Lacci´s Road to completion

[Lacci]

Greetings.
I had the idea to document my journey through the classes here, to keep me motivated, to give out some ideas for chraracter builds and make mistakes so you don´t have to
A few things in advance: I play this in a somewhat casual fashion, so my character builds are not really optimised and aren´t meant as a guide for beating high reaper levels, in fact I don´t play reaper at all. I don´t have any +8 tomes, only tomes that I unlocked through gameplay, and Lacci will stay a Gnome on all the lives. Yes, even when I will do my Barbarian live
Also, I already did my first two lives before the new forum went live. I started out as an Artificer, which I didn´t like as much as I had hoped, so I did my first TR as a Wizard. At first I tried the Necromancer/Palemaster and later changed that to a Feydark Illusionist, which I liked much more. That´s when I had the idea to go ahead and try for all the other classes on this toon. So my next stop was Paladin, a class which I haven´t really tried at all.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Lacci:

With my Paladin, I wanted to go for a full Warhammer/Tower Shield build, so I invested lots in defense.

Here´s the enhancements:

And my epic destinies:

For feats I went with all the shield mastery feats, weapon focus and improved critical for bludgeoning weapons. Also:

Improved Shield Bash
Knights Training
Bulwark of Defense
Beloved of the Divine
Holy Strike
Blinding Speed
Embodiment of Law
Scion of Arborea
Deific Warding

This whole build really surprised me as I had a lot more fun than I expected, usually I don´t like paladins in games like this.
But the resistances, immunities and buffs made this really enjoyable to play. Not the best damage output, but quite resilient, so far I had no problem with tanking stuff in epic normal raids, but granted, I`m not much of a raider, just did a handfull of them...
This is also my first toon to reach 5000 favor, which gave me +5 CON tome.

I don´t want to post my full equipment here, but the weapon is a Legendary Stormreach Guardians Hammer with enlightened step filigrees.

Right now, I´m still considering my next TR, in my top 3 now are: Monk, Blightcaster or Dark Hunter. Can´t really decide...
Well, that´s it for now, if you see me standing around on Cannith, feel free to say hello...
Also, any questions, comments, ideas and votes for the next TR are most welcome

 

[Lacci]

OK, I decided on the Dark Hunter as my next life and started that over the weekend.

I always wanted to do something with the falconry tree, so I tried to mix that up into the dark hunter tree and go with a wisdom based build. Fiddled around with it in the character planner, but in the end I found that it was too messy, too much stuff I rather wanted from the Tempest tree and I didn´t have enough points to get everything I wanted.
So then I went with the classic DEX-based dual scimitar wielding ranger.
At the moment, I`m up to Lvl 7. So far, the dark wolf feels a bit useless, haven´t found a single collar yet and that early on, I don´t have any way to keep the wolf alive on elite difficulty, it´s like he looses half his health in every fight. It got a bit better if you bring along a hireling healer. Also, what I find weird: The wolf is basically a 1:1 copy of the druid pet with a different skin, he has the same abilities, but for some reason, you don´t get an ability to revive it or to dismiss it (but he seems to auto-revive after a rest).

The bleed imbue is a bit strange as I expected it to be its own damage type and show up with a little blood-drop symbol or something like that, but it rather seems to be untyped damage, so it´s a bit hard to tell whether you´re getting bleed damage, a double strike or a sneak attack.
I might switch that later to the electric imbue from the tempest tree.

One other thing that starts to annoy me is that apparently, rangers only get light armors to choose from as quest rewards. I usually have like 5 light armors for every quest reward, but never mediums...

 

[Lacci]

Few things I have to add: For some reason I thought the Druid had an ability to dismiss his wolf, but that´s not the case. Just like the druid, the dark hunter CAN dismiss the wolf by right clicking on its portrait...

Also, I totally forgot the option of crafting handwraps into collars. After running the feydark chain and getting a pair of ferrocrystal handwraps, I remembered that and turned them into a nice collar.

Another thing: Although I´ve been playing this game for over a decade now, I never knew that there is a gameplay option to turn on/off "quest rewards based on class", so now hopefully I´ll get some medium armors to choose from.

 

[Thulsadoom]

Thats Great and have fun on your journey. Love to see people not worrying about being optimized and just enjoying the DnD part of the game. Have fun

 

[seph1roth5]

Don't know that I've ever dismissed a wolf on purpose, but have you tried right-clicking on their UI bar, or is that what you meant by portrait? I have different UI settings so I don't see my pet/companions HP or anything like that.

 

[Lacci]

Short life sign here. My progress has slowed down somewhat. That´s got to do with the recent AI changes in the last update, where many mobs now circle around like crazy making it a bit miserable for melee combat. Also, as I have read in another thread, "bleed the weak" doesn´t scale with melee power as it seems. That was no problem in the first 10 levels, but starts to show now.
I´m currently at lvl 17 and fighting large hordes becomes a bit tedious. I did "Archons Trial" recently and some of the portals spawn enough mobs to immediately trigger an orange dungeon alert.
While the dark hunters single target DPS is decent, he lacks AOE and chasing the circling mobs in melee gets annoying fast.

 

[Stormlordrising]

I wish I thought of this. I am on my first completion journey myself. I am starting with all the archetypes going to level 20 and reincarnating. I started with Dark Apostate which went really fast, and I really enjoyed it. After that, Sacred Fist again seemed really fast, and enjoyed it. Next Dark Hunter which I enjoyed playing but I dont think it was as fast as the first two. Acolyte of the Skin so far has been my least favorite and took the longest. I am now playing a Blight Caster which is a blast to play but I have been doing other things than playing. I am thinking of a Stormsinger next and maybe a melee archetype will be released by the time i am finished with it. I try to run the same quest every time so I have a good feel: All Keep on the Borders quest, almost all the harbor quest, the quest chain in the marketplace, Catacombs, Feywild, Isle of Dread, Bavoria, Menechtarun, Sharn, and then Evenstar.

 

[Lacci]

So, my progress has slowed down a lot, but eventually I reached lvl 32.
To help with the AOE damage, I tried the whirlwind attack feat (never used that before so I figured now would be a good time to try it out)
And while it takes some getting used to, it really helped a lot. The damage numbers aren´t super high, but you can still move around while using it.
I also took "Dance of Death" from the tempest tree, and with those two I got decent AOE damage.
Another game changer was the switch from "bleed the weak" to tempest´s electrical imbue.

But all in all, the Dark Hunter was so far my least favorite class to play, which is why I´ll quickly start the next life which will be a Monk.
I´ve never played a monk before, so I´ll orient myself on this build here: https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/handwraps-monk-build.403/

I won´t be able to copy it, as I´m missing many build points, tomes and equipment for that, but I´ll try something like that... handwraps, stunning fist, some healing.
But I don´t play reaper, so if I can achieve maybe 50% of that build, I´ll probably be fine.