Oh I'm not saying you should just rush into R10s or anything. In my earlier post here I did say "play at your own pace". My point is more if you can reasonably contribute in R10s with a 1st life toon - you can contribute on any life amount toon on any difficulty. Just that the higher you go - the more thought and effort you gotta put into it.well, if reaper XP was account wide, I'd have done that years ago. I sighted my experience as an example, but I am Not interested in playing catch up.
My old pnp buddies have been playing again and I have been acclimating them to low skulls because elite is way too easy, and elite is near pointless at cap. We're just old dice tossers that have zero interest in maxing out difficulty.
I know these reaper threads are always like ''r10 on a 1st life is easy, come on in the water is fine'' ...but people are super deluded about what is FUN to others. Copy pasting top builds just to join in high skulls is not fun, its MMO Plagiarism; and farming that complete of a gear set in DDO without a group pretty much sucks.
I'm glad for others that have gotten there, but I am going to continue to just help my friends as well as the newbs I run into on my server that seem to have slipped through the cracks>Until DDO comes up with a better way to manipulate this system for the player base.
Account Wide reaper points is probably the solution/but, whatever ....that idea is old and the DDO story is past that point.
If your goal is to just run low reapers like R1-R3 - it's a very much doable starting point. Especially since you have friends to run with. In fact R3-R4 is probably the goldilocks zone of reaper. You're not dining on scraps like in R1, but also not breaking your back like in R10.
Get a tank, a healer, some dps and CC - you guys will be golden.