So, Update 21 came out a couple of days ago with new content and that’s pretty much what all my ddo time has been about ever since. The good thing about the new content is that is quite complex which makes every quest a long run. They’re very interesting so even if you spent four hours trying to complete Aurgloroasa’s Lair on epic elite, you just don’t want to quit.
Update 21 introduces three new endgame quests, one of which is a regular quest and the other two are raids. It also introduces ingredients, named loot and a whole new crafting system; The Thunder Forge.
The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar
This is the new regular quest and it is located below the north-east bridge of Eveningstar, close to where the old entance to the Storm Horns was. The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar is narrated by the creator of the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood, and it is divided in three versions of the same quest (I honestly didn’t expect that it would remain like this once lamannia was over, but I’m glad it did). On your first run of the quest, you will do the short version of the Halls (standard version) which is not short at all, really, you can still explore the dungeon for about an hour without getting bored for a second. The Halls are a very interesting environment, something completely unique in the game, kind of like a mix between the Catacombs and the Waterworks put togheder in a level 28 quest. It has some very deadly traps (I’m actually happy that I had a reason to get a trapper when farming this quest) that can wipe an entire party if they don’t know what they’re doing and it has many rooms, secret doors and halls. It is the home of kobolds but not kobolds like the ones in the harbor, these ones are smarter and they can’t be killed in two seconds by just running straight to them spamming cleave or fireball which was a nice surprise to see. Monsters you will find are also, ghosts, statues (new), humans, skellies, helmed horrors (new), and more (don’t wanna spoil it). Once you finish your first run, you will unlock the two other versions of this quest, Extended and Extended with commentaries. I strongly recommend that you try out these versions since they offer a new and more exciting endfight, one of which I assure you that you won’t expect to find in such a dungeon. If you are soloing, go ahead with the commentaries version and you will run the quest listening to Ed Greenwood and the story of the creation of the Realms, even while I don’t really care about anything dnd related, I found it quite interesting. However, if you are in a party, just run the regular extended version, you don’t want to have Ed talking over your vent. Also, his voice gets bugged (a lot) and if you dare to interrupt him by recalling, you will have to listen to him until you relaunch ddo which is a pain. The named loot of this quest is quite good (I’m wearing one of them right now on my sorcerer) and it can be upgraded by just running this quest and gathering the ingredient that drops from it, Black Stones. I would recommend just farming these in the quest and to not buy them or anything, everything that drops from the Halls is highly overpriced, I actually sold 50 stones for 600 AS yesterday. Overall, an interesting, relaxing quest that will keep you entertained for awhile and you will find that party coordination will make things a lot easier.
Update 21 introduces three new endgame quests, one of which is a regular quest and the other two are raids. It also introduces ingredients, named loot and a whole new crafting system; The Thunder Forge.
The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar
This is the new regular quest and it is located below the north-east bridge of Eveningstar, close to where the old entance to the Storm Horns was. The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar is narrated by the creator of the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood, and it is divided in three versions of the same quest (I honestly didn’t expect that it would remain like this once lamannia was over, but I’m glad it did). On your first run of the quest, you will do the short version of the Halls (standard version) which is not short at all, really, you can still explore the dungeon for about an hour without getting bored for a second. The Halls are a very interesting environment, something completely unique in the game, kind of like a mix between the Catacombs and the Waterworks put togheder in a level 28 quest. It has some very deadly traps (I’m actually happy that I had a reason to get a trapper when farming this quest) that can wipe an entire party if they don’t know what they’re doing and it has many rooms, secret doors and halls. It is the home of kobolds but not kobolds like the ones in the harbor, these ones are smarter and they can’t be killed in two seconds by just running straight to them spamming cleave or fireball which was a nice surprise to see. Monsters you will find are also, ghosts, statues (new), humans, skellies, helmed horrors (new), and more (don’t wanna spoil it). Once you finish your first run, you will unlock the two other versions of this quest, Extended and Extended with commentaries. I strongly recommend that you try out these versions since they offer a new and more exciting endfight, one of which I assure you that you won’t expect to find in such a dungeon. If you are soloing, go ahead with the commentaries version and you will run the quest listening to Ed Greenwood and the story of the creation of the Realms, even while I don’t really care about anything dnd related, I found it quite interesting. However, if you are in a party, just run the regular extended version, you don’t want to have Ed talking over your vent. Also, his voice gets bugged (a lot) and if you dare to interrupt him by recalling, you will have to listen to him until you relaunch ddo which is a pain. The named loot of this quest is quite good (I’m wearing one of them right now on my sorcerer) and it can be upgraded by just running this quest and gathering the ingredient that drops from it, Black Stones. I would recommend just farming these in the quest and to not buy them or anything, everything that drops from the Halls is highly overpriced, I actually sold 50 stones for 600 AS yesterday. Overall, an interesting, relaxing quest that will keep you entertained for awhile and you will find that party coordination will make things a lot easier.
Temple of Deathwyrm
My favorite quest of the new update ever since Lamannia went up. This quest brings a strange dichotomy. In one hand, the quest is very fun and intense but in the other hand, it has so many bugs and it’s so laggy that it takes most of the fun out of it. Turbine has never been my favorite gaming company when it comes to ingame support and having to wait over an hour for a response from a developer just to get our ticket closed for no reason was not fun at all. It just makes me sad that hundreds of players are going to run their first shadow dragon raid with so many bugs that they’ll just give up and hate the quest.
However, if you decide to run it and you don’t find any bug that impedes your party’s progress, you’ll have lots of fun (and dying). The quest is basically a big castle in which there are six floors, the objetive of the raid is to solve the puzzles in every floor in order to reach the summit of the temple and fight the boss, Aurgloroasa.
The raid contains a series of pretty unique puzzles, some are randomized and require a lot of observation and others are static, so after a few runs they’re just a matter of memory. The quest is very fun and takes a long time to complete (some of the first groups to complete it on elite were inside the quest for about six hours) which is something I really like since it proves that it’s not so easy content (and that it’s buggy). Party coordination is also important in this quest, some must focus on the puzzle while some others have to take care of the trash, and the puzzles inside the castle require that everyone cooperates, so there is no real time to pike unless you’re doing normal which is when the mobs don’t spawn so often.
It has the most unique endfight in the whole game and it was a very nice surprise when we ran it for the first time. Any party doing this will have a very fun and intense time.
Fire on Thunder Peak
This is the second raid introduced in the new update and it’s a very intense fight, but that’s it: it’s just one fight. It doesn’t feel like a raid other than the difficulty, there are no puzzles, no story, no dungeon developement and it has hardly any map to move around. This is my least favorite quest of update 21 and it was really disappointing to run.
While it will keep you entertained for the whole fight, it’s just too simple for me to enjoy it a lot. It doesn’t have as many bugs as Temple of Deathwyrm and you won’t have any ticket issue but this really seems to be the kind of quest you run for the ingredients rather than the fun you get from it, which is something I don’t like about certain quests in this game. If they came out with a box that gave people the ingredients you find in this quest kind of like how they did with Caught in the Web, I’m sure that in a couple of months nobody would run this quest anymore. In the other hand, if I had a full stack of every single ingredient found in Deathwyrm, I would continue to run it as much as I can since it’s a very complex quest, nothing compared to Thunder Peak.
Other than that, it’s a very intense fight, for the first runs you will have some trouble running it because of certain quest mechanisms that are able to wipe any unexperienced party which is not bad at all. If you are looking for a straight up solid fight, go run this raid and you’ll have a fun but don’t expect any raid complexity of any kind.
Those are the three new quests in the new update and they’re all unique in their own way. They’re not so easy to complete which makes me happy and I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time running them. Also, all the named loot is totally overpriced (as I’ve said before), so hurry up and farm it and make thousands of astral shards while you can.
Article was taken from the blog:
The Portable Hole:
