I'm weak, I admit it. It took only three days for my willpower to crumble, and so last night I logged into Dungeons & Dragons Online again, my first visit since the f2p beta a few months ago. Never mind the fact that I'm enjoying exploring the world of Spellborn, Bioshock is still not complete, I'm working through two separate games with my wife, and I reserve an hour for Fire Emblem every night.... oh no, I simply had to start another game.

Anyways....

After reading as much as I could on all of the permadeath guilds in DDO I decided to make Sarlona server my home; eventually I'll apply to The Sublime, the server's resident PD guild. (Edit: Crap, they're on Thelanis server, my mistake.) In the short term I need to get my head wrapped around DDO's game play and mechanics far more solidly than I do now, as well as earn enough favor to unlock the 32-point builds (which is a terrible game design decision, by the way).

I spent about thirty minutes deciding what I wanted to play as my first character, before finally settling on a human paladin. Paladins are durable, deal good damage, and can eventually heal themselves; the DDO newbie forum lists them as one of the easier classes to play, and that sounds perfect to me.

I spent some time making my avatar look suitably Asian (my wife is Chinese... it's a weakness of mine), named him Tsuun Choi (Cantonese: "dumb vegetable"), and then stepped into the world. Korthos Island was exactly as I remembered it; I flew through the introductory quest without and problems and then dug into the main town dungeons. Since I was waiting for my wife to call and request a pick up from work, I spent my time soloing every dungeon available to me, first on Normal difficulty, and then again on Hard.

The paladin played easily enough, and although I had relatively few skills available outside of my auto attack I still managed to get by. When I entered the dungeons on Hard difficulty I found myself having to actually use the healing potions that I picked up, which was a pleasant change from the mostly danger-free WoW leveling up process. I completed my final quest with 9 health left (out of 56), which was dangerously close to failure (and in fact, I was convinced that the Sahuagin boss was going to murder me).

By the time I had to log out for the night I had amassed enough experience to gain level two, and completed all of the quests within the starter town. When next I set foot in Eberron I will be heading into the first open area, which I experienced during my beta testing. Hopefully in a week or two I will be feeling comfortable enough with the game to create my first disposable character - permadeath awaits.

Bonus material: A DDO Guide for WoW Players