Going It Alone:

Soloing and DDO

By Darkgolem

---

It is a topic that has been debated many times in the various fan sites and forums that talk about Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO): can I solo in this game?  Is there a certain class or build that can solo?  What if I go to dungeons that are below my level so that it's easier?  There are some things to examine regarding how DDO works to explain how feasible soloing is.

If you want to solo in DDO, the choice of race and class is easy--you want a warforged barbarian. With the immunities of warforged, damage reduction, and bonuses, it is the clear choice. However, there are certain problems for warforged barbarians. Healing is the biggest. You will have to spend a lot of money on potions of repair. You won't be able to get into locked checks, and you will have to suffer through traps, even with your bonus against traps. It's all about durability when soloing, and damage dealing capacity second.  As for wizards and sorcerers, sorry, no way--you're going to be group-bound.  Rogues, sure, but as soon as you get into a situation where you have to fight, and it's a tough fight, your soloing career will start its downturn. You get the idea.

The difficulty levels of dungeons increase as you go along. As you advance, you run into more and more foes in encounters. Any dungeon master who creates their own adventures, and started with level 1 dungeons, can tell you it's hard not to kill the adventurers when they begin. You place small amounts of weak enemies in adventures, and this principle applies to DDO just as well.  But as you advance, this changes, and after a few levels, a group of adventurers can handle quite a bit.

When soloing in DDO, this will be the big problem you run into. Certainly you can handle the small amounts of foes at first, but after level 2, you will run into larger and larger amounts of foes.  Soon, some of those foes can damage you fast enough that even when you're killing them off as fast as you can, you are killed by the rest, whether by spell, arrow or sword.

Another issue is experience. In theory, one can pick the repeatable adventures several times in DDO, thereby avoiding adventures that your choice of solo class and race can't survive. It sounds like a great idea, but it's not as realistic as you might think.  The problem is experience. The first time you do an adventure, you gain a 20% bonus to experience. You can also do the quest at a higher (more difficult level) for more experience.  But each time you repeat the quest you receive a 20% penalty on the experience awards.  Eventually, you receive zero experience.

There are enough quests that you could solo, but not enough that are feasible for one particular class and race combination, within certain level ranges, to support your needs for experience after about 2nd level.  Eventually, all the adventures you can handle that give experience (if they are repeatable), will be used up.  This may change in time as Turbine adds more and more adventures to DDO.  But for now this means of progression is a dead end.

Another problem is equipment.  As you advance, when you visit a chest again and again, you will find less useful and valuable items in it.  Eventually, you won't find a thing in the chest.  You probably will have enough in the way of good equipment that this won't matter. You'll be selling everything else, but you will sell them for less and less, meaning potions that fill the gaps in the abilities of your class or race will eventually be out of your financial reach.

Certain race and class combinations can solo, by repeating all repeatable quests, and doing others using magic to buff up any weak spots in their builds.  But in a few levels the reduced experience for repeating missions, the encounters designed for large and tough parties, and the financial costs of upkeep in the forms of magic and equipment, will make soloing less feasible. The bottom line is that DDO is a group-centered game, and will probably remain so.

---