This weekend I got to try out the newly launched Mists of Ravenloft expansion for Dungeons & Dragons Online. The content is for level 10 (or level 30), and on my new server I only have a level 5 artificer so far. Rather than wait through those levels I took this as an incentive to buy an Iconic hero character, a level 15 Bladeforged.
The little intro instance for the Bladeforged (a Warforged hero with the Paladin class by default) was very atmospheric, as a big fan of Eberron I was impressed with the little lore touches in the creation forge area. I chose to take a full 15 levels of Paladin, manually leveling the character would be more customisable but too time-consuming an endeavour for a solo character. Paladin is one of my favourite classes to play in any MMORPG anyway, and again the Eberron-specific Warforged character appealed more to me than the Purple Dragon Knight or other options.
Starting the new expansion I read on the wiki, is via a portal in House Jorasco. Once I’d stepped into the titular mists, my newly minted Paladin soon found himself exploring a distinctly creepy forest.
There was a short intro instance with an optional side objective; working on this reminded me of a post by Syp talking about this aspect of DDO. These optionals give players a measure of choice on how to approach a given run. When repeating early content on new alts I do vary a lot whether I do optionals or not, with new content like this I’ll be trying for most of them to fully explore each new quest.
I soon progressed on to the wilderness adventure area of Barovia. It’s nice to see variation on the default quests in this particular area. Instead of exploring map locations, there are three sets of story fragments to find. So far the ones I’ve stumbled across have been voiced, another nice touch!
New monster types (again to me) are in evidence in Barovia too. So far I’ve seen Vargouilles – creepy batwinged, disembodied heads – and animated Scarecrows. The former gave me a real thrill of recognition seeing this classic D&D monster; I can’t remember ever having seen them in a computer game before.
After some exploration I parked my character in the first Inn he came to, limited time means I’ll have to leave the quests/dungeons for next session. More spooky adventures will follow I’m sure!
GamingSF 
Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
For a limited time (until 12/17/17, I believe), one can actually roll-up a “Vet 3” status toon, which is a level 10 toon. So you actually could have roll-up a level 10 paladin and not used the Bladeforged Iconic to enter “Mists”. Not that there is anything wrong with using a Bladeforged, but your readers may like to know there is another option (at least, for a limited time) of rolling up a new, Level 10 toon. As far as I know, Vet 3 is available to everyone for free, until the end of the event (12/17/17).
😉
Thanks for the tip. I’m happy with my Bladeforged anyway, must have missed the info about the Vet 3 offer.