Why there is "solo" difficulty for heroic content?

Heroic elite is a joke already, especially when soloing it. Why resources were spent for "normal" and "solo" difficulty? ("Hard" is ok, someone may want to run it once for bonus).

Casual is perfect when all you want is a completion, but without having to do much at all.. like Mindsunder or Dreaming Dark. Yes, I still once in a while farm for Mindsunder loot, or ioun stones.

Of course, I was puzzled as to why someone would run ADQ pre on heroic casual on an epic toon.  I mean, if your toon really sucks that badly, at least have the decency to run epic casual. Heroic casual on a 20+ toon, is just embarrassing.

Casual-Pre will not make you a big fan with the ladies... just saying.

fr8o wrote on May 28^th, 2014 at 5:39am:


'cause spending your time playing DDO is a great way to pick up the ladies yo....

"Solo" is for those very few quests specifically meant to...well...solo.

What I'd like to see is

"Solo Normal"
"Solo Hard"
"Solo Elite"

But only for those very few quests with a "Solo" difficulty.

As for casual...don't get me started.  There aren't many quests that a new player/first lifer can't get through on Normal with a little patience.  Just don't skip Korthos if you've never played before...that's where you learn BASIC GAME MECHANICS and get some BASIC low level gear to start your game with.


Rant on...

What gets me infuriated well beyond the "Casual" setting is first timers INSISTING on running Elite so they don't break their streak...WHO CARES!  There's plenty of easy XP for you on Normal/Hard - don't try Elite if you've never done the quest before!

Rant Off!

Solo difficulty is something really really really old. From a time when Soloing Haverdasher was a challenge.
( because there wasn't dungeon scaling, and well no dungeon alert either ).

It wasn't really meant for casual, since at that time it ENFORCED solo play ( you couldn't enter a dungeon on solo difficulty if you were in a party ).

Some of the old lower harbor quests from that time ( the Korthos ones now ) were solo only. ( since they were meant for you to learn the game. )
Old characters have them showing as Solo if they haven't redone them on harder difficulties ( and/or TRed )

It was then changed to Casual and the enforced Solo play was removed.
In a lot of heroic quests it's still called Solo because Turbine's policy is to never look back and change things that needs to be changed when a system is changed, but in reality it should be called Casual, that's for those that can't even tackle Normal Diff.

Steiner wrote on May 28^th, 2014 at 8:11am:


Well once upon a time, even Normal was difficult... Especially a Normal Quest 5 levels above your party max level ( to maximize the XP input.) without any dungeon scaling 

Now Normal on a Quest with Scaling, that is two level below you party level... *Yawn* 

Flav wrote on May 28^th, 2014 at 8:31am:


 

Or try playing with red alert always active, gather up mobs till red alert then run the rest of quest like normal if alert goes to orange stop killing trash to and gather more mobs keep alert red.

Flav is correct.  Back in the day before:
1) Dungeon Scaling
2) Dungeon Alert
3) Hirelings
4) Death Penalty was removed

Normal was actually a challenge if you went in by yourself and you weren't a good self-healer.  This is also before clerics had the Healing Aura and Healing Bursts and there were no Mnemonics in the game.

Soloing a quest back then was actually an accomplishment even on Normal.

Heck, the first quest that you had to do was the one in the bar where you went into the basement (once you got past the training quests on Euphonia's island).  You had to kill about 10 kobolds and it was SOLO only.    If you were a Bard, Wizard, Sorc, Rogue, then you had about a 50/50 chance of dying in this quest.

"You have killed many kobolds"

Once they finally got rid of the original designer/producer and population levels had dropped considerably, someone had the thought of "Hmmm, maybe we shouldn't be so strict with the 'You better have a balanced to play our game' philosophy"

They changed the beginning area, and added some more quests with a Solo option.  This was much easier than normal for those who didn't have a guild or just liked playing by themselves.


Then later they removed solo from almost every quest they added it to except Miller's Debt.  Then they created the Arachnophobia, the Sewer quest with the dogs, the one with all the barrels and quickfoot burglars as solo only (yes they created these quests after the release for solo only play).

Hell, finishing Miller's Debt used to be tough to when it first came out.

Now, it has gone in the extreme other direction of Normal being very simple.   Heroic Elite today is very close to what Normal/Hard used to be.

Casual is a complete joke.  I don't care what your twitch skills are or how bad they are, the only reason to do casual is for a quick completion for a flagging quest or like Mindsunder or Dreaming Dark.

DropBear wrote on May 28^th, 2014 at 6:48am:


Met my wife in DDO.

It's good for farming shit, before the dupes you could farm druids chain on EC to get comms in no time.

This again? There are still new players to DDO who can not open hard nor elite difficulty and normal setting can be tough for them, especially if they are F2P. Some of them are more casual - someone called them flower sniffers. As long as turbine doesn't force me to run those silly difficulties I don't care.