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Game mechanics • Newbie guide • In development • DDO Store • Social Media
Challenges • Classes • Collectables • Crafting • Enhancements • Epic Destinies • Favor • Feats
Glossary • Items • Maps • Monsters • Places • Quests • Races • Reincarnation • Skills • Spells
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Game mechanics
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Your Character[edit]
- Abilities - The strengths and weaknesses that define your characters, such as Strength and Intelligence.
- Carrying capacity - How much weight your character can carry.
- Classes - The role which your character will predominantly play.
- Feats - Major new actions or advantages for your character.
- Skills - How adept your character is at various tasks.
- Enhancements - Minor new actions, advantages, and upgrades to your character's existing abilities.
- Hit points - A finite value used to determine how much damage a character can withstand before dying.
- Healing Amplification - Increases the amount of hit points restored when receiving healing spells or healing by other methods.
- Run speed - How fast your character can run.
- Player character conditions - Usually temporary, harmful and require certain actions to be taken to remove of them.
Attacking a Target[edit]
- Attack bonus - Determines likelihood of hitting a target with melee or ranged weapons based on Base Attack Bonus and other modifiers.
- Attack sequence - A chain of attack animations that depends on your character's Base Attack Bonus, fighting style, and whether you are stationary or moving.
- Attack roll - Represents your attempt to strike your opponent.
- Base Attack Bonus - Represents a character or monster's skill at fighting that comes purely from his or her profession, training, and personal experience.
- Critical hit - A hit with an increased damage multiplier scored by rolling in the threat range on the d20 damage roll.
- Critical hit multiplier - The number by which the base damage is multiplied upon a confirmed critical hit.
- Damage - Damage reduces a target's current hit points.
- Damage roll - Determines the amount of damage done after a successful attack roll.
- Doublestrike - A chance to make an additional attack roll with the main hand weapon any time a main hand melee attack is made.
- Fighting styles - The three main styles of melee fighting are sword and board, two-handed fighting and two weapon fighting.
- Flanking - When attacking with a melee weapon, attackers receive a bonus for attacking from behind.
- Grazing hit - Allows attacks to deal reduced damage instead of missing entirely if the total attack roll isn't enough to hit.
- Glancing blow - An additional hit caused with a two-handed weapon that can strike multiple enemies. (Replaced by Strikethrough in Update 45.)
- Melee special attack - A special attack that uses swings in the attack sequence to initiate a variety of single-target combat feats in addition to normal weapon damage.
- Shield bashing - The act of attacking with a shield.
- Sneak attack - Additional damage done by rogues under a specific set of circumstances.
- Strikethrough - An additional hit caused with a two-handed weapon that can strike additional enemies.
- Threat range - The range of the d20 damage roll where a critical hit can be scored. Actual range is determined by the weapon type of the attacker.
- Weapon dice multiplier - A multiplier applied to the base damage die of particular weapons.
- Vorpal Strike - Refers to rolling a natural 20, and confirming the critical hit.
- Melee Power
- Ranged Power
Defense[edit]
- Active blocking - Produced by holding the block key. While blocking, a character gains +2 Armor Class, has increased DR, and is immune to most special attack and weapon effects.
- Armor class - The likelihood you will be hit by melee and ranged weapons.
- Armor check penalty - The skill penalties assessed for using armors.
- Damage Reduction - Allows a certain amount of damage to be subtracted from each hit taken.
- Dodge bonus - The chance of you completely bypassing physical attacks.
- Guards - Effects that damage/debilitate your opponent as he attacks you.
- Maximum dexterity bonus - The largest Armor Class bonus you can get from your Dexterity while wearing that armor.
- Physical Resistance Rating - How much bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage is negated when you are hit.
- Magical Resistance Rating
- Saving throw - Chance to resist magical attacks
- Spell resistance - Chance to avoid being affected by spells
Spellcasting[edit]
- Casting ability - Different abilities benefit different spellcasters.
- Arcane spell failure - The chance that an arcane spell will fail to be cast due to interference from the caster's armor or shield.
- Spell - A spell is an activated magical effect produced directly by a creature.
- Spell components - Spells have one or more components that are required in order to successfully cast them.
- Spell critical - Percent chance for spells to score a critical hit. Base spell critical chance is 0%.
- Spell Lore - Gives a bonus to your spell critical chance and increase the spell critical multiplier.
- Spell point - The amount of magical energy your character has to expend on spells before needing to rest.
- Spell Power - Determines how much damage you deal with spells.
- Spell Resistance - An extra roll that the caster has to make for his magic to "land" on targets which possess it.
- Spell-like ability - An ability that works exactly like a spell of the same name yet costs no (or very few) spell points.
- Spell Penetration - Spell Penetration is the act of trying to penetrate Spell Resistance (SR).
Questing[edit]
- Death - A condition brought about at -10 HP.
- Death penalty - A temporary debuff on a character which was recently resurrected.
- Delving Bonus - A special kind of experience point bonus which encourages players to run a larger variety of quests on harder difficulties.
- Dungeon Alert - A mechanic designed to reduce server load by limiting the number of enemies which can be safely handled by a party.
- Dungeon Scaling - The mechanism that automatically adjusts the difficulty of quests depending on the number of players in the group.
- Hireling - NPC adventurers that can aid you in quests.
- Instance - A game area where players can encounter enemies or other players.
- Quest - Adventures which reward XP and loot.
- Epic (quest type)
- Raid - A raid is a highly difficult and tactically challenging quest designed for 12 players.
- Raid loot mechanic - The likelihood of receiving the item you want from a raid.
- Raid timer - Most raids have a timer, or "cooldown" period, that starts after receiving end reward from the raid quest-giver NPC.
- Ransack - Looting a chest too often within a certain span of time can temporarily reduce the quality and amount of treasure that chest generates for you.
- Reaper - Reaper Difficulty or Reaper Mode is the highest difficulty in DDO introduced in Update 34.
- Recall - A teleportation method available during a quest or while outside in a wilderness adventure area.
- Repair (equipment) - Equipment can be damaged during questing and must be repaired at vendors.
- Resource management - The process of managing finite resources (often spell points or clickies) throughout a quest.
- Resting - The act of using a shrine.
- Saga - A group of quests or even story arcs that characters can complete for an additional reward.
- Sneak - Using Invisibility or creeping around using the Sneak toggle which relies on or your passive Hide and Move Silently skills.
- Secret door - A door that appears to be an ordinary part of the wall, and can only be found by using special abilities.
- Shrine - Monoliths found in quests that can be used to replenish hit points, spell points, and special abilities.
- Social panel - An element of the UI used to help form parties.
- Trap - Mechanical or magical effect built into a dungeon which are designed to impede the progress of the party.
- Trapmaking - A feat made available to Rogues and Artificers that grants the ability to craft traps.
Monsters[edit]
- Challenge rating - Relative danger of a monster.
- Creature type - Defines features and traits for certain group of races.
- Epic Ward - Epic enemies have massive amounts of experience against adventurers that form an Epic Ward against many attack types.
- Monster attack bonus - A monster's bonus to attack rolls, helps determine the monster's likelihood of hitting you.
Leveling and Reincarnation[edit]
- Action Point - Points gained in the process of increasing in level that are spent on enhancements.
- Build point - Points spent to increase ability scores during the character creation process.
- Class trainer - The NPC you speak to when you are ready to level your character.
- Epic Destinies - A major part of an advancement system that players can use for their level 20+ characters.
- Epic levels - An Epic level is not added to a class, but is a generic level in and of itself.
- Experience points - Points earned via questing, which are required to level your character.
- Experience points after Reincarnation(s) - Experience points required to level is increased after your True Reincarnation (TR).
- Level - Can refer to many things: class level, Player Character level, caster level, spell level, or dungeon level.
- Level cap - Level cap refers to the maximum Level a character can reach within a game.
- Path - A predefined build intended for the use of inexperienced players.
- Reincarnation - Allows players to change certain decisions made in their character's advancement or to create an all-new more powerful hero.
- Respec - An MMO term that means re-specifying part or all of your character's current build.
- Veteran Status - Allows you to start creating new characters at level 4 or level 7.
Dice Rolls[edit]
- Ability check - A roll against an action's difficulty class, using an Ability modifier as a modifier.
- Attack roll - Represents your attempt to strike your opponent.
- D20 - Refers to a 20 sided dice.
- Damage roll - This is the amount of damage that is done after a successful attack roll.
- Difficulty class - A number associated with an action that represents how hard that action is to do.
- Modifier - A number that changes a roll or a granted ability. It is usually tied to an ability score.
- Natural 1 - A natural 1 is obtained when you roll 1 on the d20. On an attack roll or a saving throw, a natural 1 means a failure.
- Natural 20 - A natural 20 is obtained when you roll 20 on the d20.
- Skill check - A roll against an action's difficulty class, using a skill as a modifier.
- Confirmation roll - A roll that is made to confirm a critical threat is a critical hit.
- Vorpal Strike - Refers to rolling a natural 20, and confirming the critical hit.
Guilds[edit]
- Guild Airships - A location where access is limited only to guild members or people who are temporarily invited.
Game Economy[edit]
- Auction House - An automated way of buying and selling items with other players with in-game coin.
- Base price modifier - Affects an item's price range and its minimum level requirement.
- Bind - Definitions of various bind statuses of items.
- Broker - A special type of vendor NPC which pays more for your items than other vendors do.
- Currency - Usually refers to the in-game coin system, although other items are often used as currency by players.
- Shard Exchange - A variant of the Auction House that uses Astral Shards as the only currency.
- Daily Dice
- DDO Point
- Trade - directly between characters