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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