DDO’s Hireling Preview Night was scheduled to begin at 6pm EST so I arrived a few minutes early. Checking the Marketplace map, I found the icon for the vendor located with the trainers near the gate to the harbor, but the NPC itself had not spawned. Right about 6pm, Draithon Aurelius <Mercenaries for Hire> appeared then shortly thereafter a World Broadcast:
For tonight’s Hireling preview, Hireling vendors are now available in the following locations: the Harbor, Marketplace, Gianthold, and Meridia. Look for the vendor icon on your map.
If my theory is correct, the vendors are level-bracketed in each location. The Marketplace vendor sold contracts for Hirelings in the level 4-6 bracket. The Harbor vendor would have had levels 1-3 Hirelings, then level 7+ starting in Gianthold. I didn’t run around testing this though; and I cannot get to Meridia anyway.
In the Marketplace, contract prices were as follows:
- Level 4: 653 gold, 4 silver
- Level 5: 1,257 gold, 3 silver
- Level 6: 2,158 gold, 2 silver
All classes were available, though Hirelings appear to be single-class only; no multi-classed Jack of All Trades for hire.
Contracts last one hour, and the timer starts ticking at the moment of purchase not the time of summoning the hireling! However, it would seem that hour means an hour logged in. If I got a contract then logged out for a few hours, the contract would resume its countdown the next time I logged in.
Feeling especially evil and mischievous, I bought a contract for a level 6 elf fighter, Kastinalia Windblossom and headed into the Searing Heights landscape, which has always been extremely challenging for me even in full groups on the upper end of its level bracket. Being just a duo of an uber-squishy wizard and a hireling fighter, no heals, nada… I wasn’t expecting to last long anyway, and the denizens of Searing Heights didn’t let me down in that regard.
Upon loading into Searing Heights, I double-clicked the contract icon in Kori’s inventory and Kastinalia appeared. The Party UI also came up and Kastinalia appeared to be a normal party member except for a very small additional icon on her vitals which real players wouldn’t have. Hirelings have their own new hotbar for controlling them, very similar to what you’d expect in your typical pet-command hotbar for pet classes in other MMORPG’s. DDO’s hotbars are 10-slot and so is the Hireling hotbar. The first 6 slots are the standard controls, and the final few are class-specific. Kastinalia had 3 fighter skills. It’s possible the other fighter hireling had different ones, I didn’t try it. The cleric hireling I tried later had 4 cleric spells, for example.
Standard Hireling Controls: (listed by slot number)
- Order your hireling to stand ground.
- Order your hireling to follow you. (Default)
- Order your hireling to abandon anything it is doing and move to your location. If your hireling cannot for various reasons, it will teleport to your location.
- Order your hireling to become active. Your hireling will perform actions that it believes are useful at will. (Default)
- Order your hireling to become passive. Your hireling will not perform any actions unless specifically commanded.
- Order your hireling to interact with your current target. If this is a usable object, your hireling will attempt to move to the item and use it. If this is an enemy, your hireling will attack that creature.
As I noted, the default modes are Follow and Active. As it turns out, part of the Active behavior is the equivalent to setting your pet in other MMORPG’s to Aggressive. Then feeding it steroids. And crack. Holy mother, these guys have an insane aggro range! And they’re not afraid to use it! I am officially giving Kastinalia the middle name Leeroy; she’s earned it…
The interact command is particularly interesting. Obviously it can be used for attacking, and it was very handy in Searing Heights when I’d manage to tab-lock onto a stealthed target which was completely invisible but I could tell Kastinalia to attack and she’d run right to it! Nifty! Exploit? Perhaps, but on the other hand maybe I shouldn’t be able to tab-lock invisible targets in the first place… *cough*
Most pet commands end with “attack” but this interact truly lets you do just that! If I click a rest shrine, the hireling will run to it and use it, regaining its Hit Points and Spell Points. If the hireling dies, I can grab its soul stone and carry it to a resurrection shrine and tell the hireling to resurrect itself. I’m guessing I could probably use a hireling to talk to an NPC to activate scripted events, too. Turbine mentioned rogue hirelings using traps, etc. but I’m wondering if they can detect the traps on their own? Because if I cannot, and my Search skill doesn’t find the trap control box then I can’t target the box to have the hireling disarm it. I wish I’d thought of that before the event ended, I would have loved to have seen what the rogues can do.
The three fighter skills Kastinalia had were: Attack Boost I (+2 Armor Class for 20 seconds), Haste Boost I (+15% attack speed for 20 seconds) and Intimidate (taunt).
So Koriander and Kastinalia rush off in Searing Heights. I was madly spamming the tab key to find any stealthed mobs and told the hireling to “sic ‘em!” That worked well enough for the first few mobs. Then I ran onto a toppled pillar stretching over a river that I thought was one of the explorer locations. While running down to the pillar I’d been playing with the Stay and Follow modes so Kastinalia was running further behind than she normally would have been. Right in the middle of the pillar was a stealthed Quickfoot bandit who ganked the hell out of poor Kori! Doused me in a flaming oil then critted me a few times left me incapacitated quicker than I could fire off a spell or two. Kastinalia rushes to my rescue, slaying the weasely bandit and using her Heal skill which revives incapacitated players back to 1 Hit Point. (In D&D, incapacitated is 0 to -9 Hit Points; death occurs at -10 and lower.) She has Heal?! That’s awesome but I would have liked to have known that. However the flaming oil was still on me and almost immediately incapacitated me again. I haven’t had to use Heal in a very long time so I don’t know if it has a refresh time or if she only had a single healing kit in her inventory, but at this point Kastinalia apparently had enough of my squishy shenanigans and left me to die covered in the still-flaming oil. There were three black wolves hidden (probably stealthed too) under a bush down the hill from the pillar. Without a screen shot it is difficult to describe how far away they were, but I was lying with my robes on fire on the far edge of the pillar. Much further and I’d have fallen down into the river below. These wolves were all the way back across the pillar, down the hill a bit, hidden by terrain and stealthed and yet the crazy elf bitch still somehow sensed them and rushed off to attack! I wish I’d had WeGame or Fraps running, that moment was pure gold! I was laughing my ass off the whole time…
So, that was a quick wipe with a Wizard/Fighter duo, let’s try something safer and get a Fighter/Cleric team. I logged into my level 5 warforged fighter and bought a contract for a level 5 Cleric hireling from the Marketplace vendor. Even though the Marketplace vendor had contracts up to level 6, they will only sell contracts of a level equal or lesser than that of your character. This time I decided to try the revamped Three Barrel Cove landscape.
The cleric came with the following spells: Turn Undead, Cure Light Wounds, Dispell Magic, Cure Serious Wounds.
This went much the same as Searing Heights only it lasted longer since warforged are a little tougher, plus I had a +2 heavy shield. On the downside, warforged only take 50% (I think?) of Cure spells since they are sentient constructs not living beings. The cleric still had a crazy aggro radius but we were doing fine until we pulled two groups of mobs and I took enough crits to kill me. The landscapes weren’t going so well, as they’re intended for groups of 4+ so I took the cleric hireling into a normal quest instance. I chose “Missing in Action” which is next to the Rusty Nail tavern in the Marketplace. It’s listed as a level 2 quest and I chose Normal difficulty. The cleric performed very well here and we completed the quest easily. His aggro radius was still a factor when he’d charge off to start a fight in a different direction than I was planning on going but aside from that, the Fighter/Cleric team is as good as it would obviously seem. From what I can tell, the current AI is set to cast heals if anyone goes below 75% of their maximum Hit Points. Above that and you’ll need to manually command it to cast Cure Light/Serious Wounds. I also noticed that instead of self-casting, the cleric would drink Cure Light Wounds potions! I wasn’t expecting them to have personal inventories; I wonder what all they carry, and how much of each item?
The first public test of hirelings seemed to have gone well. The server I play on was packed with players, so many that lag was getting to be an issue even outside the city itself. The hirelings behave as advertised with the exception of the aggro radius/cone of vision/CIA spy satellite implant/whatever being larger than I expected. I would imagine this in particular may be dealt with before hirelings go live on a permanent basis, and Turbine has said this is Hirelings 1.0 — it will be an on-going process of developing and tweaking their abilities and AI. They’re a great addition to the game, offering enough control to take the place of a player without being able to create a full group of AI like we can in Guild Wars. When it comes to overall abilities, Hirelings are a bit of a compromise between a Henchman and a Hero from Guild Wars. Like a Hero, they are fully controllable including skills and spells, but like a Henchman the player cannot equip them with specific gear, skills or spells; they are pre-configured.
Tags: Dungeons & Dragons Online, MMO
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So, at level 4, is that monetarily outrageous for those Hirelings, or is it like buying food or a potion (for comparison sake).
This sounds like ti could be fun. But, it makes me wonder what happens if you are on an adventure, and the hour ends.
Could get ugly.
I would probably consider my characters relatively poor since they’ve never utilized the auction house or brokers. When I stop (or rez) at a bar, I just sell items I don’t want to the bartender. But DDO seems to be a little on the Monty Haul side of things when it comes to gear and gold rewards so I suppose it all balances out. I just bought some inscription materials so I could read a scroll to permanently learn that spell, which cost me a few thousand gold. But I’m sitting on nearly 20,000 platinum too, just from running quests and vendoring stuff.
For some of the longer quests that may exceed an hour, I’m not sure how that will be handled. Like I said, the timer seemed to start at the time of purchase, so buying multiple contracts wouldn’t help, nor would having multiple party members buy their own contracts to rotate hirelings since everyone’s contract would expire at the same time. I could be mistaken how the timer works, however, or perhaps feedback will prompt the DDO devs to make the timer start the moment you first summon the hireling.