DC Universe Online (Part Five)

Storyline Quests

The storyline quests in DCUO is, in my opinion, presented in a way that makes it a bit distinct and different from that of regular MMOs. Initially, the players start off with some of the usual quests like collect a certain number of an item or kill X number of a certain monster.

Then as you proceed with completing these minor quests, everything will slowly be pieced together like bits and pieces of a puzzle. Eventually, one thing leading to another, you will find yourself arriving at the doorstep of an instanced dungeon.

Next, after entering the dungeon, you will discover that you need to fight off piles of miscellaneous NPC mobs (lackeys) and perhaps even solve riddles before you can finally face-off with the final boss of the dungeon. But you don't need to worry too much about solving these riddles as they are fairly easy and merely involves finding objects to interact with or touching them in a certain order.

Sometimes, you may be fighting this boss alone and sometimes, you might find yourself fighting alongside AI-controlled superheroes or villains. All of these would have to depend upon the objectives of the quest of course.

And upon finishing off the final boss, you will be shown with a comic-styled video clip narration that is related to the villain and storyline of the quest followed by a newspaper headline declaring an evil villain's scheme has been thwarted (or something along that line).

Overall, I feel that what has been done is a pretty good attempt in trying to bring meaning and purpose to questing in MMOs. However, if I had to pick a bone, it would be that I kind of find that all of these supposedly "storyline" quests tend to be separated and unrelated to one another.

As you would know, the main story behind DCUO is that an ultimate evil, Brainiac, is invading Earth as we know it. But in these storyline quests, what we can find is some villain committing acts of evil that hardly has anything to do with the original plot.

At the best, it may only be so-and-so villain taking advantage of the exobyte situation to perform their own devilish schemes. In my opinion, it might have been a bit better if there was an overall direction in the plot that strings all of these individual storylines together.

Equipment System
From what I've gathered so far, the equipment system found in DC Universe Online doesn't look impressive. At best, it has only a basic rarity and equipment modding system put in place.

Rarity

The rarity of the equipment found in the game can somewhat be classified into a few colors, white, green, blue and purple (not sure if there is an orange color as I've not seen one yet).

Just like in regular MMOs, equipment of "white" rarity are the most common and can be easily found off regular mobs or bought from NPC vendors. Likewise, "green" rarity equips are also pretty common and will most often be obtained as rewards for completing the minor quests (and also the same avenues as "white" equip).

"Blue" and "purple" equips, however, are a bit harder to obtain. You will most probably be looting these off the final bosses of storyline quests depending on your luck and relative levels. They can also be bought from certain NPC vendors as far as I know, but these transactions would most probably involve some of the fancy marks, influence points and whatnots.

And needless to say, the rarer the equip, the more impressive its stats will be. So if you have four equips of similar levels and type, the "white" equip would offer the least while the "green" one would offer relatively better stats. The "Blue" equip would give more stats than the "green" one followed by the "purple" having the best stats out of the four.

Equipment Mods
From what I can tell, what you need to know about equipment modding can basically be summarized into three sections, Exobits, Plans and Sockets.

Regarding exobits, they are actually items that you can find stashed in caches such as that shown above. And these caches are found randomly placed all over DCUO in Metropolis and Gotham City.

Whenever you open one of these caches, you will obtain any of the following three forms of exobits, Aggressive (Red), Fortified (Blue) and Support (Yellow).

Next, to actually make use of the exobits, you will first need to "craft" them into exobytes and then turn them into equipment mods. But in order to do so, you will need to acquire the proper plans and have them researched (which is simply right clicking on the plans in your inventory actually).

As far as I know, the plans to craft exobits into exobytes are given to us as a reward via a quest at around level 10. As for equipment mod plans, some of them can be obtained via an NPC vendor (which is found close to the R&D workstation) while others might require you to loot them off of the final bosses in storyline quests.

So after acquiring the needed exobits and plans, you can then head on over to one of the following R&D workstations. These workstations can be found in some of the safe houses (police departments for heroes and nightclubs for villains) as well as in the "Watchtower" and "Hall of Doom".

And upon interacting with it, you will be shown with an assembly window where you can craft all sorts of exobytes and equipment mods (that you've researched). From then onwards, all you need to do is prepare the necessary ingredients to craft your desired mods.

Apart from the exobyte (which can be crafted from the exobits), the other ingredients needed by the mod can be easily bought from the NPC vendor found beside the workstations. If what you required is not sold there, then I suppose there is a good chance that the ingredient must either be obtained from salvaging looted equipments or acquired from NPC mobs.

However, do note that this salvaging function will only be unlocked when your character reaches level 30. Once you've unlocked this function, just visit the workstations again and look for the "Salvaging" tab to start breaking down unneeded equipments.

Next, to actually make use of the crafted equipment mods, you will first need to have an equipment with a socket.

Once you do, just click and drag the mod onto the equipment. A warning will pop up to ask whether you wish to continue. Upon confirmation, the bonus stats of the equipment mod will then be incorporated into the stats of the equipment.

Finally, socket affinity bonus is something extra that you get when you use an equipment mod that is compatible to the color of the equipment's socket. In its simplest sense, an equipment mod is compatible to the socket if exobits of the same color had been used as an ingredient in making the mod.

Or you can just merely refer to the equipment mod's description if your confused ;p. But anyway, by putting in a compatible equipment mod into the socket, you can trigger and activate the socket affinity bonus. Do note, however, that once you've placed a mod into the socket, it cannot be removed as far as I know. So choose your mods wisely.

Apart from rarity and equip modding, equipment found in the game can also be divided into two general types, PVE and PVP equipment. And as the name suggests, PVE equipment is meant to help the player deal with environmental mobs while PVP equipment is used against other fellow players.

The primary way to differentiate between the two is by comparing their stats. PVE equipment will have a stat called "Defense" while PVP equipment would have an alternative stat called "Toughness" instead.

And the most important difference between these two stats is that "Defense" reduces damage from non-player enemies while "Toughness" works to reduce the damage from player foes. Furthermore, these two stats are mutually exclusive and cannot both exist within the same item.

So what this means is that if you are out killing mobs with PVP armor on, you are literally hunting naked as you lack the necessary defense to protect yourself from the damage dealt by those mobs. Similarly, if you are wearing PVE armor, you would be putting yourself at risk from attacks by opposing players as you lack the needed toughness to reduce the damage inflicted.

With that, I've come to the end of my introduction of the world of DC Universe Online. I sincerely hope that these articles had been useful to you.

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DC Universe Online (Part Four)

PVP
When we talk about PVP in DC Universe Online, we can generally summarize it into two forms of fighting - fights that occur on the world scale and fights that take place in specially created instances.

World PVP
Before I talk about PVP on the world scale, I would need you to understand a little bit of how the in-game world is like.

Basically, DC Universe Online consists of two huge maps, Metropolis and Gotham City. And on these two maps, we have NPC mobs being littered all over the entire place for players to kill and hunt upon. However, the troublesome part is players of both the Heroes and Villains faction have to co-exist in these very same maps. So can you kind of guess where the conflict arises?

Yup, because of having to reside within a common area, both of the factions will inevitably have to fight over the same set of resources (NPC mobs) or space (different mobs but within same area) to complete their quests and level up. But then again, I guess just being of the opposite faction is enough of a reason to start going for each other's throats upon sighting one another.

Now if your questioning about how to level up your character within this sort of dangerous and demanding environment, then I would say you don't have to worry too much as this situation of constantly having to watch your radar for aggressive foes who might ambush you while your hunting mobs or doing quests only happens when your character is situated in the PVP server. If your in the PVE server, this sort of sneak attack would not happen because you have the option to toggle off PVP attacks (under the Action Menu "F1").

An alternative form of World PVP which you can enjoy regardless of being on the PVP or PVE server would be the Ring War in Metropolis and the Diamond Heist in Gotham City. They are a kind of event-type quest in which players can participate in a meaningful PVP battle for Influence points and Marks of Legend (forms of currencies used to buy various items and equipment with certain NPC vendors).

Usually, these events are pretty easy to spot as they would be advertised visibly right across your screen and all you have to do is follow its instructions to locate the NPC responsible for giving out the quest (do note that the NPC will only appear five minutes before the start of the event).

And as far as I know, apart from earning influence points and marks of legend, one perk of winning the Gotham City's Diamond Heist is that you will gain access (for a limited duration) to an NPC vendor that sells pretty strong PVP equipment. So if your into PVP action, this would probably be an event you won't want to miss. However, I'm not sure if the same holds true for the Ring War in Metropolis though.

On a side note, since we had talked about PVP and PVE servers, I would like to highlight the additional feature of how the game allows us to actively switch our characters between the PVP and PVE servers.

As you would all know, in most of the MMOs we played, we always had this dilemma of whether to create our character in the PVP or PVE server. A character in the PVP server would allow us to taste the kicks of fighting other fellow players. However, to reach this sort of action we would have to be at fairly high levels (not to mention having to withstand being constantly bullied by high-leveled players while leveling up).

On the other hand, a character in the PVE server would have a relatively easier time to level up to the end-game. But yet, since the character's on the PVE server, we would be missing out on the fights (even though we've reached the high levels required to participate efficiently).

So, to allow us to enjoy the benefits of both types of servers, DC Universe Online introduced the Phase Shifter (which can be found somewhere in the "Watchtower" and "Hall of Doom"). By using this device, we can transfer our character between the two servers and cater to our needs at various stages of character growth.

Instanced PVP

Instanced PVP in DCUO comes in two forms, Arenas PVP and Legends PVP. However in my opinion, these two forms of instanced PVP aren't really that much different from each other because the objectives of participating in both of them are pretty much the usual types that you can find in PVP matches like "Capture and Hold", "King of the Hill" and "Capture the Flag".

Basically, the only difference I've found between the two is that Arenas PVP uses your own avatar to fight while Legends PVP would give you the chance to use iconic heroes and villains found in the DC Comics's Universe.

And just like in World PVP, participating in these instanced PVPs would earn you influence points, marks of legend as well as marks of tactics depending on the instance.

Likewise, depending on the instance, you may also be rewarded with some other forms of marks. But these are generally instances which comes with the add-on DLC packs (Downloadable Content Pack) that you purchase with real money.

Next, as far as I know, marks of legend are used to unlock the exobyte data for certain legendary heroes and villains. After you've purchased and unlocked the avatars, you can then make use of them to fight in Legends PVP instances.

However, some of the more special heroes and villains would have to be unlocked using other forms of marks or even station cash (cash item shop currency bought with real money).

As for marks of tactics, these are actually used to buy special PVP equipment from Requisition Bots found in the "Watchtower" and "Hall of Doom". Anyway, as a general guideline, if you ever find any weird form of mark, all you have to do is pop into the "Watchtower" and "Hall of Doom". I am almost certain that you can find an NPC vendor there who would accept them as a currency. You just need to look around and find them.

Finally, to enter these Arena and Legends PVP instances, you will have to queue up for them in just the same way as the duo, alert and raid instances. But thankfully, the system does allow you to queue for all of these different maps altogether at once.

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