Back in the pre-MOTU Golden Days of DDO, I had four well geared toons: healer, melee, ranged and DC caster.  This way I always had several flagged toons to raid with while I was TRing one.  It was fun changing up play styles so I didn’t get bored.  Went on hiatus for four years and came back four months ago.  With an anemic end-game pushing everyone to run the racial/reaper TReadmill, there’s no incentive to play more than one toon anymore.

So what the hell do people do with their multiple alts these days besides using them as storage mules?  I can see having one toon at cap to play with friends when you’re taking a break from the TReadmill.  Maybe you even raid on it once or twice a week for whatever crafting mats you need.  But until you’ve gotten heroic/epic/racial completionist, alts are a distraction.  Or am I missing something?

Same here. I had 2 end-game toons (3xcomp), 1 toon working the lives for completionist, and 1 tank built 3rd lifer.
Now I have 1 toon I play, 1 toon I might, 3 or 4 times a year, get on for farming, and 5 bank toons that are perma-parked in the bank. 

Sure my main has like 1.6 mil reaper xp, but I still have 12 lives of racial, 15 after Assmear comes out, and who knows what the next dick-in-a-pencil-sharpener grind will be before I get finished with that?  Who's got time for extra toons?

Oh Khyber, Frets, Hauntingly, Ozz, Rhyze, and a few others off hand are the only ones I can think of that have done all their racials on one toon and are grinding another already.  Ash might be on his 2nd toon already, not sure.

I still play 4 toons.  The same basic mix you reference.  Divine, Tank, DPS, and DC Caster. 

I've always wanted to have one on the heroic TR, one on an Iconic or Epic TR, and two at cap.  I switched that up since reaper and racials to have two in the heroics and two at cap.  But I still play all 4.  BUt then my guild raids twice a week still.  And my other guild raids once a week.  So, end game is weaker, but not dead to me.  (I also somehow ended up with 3 TRing at once)

The advantage to alts is still what it always was.  Multiple playstyles so you dont get bored and the ability to play at multiple level ranges. 

The "alts are dead' crowd is mostly people who feel obsessed with having every possible meta +1 and 30 PL's with a backloaded Racial AP bump and backloaded +2 autogrant completionist feat just stressed them out.

I got pretty much all lives on one toon..(need 2 more assimar) got 52 reaper pts on it.. but still playing alts..

I have 4 other toons.. 3 are heroic completionist. Only one epic and that one is almost 3x heroic and all iconic.

But ya i play them when the people i tr with arent on. Or go on vacation or days they are busy. And i was using them to farm shroud, slavers, some raids. Farm new bta shit.. maybar, and if people i know are doing epic runs to pull shit or just have fun.. i jump on..

A few weeks from now.. there wont be any reason to tr or play my main.. until ravenloft that is.. or to tr for 0 past lives just to get barely over 1 more reaper pt per life.. ill never see wings.. thats too fucking spendy.

So thats when the alts come back in and your main is shelved..lol

I just play my main nowadays. I have my other two benched if I ever catch up. I won't, because I don't play as much as I used to, but whatevs.

Epoch wrote on Oct 30^th, 2017 at 11:55pm:

I just play my main nowadays. I have my other two benched if I ever catch up. I won't, because I don't play as much as I used to, but whatevs.

That’s a good point too.  Some the “alts are dead” issue comes from playing fewer hours.  I have 4 toons but I heavy favor two of them since play time is limited. They get their pls first.  The others sit at cap for raiding and only get pls when the mains are done.

I'd say at least two were needed minimum.  I used to be one of those "what's the point of alts, I'd rather have one kick ass toon" types of guys, but being able to switch back and forth between epic and heroic really does make the game less boring. 

I'm mostly going through the heroic grind on one toon right now (but even that's been briefly shelved to work on a 3rd toon), but when I get bored with the grind, I love having the option of switching over to epics for a while.  Even if it's just to do some (read - a lot of) gear farming.

Well, I still use my stable of Alts.

Basically most of them are 30, and right now the objective is to cap them in all the destinies...
When I cap one I move to the next one...
Which lead to unending fun from my guildies ,as said next Alt might have been parked for ages, so the gear is weak ( at best ) or even totally obsolete... when it's not irrelevant ( LVL 30 toon with LVL 22 gear ) and I'm not even mentioning the builds.

So I still (ir)regularly play 14 to 18 Alts. Two of them are at capped cap, the rest it at various of capped - not capped or slowly going back to 30.
( two are parked at capped-capped for the time being )

I have 5 I play.
My old main, twf fighter, who is mostly just my crafter now.
THF barb.
S&B Paladin.
Swash Bard (2 rogue)
AA Ranger (1 rogue)

I usually play 2-3 at once, and switch when I get bored since there is some variation of playstyle with each.
I don't really worry about having all of the past lives, most of them have a handful (2-7)of EPLs and a couple (2-3) HPLs. A couple of them are newer alts so are still getting all their destinies maxed.
I haven't even gotten on the racial/reaper TR train. I probably will do a little of the racial just as a way to continue earning points since you can get 750ish points from a 1-30 life not even really worrying about favor grinding and with limited content owned. And that will let me buy the rest of the content I don't have including expansion. (have about 3300 points saved now, but that won't get me everything I don't have).

I prefer playing multiple toons. Yeah some of them can't blow through EE content solo, and there isn't one of them that is super duper all past lives acquired, totally geared out......but I don't give a fuck about that. They might be gimpy because none of them are warlocks......but I don't give a fuck about that either.

I think eventually I will try to get a couple doing HPLs a couple doing EPLs and maybe leave one capped. Just to have some playstyle and quest variety. Because for a while they were all clumped together level wise doing EPLs and that got really fucking boring.

I took a long break from 2013 to 2016 and played GW2, so I am basically playing past life catch-up and I really don't have time to focus on more than one toon at a time, and I probably only going to push on 2, one caster, one melee.  I might bring up a healer but that's not on my list of things to do right now.   From my experience, on Khyber if you aren't in a guild that is doing raiding regularly, raids don't happen all that much. 

I really think SSG needs to merge some, if not all, of the servers for there to be a more active raiding scene and they should make a permanent 5% per player group bonus to push people out of private runs, but a merge doesn't seem to be in the cards...

Two toons, max.

Main one is grinding the TR treadmill with varying builds depending on what PLs I'm going for.  Using the same template build to grind through a multitude of PLs is so incredibly boring that I think I'd quit before I got halfway done.   Doing specific builds for each PL/archetype keeps the grind at least somewhat interesting.

Second/alt stays at level cap for raiding, high-skull reaper runs and helping guildies when needed.

If/when the main toon gets triple epletionist and racial completionist, I'll leave that one at cap and start running the TRs and FotM builds on the alt.

Gives a nice mix of epic/end-game and build variety without being as overwhelming as trying to fully gear and PL a horde of toons.

Stable full of warlocks! That way, once bored playing one, ya switch to being bored playing another. The friction & head-spinning generated simulates excitement.

Revaulting wrote on Oct 31^st, 2017 at 1:54pm:

The friction & head-spinning generated simulates excrement.

Fixed.

Whatever turns you on.

Ya that 10% per player bonus made me put up lfms.. i usually wont

I have my main toon which I'm grinding racials, ETRs, etc on.

Then I have a toon I park in epics, and is flagged for every raid, to help out guildies or friends with epic content. I think I've been working on an ETR for him for about a year now? Maybe more? I think he's made it to level 24. The build is silly outdated, but I can't see myself spending time on a badly outdated toon when he's already fully flagged.

I think that's the only reason for an alt: To be able to run content you won't be able to do when doing what the latest grind is.

I was on my way out back when it was really shifting towards one character (back messing around now for fun) and it actually effected how I play in other games now, I tend to run only one character and focus the fuck out of that.

off topic: Carpone weren't you a member of OR on orien? are they still around or what happened?

I have
* one main who gets most attention.
* one iconic swashbuckler who SLOWLY does random iconic lives using swashbuckling style, not worrying about reaper much.
* one first life warlock 30 who occasionally pikes in end game reaper, mostly tossing heals and no save stuff.
* one alt account "caster bard" who's SLOWLY getting selected caster past lives.

I've switched from making alts and leveling them to 20, to working on lives for my main. The primary changes I see from "pre-Severlin" DDO and today is that there wasn't a huge difference between an alt-firstlife with good twink gear and a completionist with perfect gear back then. There also wasn't any content that needed multilife, perfectly geared characters.

Today there is are difficulty levels that are way out of range for my characters. Which is fine with me. I'm running low skull reapers, keeps me on my toes. When they get easy, I'll notch it up.

The only bad thing about this is that there are otherwise decent players that are unready for reaper. And of course, it means people in advance of my powerlevel sensibly want to see better numbers on my characters to join their groups on higher skull reapers.

So reaper segregates a small playerbase more.

I've always thought this game needed a starter server that had limited potential (like no pastlives and no BTA gear) for new and casual players. If you want to reincarnate you get a (one time) free and mandatory server change to swim in the deep end.

But it's a lot late for that.

Still have 5, well 4. At the end, I play for the gameplay itself or "teamwork" ( or call it party interaction ) rather than loot or another rapper point. Always had "main melee", "main ranged or light dps" and divine and arcane caster.

Always managed to keep alts highly playable with newest shinies and few selected past lives.
Reaper and especially racial lives are such humongous grind that I can't imagine doing it on ONE toon lol. Fuck that. 10 - 15 points is alright I guess.

Lobotomised hamsters. Toons with 20+ lives in bios utterly useless too often. Especially newer players that I suppose gets told that you suck without whateverfuckingpletionist. Jesus christ, hordes of those mouse clicking, keyobard turning tardlocks with awareness of baby chimpanzee with Tourettes.
Hundreds of past lives wouldn't make up for retarded gameplay. Nothing substitutes experience or fast fingers.
Each to their own.

Wipe wrote on Nov 1^st, 2017 at 3:51am:

Jesus christ, hordes of those mouse clicking, keyobard turning tardlocks with awareness of baby chimpanzee with Tourettes.

What clicking?  I figured out I don't even have to click the mouse on my warlock - just hold that bitch down.  My efficiency went up at least 75%  ;)

Gotta completionist them all.

I pretty much have been on my main lately, 81 reaper points. Working a bit on a 2nd toon now 35 reaper points on it. Use the other toons to farm baba and strahd raid runes to feed the main toons. Unless them make rxp account bound which will never happen not much point to me running a dozen other toons.

Im just etring all my alts over and over while i run racials on my main with a group. Pretty soon ill stop the racials and i have no idea what ill do but im sure more grind will come my way..  :D

I see a lot more using alts now with ravenloft. 

Wipe wrote on Nov 1^st, 2017 at 3:51am:

Lobotomised hamsters. Toons with 20+ lives in bios utterly useless too often. Especially newer players that I suppose gets told that you suck without whateverfuckingpletionist. Jesus christ, hordes of those mouse clicking, keyobard turning tardlocks with awareness of baby chimpanzee with Tourettes. Hundreds of past lives wouldn't make up for retarded gameplay. Nothing substitutes experience or fast fingers. Each to their own.

Too true

I just went through all my alts to get named gear to feed my sentient jewel.   Some of these I used to play all the time... and man some of them have some really crappy gear that was "HOT" at one point.

However, all my hoarding paid off... my sentient jewel is at 40K XP now.
7K from using all the named stuff in our guild chests that had been in there for years... was funny to see two "The Blood Stone"s in there... fucking vendor trash now.
18K from turning in all my ingredients for those Cormyerean random weapons E-Star
And  the rest from crap that has been sitting on mules/alts forever.

Sentient XP needs has definitely cleared up a lot of my hoarder inventory.   

but back on topic, I just play my quad-Triple completionist now.  If I want a different build, I just spend a week TRing it.  Can't bring myself to play something else that isn't as powerful as it could be.  Still keep around my old Shiradi Wizard... it's still pretty unkillable even with only 3 or 4 past lives on it.

Asheras wrote on Jan 6^th, 2018 at 4:05pm:

I see a lot more using alts now with ravenloft.

I ran every one of my 12 alts through Ravenloft. Free favour and an Augment bag are too good to pass up.

Then did it again on another server (didn't get all 12 there though, those toons were hilariously out-dated).

In a sad way the TR-Racial-EPL-IPL hamster wheel was liberating for me.

I figured: "I won't see triple completion anything before the servers go dark... So fuck it."

I play alts for favour rewards, to help Guildees, free TP, and to find/grind gear.

I actually keep a few on perma-first life because their drop rates tend to be better. #tinfoilhat

Only reason i can see to play alts is the raids that give runes. feed them to other toons.

exploytoften wrote on Jan 12^th, 2018 at 2:50pm:

Only reason i can see to play alts is the raids that give runes. feed them to other toons.

This ^^  ...That moment when your Raid group hasn't gotten a healer yet, and you have one at cap.

If eveything keeps going as planned.. my alts will be making a splash in the raiding circles very early 2019..

Save my spot bro.. :D

I take a different look on alts myself. Generally I play my toons to an archetype. I have permanently a few types of toons I have found I really enjoy playing at various points. For instance I always keep a quarterstaff build, this toon in particular I make a lot of odd and strange experimental build trying out various ways to build it, some of them I admit suck but those go to 20 and it TRs into something else no big deal, its I think 18 or 19 lives in and nearing first heroic completion with a few 3x stacked already. I also keep a Chucker build, a Repeater/GxB build who also gets my rune arms. A Druid Caster/Healer, a Wizard that mostly is used to stay 20 just to farm Earth Soul Gems for Adamantine rituals and Undead ones for Undead Bane shard crafting (I used to sell a lot of that back in the day or make it for guildies).

I have a Warlock/caster that doesn't have much of a direction but something will occur to me it's I think 7 lives in. I have a Swash Icebard build I like on one of my completionists. and then there are a few specialty toons. I have what once was a Pit runner turned banker who never runs anymore and a level 16 Heroic House C Challenge farmer dating from when we ran those for mats to turn into Tokens for TR before Epic lives making that... not so much of an issue but now I find I dusted the toon off to remake some of the Cannith Gear as it really doesn't suck and the tier 3 no longer is btc but no upgrade path save going up a level set the Devbastards...

At any rate I have things set that way to make gear a bit easier but it means I need to farm more stuff when new hottness occurs. I generally keep 3-4 at 30 to farm and raid as things occur and run 1 heroic TR and 1 or 2 ETRs. I run with a static group on the Heroic TR train and I swap out which of the toons I run with it just to keep the playstyle interesting for me as I get bored with having to go cookie cutter routes.

Build experiences and trying things are why I still keep playing this game despite it's dated engine, bugs and Turbine/SSG... I wish there was a more interesting alternative but I have yet to find something that has the build diversity system in DDO. I admit its TR thing for that incremental increase is fun... enough that I have played since they went to F2P more or less.

I don't want to lock myself into just one Uber toon that is "done" I mean what fun is it farm when there is no real meaning to it anymore. I had just one toon I would have quit long ago as it would have maxed out pre-Motu probably. Keeping alts helps make it interesting for me. But then I look at things from a different view than many.

Of the 6 or 7 toons I have there are 3 active completionists and 2 others close to it doing single quad max toon holds no interest for me. Just like I won't make a single toon do every quest/raid in the game on elite either.... though a guildie of ours did that recently on his 3rd life and then more or less quit the game. He reached his long term goal and moved on.  I guess I haven't found an end goal yet so for me that is what the alts are  for. YMMV