D&D Online Members Only Forum & Dev Diary

Turbine has created a new “Members Only” forum on the official Dungeons & Dragons Online website, which is the only place you’ll find a new dev diary written by designer David Eckelberry. A snippet from the diary:

Meanwhile, another problem had been heating up: the experience of playing a spellcaster suffered badly starting around 10th level, which in D&D is when spellcasters should really be coming into their own. When a spellcaster had more than 20 or so spells to memorize, spell selection became long and cumbersome. Spellcasting in combat was even worse, with the player not only choosing between 20 spells, but also needing to keep track of how many slots of each spell were prepared or at least, for the sorcerer, how many slots were available for each spell level. It required multiple pages of hotkeys to manipulate in play, and literally pages of UI to manipulate when going through spell preparation.

Maybe you can see what was about to happen. When we increased the number of spells universally, interface and gameplay issues exploded. Players were being asked to prepare dozens and dozens of spells, and to track those choices both onscreen and mentally. The UI even broke for some characters, as they had to choose more spells than the UI was capable of handling. We tried a couple of other tweaks, but it was becoming more and more clear to us that spell memorization had some very serious issues in our game.