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[RAM]

Yes, slaves count as full part members for party size, which is why they do not get used very often, it is generally better to have a real player in the slot. As for multiple summons, most summons do not stack. The drow scorpion thing will replace your current summon. I assume that the artificer golem and the druid animal companion stack with summon monster spells. I know from personal experience that palemaster(wizard prestige enhancement) skeleton summons stack with summon monster. I think that there is a spell that creates a vaguely autonomous ball of fire that may stack and may be sort of like a summon. You could throw in some dominate monster spells. And if any of these in turn create their own ball of flame/summoned monster/skeletal minion...
 Oh, and there is a weapon effect that can create oozes...

[Kadzar]

You talking about Flaming Sphere? It's not an especially good spell; it only lasts a minute and it can't be extended or directly controlled, but it will follow you around, so I guess if you just want a bunch of things following you around, it accomplishes that.

[Aklyon]

No, Iron Defenders are their own thing.You can have both your pet construct and a summon.

[palsch]

There are quite a few reasons to avoid hirelings in certain situations.

1) A human cleric is usually better for the party.
Unless your cleric really, really sucks, a cleric who can think for themselves both gives you an extra players who can achieve goals independently and frees the attention of whoever would be driving the hireling. Well built player clerics/FvS will have far more health and deal awesome damage compared to hirelings of the same level. An excellent and experienced cleric/FvS can carry a party that has no right in completing.

They can also communicate with the rest of the party if they get into trouble or heals won't be available for a while. I love if our party's cleric is on a mic even more than if the party leader is. And a raid with multiple clerics talking and coordinating heals is just beautiful.

2) Hireling AI is painfully bad at times.
I've had all these moments in the past;
- Hireling standing stationary in a trap/blade barrier while only casting heal on himself till his SP ran out.
- Casting single-target heal during a fight where multiple adjacent characters were about to die, on a cleric who has mass heal.
- Standing to melee every rust monster and ooze in an extended quest.
And those are only since some of the major improvements. Now at least they will occasionally notice other party members who are hurt. It used to be you had to manually drive the hireling almost as much as your own toon to keep them alive and healing others. I used to carry one Green Steel raise-dead clicky for use in raids when the healer dies. I now have two primarily to raise hirelings when they go play with Epic bosses (and yes, you can solo certain epics with hires fairly easily, but you need to carefully control the hire and make sure they don't, say, stand in a blade barrier while being repeatedly tripped by comet falls).

3) Hirelings and summons will fail certain objectives or otherwise break quests.
In Shroud alone, depending on the part you are running, bringing in a summon or pet can cost people treasure, delay completion or even risk a wipe. One of my barbs cleric raises was when someone took a pet into part 5. Quests where you can't kill certain enemies or targets (Let Sleeping Dust Lie for one, opening the gateways to VoD for another) are obvious no-nos. Any puzzle or quest that has floor switches, obviously. Other times that are harder to work out where pets can bug out bosses or other triggers.

There are then some quests where a hireling simply can't carry out tasks that need a real player.

Some of this can be avoided by carefully and skilfully micromanaging a hireling while getting lucky, but that doesn't work for summons and you are fighting the aggressively bad AI again.

4) Hires count towards dungeon scaling.
This is probably less important in most cases, but if your hireling is redundant (your party already has a healer, you just want a personal heal-bot) you are going to be making the dungeon harder for the rest of the party. Each character in a quest increases the difficulty in certain ways, giving opponents more HP, making CC and DOT spells last longer, letting them do more damage and even spawning more mobs in some situations. Hirelings only count for 1/4 of a player of the same class/level, but it still adds in. Especially given that a player who is running with a hireling is usually used to soloing/zerging, with the hireling given them a (very) false sense of invulnerability. That plus dungeon scaling and spiking the difficulty for the rest of the party is a bad combination. It's common to see the solo player and hireling say how easy the quest is and how they will solo it while everyone else is busy buffing and coordinating, then to hear the double ding and get a 10% XP penalty.

5) Hires take up a party slot.
This isn't just rude if it isn't your party and denying another player the chance to run the quest, it's also bad for loot mechanics. Quests that generate good bound-to-character/account loot for certain classes are best run in large groups because it gives you more chances for each piece of loot. It's accepted practice to pass loot you can use to the class that needs it (or /roll for it in cases where multiple people need it). If you have a six man party you can get six shots at that rare helm you are after. Hirelings don't get loot so that costs you a chance. (This is also an argument for diverse parties where not everyone wants the same loot.)

6) You simply can't bring hirelings into raids, so if you intend to run raids get used to player healers.
Hireling healers are in one way more reliable; they will almost always heal you as a top priority. If I'm soloing with a hireling cleric I can pretty much treat it as an unlimited source of HP, especially given their chugging of SP pots.

Go look at the prices of SP pots on the auction house. During my elite shroud run the other day our leader/main healer used three SP pots. Half the party offered to play her back. The number one skill most clerics learn (at least if they are any good) is how to conserve mana. That means playing smart and deciding when it's worth healing.

Expecting heals in any situation is going to end badly. Mindless zerging that the healer isn't down with is going to end badly. Generally treating a player cleric as a heal bot or hireling is going to end badly.

Smart clerics stay with the main party and either dictate or match the majority playstyle, letting people who dash off fend for themselves (the mantra on the forums is 'you can't cure stupid', in game it's usually 'can't heal around corners'). They heal during fights in a mana efficient way (often using stacks and stacks of heal scrolls for extended boss fights) and maybe throw a heal to get people out of danger once the fight is over, letting people top off using pots. They throw down their high DPS abilities to support the fighting. They keep their own asses alive as a first priority. They don't act like healbots.

I'd recommend everyone run a few quests with experienced player clerics and get compliments before you trust you are a good party member. And tip your clerics. Well.

[Frumple]

See, I'm apparently too low level to see any of that. Of the three or so human clerics/favored souls I've grouped with so far, absolutely none of them have healed... at all. In elite runs with the very present chance of a kobold shaman double tapping someone for 50+ damage with a lightning bolt, in which running around damaged is a good way to get instagibbed. I'd probably love to have a competent human healer running along, but I haven't seen any yet

I've seen 3) at least once so far, though... stealthy repossession or something like that. Had to put the cleric on passive to keep it from killing kobold prophets. Mind you, that quest in general is just a massive clusterfuck for a completely unstealthy fighter, but the hireling didn't help.

Right now, I guess I just need to wait until the third or forth level quests, where some semblance of strategy is actually required, and it's possible to get people who have some vague idea what they're doing involved. So far, though, all I've really needed is a healbot, because dropping 350+pp in healing potions per quest is... unpalatable, and not being topped off gets me oneshot.

Rest of it, good points. I'll keep them in mind when I actually start seeing raids, six person parties, traps I can't get the hire out of, and more than one rust monster on a map. Maybe I should be annoyed that the earlier quests do jack-all to prepare you for the ones coming shortly thereafter?

[Aklyon]

Stealthy Repossesion is just a clusterfuck in general. Either you have a rogue who eventually fails to be stealthy enough and everyone else rushes in to the main area of the quest, or you get surrounded by a crapton of kobolds.

[Frumple]

Solo on normal was doable once I noticed the don't kill prophets thing... it just took wading through a few dozen kobolds, jumping madly while harried to the point of near immobility. I'm not looking forward to the hard/elite attempts.

[Matz05]

I did it Solo as a ranger... I think on Normal.

Annoying, but doable.

[palsch]

Stealthy Repossession is a matter of scouring the marketplace venders for an invisibility clicky. Ideally one with five casts, but three will do. You will lose invisibility every time you open a door or pull a lever, but with good timing you can keep it up for ~3/4 of the run.

I tend to use one after pulling the first lever (there isn't enough aggro to be a problem before that), one after the second (with the option of killing the red named in that room and maybe a few of his friends before vanishing and fleeing) then the last one after pulling the two levers (with one at the top of the ladder). Combine that with Expeditious Retreat and maybe barbarian sprint boost (I save that to get away from being harried) and you can clear it on elite below level in good time. Admittedly probably dying before you can finish out after you trigger all the aggro with the last lever, but at that point you can kill anything you like so just start laying into them as they mob you.

If you have access to invisibility scrolls you can keep it up for the entire run no problem. Just burn another scroll after each door/lever and keep running.

You even get an XP boost for not killing anything. Even if you don't have invisibility, with enough speed and some good armour you can usually survive a normal mad dash and grab over 1k XP inside 3 minutes, then slaughter the kobolds flocking to you for the 25 kill optional bonus. It's a common one to farm for fast experience.

If you can't find any clickies for a good price, hit me up and I'll send you one over. I got lucky on Notsoth and found one at level 3 and I'm pretty sure I have some old ones lying around on Kosoth.

Rest of it, good points. I'll keep them in mind when I actually start seeing raids, six person parties, traps I can't get the hire out of, and more than one rust monster on a map. Maybe I should be annoyed that the earlier quests do jack-all to prepare you for the ones coming shortly thereafter?

The thing to remember about DDO is it doesn't scale smoothly.

They have changed how armour works now, but for a long time it was reflective of the philosophy of the game. The enemies rolled a number for their to-hit and compared it to your armour class. Above it, they hit. Below it, they missed. Their to-hit only varied by 20 points, so unless your AC was in a very narrow range for each level you would always be hit or always be missed.

The same goes for a range of mechanics that get introduced throughout the game. Either you have the gear and knowledge to survive or you wipe, except in a few marginal cases. Sometimes that means having weapons that can break a bosses DR, otherwise you will never do more than scratch them¹. Sometimes it means knowing to have fire or acid or cold resistances up to negate damage over time that would drain your cleric's mana faster than you could blink². Sometimes it means having curse removal potions to make it so your cleric can even heal you³. Sometimes it means having a permanent deathblock item so that a Beholder can't dispel your death ward spell before insta-killing you⁴. Sometimes it means knowing when damage causing guards can fail a quest. Right now it also seems to mean knowing your awesome divine spell can instagib any nearby pale masters during an endgame raid...

The thing is, being and acting prepared for these things tends to shift your playstyle a little. You start being more sensitive to things that potentially risk a wipe or that can cause serious problems or would be considered rude if you weren't so overpowered, even if they aren't so important in a give situation. It's forming habits and recognising social norms more than anything.

Spoiler: Footnotes - where to get these things; (click to show/hide)

1 - I like crafted weapons here, given most DR breakers are designed to hit a certain type of enemy and so can be made with alignment and bane effects. A few major DR types listed here.

2 - There is a vendor in The Twelve who sells resist 20 pots in all the flavours of the elemental damage chart. I'd try to carry a minimum of 10 of each, although do note you will be drinking the fire ones very often so a few extras there are worthwhile. Ignoring 20 damage can make some traps completely harmless, so even the rarer types (like sonic) can be worthwhile. Ideally you can get ship buffs that do the same thing, but those don't last through death so you still want to keep the pots around.

3 - Curse removal pots from the guild vendor in House K are the best. You can drink them while raged. These are most important in VoD, but I like to keep them on a quick access hotkey for anytime I'm cursed. No sense wasting cleric mana either removing the curse or burning heals that have no effect. Remove disease and potion are similarly useful, if less vital.

4 - Grab any cheap deathblock item before level 8 or so. Even a robe that means forgoing your main armour. Switch into it when there are Beholder's around. Hopefully your party can warn you. Permanent deathblock is nice later, but often hard to fit into your gear.

[Metalax]

The alternative way to do stealthy repossession is to armour up as much as you can and move through the level taking care not to hit the prophets. This means no weapons that do glancing blows, no multiple target feats like cleave and no area spells. Select your target via the lock-on to next target key until you are targeting a non-prophet and only swing at them.

The prophets do pitiful damage and have a bad enough chance to hit if you have good AC that I have cleared the whole level while having them all following me trying to hit.

You actually end up with more xp clearing the dungeon this way as you get the onslaught bonus for killing more than 35 monsters and a subobjective for killing 25 kobolds that gives you 35% base xp. It is slower however, which may effect if you want to do it this way.

[The Fool]

Could you add Bowbreak and Kaliche? I'm Bowbreak and shoruke is Kaliche.

I'll delete Beldan to avoid damaging the guild reputation.

[Metalax]

Could you add Bowbreak and Kaliche? I'm Bowbreak and shoruke is Kaliche.

I'll delete Beldan to avoid damaging the guild reputation.

Invite sent to your mailboxes.

edit: As the airship buffs disappearing glitch is supposed to have been fixed, the ship has been stocked with buffs for the next month.

[RAM]

Could you add Bowbreak and Kaliche? I'm Bowbreak and shoruke is Kaliche.

I'll delete Beldan to avoid damaging the guild reputation.

Deleting a character is unnecessary, it is the number of players, rather than characters, that can damage guild reputation.

[Aklyon]

Active players.

[palsch]

So I decided to dive right in and TR Kosoth. Anyone low level who doesn't mind grinding for XP (and especially if you can open quests on elite) look me up. It looks like a long ride back to 20...