A joy for me has been playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. The game is now over 17 years old and it is still running strong.

Back in 2019 the developers introduced a new special event server challenge called Hardcore League which uses a Permadeath mechanic.

If your character dies they will be transported immediately to a holding area and can no longer play the game.

Basically, it is GAME OVER if your character dies.

You have to create a new character and start all over again from the beginning. In the realm of MMORPGs, permadeath is the ultimate challenge.

Whenever a player dies, an announcement is issued to all players. A death note in red letters. On Hardcore, death is never far away.

The Hardcore server includes a leaderboard of the top 100 players. The leaderboard tracks two metrics Reaper Points and Favor.

Favor is an indicator of how many quests or dungeons a player has cleared at certain difficulty levels.

Reaper Points are accrued through running missions on the highest difficulty settings. They come in 4 forms: Carnage (Melee), Famine (Caster), Fear (DoT), and Plague (Debuffers).

A Fear Reaper’s damage over-time ability will affect everyone in the dungeon no matter where they are. Carnage Reapers can easily kill a player in 2-3 hits.

This season I will be playing using a Morninglord, which is an Iconic class of Sun Elf. I will pair two levels of Cleric with 18 levels of Sacred Fist, which is an Archetype of Paladin that fights like a monk using hand-wraps.

So, starting tomorrow the ninth season of the Hardcore League will begin. It will run from December 6th to February 7th.