Enchantment!

(I always read that in the voice of that dwarf NPC from Dragon Age.)

Enchantments in Neverwinter are an interesting system with a considerable dose of pay-to-win.

Most gear has an enchantment slot to add extra stats, and enchantments come in ranks from one to ten. You can find the lower level ones out in the world, but to get anything higher than five you pretty much need to "refine".

Refining basically means destroying lots of low-level enchantments and/or expensive consumables to fill a refinement bar, and once it's full you can click a button to upgrade the enchantment if you have certain other consumables in your bag as well. The catch is that the upgrade isn't guaranteed and if it fails, what happens by default is that you lose all your consumables. At lower levels this doesn't seem too bad as the chances of success are still pretty reasonable, but soon the failure rate climbs up to literally 99% and the only way to circumvent that problem is to use an expensive cash shop consumable called a ward.

In short, there are three ways in which this system is somewhat pay-to-win.

1) You can buy "refinement fuel" in the cash shop that's literally a hundred times more powerful than what you commonly find out in the world. This doesn't feel too bad to me yet as you can still fill your bar purely by playing the game; it just takes very long.

2) The basic wards prevent you from losing your stuff if an upgrade fails. There is no way of achieving this without the cash shop, but I still find it tolerable because these basic wards are pretty cheap. They also don't feel mandatory quite yet.

3) The expensive wards guarantee that an upgrade will suceed even if it has a 99% failure rate. These I don't like, as nobody can realistically expect to upgrade their enchantments past a certain rank without using them. Considering that there are over a dozen item slots that can have enchantments, each of which would require several expensive wards to be upgraded to max, this just feels like an attempt to milk dedicated players for all they are worth, just because they want their characters to be as powerful as possible.