Survived the Vigilance Tasks!

Nearly three months after I first complained about the annoying design of Elemental Evil's "Vigilance Tasks", my pet tank and I finally completed the last of the four new zones that feature them. It's not that they take so long that it would really require three months to get through them all, but we found them so tedious that we kept having trouble finding the will to continue.

I still think that the way they intentionally keep sending you back to the same areas to kill the same mobs for a slightly different reason is an example of absolutely terrible design. It's easy to imagine the whole thing feeling very different if it had followed a daily structure similar to the previous campaign updates instead. Also, the rehashed maps were more of a downer than I expected. I'm planning to write a little "mini review" of each zone later.

Many thanks to Joseph Skyrim's Neverwinter Online Vigilance Quest Guide, which we found very helpful. When you're in a group, some of his recommendations don't apply the same way, but for the most part we found it easy to work out the differences. (E.g. a "simple" drop quest could become tedious in a group because the way drops work in groups can make things quite awkward. On the other hand something that was marked as difficult for soloers because of particularly tough mobs was usually comparatively quick and easy for a duo.)