Dead Zone

My goal for my little hunter ranger is to slowly take her through all the original zones and redo all the quests there to remind myself of their storylines. I only actually did them all once, as all three of my current max-level alts went into "levelling without really playing" mode at one point or another.

In an interesting contrast to most other MMOs I've played, which usually offer a variety of starting experiences for different races or classes, Neverwinter's first couple of levels are the exact same every time. This actually made them the hardest for me to replay yet again, as they all featured content that I had already done multiple times before. I usually do most of the quests up to Neverdeath Graveyard if nothing else, simply because that's where you get your last free bag.

I was pretty relieved once I pushed past that and got into the content I actually wanted to replay, however I was also kind of surprised just how much overall player activity dropped off at that point (around level thirty). Zones suddenly had less than half the number of active instances compared to before, and queue times for skirmishes jumped up from near instant to upwards of ten minutes.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, considering that this is the point where I also usually stop questing on my alts, not to mention the point where my interest originally floundered for a while when I first tried the game at launch. It's still interesting to see that this seems to affect so many people though.