My initial positive reaction to the Storm King's Thunder adventure zones has been tempered by harsh reality. Now that I've unlocked all three of them I can confidently say that they are very beautiful and that their story is enjoyable, but the dailies and associated boons are the grindiest that I've seen in a long time.
At first I thought it was just the big numbers... e.g. in Dread Ring I can get one Thayan Cipher per day, of which I need one per day to advance the campaign, which I have to repeat thirty-one times. That's very straightforward. However, when I look at a campaign where unlocking all boons requires more than 55,000 Voninblood, it's natural that this seems overwhelming, even if the dailies earn me several hundred a day. However, even if you do dailies for 500 Voninblood a day, that still leaves you with a full hundred days of grinding unless you manage to consistently supplement your currency income through relics and heroic encounters.
Also, we discovered that while doing them in a group, some of the dailies have the annoying habit of giving people different objectives even if they are in the same group and pick up the quest at the same time (e.g. one person gets "kill mobs west of the camp" and one gets "kill mobs east of the camp"), which is just annoying and makes things take even longer.
My enthusiasm is already waning.
I wonder how the questline in Neverwinter compares with the D&D 5e adventure. I picked up the adventure sourcebook a month or two ago and found it really fascinating reading --definitely would make a good campaign, particularly if you like giants-- but I'm curious how it was converted to an MMO.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes forget that these are based on actual tabletop modules. :P Looking at the summary on the official website, the connection might be tenuous - the game's story is focused solely on the frost giants' invasion of the Ten Towns and the theft of the Ring of Winter. The only character on the NPC spreadsheet that I've encountered during the campaign is Duvessa Shane, who is a quest giver. Otherwise you interact with the already known story NPCs from the game and some from the novels (Cattie-brie, Wulfgar etc.).
DeleteThe Frost Giant invasion is only one part of the overall setting book. I wonder if they're going to expand with the Fire Giant and Hill Giant part.
DeleteYeah, and it's only going to get worse when the next (fishing) module comes out. For your dailies/weeklies, focus on ostorian relics.
ReplyDeleteThe voninblood is also a pain but will come much faster if you just go relic hunting in Bryn Shander (non-quest related). Each 20 minute loop nets me around 1.5k voninblood, provided I'm on a channel with very few competing players.
Still a pain, but not as bad as farming up those linus. :/