BHE Etiquette

Having spent a lot of time questing in older campaign zones in the last few weeks, I've had plenty of opportunity to refine my BHE calling etiquette.

• When you see a big heroic encounter spawn in your instance, check your instance number on the map and call it out in zone chat, even if you yourself aren't interested in doing the encounter.
• If people whisper you, invite them to the group for an easy map transfer. Often they will leave as soon as they've moved without any further prompting. Everyone understands the purpose of these grouping requests and no further niceties are required.
• Don't bother calling repeatedly if the map already shows as full (greyed out in the selection).
• Don't bother calling if the encounter's already in progress and less than a minute from finishing - it sucks to put your map transfer on cooldown for nothing because it's over before you've even loaded in.
  

Ascension Redux

Remember when I was complaining that nobody wanted to do the big heroic encounter in Avernus? In a prime example of how quickly the tides of content popularity can turn depending on its rewards, it has suddenly become the content du jour to farm Zariel's favour for the new event.

Now zone chat is an endless stream of people asking to be invited to groups for the heroic, so the moment it pops in your map instance, you just throw some invites to the first few names that scroll past and you'll immediately be surrounded by a bunch of uber-geared people that basically kill everything for you. I just find this highly amusing.

Shorthand

In-game shorthand can tell you a lot about new content even when you don't quite know yet what all the acronyms stand for.

For example, when we first started questing in Avernus, we quickly noticed that chat was full of "+siege" and "+ape". This indicated that there were at least two big heroic encounters (BHEs, or "beehees" as my husband likes to call them) on the map that people liked to run for the rewards.

"Ape" seemed like a bit of an odd name, mind you, but we soon found out that this was because while the encounter was technically called "Demonic Summoning", it involved killing a giant Barlgura, a type of demon that looks like - you guessed it - some kind of ape. Why waste precious syllables when a simple "ape" will do it?

Coming Up

The undisputed meh-ness of Heart of Fire has caused my pet tank and me to give Neverwinter the cold shoulder for the past month, especially as we had much more entertaining alternatives to play, but that doesn't mean that I stopped caring about what Cryptic will bring out next. So I was pleased to find out that they just announced the next module, which will be called Undermountain.

Unfortunately, based on what else they announced, it sounds like this will be another module heavily focused on systems changes, including but not limited to changing the very names of classes, changing how tanking and healing works, removing feats and power points, changing item and level scaling, changing the way stats work - which includes the removal of recovery and lifesteal, which is huge - and the raising of the level cap to 80.

The reason I started the above sentence with "unfortunately" is that while all the explanations given for these in the linked dev blogs sound reasonable enough (Healing is currently pointless? You don't say!), Cryptic has a history of being very bad at getting balancing right, so I expect the launch of an expansion with this many gameplay changes to be an utter disaster. Plus the level cap increase, something that would be a normal and happy event in many other MMOs, brings up memories of Elemental Evil, Neverwinter's worst module ever. (There were many things wrong with Elemental Evil and not all of those had something to do with the level cap increase, but it was certainly a contributing factor.)

So I'll be keeping an eye on what else they announce for Undermountain - I'll definitely want to check it out at some point, but based on past experience probably not at launch.

(As an aside, while reading up on this piece of news I learned that Neverwinter Unblogged is shutting down - that is a great shame and a huge loss, as this site was a big part in keeping me up-to-date with what was going on in the game and often provided very helpful info for a more casual player like me.)

Icewind Kindness

This past weekend was an Icewind Dale bonus weekend, so I decided to take it as an opportunity to do some quests there on my three characters that haven't completed that campaign yet. Two of them hadn't even started yet, and it occurred to me that with their low gear levels, Biggrin's Tomb wasn't going to be very fun to do on my own.

I often see people looking for groups for it in zone chat however, so I figured I'd find myself one or more other not too well-geared people and we'd do it together. Somewhat to my surprise though, both times when I answered a call asking whether anyone needed Biggrin's Tomb, I actually ended up in the company of a seriously overgeared character who was just rushing through for their own weekly anyway and who had just felt like offering someone else a free ride while they were at it.

I was really surprised by those random acts of niceness and I'll try to remember to pay it forward next time I go in there on one of my own better geared characters.

Don't Hate Mondays

I have a habit of staying up late on Sundays when I shouldn't, probably because subconsciously I don't want the weekend to end. As a result I tend to feel very tired by Monday evening and usually don't game as much as I would on another day.

I'm starting to think though that I might be missing out by not playing on Mondays more often. The first time I noticed this was when I happened to spend a Monday in Borovia, where the map was being positively depopulated by all the hardcore players running around and slaughtering everything in sight to quickly get their weekly done, and when the big heroic on Yester Hill popped, I never saw Thornspur die so quickly before.

This week I observed the same phenomenon when I quickly jumped into Omu one more time, the Tyrant came up, and people killed everything so quickly that I actually got the achievement for keeping all the beast cages intact. Plus at the end, where the Tyrant is supposed to run away when his health gets low - well, it did still happen because the script commanded it, but strictly speaking his health had already hit zero a long time ago. Just finding a good group to tag along with makes this kind of content so much easier.

Inv Ship Pls

The heroic encounters in the River District are a funny thing. There are four large ones in total - three that share a spawn timer and appear in one of three corners of the map (I don't know if their order is fixed or randomised), and one that can be triggered by player hand-ins and is located almost right next to the zone's base.

As a result, everyone runs the latter all the time and general chat is flooded with invite requests so that people can chain-run the encounter by quickly hopping from one instance to the next. Meanwhile, the other three events largely go ignored. (The fact that the teleporting mobs that are part of Gyrion's forces are super annoying doesn't help.)

MMO min-maxing at its finest.

Fun With Numbers

Also in the news, Cryptic released an info graphic celebrating 2 million players on the PlayStation 4 and 12 million players in total. This is one of those numbers that sound amazing when you first hear it, but of course it's not quite all that once you realise that the game is free to play and they counted everyone who's ever created an account over the past three and a half years.

The part of the info graphic I personally found the most interesting was that (on the PS4) "over 30,000 players have reached the max level cap" because... that's really not that much. It means that the conversion from "I guess I'll try this free game" to "I'll level at least to the level cap" (which really doesn't take very long at all) is only 1.5 percent. If we extrapolate from that to the total number of players, there are only about 180,000 players with max level characters in Neverwinter, and presumably only a small percentage of those actually play regularly. So the overall active population is presumably "only" in the tens of thousands.

I also liked their note that 18 million mounts have already been attained on the PS4. With 3.2 million characters created, that makes for an average of more than five mounts per character - and in reality that number is probably even higher, as I'm sure many lowbies don't even get far enough to acquire more than their first mount.

Group Chat

In dungeon and skirmish groups, nobody ever seems to talk in this game. In other MMOs I hate this kind of antisocial behaviour, but in Neverwinter I can't blame people, considering that the action combat really doesn't lend itself to pausing to type something into chat - especially since the controls require you to effectively "tab out" of your character to access the chat box.

On the rare occasion when something does need saying, such as when someone is overlooking a crucial fight mechanic that causes the group to wipe, typing feels clumsy and awkward, as if I don't really know how to talk to people in this game.

On the plus side, nobody bothers to berate other players either. I've seen a lot of wipes and poor performances in group content already, but not once has anyone bothered to complain about any of it in chat, which makes the community feel strangely welcoming even in its complete and utter silence.