Lonelywood Citizen Assembly

Neverwinter relies heavily on friendly NPCs to make towns and villages feel populated, what with most maps being limited to something like twenty players per instance. I generally find that this works pretty well, but I was rather amused when the other day in Lonelywood it appeared that a bunch of these friendly "citizen" NPCs had somehow formed a clump and appeared to have trouble disentangling themselves from it again.

Storm King's Thunder Silenced

At long last, I completed the Storm King's Thunder campaign, the last of the "old" campaigns that were still lingering as incomplete on my main's campaign screen. Even though I already had partial completion when I started on my project to finally finish it up, it still took me three months of near daily play (admittedly not involving maximum effort, but still) to complete all the boons. Seriously, three months! The grind is real.

What's interesting was that the Voninblood, whose number requirements looked the most intimidating initially, didn't turn out to be that much of an issue. As Joseph Skyrim noted in a comment on my original post about the campaign grind, the Ostorian Relics you can collect on all four of the campaign maps and which can be traded for Voninblood largely make that particular currency a non-issue as they can be farmed easily and indefinitely. I just didn't realise this right away, which wasn't helped by me not even having a trowel (required to collect them) for a lot of my early play sessions. Also, duoing with my pet tank initially meant that each of us only got half as many relics as a solo player would have collected.

I soon found that everything seemed to hinge on Secrets of Ostoria, the currency associated with completing the main daily mission (which in turn required you to do one regular daily quest in each of the first three zones). I eventually realised that I could actually collect all the various dailies to save them up for later, they just wouldn't show up if I didn't also have the main daily in my log. I then settled into a routine of doing a whole batch of dailies in each zone on different days of the week while also saving up the completed missions to hand in one at a time each day for the overarching daily quest. If that sounds a bit convoluted that's because it was.

Sea of Moving Ice was a different matter as there was a limited amount of saving up you could do in that zone, and eventually I had to focus more attention on it as I just needed Runic Fragments (that map's unique campaign currency) to complete the last two boons. The main two lessons I took away from that were that the fishing daily couldn't be "saved up" as it auto-completes as soon as you've gathered the required amount of fish, and that "Recasting Alarm" could be abandoned and re-picked until it gave you the super easy circuit just next to the base.

All said and done, I do have to give credit where credit is due though: The zones themselves were enjoyable, with nice visuals and music, and I still enjoyed questing in them again. I just wish the campaign didn't require you to do it for quite that long.

Grind Shander

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.

Cold Run

But what about Makos...?

Nooooo!!!

(This post might not make sense to you. But if it does, nothing more needs to be said.)

Bryn Shander

More than a month after its release, I've finally started the new Storm King's Thunder campaign. So far I'm liking what I see. Both the maps and the overall style seem to be quite similar to the original Icewind Dale, which is a good thing in my eyes.

The music and overall theme are just a bit sadder, what with all those flash-frozen citizens everywhere. It would be nice if they could all be thawed out at the end of it all, though I consider that highly unlikely.

I was also somewhat reminded of the Thunderfall area in WoW's Storm Peaks, which is also filled with NPCs that were frozen mid-combat.

End of an Era

With the new module, invoking was changed once again, this time so that it doesn't reward astral diamonds anymore. Instead you get "bonus diamonds", which means that the next time you do a "real" activity that rewards AD, such as a dungeon run, you get more than usual - if I understand the new system correctly anyway. As I do those activities so rarely, this bonus isn't worth the repeated daily logins for me, so I'll be back down to only logging in only once a day for the first invoke (I still like getting those coins) and to queue up professions.

When they originally introduced the now scrapped system that required logging in six times a day, staggered over the course of at least four hours, I wasn't thrilled, but somehow I got caught up in it anyway and ended up pursuing its rewards pretty obsessively. I actually feel kind of relieved that the incentive to continue doing so is gone and I won't be staring at the clock as much anymore. I do think it might also reduce my involvement with the game though. While logging in to press ctrl+i repeatedly wasn't engaging per se, each time was an opportunity for others to grab me and drag me into group content while I was online. And the time between the first couple of invokes was so short that I often didn't find it worth logging out and ran around taking care of a couple of small bits and pieces instead.

Also, I do wonder where my AD are going to come from now. I was pretty cross when they removed them from leadership, but things ended up being okay for me because my regular outgoings are small enough that my income from invoking was sufficient to keep me afloat. I'm not sure what's going to happen now. I shouldn't run out of AD too quickly, but I would expect to run out eventually. Also, any new characters will have a really hard time earning their first bits of currency now.

New Look

What's this? A new character selection screen? But they didn't do that for any of the previous expansions!

Now my characters will look even colder every time they load in in their underwear...