My Top 5 Neverwinter Modules

Ever since Neverwinter Unblogged wrote a great article ranking the game's many modules by quality, I've been meaning to write my own (shorter) version of this. (I'm not going to link the original article because sadly the dead site's domain trips security warnings in all my browsers nowadays.) Without further ado, my five favourite modules and the reasons why I love them:

5. Mod 18: Infernal Descent (January 2020)

Yes, I'm putting the most recently completed mod on this list because while it wasn't particularly innovative, it managed to get me back into the game after a very long absence (by my standards) and after having been majorly put off by the previous releases. It returned to using systems that I'd enjoyed before, and the devil theme kept things sufficiently fresh as they aren't really an enemy we've had to fight in great numbers before.

4. Mod 1: Fury of the Feywild (August 2013)

I wasn't actually playing when this was released, but when I came back to the game for the first time it was still very relevant content. In terms of theme, in a fantasy setting you can't really go wrong by having elves and a magical forest, and while somewhat grindy in its initial iteration, I enjoyed the content from the beginning. I believe my initial assessment was "similar to New Romulus in STO, but better". While much faster and easier these days, I still always enjoy coming back to this campaign on alts too.

3. Mod 14: Ravenloft (June 2018)

Based on an iconic property that immediately sparked interest, this mod managed to do the land of Barovia and its ruler justice by representing them through gameplay elements that managed to be a refinement of things that had worked well before and making them even better and more fun. Another map that I'm very happy to come back to.

2. Mod 3: Curse of Icewind Dale (May 2014)

This was the current mod when I first returned to the game after having drifted away not long after launch, and I loved it enough that it got me to stay semi-permanently. I loved the whole setup of Caer-Konig with the two competing factions, the snowy environments and the music; and new features like the heroic encounters dotted around the map and the optional open world PvP were appealing. While the difficulty felt kind of brutal for a solo player at the time, there was also something satisfying about playing an MMO again where "everything goes much more smoothly in a group" made for an incentive to group up with friends even for simple tasks like doing dailies.

1. Mod 7: Strongholds (August 2015)

It may seem odd to give the top spot to a module that didn't feature a campaign and didn't have much of a story attached to it, but I've really come to adore my little guild's stronghold. I'm not really a huge fan of housing in general, but the stronghold map is more like a privately shared adventure zone, and I enjoyed seeing our mini guild slowly improve ours as time went on. To be honest I think this is one of the main reasons I've stayed so attached to Neverwinter over the years: Our stronghold offers a virtual home, and even after periods of absence I never have to wonder what to do upon returning - checking on the stronghold is always the first order of business, and everything else can be figured out later.

Unscaled Stronghold

Ever since their introduction, guild strongholds have featured level scaling. Since level scaling in Neverwinter isn't very good, this was of limited usefulness - you couldn't realistically go around as an upscaled level 15 and do content in the stronghold on your own - but if you found a guildie or friend to team up with, you did actually stand a chance at killing things together.

For some reason Cryptic opted to remove level scaling when they levelled everything in the stronghold up to 80 with Undermountain. This has the annoying consequence that you are completely useless as a lower-level character now. When I used a level 70 alt to tag along with my husband's paladin as he did some heroic encounters, I was nothing but a squishy liability, with some of my attacks hitting for only 1 damage.

It's an odd choice to make and I hope Cryptic still rethinks it. Levelling in Neverwinter may not be hard, but I don't really see any benefit in making the stronghold content less inclusive.

Stronghold Siege

Sticking with the theme of trying new things, I joined members of my guild's alliance for a stronghold siege for the first time the other day. Apparently this is a feature that has been in game for years, since shortly after strongholds were introduced in fact, but I had never actually tried it.

Basically it's 20v20 PvPvE on a modified stronghold map, with the basic premise being that two guilds are trying to take down each other's guild hall. In the vaguest sense it reminded me a bit of WoW's Alterac Valley: a large scale PvP match where you can score points for your side not so much by killing other people but by capturing objectives and completing certain tasks.

It struck me as something that was clearly meant to be quite involved and epic but never really seems to have taken off. The alliance just does it for the rewards from the weekly quest but doesn't take the competition very seriously: one guy just takes on the role of the enemy guild while everyone else smashes his guild hall for an easy win. Seems like a shame really; I could imagine this being pretty epic when played "properly".

Cleric Life

I didn't used to pay that much attention to him because I rarely did his quests, but lately I've been doing so more often and I've got to say: the cleric NPC in the stronghold is hilarious. As a cleric main I can really relate to his jadedness! "I wish he'd just give me tasks I can do by myself" indeed. "I'd be... grateful?" That question mark at the end just kills it. In an unusual twist for Neverwinter, the voice actor does a really great job as well. (Though actually, all the stronghold NPCs are pretty well done.)

Friendly P2W Disappointment

My guild was working on yet another building for our stronghold, this time being held back by adventurer's shards of power, which are also limited per character per day, but unlike influence, they are rewarded for something I like doing anyway, so I was slowly increasing our total day by day.

I enjoyed slowly chipping away at our common goal and feeling like I was contributing to something big. In my head, I kept calculating how many more quests I'd have to complete to hit the target.

Then, one day, the building was suddenly set up already, the coffer nearly emptied of shards. I was baffled and asked where we had suddenly got so many shards in such a short time. Had people from our alliance donated or something?

Pet tank: "No, I just bought some Zen..."
Me: :(

Influence

My mini-guild has been stuck at guild level 5 for a while. We were aiming to upgrade our guild hall to level 6, but the requirement to hand in 150k+ influence presented a bit of a brick wall. It's a currency that can only be earned by running heroic encounters in the stronghold, at a maximum rate of 400 per character per day. I think it's obvious why this presented a problem for a guild that rarely even has three people online.

However, the latest patch brought with it a welcome innovation in the form of temporary buildings, specifically one that generates about 2400 influence a day for a week, assuming you tend to it regularly. Erecting this structure also costs resources of course, but they are resources we actually have and can now convert into something we need. Maybe we'll eventually get that level 6 guild hall after all.

For the Alliance!

A recent patch introduced a feature called guild alliances. The system remains opaque to me, even though our guild has joined one such alliance. One thing I've learned is that not all guilds in an alliance are created equal; instead one gets to be the "boss", who has several subordinates, each of whom has another bunch of subordinates of their own. We hold the lowest rank of these while being beholden to a "boss" guild called "GOD", which has led to all kinds of opportunities for punny humour (comments about "seeing god", "being with god" etc.).

One clear benefit is that all the alliance strongholds get linked up for easy visitation rights, and members of all participating guilds can team up to tackle the heroic dragon encounters on the stronghold map, which seem to require 20+ people if you want to kill more than one of the four dragons.

Annoyingly, part of the rewards from these encounters are contained in special kinds of lockboxes for which you need a new kind of key from the cash shop, and I'm almost ashamed to admit that I did shell out some zen to be able to unlock the few I got. And to think the rewards weren't even that great...

It's been fun to be part of the loosely directed zerg to kill the dragons a few times now (they need to die close to simultaneously, so there's a lot of "everyone except two people switch from red to black" kind of shouting going on), but I could see those fights getting boring quickly as there isn't much else to pay attention to. The fun is additionally reduced by the fact that one or two of the dragons have glitchy/hard or impossible to see mechanics that one-shot people, so depending on which dragon you are on, you can end up in an ongoing cycle of dying, resurrecting at the nearest campfire, using an injury kit, running back, landing a couple of attacks and immediately dying again.

Foreign Merchants

The new escort quest for the jubilee event is an excellent way of grinding both renown and the protector's bounty boxes. You only need one person to have the scroll with the quest to get him moving (which is a fairly common drop), everyone else can then tag along without having it and still get the rewards. After every combat the merchant and his horses will drop either a box or some renown for everyone present... which adds up to quite a number as he gets ambushed several times, walks through a bunch of existing mob groups and you can even pull some more on top of him to make him drop extras.

There are a couple of these merchants in different zones - I escorted one in Blacklake District today and there was a huge crowd following the merchant's every step, with the low-level mobs getting one-shotted before they'd even fully spawned. With my guildies I've mostly been farming the stronghold version though - it might have been luck of the draw, but that one seemed to drop a much higher number of bounty boxes for me.

It was probably the most bizarre kind of social content I've participated in so far, constantly running up and down the road as a group to escort more merchants. It was pretty fun and relaxing though.

Foreign merchants showering us with gifts... I think Cryptic is sending a clear pro-immigration message here!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Neverwinter!

Has this on-and-off relationship really been going on for three years already? Congratulations on holding my attention for that long, game!

We found our stronghold decked out in celebratory banners, with confetti raining from the sky absolutely everywhere. There's also a new repeatable escort quest in the stronghold just for the jubilee event, which follows all the bad tropes of an escort quest to a T... well, except for the one where your escortee attacks everything, cause the foreign merchant actually just cowers.

My favourite skirmish, the Protector's Speech, is also back! I just wish they'd actually give him a new speech every year. I have to be careful not to fall down the rabbit hole of grinding it over and over again just because it's easy, fun and rewarding, simply because I do need to get sleep at some point. I do think I would like to get the horse for my control wizard though.

I'm a bit torn on how much to involve my lowbie hunter ranger. On the one hand I want to get her a key to the Protector's Garden because all my other alts have it, on the other hand this risks throwing her levelling journey seriously off course, considering that a single run of the skirmish was enough to net me nearly two levels. I'll probably go ahead with it anyway.

Also, don't forget to claim your free goodie from the Zen store every day for the next week! If nothing else, Cryptic sure knows how to celebrate.

Rich Spiders

While doing heroic encounters in the guild stronghold, someone made the interesting observation that wealth seems to be distributed surprisingly unevenly among the denizens of the stronghold. Not that anyone kills them for their loot (yay, another rank five enchantment), but it's still funny once you actually start to take notice.

Spiders appear to be the richest creatures by far (three Frozen Treasures from a single spider attack encounter!), followed by beasts and devils. The marauding orcs on the other hand appear to have almost no possessions. No wonder they are kicking up a stink - clearly a case of social unrest caused by extreme poverty.

Minions

My pet tank's enthusiasm for working on our guild stronghold has been invigorated lately, and as the only thing that we're missing to progress to the next stage right now is a bunch of influence, he's been pulling people from our SWTOR raid team into Neverwinter to make them farm for us (as it has a limit of 400 per character per day). Talk about peer pressure when it's your raid leader who asks you to do something like that!

They don't even have to do much though, just log in, go to the stronghold and join the group; credit can largely be "mooched", even from quite a distance. It's been kind of nice because I've never seen our guild stronghold this full before; we were actually running heroic encounters with a full five-man group sometimes. Everything is more fun with friends.

Market Day

After a prolonged period of inactivity, our mini guild also finally unlocked the market for its stronghold.

It's really nice to finally have vendors in there, though also a bit frustrating to see that they won't sell gear to us until we've upgraded the market to level two, and who knows when that will happen.

Vigilant

I've spent a fair amount of time hating on Elemental Evil's vigilance tasks here, but I have to confess that lately I've actually been doing them again, and even without my pet tank. My control wizard is level 69, has completed the first three zones, and just got started on Spinward Rise. Basically, there are three factors that have made me change my mind, or at least made this way of levelling more bearable to me:

1) Stronghold quests: I like that during your sixties, you get two daily quests from your guild stronghold, one to complete four vigilance tasks and one to kill fifty mobs on the way. This adds some pacing, as four a day feels much more manageable than looking at the total number of quests required to get to the end and watching them reset every hour. Also, the extra quests for doing the same thing make each round of four tasks feel more rewarding.

2) Nerfs: After admitting that they messed up, Cryptic actually went through with nerfing level 60+ mobs, as well as cutting the requirement to progress at each vigilance quest hub in half. Eight missions per hub means that you never have to stay anywhere for long and that you have less time to get sick of an area.

3) Ruthless efficiency: Using past experience, I only pick the easy quests now. (For my wizard in particular this means, anything that requires me to AoE packs of relatively weak mobs is good, while tough single mobs are a bit of a pain.) If a bad bunch is up, I'll just log off and try again later. It makes the difference between a fun half hour romp and spending lots of time dying and running back to where I got defeated.

Meanwhile, A Farm

Last time I posted about my guild's stronghold, we still seemed to have some ways to go to unlocking our second building. However, my pet tank decided to plunder his old main's campaign currencies (since he switched to playing his paladin as his main) and apparently that was enough to push us over the edge. (I still suspect that there were some real money purchases involved somewhere...)

So now we have a farm, which produces food, which in turn serves no other purpose than to power the creation of even more stronghold buildings.

The next building however is the one that really interests us: the market. I don't think the NPCs there will sell us anything interesting at level one, however just having a vendor inside the stronghold would be nice, as a lack of somewhere to sell things has been the one major drawback of using the stronghold as a hub so far.

No More AD From Leadership

General chat caught my eye today because people were arguing about a change that had been announced on the forums but nowhere else so far: the removal of astral diamond rewards from the leadership profession (and the foundry).

The driving force behind this is an unbalanced economy caused by "AFK-playing" and botting. Leadership rewards astral diamonds just for logging in and pressing some buttons, and Cryptic wants to stop that. In fairness, some players have taken this to pretty insane levels, farming leadership on fifty alts or even multiple accounts. Cryptic wants people to gain AD by actually playing the game, and I can't blame them for that.

However, I still think that the proposed changes are terrible, because after this the only ways of gaining astral diamonds will be dungeons, skirmishes and PvP (plus the pittance you get from invoking these days). But that's only a small part of the content! In practice this means that a lot of players will effectively have no source of AD anymore.

Take me as an example. I've found dungeons and skirmishes at max level to either be extremely dull or unforgivingly hard to the point that they are a pain to do in pugs. And PvP in this game is terrible in my opinion. Nonetheless I rack up a considerable amount of hours playing each week: I do dailies in the campaign areas and work on my guild's stronghold. None of this awards astral diamonds. If anything, things like unlocking campaign boons and upgrading your stronghold cost AD. Where is that currency supposed to come from in the future?

This seems like another one of those changes that hasn't really been thought through at all, or is simply driven by blind greed. ("If we minimise the ways of gaining currency in game, people will spend more money, right?")

Stronghold Life

Even though my mini-guild's stronghold still only has one building, we've grown strangely attached to it. It may be decrepit and low level, but it's ours. The heroic encounters are easy compared to the stuff in Icewind Dale and even many of the larger ones can actually be completed by a group consisting of as few as two or three people. They are fun and sometimes even quite rewarding.

It's also given us a new goal to work towards, erecting that second building (the farm). On weekends we group up and run dailies en masse to fill the guild coffer. Surprisingly it has turned out that it's not the unique stronghold currency that's holding us back (though it does take time to accumulate enough of it) but rather the amount of different campaign currencies that you have to pay in. We just don't run that many dailies, and more importantly, on some characters we actually still need the currency to advance the campaign itself and can't really donate it to the guild instead.

Lazy Peons

As far as I can tell this doesn't serve any gameplay purpose, but I like that I can poke the guards when they are lazy.

So... Strongholds

My pet tank has been excited about this module for months, since he loves building up bases. I warned him that it probably wouldn't be all that, especially for a mini guild like ours, with only 2-4 active players.

Now it's out, and it seems that I was right. Similar to a fleet starbase in STO, a guild stronghold requires the guild members to submit various currencies and resources to upgrade it. While the basic stronghold is free and the first building can be put up pretty much immediately, the second one already looks like it would take us about a hundred days or more to build, based on the limited amount of currency you can earn per character per day.

On the plus side, it's a new and pretty sizeable adventure map, and the smaller heroic encounters on it can be completed even by our tiny group. It does make me wonder how busy this map could potentially get in a large guild.

Happy Patch Day

The new Strongholds module officially launched yesterday. Cryptic has a very old-school approach to patch days, which is to say that the game never comes back up in time or actually works when it's supposed to. First they had to keep extending the scheduled maintenance, and then when the servers finally came back up, they immediately crashed again.

The game also has this weird thing going on where the launcher doesn't actually seem to do nearly as much patching as it should. Which is to say that the game told me it was fully patched up and ready to play, I logged in, and the first loading screen took ten minutes while the game was telling me that it was patching another 1100 files... better not be in a hurry to invoke!

More on Strongholds

On Thursday Cryptic posted an update on Strongholds to say that it's "coming summer 2015", plus some incredibly vague PR speak that seems to indicate that it will have both a PvE and a PvP side to it. ("Once the keep has been secured, guilds will have to battle against the environment as well as other players to ensure they maintain control of their lands.") It doesn't seem to feature anything like traditional MMO housing.

They also posted a video which shows people running around and fighting, apparently to save some villagers, and which makes you wonder how exactly the stronghold comes into it except as a background prop.

I like that the currently most upvoted YouTube comment on the video is: "Really? A guy on a 50% mount keeping up with the other guys? Make it realistic!"