Fishing Farewell

Hey, the winter festival is back! I may be feeling a bit meh about the game in general, but I always enjoy this event.

Unfortunately I immediately ran into another downer when I went to do some ice fishing and found that the ice on the lake had been smashed and you are now supposed to just fish there using the same mechanics as in Sea of Moving Ice and Chult.

Now, I like that fishing mini game, but I kind of liked ice fishing more. More importantly, the latter was just a completely different beast from "regular" fishing, a fairly fast-paced mini game that was more about racing across the ice effectively and beating other people to the good fishing holes than about anything else. Now you just stand around and fish for ten minutes.

Also, they trashed all the fishing poles that I crafted last year and are making us start over with a new and crappy pole, because for some reason these things are never allowed to carry over from one activity to the next. Not happy.

Meh Module

Funnily enough, after I complained about my workshop's unending deliveries, Cryptic went ahead and patched that out this past week, so the goods now arrive instantly and fill up your delivery box the moment you log in. I guess that was a bug instead of a feature?

I was also pleased to see that they finally fixed the Chult Signet of Patronage. I momentarily got really excited when I saw that they had finally added a signet for that campaign with Heart of Fire, but of course it launched in a broken state and couldn't actually be used. Now it can, but my initial excitement has tapered off and I'm busy with other things already.

Unfortunately this whole module feels very "meh" to me so far. The workshop is ultimately not great, and my pet tank and I have even put the new campaign on hold for now because rerunning the same couple of story quests to crawl up a giant's butt week after week got old really, really quickly.

In the community I've seen mutterings about this module being the worst addition since Elemental Evil. It's probably not quite that bad, but I haven't felt this disengaged from the game since early Chult.

Unending Deliveries

One aspect of the new crafting system is that you can tell your crafters to repeat a task "indefinitely", which in practice should simply mean "until your delivery mailbox is full". So if you have ten slots in your inbox and send your artisans out in the evening to craft as much as they can overnight, you should then wake up to ten items in your inbox, right?

Unfortunately in practice the game doesn't do the calculations for this while you're offline, and not even instantly when you log in - instead, every crafted item takes several seconds to be processed and to actually appear in your inbox, and this process doesn't even start until you actually log in.

So what now happens to me every time I log on is that I dash to my delivery box and find it maybe half full (as far as the game managed to calculate its contents in the time it took me to get there). I take everything out, and the game continues to fill it up. Again, and again, and again... until I actually run out of materials or the calculation decides that in the x hours since I last logged in, that's the maximum amount of items my artisan would have been able to craft in terms of time.

I guess I should be glad that the offline crafting is so efficient, but on the other hand it's actually kind of annoying that I now basically spend the first fifteen minutes of any given play session just sitting next to my mailbox and gradually emptying it out over and over again. I guess I could just let it hit the space limit but that would then feel wasteful. It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Workshop Woes

My initial enthusiasm for the workshop has definitely come to an end. I climbed the wall of having to earn 500,000 trade credits to upgrade my main's workshop from level 2 to level 3, just to find that the next upgrade required me to do the same thing again, only this time for 5 million credits. Also, where a big part of my initial push had been made possible by the conversion of old crafting materials to new (via a horrible vendor interface that makes you want to bash your head against the wall), I was fresh out of tradable materials by that point. The cherry on top was the realisation that instead of earning 5 million trade credits, you can just pay 5 million AD for the upgrade instead. Neverwinter has a lot of pay-to-win aspects, but they aren't always this blatant.

It also hasn't helped that without consulting any kind of guide, I went about my business very inefficiently initially. Having opened a workshop on my first alt, I'm now trying not to commit the same mistakes again, but just the thought of having to go through the whole unlocking and upgrading process on seven more characters is somewhat deflating.

It might not be so bad if you're a new player and learning things as you go, but as a more casual player who previously maxed out her professions over several years of casual play, having to start over at this point and being faced with this much grind just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Recruitment Drive

I didn't realise it before it released, but Heart of Fire is a levelling campaign, not one for max-level characters, and in line with that Cryptic has been trying to use its celebrity connection to recruit new players from the Penny Arcade fan base. Makes sense, and I certainly don't think it's a bad thing to have more variety in levelling content, even if it makes the new quests a bit trivial and boring to play through at the cap.

Cryptic is also trying to get old players to roll up new alts by currently holding a recruitment event which will earn you some rewards if you level a character during this time, similar to what they've already done in STO a few times. Unfortunately that doesn't really appeal to me either though - I was just glad to finally get all my alts to 70 earlier in the year. As much as I usually love levelling in MMOs, there's something about Neverwinter that makes its levelling game a lot less appealing than in other games.

So I really have no interest in creating another alt of a class I already have. Now if they ever release an actual new class...

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.

Gold

Cash in Neverwinter has always been in a bit of an odd place. As a new player, I remember that the prospect of needing however many gold it was to buy my first white quality horse seemed quite daunting. (They've since changed it so that you get the starter mount for free.) After that though, the usefulness of coins quickly dropped off, because beyond maybe buying some basic potions from a vendor, there wasn't much you could do with them, what with even the auction house trading in astral diamonds.

Over time, Cryptic tried to make gold a little more useful, by making it the currency required to swap out enchantments (used to be AD) and requiring gold deposits to the guild coffer for certain guild upgrades. In practice though, most people still always had way, way more gold than they'd ever be able to find a use for.

Well, the workshop has changed all of that, because the prices some artisans charge to craft things are no joke. I was initially quite thrilled by the new option to put them to work "indefinitely" (until your delivery box is full at least) but it only took a few days for me to realise that this was quickly draining all my gold reserves, which felt very weird considering that in the old crafting system most tasks were cash-neutral or even positive.

Unblogged since had an article about how there's at least one item you can craft to generate lots of gold, though I'm wondering whether in typical Cryptic fashion that wasn't actually intended and will soon be hotfixed or even considered an exploit. I've been trying it anyway, as I figure it's just gold, and since that's not tied to the "real" economy it's unlikely to be a big issue. It's still strange to suddenly be even thinking about my gold reserves though.

Auto-Loot

A new quality of life change in Heart of Fire is that you don't have to manually loot items anymore. The way it used to be was that you could loot money by simply running over it (it appears as little piles of cash on the ground after defeating an enemy), while actual items required you to run over/target a little glowy thing on the ground, wait for the interaction prompt to come up, and hit F to loot it.

This has now been changed so that like money - and lockboxes actually - you pick up all items by simply running over them.

A part of me is actually kind of disappointed by this. I remember when trying LOTRO, I was quite weirded out by how loot just appeared in my bags automatically. I enjoy the act of looking at and sorting out what rewards I just earned from defeating an opponent - if they just go into my bags without me doing anything, that makes for a very disconnected experience.

On the other hand though... whenever the game was laggy, it could be a real pain to have to wait for the loot prompt to come up for every single item drop, so I like not having to worry about that anymore, and of course not having to click repeatedly makes the whole process a lot faster. I'll still have to run around to gather my shinies at least, so it's not as if they fully automated the whole thing just yet.

You Thought Poop Quests Were Bad?

Well yes, they are, but I bet your MMO hasn't asked you to literally crawl up a giant's rectum and clean out his bowel (yet). In Heart of Fire, this isn't just a quest, it's one that's repeatable once a week.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what to make of the humour in this module. I was never really a fan of the Penny Arcade comic... every now and then someone would link me a particular strip about MMO mechanics or something and I'd go "heh yeah, that's pretty spot on" but if I tried to browse the archives at all I'd quickly get bored as I didn't find most of them even mildly amusing.

The new storyline in Heart of Fire is at least kind of funny so far; it's just all incredibly over the top, with characters constantly spouting anachronistic dialogue or the story centering on juvenile jokes like the quest mentioned above. It's all just a little bit jarring when compared to the rest of the game.

I Can Has Workshop?

Heart of Fire release day! Most of my evening was taken up by trying to figure out the new professions system, and my first impression is mostly great, with a little bit of annoyance thrown in.

I do like that they changed it from the equivalent of a lame time waster into something that's properly integrated with the rest of the game, with quests and everything. I enjoyed working my way through the associated story so far, until I hit a brick wall in the form of a "craft items worth 500,000 points" quest.

This does bring me to the main negative I have so far, which is that as someone who used to have everything maxed out, it feels a bit annoying to be held back by time-gated stuff like that again, even if Cryptic was generally generous with letting you convert old resources to new. I imagine it's going to be a bit of a chore to get all my alts back up to speed.

Trot

About two years ago, I made a point of doing the Siege of Neverwinter event on my paladin to get her the Neverwinter Champion's Charger, an armoured horse mount that, among other things, stood out for its funny walk. Instead of galloping like most horses, it ran at a very fast trot, which was not completely unique - the Jubilee Parade Horse uses the same animation - but rare. It made the rider look a littlie bit uppity and just a tad ridiculous, which suited my pally just fine.

Well, image my horror when I had to discover this week that they apparently patched that out! Now my charger gallops just like any other old horse. I am disappoint. What an odd change to make.

VIP Withdrawal

With how intensely I've been playing for the past few months, I've been purchasing VIP time throughout most of that and actually reached max VIP rank at long last. This week I let it run out though, as I've been taking a bit of a break until the release of the next module and didn't want to feel like I had to log in every day to claim my free keys during that time.

On the occasions I do log in, I've been missing the perks like mad though! Mostly I keep trying to invoke in places where I can't, and I've previously written a post about what makes the travel signpost so attractive. Now I also miss the ability to summon a mailbox or banking portal at will.

It's funny to me how much I've come to rely on VIP features after not finding them that attractive when they first came out. I still think that the game is very easily playable without them, but once you get used to the extra convenience it's really annoying to have to make do without it. I have to give credit to Cryptic there for managing to hit a sweet spot in terms of usefulness.

River District Heroic Nerf

I didn't find completing the Cloaked Ascendancy for a second time too bad - what with using a Signet of Patronage and being able to complete the area's daily quest in about ten minutes by chaining five of the small heroic encounters.

A couple of months ago Cryptic already nerfed the seal rewards from those heroics, but I didn't really care much about that at the time because I wasn't running them for the seals anyway; I was running them to progress the campaign.

Fast forward to this week, when I decided to start my third character on the River District... just to find that at some point in the recent past, Cryptic also nerfed the heroics' contribution to the daily quest. While you could previously complete it from five encounters, now you need twice as many, presumably in an attempt to push more people towards doing the mini lairs instead, which I don't like very much. (Unless those have been nerfed too. I didn't try.)

I'm feeling really dejected by this - why make an old campaign that already suffers from being somewhat boring and grindy even more so? I get that this game is very much about grinding, but at least when it came to older content, Cryptic used to be a bit more generous and tended to lower requirements over time instead of raising them.

Goodbye, Salvage

We've had another dev blog with accompanying forum thread on an upcoming Heart of Fire change: the concept of salvaging high-end gear (turning it into unrefined astral diamonds) is going away, and instead this gear will now just turn into refinement points like lower level gear.

My first reaction was a proper Darth Vader-like "Nooo!" though I guess in fairness, we don't really know just how bad it's going to be yet. The devs say that they'll add AD as a reward to lots of activities to compensate for the loss from salvaging, but they don't have a history of getting that sort of rebalancing right very often.

It's still going to be a nerf for me either way, because as it stands, I'd often collect gear on the weekend when I had more time to play, and then slowly salvage it throughout the week to maximise my bonus AD from invoking. After this change I won't be able to "save up" AD this way anymore, so if I don't have as much time to play during the week, well that's just too bad.

I suppose I should have seen it coming though, as I've been feeling quite comfortable with my AD acquisition levels lately, considering my casual level of play. One thing I've learned throughout the years is that if something is working well for me on a casual level, Cryptic will rate it as crazily unbalanced at the high-end, and it will be nerfed soon afterwards.

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.

Omu Complete

At long last, my pet tank and I completed the Lost City of Omu campaign. I can't wait for Cryptic to add Signets of Patronage for this one.

I previously mentioned the atrocious drop rate for the trophies you need to buy the Omu hunt lures, and we actually managed to make it through the entire campaign, killing hunt marks over and over, without seeing a single drop apart from the ubiquitous Razortyrannus Spines. Only today, on our last day, the umpteenth wisp that we killed actually dropped a trophy. So now that we're fully done with the campaign we'd finally be allowed to go on our first hunt. Ridiculous.

Professions Overhaul

This week I learned that the upcoming Heart of Fire module will also include an overhaul to the professions system. And we're talking proper overhaul here, not just a tweaking of mission rewards like we've had in the past. There's a dev blog and a forum thread about it so far.

In a nutshell, it's supposed to me more involved and more strongly tied into the rest of the game than the current system. Artisans won't just be icons in your inventory anymore, but actual NPCs employed by you in a workshop. And crafting is supposed to become more meaningful, so that people won't just level up by gathering wood five hundred times anymore because nothing else is worth it.

So far, so good from the sounds of it. The important thing for me is that existing progress will be carried over, as I have four characters with all their professions maxed out, with more working their way towards the same goal as we speak, and that has already been confirmed. Whether it'll actually be more fun and more rewarding remains to be seen.

Weekly Woes

Just once I'd like to tell Szoldar that I'll search for werewolves on Yester Hill and that he should check for tracks in the Howling Hills. I mean, it's not like there's a pattern here or anything...

Campaign Progress

With all my alts at 70 these days, I thought it would be interesting to have a look at where I stand in terms of progressing them through the various campaigns:

Campaign / Status	Not Started	In Progress	Completed
Sharandar	1	0	7
Dread Ring	1	1	6
Icewind Dale	2	2	4
Tryanny / Well of Dragons	0	5	3
Elemental Evil	0	5	3
Underdark	1	4	3
Maze Engine	4	0	4
Storm King's Thunder	6	0	2
River District	6	0	2
Chult	6	2	0
Ravenloft	3	3	2

It's worth noting that all progress was made the old-fashioned way, which is to say by playing, and no progression has been purchased with Zen or AD. Didn't use any Genie's Gifts either except for a couple I got from freebie packs given out at expansion launches and such.

I don't realistically expect to ever complete all the campaigns on all my characters, but "hey, let's do some work on campaign X on character Y" still serves as my biggest motivation to play whenever I log in. You can also tell how much I've been enjoying Ravenloft since it's the first camapaign in ages that I've happily started on more than two characters, and while it's still new as well.

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.

Heart of Fire

A few days ago, Cryptic revealed that the next module will be called Heart of Fire. Is it bad that my first association with this title was to imagine some sort of love child between the two Guild Wars 2 expansions (Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire)?

Interestingly, despite of that news post and some more info on Neverwinter Unblogged, I feel like I still have no idea what this module will actually be about. Apparently it's supposed to be some sort of cross-over featuring the Penny Arcade creators? The trailer makes it look like some kind of silly D&D theme park - which doesn't sound bad, I just don't know what to expect from it beyond the very general mood.

Ghosted

I wrote about Barovian hunts before. The funniest of these I've had so far was with my pet tank and two of our guildies, and with me having picked what turned out to be a very unfortunate combination of tarot (debuff) cards: The Executioner (if you die during the hunt, you can't revive and become a ghost), one of the blue cards that increase the aggro range of mobs (can't recall the number), and the third one was either The Beast or one of the damage-increasing ones, I can't remember.

Either way, what happened was that our two guildies, who were providing the dps, got absolutely swarmed by adds and died not even halfway through the hunt. Neither of us knew beforehand what "becoming a ghost" actually meant in this context, so we were quite amused to see them return and run circles around us in semi-transparent form.

As it turns out, ghosts do have some abilities, such as roots and knockbacks, but they are useless against the actual hunt target and do no damage, so what ended up happening was that me and my pet tank very slowly finished off the actual boss while our two guildies amused themselves running in circles and "playing ball" with adds.

Buggy Morlanth

This past weekend I repeated the Shroud of Souls quest line for the first time since it first came out. And whoa, was Morlanth (the last boss) ever bugged! Specifically, she didn't do anything when I attacked her - which would have been fine by me, except that this "not doing anything" also included "not dying". She just kept standing there at zero health.

When I googled the problem I only found this off-hand mention of someone else having the same issue and apparently circumventing it by attacking her really, really slowly (once every ten seconds by their own account). I Alt+F4ed to reset the fight and tried this, but without much success - if I waited too long between attacks, she would kill me (rogues aren't made to just stand around while being hit in the face), and if I tried to attack a little faster she would freeze up again.

Fortunately, after Alt+F4ing for the fifth time or so, I suddenly loaded back in to find the giant dragon that she summons at some point into the fight in front of me, and that one acted like a normal enemy, so when I killed that the quest completed. I'm just putting this here in case anyone else struggles with this bug...

Random Queues

Considering that Neverwinter had an automated group finder since its launch back in 2013, it's quite baffling that it went without any kind of random reward feature for more than four years. Blizzard realised from the beginning that this was something that was going to be needed to keep queues popping and the actual dungeons varied, back when they introduced the first dungeon finder of this kind in WoW. As it stands, Neverwinter players at endgame just ran the same couple of dungeons for years, since their daily rewards were granted for completing any dungeon, and people naturally gravitated towards what was easiest.

It was only a year ago, in the Swords of Chult module, that Cryptic introduced random queues (which are a separate thing from just ticking all the options and seeing what you get), and with Ravenloft's launch they gave them a revamp that involved a re-shuffle of the categories and changes to the rewards.

I'm still not much of a dungeon runner in Neverwinter but I'll admit that the random queue system has made me somewhat more amenable towards them. Especially for casual players it's extremely rewarding since the payout is heavily weighted towards your first run of the day per account (and as a casual you won't be running much more than one anyway). That and I'm liking the entertainment factor of the randomness. Sure, some dungeons are more fun than others, but either way it beats having your guildies constantly ask if you want to join them for their 360,867th Cloak Tower.

Kabal

One interesting aspect of soloing content that I previously only ever did while duoing with my pet tank is that I actually have to learn fight mechanics properly. For example the Kabal fight in the River District (one of that zone's weekly missions) was always a bit of a mystery to me. I figured that you had to drag his ball and chain of fiery death onto him or something, and I even seem to remember doing so successfully once or twice, but other times I couldn't get it to move, and my health would just keep going down until I died, leaving my pet tank to finish off the boss on his own.

Trying to solo this fight on my rogue I quickly got annoyed with being unable to figure out what to do, but fortunately this reddit thread came to the rescue. It also mentions the "pulling the ball onto the boss" tactic that I can't always get to work, but helpfully offered the alternative of killing the third add he spawns in just the right spot so that it leaves a fiery sphere which you can then use to melt and break the chain, and then using the fourth add to bring down his immunity shield.

I still had to use several health stones to make it through but I did succeed in the end. At least I understand now why there always seem to be people looking for a group for this one in general chat.

Barovian Hunts

I wasn't too fond of the hunts in Chult, so I was less than thrilled when it was announced that the system would be included in the Ravenloft module as well.

In practice though, the hunts in Barovia are so different from those in Chult that they might as well have given them a new name. No more grinding mobs for a chance at a chance at a chance of a drop (seriously, we've spent weeks in Omu by now and apart from the Razortyrannus Spines we haven't seen a single trophy drop from the rares we killed).

All you need to go hunting in Barovia is a wanted poster - admittedly those are still random drops, but fairly common ones at that - and off you go on a fun little romp in an instance that takes 10-20 minutes. Getting higher rated wanted posters requires you to complete the basic ones first and you're not guaranteed to get an upgrade so there's still some RNG there, but it feels more natural and more like a logical progression system than Chult's randomness.

The hunt target itself again isn't guaranteed to drop much in terms of a reward either, but this is where the zone's tarot card feature comes in, as you can use them to give yourself up to three handicaps per hunt (such as decreased damage output or extra mob spawns), with each one adding a guaranteed reward at the end. Even though Ravenloft has only been live on PC for less than two months, I've already done more hunts in Barovia than I ever participated in in Chult because they are just that much more fun.

Limit or Target?

Last weekend's bonus RP event came with a twist: the now directly awarded points went towards filling up a little bar that showed that you were able to gain a maximum of 100,000 bonus RP per character during the event. I was soon questioning this limit though, because even after several hours of play on my rogue I hadn't even hit 10k. Just how intensely do you need to play to earn that many points? Why even have a cap at all then?

But then I realised: another new feature was that you could buy boosters that would increase your RP gain. So maybe this cap was less about having a cap and more about making people spend money to reach it, knowing that the ambitious would feel bad about not filling their bars. When I think back to all the agonising WoW players used to do about hitting the valor point cap back in the day, it all makes sense. Quite a clever move.

Rude

A lot of companions in Neverwinter have little voice lines that they like to spout when summoned or in combat. (The best thing about the Sylph from the Knight of the Feywild pack was that her incessant "Isn't sun wonderful?" and similarly over-the-top expressions of cheer drove my pet tank absolutely nuts.)

I've now repeatedly run with groups in which someone had a companion (but I couldn't make out whose it was) that was constantly throwing weird insults at the enemy, such as calling them "troll licker" or "knobbly knees" (not sure about that one). What keeps throwing me though is that one of his lines sounds like "Your mother was a whore!" and I'm pretty sure that's not what he says, but at the same time I can't figure out what else it's supposed to be... so I keep hearing accusations of prostitution all over.

Shifting Perspectives

Ever since I started cleaning up unfinished campaigns on my cleric a few months ago, I feel that my attitude to Neverwinter has changed in a good way. Before that, the way I played the game was much more limited: I would tackle every new campaign with my pet tank for a while, but often we wouldn't finish it, and then I never dared to go back on my own. I was somewhat afraid of pugging as well, and my solo play was strictly limited to early/easy content such as running cult dragons or Sharandar dailies.

After my cleric's recent success at finishing off old campaigns, I felt encouraged to actually push for some more progress on my alts as well - which has been nice in so far as it means that I've got some of them working on different content now instead of just running the lot of them through the same weekly quests all the time.

Repeatedly besting Tiamat also increased my confidence in pugging. I'm still somewhat uncomfortable knowing that my damage contribution is never very high, but as long as I know basic tactics for the content in question I'm willing to cross my fingers and risk it while hoping for a friendly carry. It's worked out in my favour more often than not.

Together, those things have really worked to increase my engagement with the game.

Clone

I've quite liked the look of some of the gear upgrades that my cleric got from Ravenloft, so I didn't bother to transmute them into something else and just switched to a different look for a change. What I didn't consider was that simply wearing the newest shinies would make me look identical to other people doing the same... so I was quite startled when I ran into a fellow cleric in the Barovian inn that was wearing pretty much the same outfit as me (not to mention that she looked like she was giving me the evil eye).

It's funny to think that everyone wearing whatever was the newest endgame set used to be the norm, but with the heavy focus on customising your appearance to look more unique in recent years, it actually feels strange now when you run into someone else wearing the same outfit.

Summer Festival Haul

My original goal for this year's Summer Festival was simply to re-purchase the farmer's weapon skin for control wizards, since I "lost" the old one when I replaced my wizard's main hand. Nothing says "arcane power" like fighting with a floating watering can.

So I did that. While I was there, I also decided to get my wizard the water horse. I'd never been particularly fond of that mount, but it suddenly struck me that it seemed kind of appropriate and magical.

While checking out the rewards, I realised that some of the available mounts might suit my other alts, so I also got my rogue and guardian fighter involved to earn the Sunite Steed and the boar mount respectively. Both are characters for whom I've struggled to find mounts that feel "right" for a while, so we'll see whether any of these stick.

The big disappointment came in the form of the ticket rewards from Sahha. Checking out the vendor, I had spotted a nice set of fashion gear that could be purchased for bronze tickets, the most basic currency. "Sure, I can work on that too," I thought.

However, a dozen ticket balls and more than two thousand volleys later, I realised that I was barely halfway towards being able to purchase one of the items, never mind the set. How are you supposed to ever afford this stuff? Buy loads of balls from the store? Play Sahha all day, every day? Come back to the event five years in a row? I'm used to this game being grindy, but that just left me incredulous. It's not that big a deal in the end since the fashion was never my main goal anyway, but it was still kind of disappointing. At least everyone was friendly and honest during my ball-bouncing pugs (despite of all the warnings I'd read about scamming attempts).

P.S.: It's Blaugust! If you've ever been at all interested in blogging, check it out.

Ravenloft Story

Having finished the Ravenloft storyline (bar the dungeon, as usual), I've got to say that this is probably the best story that Cryptic's ever done. Not that this was a very high bar to clear, and I'm sure it helped that they pretty much just ported a beloved classic adventure into the game wholesale, but still...

Aside from a general lack of investment into the story (e.g. stuff like characters talking without moving their lips in cinematics), Neverwinter's biggest problem with story at endgame is that it tends to just... fizzle out. You go into a new area with a grand plan to handle X, do some dailies to help things along, until eventually, you get sent into an epic dungeon with a high gear requirement to defeat the big bad. For many the story ends right there because they can't keep up with the investment required to be able to participate in high-end group content, but from my limited experience even completing the dungeon doesn't usually provide a lot of closure, with no aftermath or epilogue.

They didn't exactly solve that problem in Ravenloft, but at least they have a noteworthy solo instance that has you deal with the immediate threat and which features some fun mechanics. Yeah, you're still supposed to do Castle Ravenloft afterwards to actually defeat Strahd, but at least you've achieved something if you never make it to the end. Plus the Sunsword was just a riot.

Signet of Patronage

The Swords of Chult module introduced a new quality of life feature that I managed to miss completely until I saw someone bring it up in a random reddit thread: Signets of Patronage.

Basically these are tokens that you can craft with campaign currency once you have completed a given campaign and which you can then pass on to your alts in order to reduce the amount of time and currency it will cost them to complete the campaign, by doubling reputation gains and cutting the cost of most campaign tasks in half.

This is great because completing campaigns on alts is a massive grind (to be honest, it tends to be a massive grind the first time around, but we tend not to mind so much when everything feels new and exciting), and up until now Cryptic's only concession to this has been to give people the option to buy campaign completion with real money instead of playing. Yeah.

As someone for whom the latter is completely out of the question, I'm pleased to finally have an in-game way of speeding things up for my alts. Mind you, compared to similar features in other games, such as SWTOR's legacy perks, the signets' benefits still feel pretty anaemic, especially since they are single-use consumables, so you'd have to craft a new one for every single alt for every single campaign. Still, it's better than nothing.

I've crafted one for Storm King's Thunder and one for Cloaked Ascendancy for my rogue and we'll see how much of a difference it makes. So far progress feels quite swift, but then it always does in the early stages.

Scourge Warlock Quests

I've previously written about how Neverwinter's class and race quests are a kind of under-appreciated feature, and while levelling my warlock I was fascinated to see how Cryptic had initially iterated on the concept before abandoning it. You see, unlike the other classes, the Scourge Warlock doesn't have to hunt down quest givers in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a letter as a hint: They get their very own warlock friend hanging out in Protector's Enclave, making it much harder to miss her quests.

These also felt much more condensed than the chains for other classes, with a lot of them pouring in quickly during my warlock's early levels, and the whole chain coming to a conclusion as early as level 30. The finale was pretty epic as well, with my warlock descending to the nine hells to meet her patron and being told that her tiefling "mentor" had a debt with the demon that would have some dire results for her unless you were willing to pick up the tab. I took the "nice" option and saved her, but I wonder what happens if you sell her out...

Summer Festival Thoughts

I completely skipped the Summer Festival last year, so I thought it would be fun to revisit it this year. Especially since some of the cosmetic rewards are really nice and actually quite easy to obtain.

Somehow... it all seems somewhat less fun than I remember though. I forgot just how much I dislike the water fight event for example, simply because I'm absolutely terrible at it. My current strategy is to run in and throw balloons until I hit someone, then run out of the area before I can get hit back, as I'll just end up with a score of zero if I stay.

And Sahha! I remembered that being decent fun despite of its slowness, but now it's just driving me nuts. They should just put a fence around most of the playing field, because it's way too easy to knock the ball out of the area, and with every reset creating 15-20 seconds of downtime you spend more time just standing around and twiddling your thumbs than actually chasing the ball, and that for ten whole minutes. It's ironic that the Sahha ball quest giver tells you that gathering the raw materials for your own ball is much more time-consuming than getting one from actually playing the game, when in reality it's the other way round.

River District Retrospective

While Storm King's Thunder was the last of the "old" campaigns where I still had boons to finish, I had some leftover business in the River District for the last couple of weeks as well. I couldn't help but think about how my opinion of that campaign area has changed.

My initial impressions of it were really positive - and I still think that the map is very nice for example, and that its weekly quests are inventive. However, what I initially considered a nice variety of daily activities unfortunately ended up feeling pretty dull over time. With no particular reason to do one thing over another, it eventually just became a matter of doing whatever's easiest/fastest until you've reached your daily goal. From my recent experience the most popular choice for this seems to be running the small heroic encounters - there are often "trains" going for them that just run in circles doing one after the other, and even a small group is enough to make them go down quite fast.

That's not exactly a bad thing, but after a while I really started to miss the direction provided by quests. Without them your daily goal just feels too much like random mob grinding. Chult had this problem too to some extent, and I'm glad to see that Cryptic seems to have back-pedalled on this, with Barovia once again offering a nice amount of quests to provide structure for your daily adventures.

Angler of the Northern Sea

At the same time as finishing Storm King's Thunder, I also got the Angler of the Northern Sea achievement (catching/finding one of each type of fish in Sea of Moving Ice). I was inspired to go after it after getting Angler of the Soshenstar, though unlike the latter this one actually required a fair amount of work.

Basically I tried to go to a different fishing spot every time I got the daily fishing mission for several weeks, eventually using this guide by DDM's Realm to keep track of which locations I still had to revisit to get the last couple of fish I was still missing.

It was time-consuming, but I thought the amount of randomness and grind required was just right to not feel annoying. I've been displaying my new title with pride, as it stands for one of the rare accomplishments in this game that can't be bought or fast-tracked with real money (at least as far as I'm aware).

Buggy Barovia

I'm really enjoying the new content in Ravenloft, but it also seems to be one of the buggier modules.

Some people have been reporting constant crashes, to the point where it made the game unplayable for them, which is fortunately something that hasn't affected me personally. However, I've seen plenty of bugs around the world.

While doing the rounds in Barovia I ran into two quests (out of five or six) that were so bugged that I had to drop them (though oddly, another time I managed to complete them successfully, so these particular bugs might not be entirely straightforward). Many of the new heroic encounters also seem to suffer from issues with spawn timers, so that you get situations such as being asked to "rescue hostages" but there are only a couple of mobs to kill and nobody to rescue... until ten minutes later, when the hostages suddenly spawn in.

It affects older zones as well: While doing the rounds in Omu with my pet tank last weekend, one of the patrol missions bugged out so badly that we were unable to complete it, as several of the mobs we were supposed to kill kept glitching into walls and refused to come out. (This one's supposed to be fixed by now according to the patch notes.)

However, the issue I currently find the most annoying is that when you're in Barovia, most of the time you can't see any of the other map instances except for one or two (while numbers indicate that actually there are more than thirty instances up). This makes it hard to casually hop around different maps to join groups for the big heroic encounter whenever it's up. Even going old school and asking for a group invite might not help, as I've gotten a nonsensical error message every time I tried to use the "transfer to their instance" prompt while grouped. Even leaving the map and coming back in only sometimes works to unite you with your group mates. It speaks for the quality of the module that people are playing enthusiastically despite of all these issues.

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.

More Free-to-Play Maths

Back in June 2015 I did some maths to figure out how much money I had spent on Neverwinter, especially compared to an old-fashioned MMO subscription. I thought it would be interesting to do a follow-up on that three years later, especially since I realised that I haven't spent any money on the game in one and a half years.

Fun fact: They did actually switch to charging me in £ instead of € eventually, which is why the total will be ever so slightly incorrect as I had to do some backwards currency conversion, but the margin of error should be negligible.

So, looking back at my receipts, I spent £247.95 on Zen in the past three years. Based on blog activity, I was only completely inactive in game for about six months during that time, so spread out across the months in which I actually played that comes to only £8.265 per month, a bit less than your average monthly sub. Go me!

What's interesting to note is that my spending wasn't spread out evenly across that time frame at all. At first I spent a small-ish amount on Zen every three to five months, then I made one slightly bigger purchase that lasted me for about half a year, and then I decided to go all in on a charge rewards promotion that really appealed to me, just for Cryptic to mess up the rewards for that big time. They did eventually resolve the issue, but it still left a sour taste in my mouth.

Since then I haven't spent any money on Neverwinter at all, though funnily enough this had less to do with being grumpy with Cryptic about the messed up promotion (though I certainly was, at least at first) and more with not knowing what to do with all the Zen I bought. Oh sure, Cryptic does have ridiculously expensive bundles in their store I could theoretically buy, but those just never struck me as good value for money, so all I've been spending money on for the past one a half years has been a month of VIP here or a few extra bank slots there. From a fairness point of view it really feels like I should give them some money again considering how much I'm enjoying the game, but I still have over 10k Zen in the bank with nothing I particularly want to spend it on, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ravenloft Launch Impressions

- First time I launched the game, it crashed before I even made it to the character selection screen. Happy patch day!

- New character selection screen! This time it's not just a new background, there are also new features such as the option to sort your characters differently.

- It looks like this module brought with it some sort of graphics update. I already noticed it on the character selection screen, but certain spell effects in game also looked a lot crisper than before. I don't like that the shade of green used for green quality items is much darker now than it used to be though.

- I thought I'd read somewhere that astral diamonds would now be account wide, but I could find no evidence of this. Maybe there's an option to put them all in the bank or something, I'll have to look again.

- The intro mission to Ravenloft felt quite lovingly crafted. Neverwinter's storytelling animations have always been on the poor side, but there was one cut scene where someone even moved their mouth while talking (gasp) and I liked what they did with the little silhouettes for when you're being told Strahd's story.

- Holy catch-up, Batman! Just completing the intro quest rewards you with a full set of 460 gear including rank 8 enchantments for every slot. Note to self: bring any and all alts to Barovia soon.

- At first glance the new map seems quite fun and like it iterates nicely on Chult. I was happy to see small heroic encounters make a comeback in particular as I sorely missed them in the jungle.

- I already attracted the night terror twice. Fortunately people were quite happy to pile on it whenever it appeared, but sadly it doesn't appear to drop anything, though my two guildies each got a title for killing it (not surprised the cleric gets left out as usual...)

- In a move that feels like over-conveniencing players, Cryptic made it so that you no longer have to actively roll on loot when you're in a party; the game just assumes that you want everything, rolls for everyone and then distributes the items accordingly. I actually feel kind of robbed. I liked seeing half a dozen items pop up on my screen and actively rolling on each one!

- The new, instanced hunts could grow on me, as the introductory one seemed quite fun. Less focus on randomised material gathering and more active hunting fun I hope?

All Classes

It took me five years, but I finally have a level 70 character of every class!

From left to right, top to bottom:

Phaelia, tiefling trickster rogue
Shintar, half elf devoted cleric
Ekaterina, human great weapon fighter
Daerys, drow control wizard
Puck, halfling hunter ranger
Ophelie, sun elf oathbound paladin
Shintank, dwarf guardian fighter
Shareen, half orc scourge warlock

I have a few more character slots available, but to be honest I can't see myself creating any more alts right now until they release another class, especially as Neverwinter is one of the few MMOs where (in my opinion), levelling another alt just for the sake of starting over isn't actually all that fun..

That said, there's still plenty of max-level stuff to do on all of my existing characters to potentially keep me busy for years to come.

Happy Fifth!

Yes, it really has been five years! I honestly continue to be impressed by how well this plucky little MMO has continued to do (based on realistic measurements of success, not WoW killer standards). I don't see a lot of talk about it in my little corner of the MMO blogosphere, but based on what limited player numbers we have to try to gauge its success, such as Steamcharts, it actually seems to be one of the more popular "second tier" MMOs, seemingly outperforming some competitors that seem to get a lot more buzz (again, in my little corner of the blogosphere), such as EVE, Rift or Secret World Legends.

In unhappier news, I managed to time my summer holiday in such a way that it will prevent me from actually participating in the Protector's Jubilee event (except for a quick check-in today) for the second year in a row. I'll never feel bad about going on holiday of course, but I do feel kind of bad about missing out all this free stuff and fun activities. I should really be better at this by now, considering I know exactly when this particular event will occur every year...

Alliance Life

Being in an alliance is quite similar to being in a clique inside a larger guild, except that it feels more "legitimate" in a way since there is a dedicated structure for it, and in terms of gameplay benefits, the guild/clique is actually more important to you than the alliance.

Like with everything else in Neverwinter, I'm more casual about socialising in it than I am in my main MMO, where I've always been super involved with any guild that I've been in. In Neverwinter on the other hand, I don't even read chat most of the time, including the green guild/alliance chat. On the rare occasions when I do look at it I notice that the people who are talking are way more into the game than I am, though I also see the occasional newbie question which serves to reassure me that I'm not completely clueless.

One thing that's interesting is that there are a couple of names that pop up in alliance chat all the time, to the point that I feel I "know" them. There is X-tremoz, the alliance leader, as well as some players called Bron, Bob and Bab who just seem to be online a lot. They don't know me at all of course, but just seeing the same names in chat over and over again gives the alliance a sense of stability even for casual players like me. It makes me appreciate that even guildies that never or rarely talk might be quietly benefitting from reading guild chat, and that in my SWTOR guild for example, someone might well be looking at me as one of those always-around public faces of the guild that hold things together.

Alliance Update

Talking about stronghold sieges made me realise that I never talked about the alliance we're in beyond my initial post about "GOD". At one point some drama occurred between GOD and one of its subordinate guilds, Will of Oblivion (WoO for short). I wasn't really involved in this; all I know is that WoO eventually left, and our mini guild - being one of WoO's direct subordinates - decided to go with them.

We helped them found their own alliance, and were given a higher position in that than we'd previously held, but to be honest it was kind of undeserved based how small we are. Then one day I found that we'd been kicked for inactivity, but since I was actually active enough to notice right away, pet tank immediately went to WoO's leadership and asked for us to be let back in. They obliged, though we ended up at the lowest rank again, which was actually fine.

And that's where we've been since then, now subordinate to a guild called "ASH-2-ASH". I'll write another post about what it's like to be in an alliance at some point.

A Touch Of Madness

Another long-neglected goal achieved: Underdark campaign completion.

The reason I had stayed away from this one for so long was that I perceived it as extremely grindy, and looking at the raw numbers, having to acquire 7000 Faerzress at 18-50 units a pop certainly does add up to quite a slog. Thankfully I got a lot of mileage out of a recent double Underdark currency event.

I did realise though that all things considered, the grind wasn't really that much worse than for most campaigns; what made the difference for me were the heroic encounters. I liked them well enough as something sprinkled in among the regular quests like in Icewind Dale, but a whole campaign of nothing but grinding heroic encounters (or skirmishes I guess) was just super boring to me. I like the classic questing model. I don't think I would have much fun in Guild Wars 2.

Dragon Mastery

So, another thing that I never thought would happen... happened: I completed the last boon from the Well of Dragons campaign. Once I realised how easy Linu's Favor was to gain through doing Temple of Tiamat, it was only a matter of time. I wasn't joking when I said I only needed to do it fifteen more times: That's exactly what I did, one day at a time.

Mind you, most of my runs weren't quite as fast and smooth as that first one, with most of them needing two or three "head phases" to get Tiamat down. One time it even took a full five rounds; I was very surprised that we didn't hit some sort of enrage or fail state considering for how long that fight had been dragging on by that point.

It also took me an embarrassing number of deaths to I figure out how the dragon souls and the five heads' various breath weapons work. On top of that, it wasn't until I did these runs that I realised that the hoard in the Well of Dragons actually has a purpose in the form of buffing the combatants and increasing your chances of good loot! I'd always thought that it was just some leftover from the old days required to originally "unlock" the Temple of Tiamat.

I could see myself doing this on some of my alts now... though not immediately; two weeks of slaying a giant five-headed dragon every day are quite enough for now.

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".

So... Ravenloft

Last week Cryptic announced that Neverwinter's next module is going to be Ravenloft. I'm not going to link the so-called announcement trailer because it's literally nothing but a few seconds of spooky sound before the title card appears - you can do better than that, Cryptic.

That said, most of the reactions I've seen so far have been rather pleased with the news. During my own tabletop roleplaying days my very first adventure was set in Ravenloft, so I have fond memories of the setting too. DDO also had a Ravenloft expansion not long ago, which Syp has been gushing about.

That said, some of the details have dampened my excitement a bit. For example there will be more hunts, which I'm still not fond of, and Castle Ravenloft itself will apparently be an epic dungeon, so my chances of ever seeing it are quite low.

I Killed Tiamat!

Only took me... three and a half years?

As part of my current project to get my main caught up on unfinished campaigns, I've been adding to the hoard in Well of Dragons to gain Linu's Favor, but it's just ridiculously grindy. Everyone says that doing the epic trial to kill Tiamat is much better for gaining this currency, but I'd never done it.

I wasn't really deterred by my recent terrible experience in Assault on Svardborg, as I knew that my pet tank and at least one other guildie had completed this particular trial successfully many times before, and if they could do it, then so could I! I quizzed my pet tank about tactics and he reckoned that - considering that this was the very first epic trial added to the game and has been around for years, so people mostly know the fight quite well - my chances were probably pretty good.

And indeed, I got lucky. It took a little while for the queue to pop, but once I got in I was just following a raging horde of experienced players around who killed everything in seconds. The top damage dealer finished the instance with nearly 150 million damage done! The tactics didn't even seem to matter much - for example I had often been told about how you need to kill Tiamat's many heads at roughly the same time (within a timed phase) to prevent them from respawning, but in this group they were dying so fast that the whole group just ran from one head to the next, killing them one by one, and then the boss was already dead before the next phase could even start. Meanwhile, I managed to die once by accidentally jumping off a cliff.

But I did get one Linu for my efforts! Now, if I can repeat that about fifteen times, it won't have been too terrible a time investment overall...

No Life At Sea

The other day I was surprised by this achievement popping up while I was making the rounds in Sea of Moving Ice (click to embiggen):

Seriously, five hours of just cruising around in the damn boat? Just more evidence that this zone is way too large. What am I doing with my life...

Lurker's Assault on Baphomet

I finished the Maze Engine campaign on my rogue today, yay! Unfortunately I also learned that one of my rogue's daily powers, Lurker's Assault, doesn't play nice with the last fight at all. Part of its effect is that it teleports me towards my current target, but something about Baphomet causes this movement to get messed up.

Once I got stuck in the air and it was kind of funny because I could at least still hit the boss, but when it happened again I somehow got trapped on the outer age of the platform on which the fight takes place instead, unable to move back in or target the boss (though he could still hit me somehow). I tried to commit suicide by jumping down into the lava (and Drizzt dutifully followed me) but it actually ended up doing no damage to me and I just ended up stuck at the bottom of the room instead. The /stuck command didn't help either, and eventually I had to Alt+F4 to get back out.

Then I repeated the fight for the weekly quest, and the exact same thing happened again. I guess I just won't be able to use that particular daily power on this fight, ever.

I Tried Assault on Svardborg Today

Until a couple of weeks ago I'd never done an "epic trial", which I guess is what passes for a raid in Neverwinter. When I finally overcame my reluctance and queued for (normal) Demogorgon (the epic trial introduced with Maze Engine), I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was and that it didn't even take ten minutes.

So when I recently hit the maximum amount of "potential bonus rewards" for the epic trial Assault on Svardborg, which you accumulate from questing in Sea of Moving Ice, I thought I'd give that one a try too.

I got a pop after about fifteen minutes. Everybody seemed kind of hesitant to run in and start the fight, until one guy finally took the lead. I followed him and immediately got turned into a block of ice. I stayed that way for about ten seconds, then died. This repeated a couple of times (me running in, turning into an ice block and then dying a few seconds later), with other people also dying left and right; then everybody abandoned the instance.

I looked up the basic strategy for the fight to better understand what had happened and to be honest it sounds way too complicated for a pug even on normal. For example when people get turned into blocks of ice, others are supposed to break them out within seconds or the frozen person dies (like I did). As if that's going to happen with a bunch of randoms!

I guess those bonus rewards will remain unclaimed.

Favourite Classes: Oathbound Paladin (3/3)

When my pet tank changed his main from Guardian Fighter to Oathbound Paladin I scoffed a little at this turn towards the "flavour of the month". In no other game had I ever seen a class that was this overpowered. Nothing ever seemed to be able to hurt him, yet at the same time he still did way more damage as a tank than I ever managed to do on my healer. I also remember watching a video of two OPs in an epic dungeon whose defensive abilities were caught in some sort of recursive loop so that the boss basically killed itself just by trying to hit them (though in fairness, I think this has been fixed since then). Still, how is that good game balance?

What eventually prompted me to roll a pally of my own was actually a desire to try out a different healing style, since I generally love healing in MMOs but had found the cleric sorely lacking. Fun fact: I actually still don't know whether pally healing is any good, because I have yet to take her into any content where healing would really be required.

But I can't deny it: just levelling as a hugely overpowered class was a lot of fun. I was kind of slow at killing things, sure, but the sheer level of indestructibleness was amazing. I could actually do quests that would (badly) sync me up to 70 because my character was so robust that it didn't matter that the level sync was poor. When I ran into a heroic encounter, I could just run in and start it regardless of other people in the area - lack of dps would potentially make it a struggle to complete it on my own, but I never had to worry about dying to elite mobs, even in crappy levelling gear (and once someone starts, other people are often all too happy to join in). In Icewind Dale I even soloed heroic encounters (albeit very slowly) that none of my other characters could take on solo to this day.

Yeah, sometimes the lack of dps feels tiresome, but I've always been a fan of slow and steady, and no other class in the game holds as steady as the Oathbound Paladin.

Favourite Classes: Control Wizard (2/3)

Unlike the Great Weapon Fighter, it wasn't love at first sight with the Control Wizard and me. In fact, I originally thought that their movement animation with their weapon (orb) out looked really weird and off-putting!

However, seeing other players play this class changed my mind about it. Their range of AoE abilities in particular was awe-inspiring both in terms of their animations and their effectiveness, ranging from the summoning of chaotic maelstroms to lightning and blizzards, with enemies getting knocked every which way with every cast.

Like with the GWF, I was pleased to find the class easy to get into as well. The tab ability simply offering a fourth encounter slot (with a modifier) was as straightforward as it gets, and the clearly themed abilities were easy enough to figure out for me to create a serviceable build even without a guide. I did occasionally find myself struggling with survivability, but simply trading one damaged-focused encounter power for a more control-focused one usually did the trick.

I can't imagine that running around on my Control Wizard and AoEing down enemies would ever get old. I still love Shard of the Endless Avalanche for example, aka "the purple ball", even though it's a pain to handle and I had to unslot it ages ago, but the concept of literally bowling my enemies over is just too much fun. Even without it, it's a great feeling to watch whole packs of mobs alternately get stunned and damaged to the point where this character was my first damage dealer that could run without a healing companion because the mobs could barely touch her anyway. Large single enemies with a lot of hit points or control immunities remain a bit of a pain though.

Favourite Classes: Great Weapon Fighter (1/3)

Now that I have a character of every class (though my Scourge Warlock isn't 70 yet), it's clear that I like some of them a lot more than others. I can identify three favourites who clearly stand apart from the rest - though I'm not sure how I would rank them against each other, which is why I'll simply talk about them in the order in which I "discovered" them.

The Great Weapon Fighter first caught my eye for its aesthetics. While the spell effects in Neverwinter are as flashy as in other fantasy MMOs, most of its combat animations still struck me as relatively down to earth. Not so with the GWF: they swing their two-handed weapons with ridiculous speed considering that those swords are as tall as their wielders, and the class's idle pose with weapon drawn has them balance the giant two-hander casually on their shoulder while only supporting it with one hand. There's something... anime about it, and it appealed to me even though I'm not usually a big fan of fighter-type classes.

While playing, I soon discovered that the GWF's tab ability also followed a delightfully simple to learn pattern of building and spending, and even better: every time you become "Unstoppable" by spending (which is often!), you also become immune to control effects for the duration, relieving you of the need to dodge annoying knockdowns and the like.

Finally, they are just easy to play regardless. I don't think I've ever looked up a guide for the class, and yet despite of this my own GWF has always done decent enough damage in any content I've taken her to. I'm sure she's far from optimised, but there seems to be no real way to go entirely wrong with the class - unlike with my rogue for example, who was a real pain to play for a long time until I looked up a guide and learned about various ability synergies that had definitely not been obvious to me before then.

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.)

Cyclical

I'm starting to see a pattern in the way I play Neverwinter:

I come back after a bit of a break, usually to check out some new content, but maybe just to continue working on an existing campaign that I haven't finished yet.

I enjoy myself, and since there is usually a limit to how much you can do to progress a single character in a single day, I find myself thinking: "Hm, might as well spend some time on working on this other thing on my alt as well!"

The next day is similar, and before I know it I'm back to logging and playing multiple alts each day.

I get so caught up in progressing all of them at the same time that every play session takes longer and longer until things start to feel like a chore; eventually I burn out and need a break.

I'm never lacking for things to do in Neverwinter - if anything it sometimes feels like there's too much to do to keep up with casually!

Lockbox Tutorial

Last night I played a lowbie character for the first time in months. Now, the game's always had this box of goodies that you get for free and that levels up with you for a while, while spitting out some simple items such as scrolls of identification and injury kits every couple of levels to help the new player along. That's not new.

What was new to me however, was that upon hitting level 20 I suddenly received three "Shimmering Lockboxes", highlighted by a voiced tutorial that told me to buy keys for them! I did check the Zen store and the keys were actually free; clearly the idea is just to make people use the interface. Then you open them, and what do you know, they contain a few things that are actually very useful to a new player, such as a free stone of health and a green quality mount.

That means lockboxes are good and well worth your time, right? Hrm.

I'm usually not someone who minds lockboxes very much, provided they are optional and don't award anything too powerful, but even I have to say that trying to lure new players into buying keys by making them open a bunch of rigged "trial lockboxes" that are guaranteed to award something nice is a whole new level of skeevy.

Finding My Confidence

Neverwinter's gear progression just to keep up with every new story module is pretty unforgiving. I never have whatever's considered "the good stuff" at any given time and always just wear whatever gear Cryptic has decided to make accessible through a vendor most recently in order to help people get caught up. Combine that with my main being a cleric (never the most fun class to solo), and I have reason to want to go into every new module with my pet tank by my side (never mind the incentive of simply wanting to play with him). Whenever we get separated while playing new content - even if it's only briefly - I soon end up calling for help, because while I can just about stay alive I'm finding it very hard and tedious to kill anything on my own.

In addition, I have many bad memories of running into gear walls on my alts. I still remember being unable to finish the lair in the witches' area in Sharandar on my rogue a long time ago - there was this one group of six mobs or so next to a cauldron that I just couldn't kill, eventually forcing me to give up and come back another day. On my hunter ranger I remember idling next to the demon spawn spots for the Maze Engine daily, waiting for someone else to come by and start it, because on my own it was a fifty-fifty chance of me just dying instead of successfully fending off the demons. It wasn't that long ago either that I had to re-think my control wizard's build because she kept dying while trying to start the dailies in Icewind Dale.

Now admittedly I overcame those challenges eventually, but I realised that fear of the fights being too tough has certainly been holding me back when it comes to newer content. Not only have none of my alts completed any of the campaigns past Underdark, but my main also still has lots of them unfinished, from times when my pet tank's interest had waned and I was too afraid to go back and try tackling anything on my own. It was only this week that I pulled myself together and decided to visit Bryn Shander again for the first time in one and a half years to progress that Storm King's Thunder campaign that I had abandoned not even halfway through. And what do you know... it went OK. Things died reasonably quickly and I found myself thinking that probably even some of my alts would do alright versus these dailies nowadays. It's just like the saying goes: once bitten, twice shy.

Angler of the Soshenstar

I don't know what possessed me this weekend, but for some reason I decided to go to Soshenstar River and do some fishing, something I still hadn't even tried in Chult before then. I didn't know what purpose it was going to serve, I just wanted to do it.

It didn't turn out to be very useful (the fish can be traded for Chultan riches, but over an hour spent fishing didn't really make me particularly wealthy), but by the time I had used up all the lures that I had accumulated while questing, I had managed to catch one of every fish available, which earned me a new achievement and title. I call that a win I guess?