11/03/2020

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.

2 comments:

  1. I get the feeling Cryptic is keen to remove anything from their games that might cost them development time or resources to maintain and service. They took out the player-made content a while back and just recently they dropped cross-game chat. Level scaling, especialy if it's already not very good, probably represents another thing they think they can do without so as to conserve resources. It all speaks to a company looking to minimize expenditure to me. Why they might want or need to do that is another matter.

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    1. There's still level scaling in lots of other places in the game though. I would think that once you have the system in place it shouldn't be too much work to apply it to different maps? But then, I know little about how programming stuff like that actually works.

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