Enchantment Changes Explained

I finally sat down to try and sort out my enchantments as per the last post and it was one horrifying realisation after another. Basically Cryptic massively raised the floor in terms of financial investment to even equip enchantments, and is low-key scamming more casual players in the conversion process.

The first point is evidenced by the fact that no enchantments lower than rank ten can even be converted. If you were wearing less than that, you can just grind the old stuff into a few refinement points - which are as good as worthless - and leave your new enchantment slots empty. I don't know how much power this actually causes you to lose, but even if it's not that much, it feels terrible. Imagine if they did this with gear - making you vendor your old kit and then forcing you to fight naked until you're willing to pay up.

The second point is rooted in the fact that the only hint the game gives you about how to get new enchantments is to see the antiquities scholar in Protector's Enclave to trade old for new. You trade in old enchantments for "medallions" and then can use this currency to buy new ones. The cheapest thing you can buy is a new rank one enchantment for 30 medallions. At one point after the trade-in I had 17 medallions left. There is also an option to buy one medallion for 40k astral diamonds. So I bought 13 of them for 13x40k = 520k AD, so I could buy one more rank one. Later I found out that I shouldn't have bothered with this trade-in at all, as Bradda the Sage just outright sells the new rank ones for 100k AD in her shop, but of course nothing in the game tells you that! I only found out through an off-hand comment in a forum post.

But even if I hadn't fallen for this nonsense, 100k AD as the bare minimum to fill even one of your enchantment slots is way too high, even if it's something that you can grind out in a day at max level. That's not to even mention the new astronomical costs of upgrading just to rank two (of five). After the conversion, my item level isn't even high enough to do the new module (according to the game's recommendation anyway). The message I'm getting here is to pay up or not play. Which is a shame because I've never minded giving Cryptic some money for things, but I've always refused to outright pay for power, and I won't do so now either.

Dragonbone Vale & Enchantment Changes

You can probably tell from my lack of posting on here that I have once again entered a phase of not being all that interested in Neverwinter, to the point that I wouldn't even have noticed that they dropped a new module called "Dragonbone Vale" this week if a couple of guildies hadn't mentioned it and the character selection screen changed backgrounds. There wasn't even any kind of countdown or announcement on the launcher...

I haven't looked at it yet however, as another change introduced with this module is a complete revamp of the enchantment system that's been in the game since launch. Again, there is no real information about this in the game itself, and I'm once again finding myself frustrated with the amount of busywork Cryptic is throwing at players seemingly for the sake of it. At least in other MMOs I play, these kinds of conversions are mostly done automatically, but in Neverwinter I'm always supposed to manually sort through dozens of now outdated items or currencies and trade them in for their new equivalents at a vendor. I just don't have the will or energy to deal with this kind of nonsense at the moment.