Sewers Most Fowl

I quite enjoyed the new April Fool's event that Cryptic added last year and was happy to see it return, but as my focus is currently on other MMOs I didn't really plan to grind the dailies again, plus at first glance it didn't look like anything had changed about the event. That was until I learned that this year, they also added an event dungeon called Sewers Most Fowl, in which you get to play as chickens in a group PvE context.

I did it with my guildies and it was great fun. If you enjoy this kind of thing, I can only recommend going in blind with friends and allowing yourself to be surprised - the event is on for another three days or so. Otherwise you can just watch me and my guildies bumble through it in this video:

Castle Ravenloft Conquered

It's pretty traditional for Cryptic to include a new dungeon and/or trial (raid) with each new module. From what I can tell these are actually always pretty inventive and well done, but since the difficulty is tuned for players at the very top-end, I tend to not see them until a few years later, once several new tiers of gear allow you to overpower the fights a bit.

I've been pretty stern with my guildies about not even wanting to bother while a dungeon is still hard (too many bad experiences), but today I allowed them talk me into running Tomb of the Nine Gods (released in 2017) and Castle Ravenloft (released in 2018). Tomb was actually pretty fun and not too tough anymore except for the last boss being somewhat manic. Castle Ravenloft was still tricky though, especially the last boss. We persevered though and eventually downed him after a number of tries. By that point, everyone apart from the tank had died 20+ times. Still, it was an adventure with friends and we enjoyed figuring out the tactics together, so it was ultimately fun. I uploaded our final fight against Strahd to YouTube:

I wouldn't want to go again any time soon though.

Hardcore Mode

There are some weekly objectives meant to slightly alleviate the grind for Zariel's favour, one of which is to complete selected dungeons in "hardcore mode". Before seeing this requirement, I had never heard of this feature.

We learned that it's a setting you can only turn on when queuing with a pre-made group, and when enabled it requires you to complete the whole run without anyone dying/getting downed. This is pretty sucky.

On our first run of hardcore Malabog's Castle, we breezed through most of it with ease, but then I lagged out on the last boss and got one-shot by the dragon's flyby, forcing us to start over. Fortunately we then got it on the second try.

After the weekly reset we did the whole thing again, and again we failed on the first run, this time due to someone else not dodging the flyby and getting one-shot by the last boss.

It kind of reminds me of the old Undying achievement in WoW, only worse in that you can't even get the normal dungeon rewards after failing, you just get ported out immediately and receive nothing. To be honest I'm neither sure why this mode is in the game nor why Cryptic felt the need to promote it with this event.

Tales of Old

My husband and a guildie have spent the last week going on about this event that's going on right now called "Tales of Old" and yesterday I finally gave in and agreed to take part. Apparently it centres on a selection of old dungeons that were previously removed and are selectively being returned for this event in a sort of challenge mode.

The framing for the event is that your party is working with a bard called Nipsy to spin an epic tale of how you supposedly once conquered a particular old dungeon, and you re-tell/re-run it several times to embellish your exploits. The first time you just do/did it without using any consumables, the second your artifacts didn't work either, the third time around you were hurting yourselves with every at-will power you cast, the fourth time all the enemies were doing poison damage on top of their normal abilities, and the final time you also had most/all(?) of your stats halved and are shrunk in size.

There are limitations both in the form of a timer (though it's not too tight and can be extended) and a death counter, which work together quite nicely to keep you going at a decent pace but without getting careless, as running out of "lives" ends the adventure just as prematurely as letting the timer run out.

We only did the first three difficulties in our run of Lair of the Mad Dragon as it was coming up to the event's reset time and my husband found out first hand that being in the instance when it resets leads to nothing but a very bad time. These were all fairly chill, though I'm told that the difficulty ramps up considerably at stages four and five.

As someone who's generally not super keen on Neverwinter's dungeons I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun this was, though I can imagine the required repetition becoming quite tedious in the long run. Still, now I want to try some of the other dungeons in the rotation before the event ends in a few days.

Scaling Strangeness

I knew that Cryptic was going to change the way scaling works in Undermountain, and I actually welcomed the idea as I thought that the existing system was pretty poor. After running a couple of Cloak Towers though, things didn't seem much different from before: Downscaled max-level characters were still rushing through, pulling and killing everything on their own while lowbies lagged behind - I guess things just went marginally more slowly, as it took more than one hit to kill an enemy now.

But then I ran into the strangeness in Illusionist's Gambit, and I soon got another taste of it in the Storming the Keep skirmish. Three years ago, I ridiculed this one for scaling players up to 60 while leaving the mobs in their twenties, making the whole thing a complete joke. Well, when I ran it this time, this was still happening... but our group of 60ies really struggled to kill those twenties! We barely made it through to the end, with me desperately spamming my one heal as much as it would let me and people still ended up getting downed repeatedly.

I found several reports of the new scaling being utterly broken (e.g. people being one-shot while doing normal Demogorgon) but that was more than two months ago, and supposedly there's been a patch to fix things since then? All I can say is that I'm very confused.

Vote to Kick

Today I learned:

Three out of five people voting to kick someone for being AFK is not enough, the fourth party member can prevent the kick indefinitely.

Once you've initiated a vote kick once, you can't try again for another four(!) hours.

Basically what happened was that the pug I was in ended up with a guy in the group who was AFK throughout the entire thing. When we reached the last boss and couldn't proceed without him, we tried to vote kick him, but one guy always rejected it.

By the time we had figured this out, all three of us had used up our vote kicking rights. Then the one guy who had quietly objected left the group, leaving us with the AFK-er (who had by then fully disconnected) and no way to remove him from the group in order to complete the dungeon, forcing us to disband.

What.

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.

Orcus Down!

I don't have a video or a screenshot showing the UI and achievement of it because my Nvidia share feature decided to act up again, but this past week, my guild cleared Castle Never in a full guild run for the first time! Unfortunately all I got is this screenshot of Orcus quickly disintegrating as Neverwinter mobs and bosses are wont to do.

We had tried Castle Never only once before and made it up to the last boss back then, but he just one-shot our tank at the start of the fight, every time, so that we could not get any further. This time things went much better, apparently due to the boss's damage having received a heavy nerf in the meantime.

I was my usual useless self and died a lot (if I did any buffing, there are no numbers to prove it), but even I managed to survive the final attempt, which was at least something.

Epic Temple of the Spider

This past weekend I ran my first epic dungeon, Temple of the Spider, with a bunch of guildies. Things went well enough until we got to the last boss, where I died within less than a minute. I wasn't alone however, and two of my guildies soon shared my fate. The two remaining players, my pet tank on his paladin and a guildie on a great weapon fighter, managed to get the boss down... eventually. I know that it took more than twenty minutes because I was marked as idle twice while hugging the floor and watching YouTube videos on my second monitor. In the end I was rewarded for my prolonged inactivity by the chest at the end spitting out a new and better version of my horned hat. There really is no justice in this world - good thing that in Neverwinter that often seems to work out to my advantage...

Guild Run

My pet tank incessantly pestering our guildies to play Neverwinter and level up is starting to pay off: Last night we finally had enough sufficiently geared max-level characters online to run an epic dungeon as a guild group! We took our time to find all the treasure chests and the bonus boss in the side rooms that pugs usually run past, and much fun was had by all. The only downside was that the game's overzealous queuing system swiftly removed one of our guildies from the group when he suffered a disconnect near the end and instantly replaced him with a random pug. Still, a pivotal milestone for our guild's Neverwinter chapter! You can watch the full run and listen to us banter in the video below:

Valindra's Tower

While I've been avoiding epic dungeons and skirmishes after some bad experiences, my pet tank keeps trying them. Last night he was in Valindra's Tower with a guildie, wiping once again. Looking over his shoulder, I noticed that their group was one player short, so I thought I'd surprise them by jumping into the queue on my rogue. If they were that desperate for a fifth, even my poor dps would be an improvement! But I got no pop.

"Try your cleric," my pet tank advised after I had told him what I was trying to do. Aha! On my cleric I got a pop instantly, for a group of four people trying to fill that last spot. So I joined - and landed in a completely different party about to engage the first boss. Oh. Since I hate dropping from groups for no good reason, I thought I'd see what this dungeon was all about.

Having never been to Valindra's Tower before, I ran in circles while the rest of the group killed the first boss. Eventually I managed to catch up though. Everything died really quickly, apparently because we had an amazing great weapon fighter in the group who did twice as much damage as the entire rest of the group combined (something like seventy million over the course of the run). Soon we were done. Meanwhile, my pet tank's group was still wiping and still one person short.

I tried my rogue again. After a few minutes, I got a pop - this time for a completely fresh run. This one, too, contained a seventy-million-damage great weapon fighter who made the whole thing a breeze.

My pet tank's group eventually had to give up. The queue system seemed to have bugged out and was refusing to give them a fifth party member, and they just kept wiping on the last boss (Valindra herself). He then told me that this had been his fifth attempt at this dungeon and that he had yet to complete it even once. While I had just bumbled in like a clueless idiot and got carried to completion twice within an hour. Oops?

Hey, at least both of my characters got silly hats out of it. Behold the horned cleric!

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?")

Death of Dungeons

When Elemental Evil launched, I vaguely recall reading something about Cryptic using it as an opportunity to re-tune low level dungeons so that they'd only require three players of no particular class composition and could be queued for by a wider range of levels. It sounded like an understandable move for a game that was having issues with queue times and I didn't even give it a second thought.

This past week, my pet tank has been roping some guildies from SWTOR into giving Neverwinter (another) try. I, too, rolled up another alt in hopes of being able to play with them. We were shocked to find that traditional group gameplay has been almost completely eradicated from the levelling game. Sure, Cragmire Crypts, the Grey Wolf Den and Temple of the Spider have been revamped in the fashion mentioned above and now allow level scaling all the way up to seventy. However, all the other levelling dungeons have been removed from the game, plus a couple of former max level ones as well. The wiki has the official list of victims:

The Cloak Tower
Lair of the Mad Dragon
Throne of Idris
Lair of the Pirate King
The Frozen Heart
Spellplague Caverns
Caverns of Karrundax
The Dread Vault
Castle Never
Fardelver's Crypt
Dwarf King Crypt

I'm pretty shocked, as I associate some pretty memorable experiences with some of those names. One would think that Cryptic probably did this with the intent of eventually bringing them back in revamped form as well, but with everything else they've got going on one has to wonder when they were hoping to find the time. I just can't help but think that a Dungeons and Dragons game with most of the dungeons taken out is severely diminished.