Combat Change Mayhem

As mentioned previously, mod 20 was supposed to bring about some major gameplay changes (once again), but in a somewhat surprising move, Cryptic decided to just drop those on us early last week and without warning, with the actual new content being scheduled to come out later.

As is definitely a pattern whenever Cryptic changes the combat and/or stats, everything's kind of screwed up for the moment. My guildies and I did a Castle Never for the weekly challenge and suffered so many deaths, it was funny. You could argue that it's not a bad thing to tune the content up so that people can't just ignore or skip mechanics quite so easily anymore, but our group was between 30 and 40k item level, while the recommended minimum for that dungeon is 20k. No idea how a party with that would get through any of those fights.

Also, while my dps as a healer was never the greatest it's even worse now. I'll concede that healing itself felt better though, as damage was taken more consistently so that I could get into more of a rhythm healing it up.

On the plus side, Avernus appears to have been nerfed into the ground and we had a good time doing some hunts there. Just gotta sit tight and wait for Cryptic to rebalance things within the next couple of weeks/months - as usual.

Re-role

I remembered the Protector's Speech skirmish as this quick piece of content that you could get in and out of within minutes, so I was very surprised when this year, I found myself faced with queues of ten minutes or more on some characters. On checking I realised that at some point Cryptic added role requirements for this skirmish, meaning that as someone with a dps spec you need to wait for enough tanks and healers to queue up. This strikes me as annoying simply because I don't think a full trinity group is really needed for this content.

However, if this was all just a ploy by Cryptic to make more people try tanking or healing, it's certainly worked on me. As the skirmish doesn't really require much tanking or healing, I'm not worried about my performance at all and will do anything to make the queue pop faster - there's pretty much always some overgeared damage dealer in the group that two-shots everything anyway. So I've now added dual specs for my warlock and great weapon fighter barbarian (the newest of my characters that I've decided to revive) to queue up as healer and tank respectively, even though I don't really know how to do either. I can only suggest that everyone who plays a class that can be more than a damage dealer does the same, simply to keep those pops rolling.

Healing Sucks

I've had some time to get used to the Undermountain class changes at least on my cleric and my rogue by now, and playing dps cleric isn't all that bad. I use the Arbiter dps specialisation most of the time, and once you figure out the rhythm it relies on, it actually plays pretty smoothly and might even be considered fun!

Unfortunately there has been no such redemption for the healing spec. I even looked up a guide and everything, to make sure I wasn't just doing it wrong, but even the guide writer admitted that the healing gameplay is pretty dull. Most of the time your rotation is basically ABABAB, with A being an AoE heal (so there isn't even any prioritising of targets going on) and B coming down to standing still to pray and regenerate your divinity resource. There is enough synergy there that you "only" have to spend about as much time praying as you spend casting, but that is frankly still too much. Plus the combination of just using a single heal most of the time that isn't even targeted is just boring as hell.

I always found the way Neverwinter didn't used to have any "real" healers a bit odd, but if you accepted that system for what it was it was fun. I'm not against the idea of having the classes play like a "proper" trinity now either, considering that this is what I enjoy in my other MMOs, but then Cryptic really needs to step it up and make the healing gameplay more interesting than alternating between quick bursts of spamming one ability and standing around praying. I hear that the next module is supposed to bring changes to the system, but I'll reserve judgement until I actually see how they play out.

Early Levelling Impressions

My little cleric is in her forties now, and so far I like the new levelling experience less than the old one.

- As I already mentioned, you rarely get anything when you level up. This is boring and reminds me of current World of Warcraft in a bad way.

- Acquisitions Incorporated feels like more of a stain on the game than I expected. I was not thrilled by the humour when it came out but thought that maybe it was less jarring if you actually ran into the chain "organically" as a lowbie... but nope, it's just as bad. There's a huge tonal dissonance between that campaign and everything else, and the quest givers just come off as jerks. I don't want to work for them. I did the intro and then didn't go back, despite of them sending me letters in the mail.

- Gear is oddly hard to come by. Rewards from dungeons are random to a ridiculous degree, to the point that most are either for a different class or a character thirty levels higher. Out in the world they are strangely scarce now. I remember back when we used to have to identify all our drops (another thing that they got rid of) it seemed to be raining unidentified items left and right. Now I hardly see any gear drop from mobs at all.

- Where are my heals? They completely removed life steal, which I can kind of understand because of how OP it was, but they also seem to have taken away the cleric's various healing effects that used to be attached to attacks. At the moment I feel like just another random dps. And the one heal my baby cleric does have feels ridiculously weak, barely even moving anyone's health bar. It feels like something that was tuned for max-level characters in epic gear, leaving lowbies in random levelling gear feeling disproportionally weak.