My Top 5 Neverwinter Modules

Ever since Neverwinter Unblogged wrote a great article ranking the game's many modules by quality, I've been meaning to write my own (shorter) version of this. (I'm not going to link the original article because sadly the dead site's domain trips security warnings in all my browsers nowadays.) Without further ado, my five favourite modules and the reasons why I love them:

5. Mod 18: Infernal Descent (January 2020)

Yes, I'm putting the most recently completed mod on this list because while it wasn't particularly innovative, it managed to get me back into the game after a very long absence (by my standards) and after having been majorly put off by the previous releases. It returned to using systems that I'd enjoyed before, and the devil theme kept things sufficiently fresh as they aren't really an enemy we've had to fight in great numbers before.

4. Mod 1: Fury of the Feywild (August 2013)

I wasn't actually playing when this was released, but when I came back to the game for the first time it was still very relevant content. In terms of theme, in a fantasy setting you can't really go wrong by having elves and a magical forest, and while somewhat grindy in its initial iteration, I enjoyed the content from the beginning. I believe my initial assessment was "similar to New Romulus in STO, but better". While much faster and easier these days, I still always enjoy coming back to this campaign on alts too.

3. Mod 14: Ravenloft (June 2018)

Based on an iconic property that immediately sparked interest, this mod managed to do the land of Barovia and its ruler justice by representing them through gameplay elements that managed to be a refinement of things that had worked well before and making them even better and more fun. Another map that I'm very happy to come back to.

2. Mod 3: Curse of Icewind Dale (May 2014)

This was the current mod when I first returned to the game after having drifted away not long after launch, and I loved it enough that it got me to stay semi-permanently. I loved the whole setup of Caer-Konig with the two competing factions, the snowy environments and the music; and new features like the heroic encounters dotted around the map and the optional open world PvP were appealing. While the difficulty felt kind of brutal for a solo player at the time, there was also something satisfying about playing an MMO again where "everything goes much more smoothly in a group" made for an incentive to group up with friends even for simple tasks like doing dailies.

1. Mod 7: Strongholds (August 2015)

It may seem odd to give the top spot to a module that didn't feature a campaign and didn't have much of a story attached to it, but I've really come to adore my little guild's stronghold. I'm not really a huge fan of housing in general, but the stronghold map is more like a privately shared adventure zone, and I enjoyed seeing our mini guild slowly improve ours as time went on. To be honest I think this is one of the main reasons I've stayed so attached to Neverwinter over the years: Our stronghold offers a virtual home, and even after periods of absence I never have to wonder what to do upon returning - checking on the stronghold is always the first order of business, and everything else can be figured out later.

Neverwinter vs. STO

There is a little chart called "weekly top games" on the Arc launcher, and for as long as I can remember, Neverwinter has held the number one spot on it, followed by Star Trek Online in second. Ever since I came back though, I've noticed that STO has been in first place some weeks. Has Neverwinter really decreased in popularity that much?

I consulted the Steam Charts once again, just to get a gauge on the relative popularity of the two games, and they do indeed show more people having played STO than Neverwinter for most of 2020. The last time that happened was back in 2016! Then I realised that STO recently celebrated its 10th anniversary though, which I'm sure helped it garner some extra attention, and activity does appear to have been dropping off again since that event ended on PC.

That said, the Neverwinter chart has definitely seen better days too. The game's last major peak appears to have been in July 2018 with the release of Ravenloft (understandably), and after the release of Undermountain in particular you can see a noticeable decline in interest (also understandably if you ask me - people don't like having to relearn the entire game!). We'll see if the current climate encourages more players to give the game another chance, like I have.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.