Limit or Target?

Last weekend's bonus RP event came with a twist: the now directly awarded points went towards filling up a little bar that showed that you were able to gain a maximum of 100,000 bonus RP per character during the event. I was soon questioning this limit though, because even after several hours of play on my rogue I hadn't even hit 10k. Just how intensely do you need to play to earn that many points? Why even have a cap at all then?

But then I realised: another new feature was that you could buy boosters that would increase your RP gain. So maybe this cap was less about having a cap and more about making people spend money to reach it, knowing that the ambitious would feel bad about not filling their bars. When I think back to all the agonising WoW players used to do about hitting the valor point cap back in the day, it all makes sense. Quite a clever move.

Bonus RP Event

One of the above is currently going on in-game. When the first one came around, I sighed a bit. Wasn't part of the point of the big refinement changes to make sure that people wouldn't feel like they needed to wait until a special refinement weekend anymore to upgrade all their items?

However, in this case I worried for nothing, because Cryptic stayed true to their word. Unlike the previous double refinement events, the new bonus RP changes nothing about the way you actually upgrade your items - it just causes refinement items to drop with higher frequency while you're out questing in the world.

From my limited experience this isn't really something to write home about, but for a casual player like me it can provide that extra push to take an alt out for a spin, knowing that on top of whatever else I'll be doing, I'll also be earning extra RP.

Like previous changes to invocation, this is another step towards encouraging people to actually play instead of simply rewarding them for logging in at the right time. I don't know how well that's working out for Cryptic, but it does seem like a sensible plan.

Refinement Revamp

It's been quiet on here because I've been off Neverwinter for the last few months. As usual, I always come back though, which in this case started with trying to make sense of the changes that were made to the refinement system with the Swords of Chult module launched in October.

I had actually already read about both the inventory and the refinement point changes beforehand, but seeing them live was still something else. I can't deny that they look good on paper, and also that it's super convenient to be able to identify all the greens in my bag with one button click and then refine the lot of them with another. However, right now I also can't help feeling like I'm missing something. It all seems a bit too easy. Surely there must still be some trick to deciding what to refine and when? It just seems strange after the previous complexity.

What's also interesting is that it seems that the amount of RP you get from green gear drops has been buffed, relatively speaking. It used to be as much as a white pearl per item, now it's as much as a peridot, which is five times as much! Combined with the new ease of turning these drops into refinement points, this has had the funny side effect of my pet tank going from ridiculing me for picking up all the "junk" to actually wanting said junk for himself. I can't quite decide yet whether I'm happy that he's now helping me hoover up all the shinies after every fight or annoyed that he's suddenly competing for the loot.

Orange

Back in 2015 I wrote about the concept of artifact gear and how its grindiness worried me. Nearly two years later, I finally maxed out my cleric's main hand weapon. By now I honestly wasn't sure it was ever going to happen!

But don't worry about me running out of things to grind for, there's still her off-hand, the belt and four artifacts to go, not to mention that none of my enchantments are above rank 10...

Artifact Gear Scares Me

A couple of weeks ago I finally got artifact weapons for my max-level alts.

Artifact gear was apparently introduced during Tyranny of Dragons (when I wasn't actively playing). It's a simple concept: Instead of continuously replacing your gear, you keep the same item but upgrade it by pouring resources of some kind into it. Many other MMOs have similar systems, and even Blizzard is planning to introduce its own version in the upcoming Legion expansion for WoW.

It sounds cool in theory, but I've not been particularly enamoured with Neverwinter's implementation. The problem is that it's just another grind in an already very grindy game. Now you don't just have to upgrade your artifacts and enchantments, but also your weapon, your off-hand, your cloak, your belt... or you can pay your way to better gear by buying lots of refinement points of course!

People like to rail against the RNG of getting upgrades from boss or chest drops, but a predictable but endless grind is not really my cup of tea either.

Gameplay Problems with Elemental Evil

I've mostly been complaining about the awkwardness of the level scaling and the tediousness of the quests that came with the Elemental Evil level increase, but this post on Neverwinter Unblogged offers insight into why the community has many more reasons to be displeased with this module. Basically, character power has been decreased, reasons to grind have been increased - all in all it's a very obvious attempt to push people towards the cash shop more forcefully. I'm very much in favour of financially supporting a game I enjoy, but expecting people to spend literally hundreds of dollars if they want to gear up even a single character is not a monetisation model I want to support.

More Invocation Changes

When they changed the invocation system a couple of months ago, one of the new perks of the multiple invokes per day was that one of them would grant you a refinement stone of some kind. What was funny about this was that it was initially randomised which kind of stone you would get, but then you would get the same stone every day, forever.

The result of this was that if you were lucky and got a useful stone the first time, you would continue to get something useful every day. This was true for my cleric and my rogue for example. If you were unlucky, you might end up like my great weapon fighter, who has a pile of over fifty stability stones (bound to character of course) and no stability artifact to use them on. This system seemed rather odd and like it was probably bugged.

This seems to have been confirmed with the latest patch, since they "fixed" it now so that invoking grants a goodie bag instead, which will then contain a random stone. This is good news for my great weapon fighter, but bad news for my other characters, who now suddenly have a chance of getting something useless. Worse, since you can now get something different out of a whole selection of useless items, it's going to hurt your inventory space, and much worse than those 50+ stability stones ever did.

Also, never one to leave out an opportunity to monetise, Cryptic seems to have programmed the system in such a way that you also get a coupon for the Zen store from every single one of those goodie bags, which I find quite annoying. I don't mind finding them out in the world on occasion, but having multiples of them dumped in my inventory every day seems kind of... pushy.

I know it won't happen, but I kind of want that bug back.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

The latest patch introduced a small quality of life change to the refinement process. It used to be that if you selected a type of enchantment or stone to use for refining, it would put all of them into the refinement window (up to a maximum of five) and if you didn't want to refine the whole lot, you had to click some more to get the rest of them back out. Now you can select an amount to put into the window, and the items also stack so that e.g. ten radiant enchantments only take up one of the five available slots.

In the same patch, a bug was introduced that when you get a crit during refinement, instead of receiving additional points, you instead receive none at all and the used-up ingredient just vanishes.

Yeaaah...

Enchantment!

(I always read that in the voice of that dwarf NPC from Dragon Age.)

Enchantments in Neverwinter are an interesting system with a considerable dose of pay-to-win.

Most gear has an enchantment slot to add extra stats, and enchantments come in ranks from one to ten. You can find the lower level ones out in the world, but to get anything higher than five you pretty much need to "refine".

Refining basically means destroying lots of low-level enchantments and/or expensive consumables to fill a refinement bar, and once it's full you can click a button to upgrade the enchantment if you have certain other consumables in your bag as well. The catch is that the upgrade isn't guaranteed and if it fails, what happens by default is that you lose all your consumables. At lower levels this doesn't seem too bad as the chances of success are still pretty reasonable, but soon the failure rate climbs up to literally 99% and the only way to circumvent that problem is to use an expensive cash shop consumable called a ward.

In short, there are three ways in which this system is somewhat pay-to-win.

1) You can buy "refinement fuel" in the cash shop that's literally a hundred times more powerful than what you commonly find out in the world. This doesn't feel too bad to me yet as you can still fill your bar purely by playing the game; it just takes very long.

2) The basic wards prevent you from losing your stuff if an upgrade fails. There is no way of achieving this without the cash shop, but I still find it tolerable because these basic wards are pretty cheap. They also don't feel mandatory quite yet.

3) The expensive wards guarantee that an upgrade will suceed even if it has a 99% failure rate. These I don't like, as nobody can realistically expect to upgrade their enchantments past a certain rank without using them. Considering that there are over a dozen item slots that can have enchantments, each of which would require several expensive wards to be upgraded to max, this just feels like an attempt to milk dedicated players for all they are worth, just because they want their characters to be as powerful as possible.