Extreme Generosity

I've mentioned before that Neverwinter has become a lot more generous with its freebies recently, but they keep topping themselves!

Since the last week of July an event called "20 Weeks of Gifts" has been active, which lets you claim a reward from the promo vendor every week. To get this, hit L after logging in, click "claim valuables" and then go to the "promo" tab. Alternatively, you can get to the same window by visiting the Rewards Claim Agent NPC in Prospector's Enclave, who is marked as the third most northern point of interest on the map there.

I didn't previously feel the need to shout about these because while things like a free stone of health are nice, they're not exactly game-changers. These last two weeks they really ramped things up though! Last week we got a choice pack for a legendary account-wide companion, and this week we're getting the same but for a mount. I chose the Black Ice Warhorse, a classic that I've had an eye on for a looong time, but I just never felt like spending the money. I never thought I'd just get it for free eventually!

So even if you haven't been playing lately, I think this is the kind of freebie that's worth logging in for. I'd also keep an eye out for the remaining weeks of the event, because so far the rewards have only gotten better and there's still a lot of weeks to go that could hold nice surprises...

New Levelling Experience

Seeing how mod 21 is all about changing the levelling experience, I thought it made sense to create a new alt to check out how that's worked out. Thus Barb the Aasimar bard was born (more on bards another time). It's kind of strange to me to be investigating the tutorial again after I wrote about it being revamped only a little over a year ago.

I only played through that version of the intro once so my memories of it aren't very detailed, but based on what I wrote back then the first part outside the city doesn't seem to have changed much, except maybe that the combat felt a bit less faceroll than I remember. However, the part inside Protector's Enclave is completely different: We're once again back to no signs of fighting inside the city gates, and there's nothing about the Nashers wanting to steal the crown anymore. Instead you get sent to Sergeant Knox in the newly invented "Adventurer's Guild", where you're given a brief combat tutorial in a special training room before being sent straight to Neverdeath Graveyard.

I don't know whether I like or dislike this change, I just know that as a long-time player it feels extremely bizarre. With whole low-level zones and story arcs wiped out, it feels extremely rushed compared to the old experience... yet at the same time I'm not sure that's really a bad thing, considering I've said in the past that - in somewhat of an inversion of most games in the genre - Neverwinter's early levels used to be among the worst, largely because of how samey and front-loaded with system tutorials they were (which was alright the first time but extremely tedious on alts).

I could see it being appealing for new players to "jump into the action" more quickly, but my general experience with MMOs has been that propelling the player forward more quickly isn't necessarily more engaging either.

The lack of any sort of visible character progression with the removal of XP is also extremely strange to me. The new milestone system means that you only gain levels for completing certain quests, but until you are on one of those quests, there's no visual indicator of how close you are to the next milestone/level, so your only real motivation to keep going is sheer momentum or interest in the story, and let's be honest, with the exception of a few clever storylines, narrative has never been Neverwinter's strong suit.

I guess this also means that you will no longer have a choice of alternative levelling paths, which I can see getting rather repetitive on alts, even if the overall length of the journey has been shortened by a lot.

Barren, yet Overloaded

 ... is my briefest of day one impressions of mod 21. Barren, because that's how the Sword Coast map looks to me with seven zones removed - see below for which ones got the axe:

Overloaded, because every character has dozens of new rewards to claim for content they've already completed, and just claiming all the boxes without even opening most of them was enough to give me a slight case of inventory panic. I'll have to take all my alts through this process slowly.

Oh, and I gained a new max-level alt because my previously level 65 cleric alt that I created after Undermountain is now also at the new cap of 20.

Neverwinter Turns Eight

You wouldn't be able to tell from the below image because nobody bothered to update the decorations in the stronghold, so they still have the number seven on them.

Also, the random text on this screenshot is there because for some reason my in-game screenshot functionality stopped working, so I had to use an external programme which doesn't automatically hide certain pieces of text. Such is life with Cryptic - they mean well and some of their content is very fun, but everything's always a bit of a mess.

In the Protector's Garden they took away the number on the floor and just replaced it with a lion logo. I also didn't see any numbered banners there - I guess that should future-proof the celebrations against forgetful developers at least.

I had misunderstood part of the post about the levelling revamp by the way and it's not live yet. In fact we don't have a date yet, but it's probably going to be in a few weeks.

Wrath of Acererak

Any quest that asks you to do heroics in Omu is a bit annoying because there is only one, The Tyrant, and it only pops about once an hour. Doing the other quests in the area only takes so much time and if you're unlucky, you can be in for quite a wait.

There is another option though - if you empower all nine shrines on the map, another large heroic encounter called "Wrath of Acererak" is triggered. For a long time, I never saw this even once, as shrines only stay empowered for about five minutes, which means that you need at least three people to work in tandem to trigger the event. While Omu was current content, I did this with my guildies out of sheer curiosity once, but that was it.

However, in the past week I did this heroic about five times and often did my part to empower the shrines too: It was Chult bonus week, and people get bored waiting for the Tyrant to pop. It was actually quite satisfying to see that strangers can work together to launch the event as well - all it takes is a little bit of co-ordination in zone chat. Plus I love the evil cackling sound that plays whenever you succeed in launching it.

Ascension Redux

Remember when I was complaining that nobody wanted to do the big heroic encounter in Avernus? In a prime example of how quickly the tides of content popularity can turn depending on its rewards, it has suddenly become the content du jour to farm Zariel's favour for the new event.

Now zone chat is an endless stream of people asking to be invited to groups for the heroic, so the moment it pops in your map instance, you just throw some invites to the first few names that scroll past and you'll immediately be surrounded by a bunch of uber-geared people that basically kill everything for you. I just find this highly amusing.

All Alts on Deck

I'm proud to say that I finally got one character of every class to 80. Since I already had all of them at 70 and levelling is quite quick these days, it didn't technically require much effort to gain those extra ten levels on each alt, however I intentionally took it slowly to give myself a chance to re-familiarise myself with each class after the complete havoc that Undermountain wreaked on class design.

I do like how the new appearance system makes it much easier to give each character a decent look, even if you don't have the perfect item for every slot (yet). Just being able to easily apply basic dyes to resolve colour clashes already helps a lot.

Dragon Run

Every hour at fifteen minutes to the hour, five giant dragons appear in the Well of Dragons. I somehow managed to be completely oblivious to this for a long time, though I did eventually catch on when people were constantly talking about "dragon runs" in chat. Groups assemble at or just before the start of the event and then try to kill all the dragons before they have time to leave again, either starting at green and going clockwise or starting at black and going counter-clockwise. I've sometimes seen arguments about which way is the right way, though most people seem to lean towards starting at green these days.

I often like to join for a dragon run if I arrive at the right time, as they are easy enough to zerg down (except for the blue dragon - I hate the blue dragon) and it basically counts as completing five epic heroic encounters with decent rewards. Completing at least one epic heroic encounter in Well of Dragons is also one of the objectives of one of the legacy campaign quests, and the dragons are the only encounters that qualify.

One thing that has confused me lately is that I sometimes see people going straight for the white dragon at the start of the event, which is kind of in the middle and just splits people up. I have yet to figure out what the logic behind that is (but there is pretty much always some kind of logic behind whatever people do in this game).

Finale

Neverwinter isn't the greatest MMO for story, both because of the quality of the writing and the way it is delivered. That said, I just want to give them credit for continuously trying to improve. I won't deny it, the ending of the Path of the Fallen campaign was neither particularly surprising nor original, but it sure managed to give me the feels. Well done, Cryptic.

Rage of Bel

I somehow managed to miss that a new quest and event were added to Vallenhas about two months ago - while guildies were actually talking about it back then, I conflated the activity with a different, temporary event that I wasn't interested in at the time.

Keen to catch up, I got started on the quest last week, which mostly involves doing so-called insurgencies, which seem to basically be a big mob farm for pick-up groups. After enough insurgencies have been completed, the instanced Rage of Bel fight unlocks for an hour, though you'll have to manually join/form a group for it as it can't be queued for.

I joined a pug as healer after getting a quick rundown from my husband about how the fight worked and it went surprisingly well! The group I was in had really good dps and burned through the whole encounter with no problems, so we ended up farming it half a dozen times. I just caused one wipe (which was very much to my shame) when I first got the blue catapult mark and couldn't quite figure out what to do (I had been told the theory but the practice confused me). I was surprised nobody shouted at me or kicked me from the group, but I don't want to imagine what some of them must have been yelling behind their screens while I was running all over the place in confusion...

Ascension

I've mentioned previously that a map's big heroic encounters play an important part in defining a zone's flavour. The Avernus Wastes have only one such BHE, and unfortunately it's not in a good place right now, as it's both hard and doesn't seem to reward anything particularly worthwhile (that you can't also get from easier content).

Our little three-man group really wanted to get it done this week simply because completing it once is a requirement for one of the weekly quests, but it was a real struggle and took us three attempts. Lack of dps seems to be the main issue, as the event has a ten minute timer and the mobs just take ages to kill. We failed twice on the last stage because we ran out of time, and even when we finally succeeded we had less than a minute left on the timer. It's apparently very important to get a large group of people to join in as soon as you start, as losing too much time without maximum dps seems to be something you simply can't afford right now.

Path of the Fallen Impressions

Because the new module didn't quite offer enough naming confusion yet, the new campaign coming with Avernus is called "Path of the Fallen". We finally started it this afternoon.

Having just spent days swoop racing in SWTOR, I was amused to be confronted with another racing mechanic, as characters are given an "infernal machine" to race across the wastelands of Avernus.

One of the machine's abilities is to "listen to the radio" (or whatever it's called in D&D terms). My husband told me that hearing devils talk about politics was vaguely amusing, but for me even trying to use that ability managed to crash the entire game every single time (because Cryptic), so I've missed out so far.

The mobs are pretty tough. The recommended item level is another 1k higher than the (already high) recommendation to start Infernal Descent, and it was very noticeable. Even though we were doing the quests with a group of three who all had higher than the recommended item level, we were downed a few times (though this mostly happened when we foolishly allowed ourselves to be split up).

Lockbox Opening Experience

Having accumulated 177 lockbox keys from several months of VIP, I thought I'd go and open some lockboxes for a change. Not having done so in ages, the biggest surprise to me was that Cryptic implemented a special UI for this at some point, making sure that the items from your box are represented by larger images and unveiled with as much fanfare as possible (similar to how other games with lootboxes handle this already). When you get a particularly rare item, there's even an angelic choir-like "ooh" sound effect.

Unfortunately this UI change was already the most exciting thing about the whole experience. I complained about Neverwinter's lockbox contents being largely useless in the past, but I vaguely recall that they were at least a little more varied back then, including items like gear pieces, fashion etc. This time around I found that the drops were brutally utilitarian - which is the opposite of useless I guess, but boring. Aside from a single companion, everything else in those 177 boxes was either a refinement stone or an enchantment. For a system that's supposed to entice people with "surprise mechanics", I've got to say that's remarkably uninspired.

Happy Seventh!

Last year my enthusiasm for Protector's Jubilee was slightly subdued, due to a mix of bugs and feeling like the game changes made in Undermountain had really pushed me away. Fortunately I'm in a much better place this year, as my casual play over the last three months has managed to rekindle my affection for the game (even if I've only fully "revived" three of my old characters so far).

I noted with some amusement that Cryptic gave up on adding more numbers to the floor in the Protector's Garden (you can see them in the bottom screenshot in this post). It seems they ran out of space and therefore decided to simply start over with the number seven.

My husband also noted that they forgot to update the banners in the Protector's Speech skirmish as they still show the number six instead of seven at the time of writing. Never change, Cryptic.

As usual for Neverwinter's birthday celebrations, there are lots of freebies to be had - just remember to claim them from the claims vendor every day (which can be accessed from anywhere by pressing L and then the big claim button). They seem to have gotten rid of the "free" section on the Zen market at some point where gifts were handed out in past years.

Siege

Devil Siege or Siege for short is one of the large heroic encounters in Avernus, and it's an odd one. The objective is to damage a massive siege engine until a boss appears, then kill the boss.

To achieve this, people first have to operate some catapults. How to do this is not terribly intuitive - for example they cannot be interacted with while any combat is going on too close to them, meaning that someone other than the catapult operator needs to make sure to drag any mobs away first.

What's really flummoxing though is that none of the actual objectives are displayed on the encounter tracker. It just tells you to kill devils - no mention of the siege engine at all - even though this appears to only be a bonus objective, and one I've never seen come even close to completion due to the insane number of kills it requires. I'm sure everyone new to the zone spends at least their first few runs of this heroic just killing devils in the middle, confused about what's going on and having to rely on one or two veterans who know what to do to actually progress the encounter.

More recently, the siege engine's health bar that can be seen in the above screenshot disappeared too, so now you don't even have an indicator of how well the fight is progressing. It's just confusing to me how anyone at Cryptic could have thought that this was a good idea.

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.

In Hell

Infernal Descent takes place in Avernus, the first circle of hell according to D&D lore. Players are provided with a safe haven there in the form of your base of operations, a stronghold that was pulled down into hell due to a curse or something, but otherwise the environment is (understandably) very hostile.

I think it's always challenging to make players spend extended amounts of time in zones that are by their very nature extremely hostile and unpleasant, because if the environment truly lives up to its reputation, no amount of rewards will make people want to hang around.

Avernus, too, largely manages to deliver on what you'd expect from a circle of hell, with a slightly grating soundtrack and everything being tinted in unpleasant shades of red. Even the mobs contribute, as the Erinyes' screeching for example is a proper pain in the rear. It's bearable for the duration it takes to get your weeklies done and the gameplay is fun, but unsurprisingly the first circle of hell is not a place where I'd like to spend more time in the long run.

April Fowls

In the past, Cryptic impressed players on April Fools' Day by creating a whole new, lovingly crafted joke campaign for the event, which became so popular that they just turned it into a generally recurring event after a while.

Since then I don't recall seeing anything new for April Fools, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them come up with something new this year: "April Fowls".

This silly event is chiock-full of bad chicken puns and mostly consists of a few daily quests that involve you turning into a chicken and using unique combat abilities. The currency you earn from them can be used to buy a giant chicken mount or a couple of vanity pets.

There is also a chicken themed PvP brawl that involves you taking on the same chicken forms and abilities as in the daily quests while pecking enemy players to death. I've only done it once so far but couldn't stop laughing pretty much through the entire thing.

It's not the most sophisticated event ever, but the light-hearted silliness of it all is just right for the current climate in my eyes, and for a limited-time event it's been great fun. It's on for a few more days if you haven't had a chance to give it a go.

Also amusing: guards continue to salute me while in chicken form.

Infernal Descent

As much as Uprising was a letdown, fortunately the newest module seems to be a good one again. In fact, my immediate impression was that after something like three lacklustre modules in a row, someone at Cryptic must have sat down to check which one was the last module that players really liked (Ravenloft) and decided to simply copy that.

Infernal Descent doesn't feature as iconic a setting, but it also has an introduction with some neat-ish cut scenes, interesting NPCs, and the way the overall campaign works is almost a straight copy and paste from Ravenloft: a map with a mix of big and small heroic encounters, endlessly repeatable quests on a randomised rotation and some very rewarding weeklies.

Keeping Up Appearances

At launch, Neverwinter had no real cosmetic system at all, only the option to display a "fashion set" instead of your regular gear, which was extremely limited. Later on they added dyes and the ability to "overwrite" an item's appearance with that of another item, but doing so destroyed the latter, which was annoying e.g. when you got a new weapon and had to choose between either salvaging the old one for currency or destroying it to preserve the appearance. It could also get quite expensive if you replaced your gear frequently but wanted to keep the same look.

I was pleased to see that with Uprising the devs decided to make an attempt at getting Neverwinter caught up with more modern MMOs in regards to cosmetics. There is now a dedicated appearance tab where you can set a look you want and it stays on even if you swap gear around. You still need to destroy gear that you want to "add to your appearance library" once, but after that you can re-use the look forever. Likewise dyes only need to be unlocked once and are re-usable after that.

I felt vindicated for actually having kept some old gear pieces that I liked the look of in the bank for a rainy day - now I just needed to convert them to appearance library items and they were ready to be worn again!

The system's still far from perfect, mind you - for example there is currently no way to save multiple outfits for easy swapping. Also, the old fashion system still exists and now just feels weird and confusing in the way these things tend to go in older MMOs when a newer system effectively replaces an older one but the old one doesn't get removed. Still, it's a step in the right direction.