River District Heroic Nerf

I didn't find completing the Cloaked Ascendancy for a second time too bad - what with using a Signet of Patronage and being able to complete the area's daily quest in about ten minutes by chaining five of the small heroic encounters.

A couple of months ago Cryptic already nerfed the seal rewards from those heroics, but I didn't really care much about that at the time because I wasn't running them for the seals anyway; I was running them to progress the campaign.

Fast forward to this week, when I decided to start my third character on the River District... just to find that at some point in the recent past, Cryptic also nerfed the heroics' contribution to the daily quest. While you could previously complete it from five encounters, now you need twice as many, presumably in an attempt to push more people towards doing the mini lairs instead, which I don't like very much. (Unless those have been nerfed too. I didn't try.)

I'm feeling really dejected by this - why make an old campaign that already suffers from being somewhat boring and grindy even more so? I get that this game is very much about grinding, but at least when it came to older content, Cryptic used to be a bit more generous and tended to lower requirements over time instead of raising them.

Buggy Morlanth

This past weekend I repeated the Shroud of Souls quest line for the first time since it first came out. And whoa, was Morlanth (the last boss) ever bugged! Specifically, she didn't do anything when I attacked her - which would have been fine by me, except that this "not doing anything" also included "not dying". She just kept standing there at zero health.

When I googled the problem I only found this off-hand mention of someone else having the same issue and apparently circumventing it by attacking her really, really slowly (once every ten seconds by their own account). I Alt+F4ed to reset the fight and tried this, but without much success - if I waited too long between attacks, she would kill me (rogues aren't made to just stand around while being hit in the face), and if I tried to attack a little faster she would freeze up again.

Fortunately, after Alt+F4ing for the fifth time or so, I suddenly loaded back in to find the giant dragon that she summons at some point into the fight in front of me, and that one acted like a normal enemy, so when I killed that the quest completed. I'm just putting this here in case anyone else struggles with this bug...

Kabal

One interesting aspect of soloing content that I previously only ever did while duoing with my pet tank is that I actually have to learn fight mechanics properly. For example the Kabal fight in the River District (one of that zone's weekly missions) was always a bit of a mystery to me. I figured that you had to drag his ball and chain of fiery death onto him or something, and I even seem to remember doing so successfully once or twice, but other times I couldn't get it to move, and my health would just keep going down until I died, leaving my pet tank to finish off the boss on his own.

Trying to solo this fight on my rogue I quickly got annoyed with being unable to figure out what to do, but fortunately this reddit thread came to the rescue. It also mentions the "pulling the ball onto the boss" tactic that I can't always get to work, but helpfully offered the alternative of killing the third add he spawns in just the right spot so that it leaves a fiery sphere which you can then use to melt and break the chain, and then using the fourth add to bring down his immunity shield.

I still had to use several health stones to make it through but I did succeed in the end. At least I understand now why there always seem to be people looking for a group for this one in general chat.

River District Retrospective

While Storm King's Thunder was the last of the "old" campaigns where I still had boons to finish, I had some leftover business in the River District for the last couple of weeks as well. I couldn't help but think about how my opinion of that campaign area has changed.

My initial impressions of it were really positive - and I still think that the map is very nice for example, and that its weekly quests are inventive. However, what I initially considered a nice variety of daily activities unfortunately ended up feeling pretty dull over time. With no particular reason to do one thing over another, it eventually just became a matter of doing whatever's easiest/fastest until you've reached your daily goal. From my recent experience the most popular choice for this seems to be running the small heroic encounters - there are often "trains" going for them that just run in circles doing one after the other, and even a small group is enough to make them go down quite fast.

That's not exactly a bad thing, but after a while I really started to miss the direction provided by quests. Without them your daily goal just feels too much like random mob grinding. Chult had this problem too to some extent, and I'm glad to see that Cryptic seems to have back-pedalled on this, with Barovia once again offering a nice amount of quests to provide structure for your daily adventures.

Shroud of Souls

I expected Shroud of Souls to be a "mini module" in the vein of Sea of Moving Ice, and as such was very surprised today when I realised that a single quest chain was all there was to its story - no new campaign tasks or repeatable missions, nothing.

I can't exactly complain, because I'm still busy with the River District and I did enjoy the Shroud of Souls quest chain very much for what it was - I loved how it took you across various different zones and re-used existing characters.

I'm just not sure how to manage my expectations in regards to these releases halfway through a campaign now.

The Cloaked Ascendancy Story (Spoilers)

We finished chapter five of the Cloaked Ascendancy story today, and while there is still the quest to do Spellplague Caverns, I think the main arc is pretty much over. While I consider the River District a great new map, the story accompanying it has struck me as very lacklustre. I don't expect a particularly high standard of storytelling from Cryptic, but I know they can do better than this.

It started off interesting enough: Who is this Gyrion? And Lord Neverember grousing about how ungrateful people were towards him was pretty hilarious. For a moment I wondered whether he was about to go rogue or something, but the actual reveal was fine too.

But the whole thing with Celeste was really badly done. When she "changed sides", she looked like she was being mind-controlled or something and it just felt wrong that nobody seemed in the least concerned by this! When it was revealed that she had only gone undercover I was kind of: "Bwuh?" It just didn't add up. Maybe the bad voice acting and lack of animation on her face were to blame in this case.

Gyrion and his allies didn't really go anywhere either though. There is a hint early on that they might have interesting backgrounds, with Kabal having formerly been a mage for example, but in the end nothing ever came of that either. Honestly a bit of a let-down.

Fun Weeklies

PSA: It seems that in the Cloaked Ascendancy's campaign progression, it's better to immediately follow up "Investigate [Boss X]" with "Confront [Boss X]" instead of investigating the other two bosses first, as this apparently unlocks the weekly quest. My pet tank and I were not aware of this and therefore wasted some valuable progression time during which we could have already had access to the weekly.

I really like what they've done with the weekly mission in this zone. There are three bosses with strongly themed lairs (magic, fire, nature), and each one presents a slightly different challenge in terms of mechanics, not just focusing on combat. In the first you super-jump across floating platforms, in the second you dodge streams of fire and in the third you get to ride fey stags through an obstacle course before confronting the boss. You only actually have to face one of them each week too, so if not all of these mechanics float your boat, you can pick your favourite and just stick to that.

Even though we initially died many times before we got it right the first time, I think the stag ride in Nostura's realm is my personal favourite so far. The slight trippiness of it all somehow reminded me of Robot Attack Unicorn - thus I chose Erasure as my soundtrack when I recorded it:

Inv Ship Pls

The heroic encounters in the River District are a funny thing. There are four large ones in total - three that share a spawn timer and appear in one of three corners of the map (I don't know if their order is fixed or randomised), and one that can be triggered by player hand-ins and is located almost right next to the zone's base.

As a result, everyone runs the latter all the time and general chat is flooded with invite requests so that people can chain-run the encounter by quickly hopping from one instance to the next. Meanwhile, the other three events largely go ignored. (The fact that the teleporting mobs that are part of Gyrion's forces are super annoying doesn't help.)

MMO min-maxing at its finest.

River District

Like most of Neverwinter's campaigns, the River District can be summed up as "more of the same, but a bit different". Here's what I like and don't like about it so far:

Like:

+ The environment. While one could argue that a slightly twisted cityscape doesn't make for the most exciting adventuring zone, I like being back in the game's eponymous capital.

+ Zone size. Sea of Moving Ice taught me that bigger isn't necessarily better, especially when a single round of dailies takes ages simply because you spend ten minutes travelling to where you need to be. I like how the River District feels much more compact.

+ Variety of activities. Instead of being asked to do x number of daily quests every day, you're only given a single quest that basically asks you to "do stuff" and you can pick your own activity mix to complete it. This allows you to change things up at any time.

+ Better treasure maps. The treasure maps from Sea of Moving Ice have made a return here, but since the environment contains a lot more notable points of interest, you actually stand a reasonable chance of finding the treasure even without a guide.

Dislike:

- Mob density. This might be a side effect of the small zone size, but mob packs are plentiful and hard to avoid. Additionally they seem to be tuned to hit in such a way that a purple quality mount isn't enough to not get knocked off anymore, so I'm getting dismounted pretty much any time I aggro anything at all.

Overall, the good seems to outweigh the bad so far.

Still Around

I just haven't been playing Neverwinter lately because the launch of the latest SWTOR expansion drew both me and all my guildies back to that. The greatly reduced log-in rewards also didn't give me any reason to keep logging in at least once a day anymore.

However, my pet tank and I are now back to check out the River District. I loved the giant O-face my character made in chapter four of the story. More thoughts may follow as and when.