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).

Immersion

In the Well of Dragons there is an area called the cult prison camp. There are two dailies that require you to go to this area, one to kill hostile NPCs and one to free prisoners. However as far as I can tell, these are never given on the same day.

On a day like today, where the only available daily quest is to kill enemies in the camp, this means that one arrives to the bizarre sight of the area being pretty much devoid of cultists, while sad prisoners are standing around all over the place, still shackled and with their heads bowed, looking lost. Nobody's got a quest to save them!

A guildie and I started running around and releasing them anyway. (You do not have to be on the associated quest to be able to do this.) My pet tank yelled at us for wasting time when we should have helped him hunt down the few remaining cultists instead.

Well of Dragons

Since my pet tank and I finally managed to unlock the Well of Dragons dailies, we've been doing them whenever we can, in order to work on our campaign progression. I haven't been impressed.

Up until Tyranny of Dragons, I felt that every new campaign was an improvement or at least a fresh new take on the way the game does dailies. But the Well of Dragons... meh.

Scenery-wise it feels like a rehashed Dread Ring with dragons instead of zombies, coloured brown instead of grey. The dailies can take freaking forever if you happen to get a bad set, about three or four times as long as a round of Dread Ring, and the heroic encounters don't seem to draw much interest.

I wonder though how much of this is the fault of Elemental Evil's level scaling and increase in difficulty. After all, I used to love Icewind Dale, but since the level increase questing there has been pretty damn tedious as well.

Sacrificial Victims

... is the name of a lair quest in the Well of Dragons which you have to complete in order to unlock the dailies in that zone. It's also been a huge road block for my pet tank and me, which is pretty scary considering that this is supposed to be simple solo progression.

The first time we attempted it we were still in our sixties and hadn't realised yet just how inadequate Cryptic's level scaling is. We wiped repeatedly on the trash and the boss was blatantly impossible as any hit would one-shot either of us.

We came back once we'd hit level seventy. The trash became more manageable, but the boss still felt impossible. My pet tank couldn't dodge every single attack by both the boss himself and his two drake adds, yet getting hit would kill him. And whenever the boss summoned his first set of additional adds, they would all aggro on me and I'd die in the blink of an eye. We had to give up - again.

Today we came back yet again, after having acquired some considerably better gear via the updated rewards from the Sharandar and Dread Ring campaigns. This time we finally got him down. During the first add summon things still got a little hairy since his drakes weren't dead yet, but we made it.

We were very excited to have finally unlocked the dailies and immediately picked up our three for the day. It took us a full hour to complete them.

Welcome to the New Endgame, Same as the Old Endgame

With Elemental Evil's level cap increase, Cryptic decided to boost all the old level sixty endgame areas up to seventy. I had to think about this for a while, because I'm not against repurposing old content in principle. I do however think that in Neverwinter's case this has not worked out very well for a couple of reasons:

1) Considering that the quests for places like Sharandar still pop up at level sixty and that the game offers (somewhat ineffective) level scaling, casual and returning players get suckered into thinking that they can level up in those old zones and get trounced as a result, which causes them to leave in frustration. (I actually had this problem myself to a degree.)

2) With effectively no old content left at sixty, the only way to level up by questing is by doing the new Elemental Evil zones. This means that players are funnelled into what's currently probably the worst content in the game, and may - again - cause them to leave in frustation.

3) Even for those who can cope with the new level 70 versions of the old campaigns, playing through nothing but the exact same content that they've done before just to get a couple of new rewards is bound to get boring quickly.

Also, it simply feels tedious when mobs that you used to be able to beat quite easily are now so much stronger - especially when your character is the one who's supposed to have gained power. My pet tank and I did two rounds of Icewind Dale this weekend and what used to be a fun little romp left me feeling tired and exhausted. While we never died, it took ages to kill anything, and since the mobs were so deadly, complete focus and constant dodging were required at all times.

More on Level Scaling and Content Order

I realised only yesterday that my approach to the new module has been all wrong. I thought that since I haven't played properly since Icewind Dale, it would make sense to go through everything that has been added since then in order of its release (Tyranny of Dragons - Rise of Tiamat - Elemental Evil).

The problem is that all the old level 60 content seems to have been levelled up to 70, and the level scaling doesn't work very well. I was willing to chalk up my great weapon fighter's bad first experience to my lack of gear and skill, however when my pet tank and I went into the (now also level 70) Well of Dragons area from Rise of Tiamat with our reasonably well-geared guardian fighter / cleric duo, we still got trounced by the mobs there, even as a team. If my cleric got hit by anything, she would die in 1-2 hits, and some things even one-shot my pet tank. We tried the instanced solo quest to rescue some prisoners and eventually had to give up on it as the boss at the end just seemed impossible to overcome with the constant risk of one-shots.

After that experience my pet tank suggested that we should have a look at the new Elemental Evil content, and lo and behold: that was actually level 60 and allowed us to progress. So if, like me, you have come back to the game for ten more levels and some fun with Minsc and Boo, forget about all the previous campaigns for now - fighting level 70+ mobs is just too much of a pain in the arse at level 60, with or without level scaling. Just stick to the Elemental Evil content to level up - and maybe the early dailies from Tyranny of Dragons (which are in low-level zones).