Omu Complete

At long last, my pet tank and I completed the Lost City of Omu campaign. I can't wait for Cryptic to add Signets of Patronage for this one.

I previously mentioned the atrocious drop rate for the trophies you need to buy the Omu hunt lures, and we actually managed to make it through the entire campaign, killing hunt marks over and over, without seeing a single drop apart from the ubiquitous Razortyrannus Spines. Only today, on our last day, the umpteenth wisp that we killed actually dropped a trophy. So now that we're fully done with the campaign we'd finally be allowed to go on our first hunt. Ridiculous.

Professions Overhaul

This week I learned that the upcoming Heart of Fire module will also include an overhaul to the professions system. And we're talking proper overhaul here, not just a tweaking of mission rewards like we've had in the past. There's a dev blog and a forum thread about it so far.

In a nutshell, it's supposed to me more involved and more strongly tied into the rest of the game than the current system. Artisans won't just be icons in your inventory anymore, but actual NPCs employed by you in a workshop. And crafting is supposed to become more meaningful, so that people won't just level up by gathering wood five hundred times anymore because nothing else is worth it.

So far, so good from the sounds of it. The important thing for me is that existing progress will be carried over, as I have four characters with all their professions maxed out, with more working their way towards the same goal as we speak, and that has already been confirmed. Whether it'll actually be more fun and more rewarding remains to be seen.

Weekly Woes

Just once I'd like to tell Szoldar that I'll search for werewolves on Yester Hill and that he should check for tracks in the Howling Hills. I mean, it's not like there's a pattern here or anything...

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.

Lonelywood Citizen Assembly

Neverwinter relies heavily on friendly NPCs to make towns and villages feel populated, what with most maps being limited to something like twenty players per instance. I generally find that this works pretty well, but I was rather amused when the other day in Lonelywood it appeared that a bunch of these friendly "citizen" NPCs had somehow formed a clump and appeared to have trouble disentangling themselves from it again.

Heart of Fire

A few days ago, Cryptic revealed that the next module will be called Heart of Fire. Is it bad that my first association with this title was to imagine some sort of love child between the two Guild Wars 2 expansions (Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire)?

Interestingly, despite of that news post and some more info on Neverwinter Unblogged, I feel like I still have no idea what this module will actually be about. Apparently it's supposed to be some sort of cross-over featuring the Penny Arcade creators? The trailer makes it look like some kind of silly D&D theme park - which doesn't sound bad, I just don't know what to expect from it beyond the very general mood.

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.

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...

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.

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.