Echoes of Prophecy

So Neverwinter released a new "battlepass campaign" in the spirit of the Redeemed Citadel. Only this time, the "server event" aspect of it appears to have been removed, there is no leaderboard, and the "premium pass" doesn't grant a permanent unlock for the campaign either; it just gives you extra rewards and four additional months to do the content.

Instead of endlessly grinding devils and demons, this campaign mainly asks you to focus on re-running existing legacy campaign content and dungeon queues.

My first thought upon reading this was that it didn't sound great. I don't entirely mind the idea of a fresh incentive to repeat old content, as that could actually make for an interesting addition for alts that "need" to do these campaigns at some point anyway... but the time-limited nature of it and the paid pass not giving you permanent access anymore were somewhat off-putting to me.

However, then I found out that this time around, progress is also account-wide, and at least for this milestone, a lot less grindy than Redeemed Citadel ever was. Having just done the intro quests on four characters, I'm already halfway through the milestone.

I guess I'll do it then, though progress being this fast actually makes it a bit of a non-event again, as I might well end up completing the entire milestone by the end of today. Cryptic's new ideas about what kind of "content" is supposed to keep players busy for months on end remain somewhat disappointing.

Campaigns and Adventures

A few years ago I gently poked fun at Cryptic for wanting to fit all the game's zone quests into their "campaign" endgame model. Considering what an awkward fit that was, I like how they've split content into campaigns and "adventures" with mod 21. A campaign is still what it always was: a grind to repeat content like dailies or heroic encounters in order to fill a bar and earn things like boons and access to higher-level group content.

An adventure on the other hand is simply a series of story quests - whether inside a single zone or delivered via loosely connected solo instances - that you're only expected to complete once, and at the end you get some more mundane (but in the new system also quite high-level) rewards such as increasing amounts of AD, gear, plus conveniences like mounts or bags.

All the old levelling zones that were kept are now adventures, as is Acquisitions Incorporated, which was always terrible as a campaign, seeing how it was basically a collection of story quests that the campaign framework required you to grind over and over again. The Underdark story (which was always completely disconnected from the campaign with the same name) has also been reclassified as an adventure, and the associated campaign to grind heroic encounters has been completely removed. This does make things more consistent.

The only downside from my point of view is that since they upped the rewards for adventures so drastically, they kind of feel mandatory to do on all characters now. I used to skip a lot of the old zones while levelling up my alts just to keep things varied, meaning that I'm now looking at potentially re-running zones like Neverdeath Graveyard, Vellosk etc. on half a dozen max-level alts just because the new rewards are too good to pass up.

New Sharandar Impressions

Not a huge fan of the new campaign progression UI looking like the Redeemed Citadel one.

While the graphical fidelity in New Sharandar seems to be improved, it actually looks somewhat duller to me visually, as the increased "realism" has resulted in more muted colours for example. I liked how the older, brighter palette gave the forest a more magical feel.

More randomised quests of which you can only pick up and do two at a time = slightly meh for group play as you rarely end up with the same ones.

I guess it's intentional that this content is a bit easier again after Avernus, but at least the heroic encounters feel slightly ridiculous at the moment. The small ones finish so quickly that it's almost impossible to participate if you aren't already on top of one when it spawns, and even the zone's BHE gets obliterated in less than five minutes.

Legacy Campaigned Out

Working on various (legacy) campaigns on my alts is one of my favourite things to do in Neverwinter. So I was pleased that Cryptic ran a lot of double campaign currency events over the past couple of months - in fact they covered all the legacy campaigns during that time: first a week of Sharandar, then Dread Ring, then Icewind Dale and so on.

However, this proved once again that you can have too much of a good thing: After eight weeks or so of grinding campaigns like a maniac on multiple alts, I'm just terribly burnt out. (Even with double currency and a signet of patronage, nobody should try to complete the entirety of the Chult campaign several times in a single week. Just saying.)

And thus, I once again find myself drifting away from Neverwinter for a bit to recover. Somehow, that's how it always goes.

Redeemed Citadel Event

Cryptic decided to take event gaming to a new level with a special one-time campaign to restore the redeemed citadel in Avernus. It's pitched as "the entire server working together" to progress through four different phases, however on closer inspection that seems to be nothing but a cosmetic veneer, as the news item also states that "if a milestone is completed by the server early, there will be some time—a few days or weeks—before the next milestone begins". After less than two days we've already progressed more than 20% towards the first milestone, but looking at the pitched event duration on the calendar, I'm guessing that each phase is going to last 28 days regardless.

In a savvy monetisation move, you earn some pretty good rewards for grinding the event - but you can earn double the rewards (including some unique additions) and a new race by also paying. On one level I find this kind of monetisation quite annoying, but I can't deny that I'm tempted. If you're already doing the grind, why deny yourself some of the potential rewards?

Paying also removes the timer for earning the rewards - otherwise you have to complete each grind during its dedicated time slot, which works out to earning about 1000 of Zariel's favour a day - for nearly four months. Based on our efforts the first two nights, this isn't completely unreasonable if Neverwinter is your only MMO and you play every day, but for a more casual player it's quite a big ask.

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.

My 5 Worst Neverwinter Modules

As a counterpoint to the last post, these were my personal least favourite additions to Neverwinter over the years:

5. Mod 12: Tomb of Annihilation & Swords of Chult (July 2017)

The jungle theme never resonated with me (awkwardly stereotyped NPCs didn't help), and personally I found the focus on pure mob grinding over doing anything vaguely resembling actual content pretty off-putting. It was also quite hard on release and being unable to ride anywhere without getting knocked off your mount by jumpy dinos every couple of steps was super annoying. It took me a long time to work up the energy to complete this campaign.

4. Mod 17: Uprising (August 2019)

I wasn't actively playing when this came out, but after finally completing this mod's content earlier in the year, I'm still baffled how they ever managed to sell this to the player base as a full module.

3. Mod 6: Elemental Evil (April 2015)

The first time Cryptic decided to raise the level cap, they did seemingly everything wrong: The XP curve was terrible, tuning was out of whack, and the new content felt cheap, grindy and recycled - to name but a few of the problems. Looking back at my blog posts from that time, I somehow managed to at least somewhat enjoy myself despite of all this, but it was still bad.

2. Mod 16: Undermountain (April 2019)

I was a bit hesitant to rank this one this high (or low as it were) since I actually think the Undermountain campaign is pretty fun, but everything else that went along with Cryptic raising the level cap for the second time was pretty awful in my opinion. (They just don't know how to do this, do they?) You can argue that some of the changes they made were good and maybe even needed, but drastically revamping all the classes plus the way powers, boons and companions work - all at the same time - was a huge mistake in my opinion, as it made it an absolute nightmare to find my footing in the game again as a casual player with many alts. Also, the story may have been fun to go through once, but redoing a long and completely linear quest chain on every alt is rather tedious.

1. Mod 15: The Heart of Fire (November 2018)

The Penny Arcade style humour of these quests fits into the rest of the game about as well as a fish on a bicycle, and while this might have been fine in an optional one-time quest, the fact that you're supposed to re-do the same small handful of story quests stuffed with bad jokes over and over for all your boons is just awful. While I did finish the base story once, I still haven't earned the boons from this even on my main as the mere thought of having to re-do those quests yet again makes me want to throw up. As the cherry on top, this was also the module that did away with the old professions system and replaced it with the workshop, which I still don't quite get along with to this day. Let's not do anything like that ever again please.

My Top 5 Neverwinter Modules

Ever since Neverwinter Unblogged wrote a great article ranking the game's many modules by quality, I've been meaning to write my own (shorter) version of this. (I'm not going to link the original article because sadly the dead site's domain trips security warnings in all my browsers nowadays.) Without further ado, my five favourite modules and the reasons why I love them:

5. Mod 18: Infernal Descent (January 2020)

Yes, I'm putting the most recently completed mod on this list because while it wasn't particularly innovative, it managed to get me back into the game after a very long absence (by my standards) and after having been majorly put off by the previous releases. It returned to using systems that I'd enjoyed before, and the devil theme kept things sufficiently fresh as they aren't really an enemy we've had to fight in great numbers before.

4. Mod 1: Fury of the Feywild (August 2013)

I wasn't actually playing when this was released, but when I came back to the game for the first time it was still very relevant content. In terms of theme, in a fantasy setting you can't really go wrong by having elves and a magical forest, and while somewhat grindy in its initial iteration, I enjoyed the content from the beginning. I believe my initial assessment was "similar to New Romulus in STO, but better". While much faster and easier these days, I still always enjoy coming back to this campaign on alts too.

3. Mod 14: Ravenloft (June 2018)

Based on an iconic property that immediately sparked interest, this mod managed to do the land of Barovia and its ruler justice by representing them through gameplay elements that managed to be a refinement of things that had worked well before and making them even better and more fun. Another map that I'm very happy to come back to.

2. Mod 3: Curse of Icewind Dale (May 2014)

This was the current mod when I first returned to the game after having drifted away not long after launch, and I loved it enough that it got me to stay semi-permanently. I loved the whole setup of Caer-Konig with the two competing factions, the snowy environments and the music; and new features like the heroic encounters dotted around the map and the optional open world PvP were appealing. While the difficulty felt kind of brutal for a solo player at the time, there was also something satisfying about playing an MMO again where "everything goes much more smoothly in a group" made for an incentive to group up with friends even for simple tasks like doing dailies.

1. Mod 7: Strongholds (August 2015)

It may seem odd to give the top spot to a module that didn't feature a campaign and didn't have much of a story attached to it, but I've really come to adore my little guild's stronghold. I'm not really a huge fan of housing in general, but the stronghold map is more like a privately shared adventure zone, and I enjoyed seeing our mini guild slowly improve ours as time went on. To be honest I think this is one of the main reasons I've stayed so attached to Neverwinter over the years: Our stronghold offers a virtual home, and even after periods of absence I never have to wonder what to do upon returning - checking on the stronghold is always the first order of business, and everything else can be figured out later.

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).

Avernus

Last week Cryptic announced that the next module will be called Avernus. They haven't really said much more about it other than that it will come out "soon" (™) and that we'll continue our adventures in the first circle of hell under the guidance of Makos.

All I keep thinking is that "Avernus" seems like a very confusing name for a module that is the second one to take place there. That's kind of as if Underdark had been called "Going down" and then Maze Engine had been called "Underdark", when in fact both of them (mostly) took place in the Underdark.

Legacy Campaigns

When the level cap was raised to 80 with Undermountain, most old campaigns were awarded "legacy" status and not updated. I'm not sure what the selection criteria were, considering that the old Elemental Evil is still considered "current" while the much more recent Ravenloft has been designated a legacy campaign, but I'm guessing it might have simply come down to avoiding the hassle of re-scaling content where it would have been required.

With those old campaigns stuck at level 70, quests there can be completed with much more ease than previously now. To what end though? Cryptic were clearly asking themselves the same question and decided to add new weekly "legacy campaign quests" that ask you to either do quests, kill mobs or run heroic encounters on those old maps and that reward a special currency that can be used to purchase certain desirable items which were previously very hard to come by, such as companion upgrade tokens and high level enchanting stones.

This is one new feature I really love, as I'm both a fan of giving old content a new purpose and I really benefit from this new, more casual avenue to accessing those rare items.

All legacy campaign quests also reward currency for the campaign they are related to, plus bonus currency for a campaign of your choice (e.g. you could complete a quest to do Icewind Dale heroics and get both Icewind Dale currency as well as Chult tokens). This is useful to help get alts through campaigns you don't like as much and to get extra tokens that are required for stronghold upgrades.

I think this is really great design as it has also worked to greatly reinvigorate some of the old maps and especially the larger heroic encounters on them, which many people had previously lost interest in due to lack of rewards.

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.

Uprising Letdown

Having just completed Uprising at the time of writing this post, I have to say that it has to be the laziest campaign that Cryptic has ever released, and lazy is not a word I use lightly in a context like this. It literally adds nothing but a tiny new quest hub where an NPC gives you a mission to fetch four whatsits.

To get a whatsit, you first need to gather thingamabobs. To get thingamabobs, you need to run more of the same expeditions that you've been running for all of Undermountain, only without the relics and with some different boss mobs at the end.

To get access to those ever so slightly different expeditions, you first have to get doodads. To get a doodad, you have to do a daily quest to kill mobs in the exact same zones that you used to level through Undermountain, only now they have some different mobs in them.

So basically, aside from the quest hub and a couple of new boss mobs, there were no new zones, story or content in Uprising. Worse, what I explained above isn't even properly conveyed in game either - you're just given the quest for the four whatsits and then two daily quests to get doodads, with no indication of how the two are connected. For some reason Cryptic couldn't even be bothered to create an actual campaign screen for this one to track your progress. You'll just have to google it to figure it out.

It's not that I hated the content (mob grinding is a big part of Neverwinter and doesn't need to be particularly inspired as far as I'm concerned), but I'm stunned that they officially labelled this as module 17 considering that there've been sub-modules in the past that had more than this to offer.

Delving Into Undermountain

Remembering that most of my best times in Neverwinter involved playing the game with my husband, I convinced him to reinstall it as well and dust off his oathbound paladin. At first he was very reluctant, but already a few hours in he didn't want to stop playing again because he was really enjoying himself and wanted to see how the storyline we were playing through was going to end.

In fact, his enthusiasm was so overwhelming that we ended up playing through almost the entirety of the Undermountain campaign in a single Sunday afternoon session. This was made possible by it being the first campaign that didn't feature any time gating for story progression or boon acquisition. I don't know if it was like that at launch or if this is something Cryptic implemented later, but it made for a pleasant discovery either way.

The gameplay was a mix of the usual "kill x things over there and click y things while you're at it", but that's what we we're here for, isn't it? I did notice that some missions involved the use of some newfangled temporary abilities, but they were integrated into the UI in an unobtrusive way and not annoying.

The story was also enjoyable, in usual D&D fashion involving a mix of the slightly tragic but often silly. We were curious to see where plot developments would go throughout the whole thing and kept chatting about it while doing the quests. "I really want to know who that mysterious woman is!" Or: "I wonder what we're going to do with this guy; I mean we're working with him right now but he's evil, right?"

I may have been very annoyed with his module for all its system changes, but in terms of story they certainly did a very good job.

Early Levelling Impressions

My little cleric is in her forties now, and so far I like the new levelling experience less than the old one.

- As I already mentioned, you rarely get anything when you level up. This is boring and reminds me of current World of Warcraft in a bad way.

- Acquisitions Incorporated feels like more of a stain on the game than I expected. I was not thrilled by the humour when it came out but thought that maybe it was less jarring if you actually ran into the chain "organically" as a lowbie... but nope, it's just as bad. There's a huge tonal dissonance between that campaign and everything else, and the quest givers just come off as jerks. I don't want to work for them. I did the intro and then didn't go back, despite of them sending me letters in the mail.

- Gear is oddly hard to come by. Rewards from dungeons are random to a ridiculous degree, to the point that most are either for a different class or a character thirty levels higher. Out in the world they are strangely scarce now. I remember back when we used to have to identify all our drops (another thing that they got rid of) it seemed to be raining unidentified items left and right. Now I hardly see any gear drop from mobs at all.

- Where are my heals? They completely removed life steal, which I can kind of understand because of how OP it was, but they also seem to have taken away the cleric's various healing effects that used to be attached to attacks. At the moment I feel like just another random dps. And the one heal my baby cleric does have feels ridiculously weak, barely even moving anyone's health bar. It feels like something that was tuned for max-level characters in epic gear, leaving lowbies in random levelling gear feeling disproportionally weak.

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.

Shifting Perspectives

Ever since I started cleaning up unfinished campaigns on my cleric a few months ago, I feel that my attitude to Neverwinter has changed in a good way. Before that, the way I played the game was much more limited: I would tackle every new campaign with my pet tank for a while, but often we wouldn't finish it, and then I never dared to go back on my own. I was somewhat afraid of pugging as well, and my solo play was strictly limited to early/easy content such as running cult dragons or Sharandar dailies.

After my cleric's recent success at finishing off old campaigns, I felt encouraged to actually push for some more progress on my alts as well - which has been nice in so far as it means that I've got some of them working on different content now instead of just running the lot of them through the same weekly quests all the time.

Repeatedly besting Tiamat also increased my confidence in pugging. I'm still somewhat uncomfortable knowing that my damage contribution is never very high, but as long as I know basic tactics for the content in question I'm willing to cross my fingers and risk it while hoping for a friendly carry. It's worked out in my favour more often than not.

Together, those things have really worked to increase my engagement with the game.

Signet of Patronage

The Swords of Chult module introduced a new quality of life feature that I managed to miss completely until I saw someone bring it up in a random reddit thread: Signets of Patronage.

Basically these are tokens that you can craft with campaign currency once you have completed a given campaign and which you can then pass on to your alts in order to reduce the amount of time and currency it will cost them to complete the campaign, by doubling reputation gains and cutting the cost of most campaign tasks in half.

This is great because completing campaigns on alts is a massive grind (to be honest, it tends to be a massive grind the first time around, but we tend not to mind so much when everything feels new and exciting), and up until now Cryptic's only concession to this has been to give people the option to buy campaign completion with real money instead of playing. Yeah.

As someone for whom the latter is completely out of the question, I'm pleased to finally have an in-game way of speeding things up for my alts. Mind you, compared to similar features in other games, such as SWTOR's legacy perks, the signets' benefits still feel pretty anaemic, especially since they are single-use consumables, so you'd have to craft a new one for every single alt for every single campaign. Still, it's better than nothing.

I've crafted one for Storm King's Thunder and one for Cloaked Ascendancy for my rogue and we'll see how much of a difference it makes. So far progress feels quite swift, but then it always does in the early stages.

Storm King's Thunder Silenced

At long last, I completed the Storm King's Thunder campaign, the last of the "old" campaigns that were still lingering as incomplete on my main's campaign screen. Even though I already had partial completion when I started on my project to finally finish it up, it still took me three months of near daily play (admittedly not involving maximum effort, but still) to complete all the boons. Seriously, three months! The grind is real.

What's interesting was that the Voninblood, whose number requirements looked the most intimidating initially, didn't turn out to be that much of an issue. As Joseph Skyrim noted in a comment on my original post about the campaign grind, the Ostorian Relics you can collect on all four of the campaign maps and which can be traded for Voninblood largely make that particular currency a non-issue as they can be farmed easily and indefinitely. I just didn't realise this right away, which wasn't helped by me not even having a trowel (required to collect them) for a lot of my early play sessions. Also, duoing with my pet tank initially meant that each of us only got half as many relics as a solo player would have collected.

I soon found that everything seemed to hinge on Secrets of Ostoria, the currency associated with completing the main daily mission (which in turn required you to do one regular daily quest in each of the first three zones). I eventually realised that I could actually collect all the various dailies to save them up for later, they just wouldn't show up if I didn't also have the main daily in my log. I then settled into a routine of doing a whole batch of dailies in each zone on different days of the week while also saving up the completed missions to hand in one at a time each day for the overarching daily quest. If that sounds a bit convoluted that's because it was.

Sea of Moving Ice was a different matter as there was a limited amount of saving up you could do in that zone, and eventually I had to focus more attention on it as I just needed Runic Fragments (that map's unique campaign currency) to complete the last two boons. The main two lessons I took away from that were that the fishing daily couldn't be "saved up" as it auto-completes as soon as you've gathered the required amount of fish, and that "Recasting Alarm" could be abandoned and re-picked until it gave you the super easy circuit just next to the base.

All said and done, I do have to give credit where credit is due though: The zones themselves were enjoyable, with nice visuals and music, and I still enjoyed questing in them again. I just wish the campaign didn't require you to do it for quite that long.

A Touch Of Madness

Another long-neglected goal achieved: Underdark campaign completion.

The reason I had stayed away from this one for so long was that I perceived it as extremely grindy, and looking at the raw numbers, having to acquire 7000 Faerzress at 18-50 units a pop certainly does add up to quite a slog. Thankfully I got a lot of mileage out of a recent double Underdark currency event.

I did realise though that all things considered, the grind wasn't really that much worse than for most campaigns; what made the difference for me were the heroic encounters. I liked them well enough as something sprinkled in among the regular quests like in Icewind Dale, but a whole campaign of nothing but grinding heroic encounters (or skirmishes I guess) was just super boring to me. I like the classic questing model. I don't think I would have much fun in Guild Wars 2.