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.

Class Confusion, Part 2

I made an effort to at least log into all my characters of the other four classes and have a bit of a play around.

Wizard: This one probably felt the least changed so far, with all of my favourite abilities seemingly still present, but similar to the rogue it still didn't feel quite right. The control aspect just wasn't entirely there and using the same rotation I used to use, instead of enemies getting locked down I just got punted around a lot and my damage output generally felt weak. It's possible that I missed something when setting up the feats; will have to investigate.

Ranger: Similar to the wizard, this one doesn't feel like it's changed a lot; it was just so much weaker in terms of damage output. Maybe it's a gear scaling thing and they'll all feel stronger again once at the new level cap.

Paladin: No more healing and doing damage (even a little) at the same time, bah! And they gave them a similar divinity mechanic to the cleric's, which I'm not a huge fan of. I may have to play a bit more to be able to make a definitive judgement, but my first impression is that like with the barbarian, they ruined another of my favourite classes.

Fighter: Like with the warlock, I don't actually have very detailed memories of playing this one, but I certainly wasn't a fan of the class's gameplay in the past. That said, the new seethe mechanic for the dps spec actually feels like it could be fun, setting up combos of first blocking damage and then hitting all the harder for it.

So far, it seems that the classes that I liked have mostly been made less fun, while a couple of the ones I didn't like have been improved a little. Homogenisation achieved?

Class Confusion

I'm slowly getting used to the new cleric mechanics. I still haven't figured out divinity management in my healing spec, but hopefully I'll get there.

The real problem is that I have seven more characters that I don't have a clue how to play now. Levelling them over the course of several years, I had plenty of time to get acquainted with how each one worked at least on a casual level. Now they've all had their mechanics changed, powers and boons reset, and I'm basically lost.

I have tentatively started logging into a few of them to get an idea of where things stand with other classes, and my first impressions can mostly be summed up as "uncomfortable":

Rogue: The basic mechanics (stealth etc.) of this one don't seem to have changed - thank god - however unfortunately the build I used to run with no longer exists. I used to rely on certain abilities having synergies (use A to trigger B and reset the cooldown on C) that are no longer in the game, so I did a lot of flailing about wondering why things weren't coming off cooldown as expected. Will need to look up a new build at some point.

Barbarian: I was crushed to find that Battlerage (formerly Unstoppable) no longer grants temporary hitpoints. It was a key part of the ability that it combined an incentive to not bother with dodging out of the red circles (the control immunity) with the ability to survive standing in them for a few seconds. The new version grants a slight damage reduction instead but that's not nearly as good. Not sure where to go with this one.

Warlock: This was the class I knew the least about since it was the last one I levelled, which has the advantage that I'm feeling less pain from my previous knowledge being made redundant now. I never really "got" warlocks, and the new and improved version is even more confusing to me. They have a new resource bar that doesn't seem all that great and depletes so rapidly that I feel like I should constantly hurry from combat to combat to avoid "wasting" the resource, which I don't like at all. But hey, I never liked the class much to begin with, so I guess this one's no big loss.

Getting Reacquainted

Luckily for me, Cryptic managed to fix the bug with the anniversary quests two days into the event after all. After spending a little time fiddling about with the character panel on my cleric, I jumped into a quick Protector's Speech skirmish to try out some of my new abilities.

I didn't know it was possible to feel this lost in a game that you've played for more than five years and have only been away from for six months. Is this Neverwinter's NGE? I think at this point it doesn't even matter whether the changes are good or bad, there are just too many of them. With my cleric's base functionality completely changed and numerous abilities removed or revamped, it feels like I'm playing a completely different game, one in which I just happen to have characters that look like the ones I used to play.

There has been a token effort to explain the class changes in game, but frankly, a few paragraphs of text can't make up for years of muscle memory. It breaks my heart to think back to a year ago, when I was proud to have hit 70 (then max level) on all eight classes and foresaw myself playing the game for years to come.

As it pains me to just abandon all that even in the face of my current frustration, I resorted to that last bastion of hope for confused returning players: rolling up a new character. I didn't really want a second cleric, but at the moment going down that path seems to be my only chance of figuring out WTF is going on with the class. Let's not even think of alts for now.

At least redoing the newbie experience felt less irksome than usual as it's actually been a while now since I last went through it. One interesting change I noticed is that they got rid of all the level-up prompts telling you what you just earned, I guess at least partially because there is less to earn (e.g. no more power points, you just get certain powers at fixed levels).

Coming Up

The undisputed meh-ness of Heart of Fire has caused my pet tank and me to give Neverwinter the cold shoulder for the past month, especially as we had much more entertaining alternatives to play, but that doesn't mean that I stopped caring about what Cryptic will bring out next. So I was pleased to find out that they just announced the next module, which will be called Undermountain.

Unfortunately, based on what else they announced, it sounds like this will be another module heavily focused on systems changes, including but not limited to changing the very names of classes, changing how tanking and healing works, removing feats and power points, changing item and level scaling, changing the way stats work - which includes the removal of recovery and lifesteal, which is huge - and the raising of the level cap to 80.

The reason I started the above sentence with "unfortunately" is that while all the explanations given for these in the linked dev blogs sound reasonable enough (Healing is currently pointless? You don't say!), Cryptic has a history of being very bad at getting balancing right, so I expect the launch of an expansion with this many gameplay changes to be an utter disaster. Plus the level cap increase, something that would be a normal and happy event in many other MMOs, brings up memories of Elemental Evil, Neverwinter's worst module ever. (There were many things wrong with Elemental Evil and not all of those had something to do with the level cap increase, but it was certainly a contributing factor.)

So I'll be keeping an eye on what else they announce for Undermountain - I'll definitely want to check it out at some point, but based on past experience probably not at launch.

(As an aside, while reading up on this piece of news I learned that Neverwinter Unblogged is shutting down - that is a great shame and a huge loss, as this site was a big part in keeping me up-to-date with what was going on in the game and often provided very helpful info for a more casual player like me.)

Recruitment Drive

I didn't realise it before it released, but Heart of Fire is a levelling campaign, not one for max-level characters, and in line with that Cryptic has been trying to use its celebrity connection to recruit new players from the Penny Arcade fan base. Makes sense, and I certainly don't think it's a bad thing to have more variety in levelling content, even if it makes the new quests a bit trivial and boring to play through at the cap.

Cryptic is also trying to get old players to roll up new alts by currently holding a recruitment event which will earn you some rewards if you level a character during this time, similar to what they've already done in STO a few times. Unfortunately that doesn't really appeal to me either though - I was just glad to finally get all my alts to 70 earlier in the year. As much as I usually love levelling in MMOs, there's something about Neverwinter that makes its levelling game a lot less appealing than in other games.

So I really have no interest in creating another alt of a class I already have. Now if they ever release an actual new class...

Scourge Warlock Quests

I've previously written about how Neverwinter's class and race quests are a kind of under-appreciated feature, and while levelling my warlock I was fascinated to see how Cryptic had initially iterated on the concept before abandoning it. You see, unlike the other classes, the Scourge Warlock doesn't have to hunt down quest givers in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a letter as a hint: They get their very own warlock friend hanging out in Protector's Enclave, making it much harder to miss her quests.

These also felt much more condensed than the chains for other classes, with a lot of them pouring in quickly during my warlock's early levels, and the whole chain coming to a conclusion as early as level 30. The finale was pretty epic as well, with my warlock descending to the nine hells to meet her patron and being told that her tiefling "mentor" had a debt with the demon that would have some dire results for her unless you were willing to pick up the tab. I took the "nice" option and saved her, but I wonder what happens if you sell her out...

All Classes

It took me five years, but I finally have a level 70 character of every class!

From left to right, top to bottom:

Phaelia, tiefling trickster rogue
Shintar, half elf devoted cleric
Ekaterina, human great weapon fighter
Daerys, drow control wizard
Puck, halfling hunter ranger
Ophelie, sun elf oathbound paladin
Shintank, dwarf guardian fighter
Shareen, half orc scourge warlock

I have a few more character slots available, but to be honest I can't see myself creating any more alts right now until they release another class, especially as Neverwinter is one of the few MMOs where (in my opinion), levelling another alt just for the sake of starting over isn't actually all that fun..

That said, there's still plenty of max-level stuff to do on all of my existing characters to potentially keep me busy for years to come.

Favourite Classes: Oathbound Paladin (3/3)

When my pet tank changed his main from Guardian Fighter to Oathbound Paladin I scoffed a little at this turn towards the "flavour of the month". In no other game had I ever seen a class that was this overpowered. Nothing ever seemed to be able to hurt him, yet at the same time he still did way more damage as a tank than I ever managed to do on my healer. I also remember watching a video of two OPs in an epic dungeon whose defensive abilities were caught in some sort of recursive loop so that the boss basically killed itself just by trying to hit them (though in fairness, I think this has been fixed since then). Still, how is that good game balance?

What eventually prompted me to roll a pally of my own was actually a desire to try out a different healing style, since I generally love healing in MMOs but had found the cleric sorely lacking. Fun fact: I actually still don't know whether pally healing is any good, because I have yet to take her into any content where healing would really be required.

But I can't deny it: just levelling as a hugely overpowered class was a lot of fun. I was kind of slow at killing things, sure, but the sheer level of indestructibleness was amazing. I could actually do quests that would (badly) sync me up to 70 because my character was so robust that it didn't matter that the level sync was poor. When I ran into a heroic encounter, I could just run in and start it regardless of other people in the area - lack of dps would potentially make it a struggle to complete it on my own, but I never had to worry about dying to elite mobs, even in crappy levelling gear (and once someone starts, other people are often all too happy to join in). In Icewind Dale I even soloed heroic encounters (albeit very slowly) that none of my other characters could take on solo to this day.

Yeah, sometimes the lack of dps feels tiresome, but I've always been a fan of slow and steady, and no other class in the game holds as steady as the Oathbound Paladin.

Favourite Classes: Control Wizard (2/3)

Unlike the Great Weapon Fighter, it wasn't love at first sight with the Control Wizard and me. In fact, I originally thought that their movement animation with their weapon (orb) out looked really weird and off-putting!

However, seeing other players play this class changed my mind about it. Their range of AoE abilities in particular was awe-inspiring both in terms of their animations and their effectiveness, ranging from the summoning of chaotic maelstroms to lightning and blizzards, with enemies getting knocked every which way with every cast.

Like with the GWF, I was pleased to find the class easy to get into as well. The tab ability simply offering a fourth encounter slot (with a modifier) was as straightforward as it gets, and the clearly themed abilities were easy enough to figure out for me to create a serviceable build even without a guide. I did occasionally find myself struggling with survivability, but simply trading one damaged-focused encounter power for a more control-focused one usually did the trick.

I can't imagine that running around on my Control Wizard and AoEing down enemies would ever get old. I still love Shard of the Endless Avalanche for example, aka "the purple ball", even though it's a pain to handle and I had to unslot it ages ago, but the concept of literally bowling my enemies over is just too much fun. Even without it, it's a great feeling to watch whole packs of mobs alternately get stunned and damaged to the point where this character was my first damage dealer that could run without a healing companion because the mobs could barely touch her anyway. Large single enemies with a lot of hit points or control immunities remain a bit of a pain though.

Favourite Classes: Great Weapon Fighter (1/3)

Now that I have a character of every class (though my Scourge Warlock isn't 70 yet), it's clear that I like some of them a lot more than others. I can identify three favourites who clearly stand apart from the rest - though I'm not sure how I would rank them against each other, which is why I'll simply talk about them in the order in which I "discovered" them.

The Great Weapon Fighter first caught my eye for its aesthetics. While the spell effects in Neverwinter are as flashy as in other fantasy MMOs, most of its combat animations still struck me as relatively down to earth. Not so with the GWF: they swing their two-handed weapons with ridiculous speed considering that those swords are as tall as their wielders, and the class's idle pose with weapon drawn has them balance the giant two-hander casually on their shoulder while only supporting it with one hand. There's something... anime about it, and it appealed to me even though I'm not usually a big fan of fighter-type classes.

While playing, I soon discovered that the GWF's tab ability also followed a delightfully simple to learn pattern of building and spending, and even better: every time you become "Unstoppable" by spending (which is often!), you also become immune to control effects for the duration, relieving you of the need to dodge annoying knockdowns and the like.

Finally, they are just easy to play regardless. I don't think I've ever looked up a guide for the class, and yet despite of this my own GWF has always done decent enough damage in any content I've taken her to. I'm sure she's far from optimised, but there seems to be no real way to go entirely wrong with the class - unlike with my rogue for example, who was a real pain to play for a long time until I looked up a guide and learned about various ability synergies that had definitely not been obvious to me before then.

7 of 8!

That's my guardian figher at 70, which only leaves the scourge warlock!

I originally created this character to play on stream with my friend Traitine, but then we ended up only playing a single session together before he was like: "Yeaaah, this game is not for me." So eventually I just levelled her up on my own.

She'd been lingering in the low sixties for ages, but with the recent smoothing out of the 60-70 curve I thought I'd play around a bit to see how much of  a difference it made and she flew right through those last few levels.

Unfortunately I can't claim to have found the class very fun, and I can't blame my pet tank for rerolling to paladin now. Presumably guardian fighters have their role to play at endgame, but while levelling - especially after having levelled a paladin first - the experience just kept making me think of a paladin with many of the fun features removed. Sorry, GF fans!

Carry On

I've mentioned before that the huge number of attributes that a character can have in Neverwinter creates huge min-maxing potential. I haven't played another MMO where there is such a massive difference between characters not just based on class and skill but also based on gear.

A good example was when my pet tank and I queued for the Merchant's Prince's Folly skirmish today (small group PvE content). We could immediately tell that someone in the group was doing massive dps based on how quickly we were carving through the instance, and indeed, at the end the statistics screen revealed that our great weapon fighter (for some reason it's almost always a great weapon fighter) had done more than 38 million damage compared to my less than two. That means that he did more than 1800% of my own damage! And it's not as if I was just standing around and not trying.

It can be a bit discouraging sometimes to see these huge performance gaps, but at the same time I have to hand it to the community that at least in the sort of PvE content that I tend to do, nobody ever bothers you about bad performance. More often than not I tend to just be grateful to those players for carrying people like me to victory without complaint.

6 Down, 2 To Go

My oathbound paladin hit level 70, hurrah! That brings my total of character classes at the level cap up to six. Now I'm only missing a guardian fighter (I have one, but she's only in her forties right now), and a scourge warlock, which I'm planning to create soon!

Alts

My stable of alts keeps growing; the only class I don't have yet is the scourge warlock and I'm planning to create one soon. It's funny to me that I sufficiently enjoy creating alts in this game to do this even though it's not very alt-friendly if you think about it.

Sure, having a lot of alts can be beneficial when it comes to farming certain currencies that are capped per character per day, but getting an alt up to a useful level requires a serious investment of time or money, considering the grind required to get all your boons alone.

Also, the levelling process is highly repetitive: I think the game does a good job at easing new players into new features and mechanics, but when you're on your 7th alt it gets very old to have to go through all the various tutorials about companions, invoking and what not. I wonder if the tomes of experience enable you to just skip some of that stuff? Might have to try that next time.

But while you can do some AFK-levelling via invoking for example to skip zones you are tired of, there aren't really any "active" alternatives to levelling via questing, as activities like dungeons or skirmishes only grant piddly amounts of XP. So where in other MMOs, rolling an alt is an opportunity to see a different starting zone and try a different levelling path, in Neverwinter it's pretty much always the same old.

OP

I've been levelling my oathbound paladin again lately. I don't think I've talked about her much on here other than mentioning her creation. She's level 65 now and I forgot just how fun she is to play.

It seems appropriate that oathbound paladin gets shortened to "OP", which also tends to stand for "overpowered" in general gaming circles, as the class is virtually indestructible in PvE content, even with a mix of hodgepodge levelling gear with no enchantments in it such as my character is wearing. The last time I died with her was when I tried to duo the big heroic encounter with the crabs in Drowned Shore with a rogue and even there it took a while until a dozen gold crabs could get me down. I've written about how bad the upwards level scaling for certain quests is, but my pally was actually my first character who was able to cope with it and successfully completed quests that way solo (though there was still a risk of death and enemies went down very slowly).

It's kind of bizarre how out of whack the tuning for this class is compared to any others I've played, but I've also got to admit that it's pretty fun. Neverwinter's action combat can be a bit tiring at times with all the dodging you have to do to survive, but my paladin is one character I can play even when I'm tired or not very focused, as she's nearly invincible and occasionally raising my shield in tougher encounters is more than enough to keep me alive.

Hunter Ranger

My hunter ranger hit 70 this past week, and while that gave me reason to celebrate, I've also been somewhat disappointed by the class.

Initially I was really pleased with the way hunter rangers switch between ranged and melee combat, especially as it features some very cool animations. It reminded me of the days when my hunter in WoW could also dual wield and would hamstring opponents that came in too close, despite of being a predominantly ranged class.

However, while levelling up I quickly found that trying to fight at range became more and more tedious, with poor kiting options that just result in every solo fight being a slow and tiring dodge-fest. Somewhat bizarrely, my characters' abilities' power levels and fun factor also seem to be inverse to their cooldown, which is to say that my dailies are boring and useless, while spamming my at-wills seems to be the way to go most of the time. Alas, I guess me and the HR weren't meant to be.

Still Playing

I should really post here more often, considering that I've actually been playing a fair amount again as of late. Funny how even short posts can sometimes take effort to write.

My newest project is a halfling hunter ranger, since I still had an empty character slot lying around from one of the packs I bought back in the day and I missed the feeling of levelling a character from scratch.

I was actually a bit afraid of making another alt because I'm somewhat addicted to invoking and didn't want to add yet another character that would add to my compulsion of "having to" log in seven times a day to collect free astral diamonds. So I've set myself the rule that I'll only log this particular alt if I'm actually going to play her "properly" that day in some way - I don't need yet another character levelled the AFK way anyway.

Class and Race Quests

One of Neverwinter's lesser advertised features is that it has distinct quest lines for different classes and races. They are nothing amazing and you only get one about once every ten levels, but they still add some nice flavour and provide you with some new content every time you roll an alt of a different class or race. That's why I made my control wizard a drow, so I would get both a new class and a new race in one go.

When you're high enough level for a new one of these quests, you get a letter from the quest giver in the mail and have to go find them. Since this isn't an actual quest by itself, it's kind of refreshing to have to go and look for the right NPC without having a sparkly path to follow. Even though my control wizard has mostly been levelling through invoking (once again), I've made an effort to at least go out and do each new race and class quest as I get it.

Sadly Cryptic doesn't seem to have much interest in adding to or even maintaining this feature. My pet tank explained to me that there was neither a race nor a class quest waiting for his dragonborn paladin (the newest class and race in the game). And on my wizard I ran into a dead end in Rothé Valley, where my race quest told me to go into a farmhouse, but the entrance is currently bugged so you can't enter. Apparently this was reported on the forums two months ago already, but nothing has been done to fix it.

Fighting Dragons

I've been enjoying the heroic encounters with dragons that were originally added in the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. Unlike the ones in Icewind Dale and the new Elemental Evil zones, they are not random, but on a steady, visible timer. While this could theoretically make them less interesting, it makes sense from a practical point of view since there is only one dragon per zone, and since these are not endgame areas, nobody has any reason to hang out there for long periods of time just to wait for random encounters to spawn. The dragon fights also require a healthy number of participants to go down smoothly, and the timers help to get everyone in place at the right time.

Since I'm terrible at action combat, I've been dying a lot, but it's no big deal as people are generally pretty helpful and try to revive fallen allies. And even if I get downed for good, the nearest respawn point usually isn't too far away.

The thing that fascinates me is how different the synergies of each dragon zerg are. As a very casual player I have little to no idea of what other classes and specs can do, but at times I've been on the receiving end of some absolutely incredible buffs. There was one encounter where instead of my usual frequent deaths, nothing seemed to be able to move my hitpoints at all, and another where my action points kept refilling so rapidly that I could spam my daily power pretty much non-stop. That was pretty crazy. I just wish I knew which class caused what so that I can follow them around in the future!