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.

Combat Change Mayhem

As mentioned previously, mod 20 was supposed to bring about some major gameplay changes (once again), but in a somewhat surprising move, Cryptic decided to just drop those on us early last week and without warning, with the actual new content being scheduled to come out later.

As is definitely a pattern whenever Cryptic changes the combat and/or stats, everything's kind of screwed up for the moment. My guildies and I did a Castle Never for the weekly challenge and suffered so many deaths, it was funny. You could argue that it's not a bad thing to tune the content up so that people can't just ignore or skip mechanics quite so easily anymore, but our group was between 30 and 40k item level, while the recommended minimum for that dungeon is 20k. No idea how a party with that would get through any of those fights.

Also, while my dps as a healer was never the greatest it's even worse now. I'll concede that healing itself felt better though, as damage was taken more consistently so that I could get into more of a rhythm healing it up.

On the plus side, Avernus appears to have been nerfed into the ground and we had a good time doing some hunts there. Just gotta sit tight and wait for Cryptic to rebalance things within the next couple of weeks/months - as usual.

Mob Signature Abilities

Courtesy of a week of double campaign currency I spent a lot of time in Icewind Dale last week, mostly on alts who still needed to complete the campaign. They weren't very powerful, so many fights still presented some challenge, and it made me realise just how strong a reaction I have towards certain mob types.

For example I loathed doing the quest to kill young remorhazes, as they had loads of health compared to the average mob and their endless fire circles and knockbacks made them extremely annoying to fight on melee classes. Similarly I always have a sort of low-key hatred for fighting wolves of every kind, because while they are generally weak mobs, they have an annoying knockdown that isn't telegraphed clearly and therefore hard to avoid. On the other hand I'm happy to fight corrupted dwarves for days, as their attacks are pretty predictable and easy to counter.

I think this variety in the way enemies fight as well as the fact that the game actually forces you to pay attention to what each ability does is one of the reasons I find Neverwinter's combat enjoyable despite of not being a fan of action combat in general.

Healing Sucks

I've had some time to get used to the Undermountain class changes at least on my cleric and my rogue by now, and playing dps cleric isn't all that bad. I use the Arbiter dps specialisation most of the time, and once you figure out the rhythm it relies on, it actually plays pretty smoothly and might even be considered fun!

Unfortunately there has been no such redemption for the healing spec. I even looked up a guide and everything, to make sure I wasn't just doing it wrong, but even the guide writer admitted that the healing gameplay is pretty dull. Most of the time your rotation is basically ABABAB, with A being an AoE heal (so there isn't even any prioritising of targets going on) and B coming down to standing still to pray and regenerate your divinity resource. There is enough synergy there that you "only" have to spend about as much time praying as you spend casting, but that is frankly still too much. Plus the combination of just using a single heal most of the time that isn't even targeted is just boring as hell.

I always found the way Neverwinter didn't used to have any "real" healers a bit odd, but if you accepted that system for what it was it was fun. I'm not against the idea of having the classes play like a "proper" trinity now either, considering that this is what I enjoy in my other MMOs, but then Cryptic really needs to step it up and make the healing gameplay more interesting than alternating between quick bursts of spamming one ability and standing around praying. I hear that the next module is supposed to bring changes to the system, but I'll reserve judgement until I actually see how they play out.

Life Steal

The life steal stat in Neverwinter has long been my go-to example of why allowing too much self-healing is bad, at least in a game that's supposed to have a trinity system. People were healing themselves so much that dedicated healers quickly became redundant, and since it scaled with damage output, characters also became increasingly unkillable the more damage they did.

It received a big nerf at least once (possibly more often than that) but it was only with Undermountain that Cryptic decided to remove the stat altogether, while also all but eliminating abilities that used to do both damage and healing simultaneously.

And I've got to say, even though I agree that it was bad... suddenly being without it after years of playing a certain way sucks too, as my characters now have to consume potions/health stones like nobody's business. Considering that regular potions barely heal you at all and the actually useful health stones are sold in the cash shop, it's also hard not to suspect Cryptic of having made this move to encourage cash shop purchases rather than out of any actual gameplay concerns.

Cleric Gameplay Kinda Sucks Now

While researching player opinions on mod 16, I came across someone complaining that clerics were now just a class that stands in a corner somewhere. This sounded like an odd complaint, but I'm starting to see where it came from.

The problem is that divinity has turned into a simple resource pool for encounter powers, and one that drains extremely quickly at that. It takes less than half a dozen attacks for me to run out, and then I'm basically down to at-wills.

This wouldn't be so bad if using at-wills helped to regenerate divinity, as you could then weave back and forth between using them and encounters. But no, you're supposed to stand still and pray in combat to regenerate divinity, and it takes a while to boot.

The idea of a cleric pausing in combat to pray may have made sense in Everquest back in 1999, but in an MMO with action combat in 2019 it's absolute madness and makes you feel like a right muppet, especially when you have to keep interrupting your prayers to dodge out of telegraphs, all the while contributing nothing to the fight.

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.

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.)

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.

Injuries And Mending

If you die or step into a trap in Neverwinter, unlike in many other MMOs, you don't accrue repair bills on your gear. Instead you suffer a growing amount of injuries, which - depending on the exact type - can have effects such as slowing your run speed or reducing your maximum hit points. If you are past a certain rank of VIP, you become immune to injuries. Otherwise, the only way to heal is to use an injury kit from a vendor or to stand next to a campfire for a certain amount of time.

This relatively minor setback can still be amazingly annoying to the casual player, as you may forget to buy kits from the vendor and find yourself unable to treat an injury out in the field, or - despite of gold being virtually useless as a currency for anything else - you might balk at the expense for the kits and waste a lot of time standing around near campfires to save money.

Recently however, I was pleased to find that the amount of time required to heal an injury "naturally" by the fire was radically slashed from 3 minutes to 30 seconds. This is a great quality of life improvement for non-VIPs. Where 3 minutes pretty much meant an AFK break, 30 seconds are as good as over by the time you've even had time to get your bearings after resurrecting at the campfire, meaning that you can get right back into the action.

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.

Action Combat

I don't like action combat. How come I'm playing Neverwinter? Well, I like a lot of other things about it, and I spend a lot of time pretending that it doesn't have action combat. Which is to say that about 90 percent of my play time is spent grouped up with my pet tank. He holds things (more or less) in place, and I do some damage from behind the mobs or from a bit of a distance, so I don't have to move too much.

Soloing however tends to leave me frustrated after a while. Today I finished Drowned Shore on my control wizard alt and while things had generally been going OK until then, the final boss of the zone killed me five or six times before I got him down. It was always the same thing: one of his red circles one-shotting me. I didn't have a problem dodging out of them as long as it was one on one, but whenever he summoned adds I would inevitably end up getting distracted by them at a crucial moment and boom! Back to the campfire, time to start over again.

Even a lot of the harder content in a game like SWTOR feels positively forgiving when compared to such one-shot abilities in what's supposed to be regular old solo content. But where other people enjoy this challenge, I've never been good at twitchy combat and just find it exhausting.