Elemental Not-So-Evil

I haven't done much in any of the Elemental Evil zones in a long while, mostly because I never liked them, but I actually liked them even less after the revamp that was supposed to make them more fun. At one point I ran most of my alts through Spinward Rise for the artifact weapon awarded at the end of that, but with better gear cheaply available on the auction house now, even that has become redundant.

Last night I decided to finally give Drowned Shore another go on my rogue, if only for the associated boons, and was pleasantly surprised! First off, doing these zones at 70 eliminates most of the annoyances caused by the dense mob packs, as you can (near) one-shot everything anyway. More interestingly though, it appears that Cryptic gave the quests another makeover at some point that I previously missed, so all those annoying quests that made you re-run the same lair two or three times are gone. I think the entire zone didn't require me to do more than fifteen quests or so now.

Easiest boons ever? (Though still a bit boring.)

Elemental Evil Revisited

Having finished her tour of the original set of adventure zones, my hunter ranger is now doing Drowned Shore. I loathed the original implementation of Elemental Evil's vigilance tasks, but after several rounds of nerfs and with some experience under my belt, they weren't so bad. Nonetheless, Cryptic recently decided to scrap the whole concept altogether and turned the vigilance tasks in the four EE zones into regular one-time quest lines. This is my first time checking out that content since the change.

Sadly, it's not really an improvement! They did scrap a good chunk of the quests, but you still get sent back and forth between the same couple of locations a lot, only with two quests at a time instead of four, making each run feel less productive. Also, you can't "choose your poison" anymore and sadly Cryptic didn't decide to just keep the easy quests, meaning that you now have to do annoying stuff like run each lair twice to complete the zone. Worse, I can't believe someone thought it a good idea to keep that guard memento quest with the stupidly low drop rate in. As an extra "bonus" I've found that some of the revamped quests don't seem to count for the "do four quests in an Elemental Evil zone" daily from the stronghold.

It's just a pain all around still. And that's without even getting into the annoying difficulty curve in that level range, where it's sometimes easier to die and respawn at a campfire than to try and make your way back through groups of mobs that respawn so quickly that you don't even have time to pick up the loot. Why, Cryptic, why...?

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.

Bugged

I know that new content releases always come with bugs, but I was still surprised to run into what I would consider a pretty game-breaking bug today. My pet tank and I went back to do the level 70 solo instance in Neverdeath Graveyard that my great weapon fighter struggled with (the quest is called "Ghost Stories"), and as a duo we did alright, even if the scaling didn't work too great. However, just as we entered the last room of the instance, the level scaling simply fell off - leaving our level 60s to face off against level 73 mobs with no bolstering whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, we couldn't even scratch them. This made it impossible to finish the associated meta quest - not until we're level 70 anyway. I found a forum thread about the problem, but there is no known workaround.

In less game-breaking but still annoying news, one of the quests at the Drowned Shore refused to update properly for us after we had already fulfilled its requirements. Fortunately the forums came to the rescue again, this time with the advice that the quest only bugs out in a group and can be fixed by leaving the party. Still annoying though.