Sewers Most Fowl

I quite enjoyed the new April Fool's event that Cryptic added last year and was happy to see it return, but as my focus is currently on other MMOs I didn't really plan to grind the dailies again, plus at first glance it didn't look like anything had changed about the event. That was until I learned that this year, they also added an event dungeon called Sewers Most Fowl, in which you get to play as chickens in a group PvE context.

I did it with my guildies and it was great fun. If you enjoy this kind of thing, I can only recommend going in blind with friends and allowing yourself to be surprised - the event is on for another three days or so. Otherwise you can just watch me and my guildies bumble through it in this video:

April Fowls

In the past, Cryptic impressed players on April Fools' Day by creating a whole new, lovingly crafted joke campaign for the event, which became so popular that they just turned it into a generally recurring event after a while.

Since then I don't recall seeing anything new for April Fools, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them come up with something new this year: "April Fowls".

This silly event is chiock-full of bad chicken puns and mostly consists of a few daily quests that involve you turning into a chicken and using unique combat abilities. The currency you earn from them can be used to buy a giant chicken mount or a couple of vanity pets.

There is also a chicken themed PvP brawl that involves you taking on the same chicken forms and abilities as in the daily quests while pecking enemy players to death. I've only done it once so far but couldn't stop laughing pretty much through the entire thing.

It's not the most sophisticated event ever, but the light-hearted silliness of it all is just right for the current climate in my eyes, and for a limited-time event it's been great fun. It's on for a few more days if you haven't had a chance to give it a go.

Also amusing: guards continue to salute me while in chicken form.

Talking Swords

(Minor Undermountain quest spoiler to follow.)

I don't remember where and when I first heard or read it, but I distinctly remember someone once telling me that talking magical weapons in a D&D setting were pretty much always bad news. This memory keeps coming back to me every time I encounter one, but Neverwinter seems to be set on defying my expectations.

First there was the Sunsword in Ravenloft, whose pride and OP-ness made for - in its own words - "a superlative experience".

Now, in Undermountain you find another talking sword in a green dragon's lair. After you beat the dragon, it urges you to use its blade for the finishing blow. So you stick it into the dragon's head... and the creature rises again, with the magical sword now effectively controlling the dragon's mind and body.

Then you spend the rest of the zone with a dragon buddy helping you fight the baddies.

Not what I expected.

(Also, obligatory Bloglovin link so I can add the blog to my list there!)

A Lich's Lament

Playing through Neverdeath Graveyard again I got to re-do what's probably my favourite quest in the game (see title).

It starts from a phylactery which is a random drop from the undead in the area. The lich contained within tells you that he just wants to be left in peace already and asks you to find a quiet final resting place for him in the area. You check out various locations but he finds something (hilariously) wrong with each and every suggestion, from uppity necromancers to destructive adventurers.

Exasperated, he eventually tells you that he's fed up with un-life and asks you to just hand his phylactery over to the doomguards so that they may destroy him. You do so, but Doomguard Volahk immediately states that the lich is likely too powerful to be destroyed so that the phylactery will have to be contained in a special secure vault instead, possibly for centuries - much to the lich's delight.

The voice acting for this quest is great and the lich's monologues are consistently hilarious - which just goes to show again that it's quite possible to have content be both lore-appropriate and funny.

You Thought Poop Quests Were Bad?

Well yes, they are, but I bet your MMO hasn't asked you to literally crawl up a giant's rectum and clean out his bowel (yet). In Heart of Fire, this isn't just a quest, it's one that's repeatable once a week.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure what to make of the humour in this module. I was never really a fan of the Penny Arcade comic... every now and then someone would link me a particular strip about MMO mechanics or something and I'd go "heh yeah, that's pretty spot on" but if I tried to browse the archives at all I'd quickly get bored as I didn't find most of them even mildly amusing.

The new storyline in Heart of Fire is at least kind of funny so far; it's just all incredibly over the top, with characters constantly spouting anachronistic dialogue or the story centering on juvenile jokes like the quest mentioned above. It's all just a little bit jarring when compared to the rest of the game.

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...

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.

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.

Rude

A lot of companions in Neverwinter have little voice lines that they like to spout when summoned or in combat. (The best thing about the Sylph from the Knight of the Feywild pack was that her incessant "Isn't sun wonderful?" and similarly over-the-top expressions of cheer drove my pet tank absolutely nuts.)

I've now repeatedly run with groups in which someone had a companion (but I couldn't make out whose it was) that was constantly throwing weird insults at the enemy, such as calling them "troll licker" or "knobbly knees" (not sure about that one). What keeps throwing me though is that one of his lines sounds like "Your mother was a whore!" and I'm pretty sure that's not what he says, but at the same time I can't figure out what else it's supposed to be... so I keep hearing accusations of prostitution all over.

Cleric Life

I didn't used to pay that much attention to him because I rarely did his quests, but lately I've been doing so more often and I've got to say: the cleric NPC in the stronghold is hilarious. As a cleric main I can really relate to his jadedness! "I wish he'd just give me tasks I can do by myself" indeed. "I'd be... grateful?" That question mark at the end just kills it. In an unusual twist for Neverwinter, the voice actor does a really great job as well. (Though actually, all the stronghold NPCs are pretty well done.)

Stop the Press!

This weekend I discovered that Cryptic updated the icon for Feydark Crystals. :-o

Ecosystem

I usually don't give much thought to whether my virtual fantasy environments make sense, probably because they wouldn't really stand up to closer examination. Could a forest of this size really sustain that many wolves? Etc.

However, the situation in the jungles of Chult is particularly jarring. You can't take two steps without being assaulted by packs of predatory beasts, yet there isn't a single herbivore in sight. Whatever do all those raptors and tigers and tarantulas and giant scorpions even eat? Each other I guess.

In-Joke

When my pet tank and I encountered our first tyrannosaur in the jungle, we initially weren't sure whether we were meant to fight or flee. It hardly seemed to take any damage at first - until we knocked it over, which seemed to temporarily apply a massive damage buff.

"It's Kephess!" I exclaimed.

That probably won't make sense to 99% of my readers, but I wanted to write it down for future reference anyway.

(Boring explanation for anyone who really wants one: In SWTOR there is a reptilian (Trandoshan) raid boss called Kephess, who got revived repeatedly after being beaten several times. Thanks to this, it became a running joke that he's everywhere, secretly responsible for everything etc. In his second incarnation, one of the fight's major mechanics is to knock him down to do increased damage to him. The similarity just struck me as quite amusing.)

Battling Bots

I don't really like Neverwinter's PvP, mostly for balance reasons, but after having a fairly good time in the 10-19 bracket with Traitine the other day, I decided to give it another try on my level 62 pally tonight. Imagine my surprise when I was joined by nothing but bots on both teams...



I had some silly fun with that for a couple of matches, as shown above. (I didn't intend to record my voice actually, but I used it for the video in the end because both the confusion and the insane cackling seem naturally appropriate.) Then I got into a match where there was an actual player on the enemy team, a trickster rogue who kept perma-dazing and two-shotting me. That reminded me of why I don't like Neverwinter's PvP to begin with and I quit.

Epic Temple of the Spider

This past weekend I ran my first epic dungeon, Temple of the Spider, with a bunch of guildies. Things went well enough until we got to the last boss, where I died within less than a minute. I wasn't alone however, and two of my guildies soon shared my fate. The two remaining players, my pet tank on his paladin and a guildie on a great weapon fighter, managed to get the boss down... eventually. I know that it took more than twenty minutes because I was marked as idle twice while hugging the floor and watching YouTube videos on my second monitor. In the end I was rewarded for my prolonged inactivity by the chest at the end spitting out a new and better version of my horned hat. There really is no justice in this world - good thing that in Neverwinter that often seems to work out to my advantage...

Level Up

It's been quiet on here because in the past month my attention has been elsewhere once again, which is why I only found out today that ten days ago, Cryptic introduced the option to buy max-level characters from the Zen store. It's actually kind of surprising that it took them this long, considering how many other MMOs already do this and Crytpic's general tendency to let you buy advantages for real money in every possible area of the game.

I'm never really tempted by these offers because I actually enjoy levelling, but this one comes with an extra perk: Every boosted character gets to choose one of five painted owlbear mounts for themselves (picture from the official news post):

Owlbears!

Seriously, who wouldn't love to own one of these? I especially like the purple one.

Of course, then I checked the actual price of a boosted character on the Zen market, and it's 5,000 Zen. Even if you buy the biggest bundle to get the most bang for your buck, that's still about thirty quid. No owlbear is worth that to me.

New Look

What's this? A new character selection screen? But they didn't do that for any of the previous expansions!

Now my characters will look even colder every time they load in in their underwear...

Foreign Merchants

The new escort quest for the jubilee event is an excellent way of grinding both renown and the protector's bounty boxes. You only need one person to have the scroll with the quest to get him moving (which is a fairly common drop), everyone else can then tag along without having it and still get the rewards. After every combat the merchant and his horses will drop either a box or some renown for everyone present... which adds up to quite a number as he gets ambushed several times, walks through a bunch of existing mob groups and you can even pull some more on top of him to make him drop extras.

There are a couple of these merchants in different zones - I escorted one in Blacklake District today and there was a huge crowd following the merchant's every step, with the low-level mobs getting one-shotted before they'd even fully spawned. With my guildies I've mostly been farming the stronghold version though - it might have been luck of the draw, but that one seemed to drop a much higher number of bounty boxes for me.

It was probably the most bizarre kind of social content I've participated in so far, constantly running up and down the road as a group to escort more merchants. It was pretty fun and relaxing though.

Foreign merchants showering us with gifts... I think Cryptic is sending a clear pro-immigration message here!

Collector

One of the peculiarities of Neverwinter's questing system is that when you are in a group, you will get quest items dropping for you for quests that you don't actually have but your group mates do. This has been driving my pet tank to distraction whenever I take one of my alts to Icewind Dale, as I keep hoovering up all the enchanted weapons (which I don't need) while he hardly seems to get any (the loot is still bound to the individual, so I couldn't trade them). On my rogue I had a proud collection of more than fifty of the things.

This week I finally hit the reputation point where I could pick up the quest myself. It was so exciting to be able to hand it in right away! Only downside? Jubal Oakstaff took my entire collection in one go, even though the quest only requires ten or something. Greedy bugger.

Rich Spiders

While doing heroic encounters in the guild stronghold, someone made the interesting observation that wealth seems to be distributed surprisingly unevenly among the denizens of the stronghold. Not that anyone kills them for their loot (yay, another rank five enchantment), but it's still funny once you actually start to take notice.

Spiders appear to be the richest creatures by far (three Frozen Treasures from a single spider attack encounter!), followed by beasts and devils. The marauding orcs on the other hand appear to have almost no possessions. No wonder they are kicking up a stink - clearly a case of social unrest caused by extreme poverty.