Things to Do in Mod 21

I was wondering what there was going to be to do for existing players in Jewel of the North if it was all focused on revamping the way levelling works. The answer is: not much. As mentioned in my previous post, if you never completed the levelling zones that remain in the game, now is a good time to go back and do them. Even if you already did them, there are a couple of new tutorial quests that you'll have to go through to earn the new rewards, but that's it.

That said, I reckon this is a great time to give the game another shot if you haven't played in a while. Just do whatever new quests Sergeant Knox has for you and the rewards will start rolling in in no time. The new catch-up gear will bring you close to on par with what used to be top level gear only a module or two ago. It's kind of impressive how far the game has come in terms of generosity there, because I still remember how stingy it used to be with simple quality-of-life things like mounts and bags. Now you have a blue quality mount and companion before hitting level ten and get a 42-slot bag just for completing Vellosk.

New Levelling Experience

Seeing how mod 21 is all about changing the levelling experience, I thought it made sense to create a new alt to check out how that's worked out. Thus Barb the Aasimar bard was born (more on bards another time). It's kind of strange to me to be investigating the tutorial again after I wrote about it being revamped only a little over a year ago.

I only played through that version of the intro once so my memories of it aren't very detailed, but based on what I wrote back then the first part outside the city doesn't seem to have changed much, except maybe that the combat felt a bit less faceroll than I remember. However, the part inside Protector's Enclave is completely different: We're once again back to no signs of fighting inside the city gates, and there's nothing about the Nashers wanting to steal the crown anymore. Instead you get sent to Sergeant Knox in the newly invented "Adventurer's Guild", where you're given a brief combat tutorial in a special training room before being sent straight to Neverdeath Graveyard.

I don't know whether I like or dislike this change, I just know that as a long-time player it feels extremely bizarre. With whole low-level zones and story arcs wiped out, it feels extremely rushed compared to the old experience... yet at the same time I'm not sure that's really a bad thing, considering I've said in the past that - in somewhat of an inversion of most games in the genre - Neverwinter's early levels used to be among the worst, largely because of how samey and front-loaded with system tutorials they were (which was alright the first time but extremely tedious on alts).

I could see it being appealing for new players to "jump into the action" more quickly, but my general experience with MMOs has been that propelling the player forward more quickly isn't necessarily more engaging either.

The lack of any sort of visible character progression with the removal of XP is also extremely strange to me. The new milestone system means that you only gain levels for completing certain quests, but until you are on one of those quests, there's no visual indicator of how close you are to the next milestone/level, so your only real motivation to keep going is sheer momentum or interest in the story, and let's be honest, with the exception of a few clever storylines, narrative has never been Neverwinter's strong suit.

I guess this also means that you will no longer have a choice of alternative levelling paths, which I can see getting rather repetitive on alts, even if the overall length of the journey has been shortened by a lot.

TheLazyPeon Stumped by Neverwinter

TheLazyPeon is a well-known MMO YouTuber. The other day he released a video compilation of snippets from "failed" MMO reviews, as in games he wanted to review but gave up on for one reason or another. Most of them turned out to be indie or early access titles of some kind, so I was very surprised to see Neverwinter in there as well.

Basically Peon got bored during the starter experience on two different characters (which I can't entirely blame him for - I've said before that in an inverse of most MMORPGs, the early levels are some of the worst in Neverwinter) and then decided to try and jump straight into endgame group content by buying a level 70 character boost.

This caused him to run into an interesting problem however: 70 isn't actually the level cap anymore, there's no PvP before the cap, and most of the higher-level dungeons require some kind of unlock through completing quest content, so he still didn't have access to any queues other than the levelling ones, and those didn't seem to want to pop (I'm guessing at least in part because he was queued as dps). He eventually gave up in disgust. I always find it interesting how players manage to navigate themselves into "dead ends" in an MMO, and that was new one to me.

New Tutorial

One of the things that intrigued me enough to get back into Neverwinter was mention of a revamped early levelling experience. In hindsight I had already read about plans for that back in July last year; I'd just forgotten about it again after more or less moving on from the game.

So I went ahead and created a new great weapon fighter barbarian of the one free-to-play race I didn't have yet - wood elf, apparently (this game has too many sub-species of elves) - and levelled her from one to ten.

And... I quite liked it! In terms of functionality and major plot points, the tutorial is largely unchanged, but it now makes for a much smoother continuation from the intro cinematic. I always thought it was a bit odd that after you witness the city under attack, the game then introduced your character as a shipwreck survivor (?!), with the only vague connection to the cinematic being a flash of memory indicating that your ship was sunk by the same dracolich that's also attacking the city. Then you fight your way into Neverwinter itself and... everything is peachy keen inside.

In the new version, you willingly join the battle to defend the city and even assist Makos with bringing down the dracolich. You also meet Celeste early on. When you get into the city, there is still fighting going on, with the Nashers having used the distraction to steal the crown, and only after you re-emerge from the vaults do you see that things have calmed down.

What does intrigue me is the fate of Private Wilfred though, who used to be the friendly NPC guiding you through the tutorial instead of Makos, just to die by Valindra's hand five minutes later. In the new version he's inside the city and lends you a horse at Sergeant Knox' command but doesn't speak. Has the timeline been altered to result in his survival? Or is he just doomed to die at a later point now, like the protagonist's fiancée in the 2002 version of The Time Machine? I kind of want to find out.

Skirmishes

I don't know why low-level skirmishes are still limited to such a small level range. Cryptic clearly has the tech to make everything scale (even if the results are questionable) and definitely did the right thing by applying this tech to all the levelling dungeons. Why not skirmishes too?

Trying to run all the levelling skirmishes on my baby cleric has been hard work simply because you out-level them quite quickly and the "dead zone" I observed three years ago is still a thing. I did miss one skirmish entirely simply because despite of hours of queuing I just couldn't get it to pop, and the alternative to skipping it would have been to stop doing things that give XP and just stay logged in, waiting in the queue for who knows how many more hours.

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.

Uprising

While I'm only just trying to come to grips with the havoc wrought by Undermountain, Cryptic already announced the next module coming in August, called Uprising.

It will introduce the first new race in a while, the Gith. I have to admit that I'd never heard of them before this, and my first impression is that they look like the love children of orcs and elves. Also, apparently we'll be going to space?! I'm not familiar with that part of D&D lore at all, but it sounds wacky.

To me though, the most intriguing change mentioned in the announcement post was "recrafted early game zones and stories". I've never found Neverwinter's levelling particularly engaging, but it's serviceable, and to be honest I'm not sure what they could do to make it better, the game being what it is. Makes me glad to be levelling a new character right now though - that means that the current content will still be fresh on my mind when it comes to comparing old and new.

Scaling Strangeness

I knew that Cryptic was going to change the way scaling works in Undermountain, and I actually welcomed the idea as I thought that the existing system was pretty poor. After running a couple of Cloak Towers though, things didn't seem much different from before: Downscaled max-level characters were still rushing through, pulling and killing everything on their own while lowbies lagged behind - I guess things just went marginally more slowly, as it took more than one hit to kill an enemy now.

But then I ran into the strangeness in Illusionist's Gambit, and I soon got another taste of it in the Storming the Keep skirmish. Three years ago, I ridiculed this one for scaling players up to 60 while leaving the mobs in their twenties, making the whole thing a complete joke. Well, when I ran it this time, this was still happening... but our group of 60ies really struggled to kill those twenties! We barely made it through to the end, with me desperately spamming my one heal as much as it would let me and people still ended up getting downed repeatedly.

I found several reports of the new scaling being utterly broken (e.g. people being one-shot while doing normal Demogorgon) but that was more than two months ago, and supposedly there's been a patch to fix things since then? All I can say is that I'm very confused.

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...

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!

Experience Overflow

Overflow experience is a feature that I've liked from the start, however at level 70 it used to take quite long to level up. At 1,785,000 XP a pop, it took me quite a few play sessions to level up even once, and for that much effort the rewards often felt lacklustre.

Since Lost City of Omu was released, I noticed that I was suddenly levelling up much more quickly. At one point I managed to get three level-up rewards in a single play session! A quick Google search revealed that as part of this latest update, Crypic smoothed out the XP curve from 60-70, which apparently also reduced the XP requirement to level up at 70 to a measly 100,000 XP. That's less than 6% of the old requirement!

And I'm absolutely loving it. It makes playing at max level feel so much more rewarding, even more so as you have a chance of getting the 30,000 rough astral diamonds reward multiple times a day if you're lucky. For me that's a considerable cash flow addition!

Of course, knowing Cryptic's modus operandi whenever it has been too easy to earn AD in the past, I expect that this will be nerfed again soon, but I'll definitely enjoy it while it lasts.

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.

60-70

... is still a very tedious level range, and as observed previously, the update to the Elemental Evil campaign hasn't actually made it more fun (in my opinion). I was however pleased to find that there are more alternative XP sources in that level bracket now than ever before.

For example you can start the Underdark story as early as 60 and it actually scales the content to your level instead of scaling your character - though my pet tank and I had issues with that in at least one chapter where we walked in and found that all the mobs were level 70, so I'm guessing that tech still has some kinks that need working out.

Also, Sharandar is genuine levelling content now! I was wary of going there since I still remembered the early Elemental Evil days, where the game would prompt you to go there at 60 even though everything was level 70 and you'd just get trounced because the scaling was pretty ineffective. The in-game map also still told me not to go there at level 69, warning me that the enemies were too high level. However, while looking over my pet tank's shoulder I noticed that the first area in Sharandar is now genuinely level 64, the second one 66 and the third one 68. So you can get a head start on those boons now and the dailies give great XP to boot.

Lowbie Changes

As well as picking up my hunter ranger again, I also bought more character slots and rolled up another new alt, a sun elf paladin. I was surprised to find that they changed the Theft of the Crown quest to shoehorn Sybella from the Benign Order of the Third Eye into it in the middle.

Speaking of that, I still don't know how to complete her mini-campaign - on the one character I've done it on, I'm sat at 86% after completing everything. Then again, maybe that's just another one of those display bugs - just like some of my characters have 150 or even 200% Sharandar completion.

My new alt also still got an in-game mail to advertise use of the Gateway - might want to remove that, Cryptic.

Show Me Those Quests!

You may or may not remember that I made it my hunter ranger's goal to re-do all the quests in the original adventuring zones. After the whole project lay dormant for a couple of months, I picked it up again the other day and was most annoyed by how difficult it was to stay on track. During the Protector's Jubilee XP bonanza I outlevelled the zone I was working on at the time, causing all the quests to "go grey", which - following the example set by WoW - caused all the exclamation marks above nearby quest givers' heads to disappear, forcing me to repeatedly click on every NPC in the area to see if a new quest had unlocked. I repeatedly ran into dead ends when I lost track of the main chain and suspect that I missed more than one side quest this way.

I'm glad that SWTOR never had a system like that, even before they had level sync and when low-level quests gave virtually no rewards. Some of us actually care about seeing the whole story, even if we're overlevelled for it! The disappearance of those quest markers is even weirder in Neverwinter, where grey quests actually continue to give pretty decent XP. I suppose there is the potential for confusion if later quests recycle an old area and players could get old lowbie and new high-level quests mixed up, but that could be solved by at least having a "show grey quests" on/off toggle like they introduced in WoW later on.

Everything is a Campaign

The latest patch introduced a funny change to the campaign window: All the levelling zones are now counted as quasi-campaigns and reward items of varying value for completion. Some of the low-level ones are pretty amazing for poor players: For example completing the Tower District now rewards a full set of green quality profession workers, one for each profession! Kind of makes me want to bang my head against the wall for all the hours and days I spent levelling up white quality ones... but it's a nice change for new players for sure.

I might even be tempted to go back and finish off the zone on my max-level alts that never completed it. I'm just not sure the campaign window was the right place for this addition, as it looks pretty cluttered now and makes it harder to keep track of your progress in the "real" campaigns.

Dead Zone

My goal for my little hunter ranger is to slowly take her through all the original zones and redo all the quests there to remind myself of their storylines. I only actually did them all once, as all three of my current max-level alts went into "levelling without really playing" mode at one point or another.

In an interesting contrast to most other MMOs I've played, which usually offer a variety of starting experiences for different races or classes, Neverwinter's first couple of levels are the exact same every time. This actually made them the hardest for me to replay yet again, as they all featured content that I had already done multiple times before. I usually do most of the quests up to Neverdeath Graveyard if nothing else, simply because that's where you get your last free bag.

I was pretty relieved once I pushed past that and got into the content I actually wanted to replay, however I was also kind of surprised just how much overall player activity dropped off at that point (around level thirty). Zones suddenly had less than half the number of active instances compared to before, and queue times for skirmishes jumped up from near instant to upwards of ten minutes.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, considering that this is the point where I also usually stop questing on my alts, not to mention the point where my interest originally floundered for a while when I first tried the game at launch. It's still interesting to see that this seems to affect so many people though.

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.