Profession Project

I've never quite made my peace with the workshop that replaced the old profession system, but I do have functional (if not maxed-out) workshops on three characters and do try to level up my skills and artisans occasionally when I have some gold to spare.

One thing I noticed recently was that a lot of the crafted gear actually has some pretty nice looks, so now part of the project has become to craft each available look for every class so they can add them to their appearance libraries for mixing and matching.

I've never been the type who considers fashion the real endgame, but so far it's been a surprisingly entertaining project.

My 5 Worst Neverwinter Modules

As a counterpoint to the last post, these were my personal least favourite additions to Neverwinter over the years:

5. Mod 12: Tomb of Annihilation & Swords of Chult (July 2017)

The jungle theme never resonated with me (awkwardly stereotyped NPCs didn't help), and personally I found the focus on pure mob grinding over doing anything vaguely resembling actual content pretty off-putting. It was also quite hard on release and being unable to ride anywhere without getting knocked off your mount by jumpy dinos every couple of steps was super annoying. It took me a long time to work up the energy to complete this campaign.

4. Mod 17: Uprising (August 2019)

I wasn't actively playing when this came out, but after finally completing this mod's content earlier in the year, I'm still baffled how they ever managed to sell this to the player base as a full module.

3. Mod 6: Elemental Evil (April 2015)

The first time Cryptic decided to raise the level cap, they did seemingly everything wrong: The XP curve was terrible, tuning was out of whack, and the new content felt cheap, grindy and recycled - to name but a few of the problems. Looking back at my blog posts from that time, I somehow managed to at least somewhat enjoy myself despite of all this, but it was still bad.

2. Mod 16: Undermountain (April 2019)

I was a bit hesitant to rank this one this high (or low as it were) since I actually think the Undermountain campaign is pretty fun, but everything else that went along with Cryptic raising the level cap for the second time was pretty awful in my opinion. (They just don't know how to do this, do they?) You can argue that some of the changes they made were good and maybe even needed, but drastically revamping all the classes plus the way powers, boons and companions work - all at the same time - was a huge mistake in my opinion, as it made it an absolute nightmare to find my footing in the game again as a casual player with many alts. Also, the story may have been fun to go through once, but redoing a long and completely linear quest chain on every alt is rather tedious.

1. Mod 15: The Heart of Fire (November 2018)

The Penny Arcade style humour of these quests fits into the rest of the game about as well as a fish on a bicycle, and while this might have been fine in an optional one-time quest, the fact that you're supposed to re-do the same small handful of story quests stuffed with bad jokes over and over for all your boons is just awful. While I did finish the base story once, I still haven't earned the boons from this even on my main as the mere thought of having to re-do those quests yet again makes me want to throw up. As the cherry on top, this was also the module that did away with the old professions system and replaced it with the workshop, which I still don't quite get along with to this day. Let's not do anything like that ever again please.

Meh Module

Funnily enough, after I complained about my workshop's unending deliveries, Cryptic went ahead and patched that out this past week, so the goods now arrive instantly and fill up your delivery box the moment you log in. I guess that was a bug instead of a feature?

I was also pleased to see that they finally fixed the Chult Signet of Patronage. I momentarily got really excited when I saw that they had finally added a signet for that campaign with Heart of Fire, but of course it launched in a broken state and couldn't actually be used. Now it can, but my initial excitement has tapered off and I'm busy with other things already.

Unfortunately this whole module feels very "meh" to me so far. The workshop is ultimately not great, and my pet tank and I have even put the new campaign on hold for now because rerunning the same couple of story quests to crawl up a giant's butt week after week got old really, really quickly.

In the community I've seen mutterings about this module being the worst addition since Elemental Evil. It's probably not quite that bad, but I haven't felt this disengaged from the game since early Chult.

Unending Deliveries

One aspect of the new crafting system is that you can tell your crafters to repeat a task "indefinitely", which in practice should simply mean "until your delivery mailbox is full". So if you have ten slots in your inbox and send your artisans out in the evening to craft as much as they can overnight, you should then wake up to ten items in your inbox, right?

Unfortunately in practice the game doesn't do the calculations for this while you're offline, and not even instantly when you log in - instead, every crafted item takes several seconds to be processed and to actually appear in your inbox, and this process doesn't even start until you actually log in.

So what now happens to me every time I log on is that I dash to my delivery box and find it maybe half full (as far as the game managed to calculate its contents in the time it took me to get there). I take everything out, and the game continues to fill it up. Again, and again, and again... until I actually run out of materials or the calculation decides that in the x hours since I last logged in, that's the maximum amount of items my artisan would have been able to craft in terms of time.

I guess I should be glad that the offline crafting is so efficient, but on the other hand it's actually kind of annoying that I now basically spend the first fifteen minutes of any given play session just sitting next to my mailbox and gradually emptying it out over and over again. I guess I could just let it hit the space limit but that would then feel wasteful. It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Workshop Woes

My initial enthusiasm for the workshop has definitely come to an end. I climbed the wall of having to earn 500,000 trade credits to upgrade my main's workshop from level 2 to level 3, just to find that the next upgrade required me to do the same thing again, only this time for 5 million credits. Also, where a big part of my initial push had been made possible by the conversion of old crafting materials to new (via a horrible vendor interface that makes you want to bash your head against the wall), I was fresh out of tradable materials by that point. The cherry on top was the realisation that instead of earning 5 million trade credits, you can just pay 5 million AD for the upgrade instead. Neverwinter has a lot of pay-to-win aspects, but they aren't always this blatant.

It also hasn't helped that without consulting any kind of guide, I went about my business very inefficiently initially. Having opened a workshop on my first alt, I'm now trying not to commit the same mistakes again, but just the thought of having to go through the whole unlocking and upgrading process on seven more characters is somewhat deflating.

It might not be so bad if you're a new player and learning things as you go, but as a more casual player who previously maxed out her professions over several years of casual play, having to start over at this point and being faced with this much grind just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Gold

Cash in Neverwinter has always been in a bit of an odd place. As a new player, I remember that the prospect of needing however many gold it was to buy my first white quality horse seemed quite daunting. (They've since changed it so that you get the starter mount for free.) After that though, the usefulness of coins quickly dropped off, because beyond maybe buying some basic potions from a vendor, there wasn't much you could do with them, what with even the auction house trading in astral diamonds.

Over time, Cryptic tried to make gold a little more useful, by making it the currency required to swap out enchantments (used to be AD) and requiring gold deposits to the guild coffer for certain guild upgrades. In practice though, most people still always had way, way more gold than they'd ever be able to find a use for.

Well, the workshop has changed all of that, because the prices some artisans charge to craft things are no joke. I was initially quite thrilled by the new option to put them to work "indefinitely" (until your delivery box is full at least) but it only took a few days for me to realise that this was quickly draining all my gold reserves, which felt very weird considering that in the old crafting system most tasks were cash-neutral or even positive.

Unblogged since had an article about how there's at least one item you can craft to generate lots of gold, though I'm wondering whether in typical Cryptic fashion that wasn't actually intended and will soon be hotfixed or even considered an exploit. I've been trying it anyway, as I figure it's just gold, and since that's not tied to the "real" economy it's unlikely to be a big issue. It's still strange to suddenly be even thinking about my gold reserves though.

I Can Has Workshop?

Heart of Fire release day! Most of my evening was taken up by trying to figure out the new professions system, and my first impression is mostly great, with a little bit of annoyance thrown in.

I do like that they changed it from the equivalent of a lame time waster into something that's properly integrated with the rest of the game, with quests and everything. I enjoyed working my way through the associated story so far, until I hit a brick wall in the form of a "craft items worth 500,000 points" quest.

This does bring me to the main negative I have so far, which is that as someone who used to have everything maxed out, it feels a bit annoying to be held back by time-gated stuff like that again, even if Cryptic was generally generous with letting you convert old resources to new. I imagine it's going to be a bit of a chore to get all my alts back up to speed.

Professions Overhaul

This week I learned that the upcoming Heart of Fire module will also include an overhaul to the professions system. And we're talking proper overhaul here, not just a tweaking of mission rewards like we've had in the past. There's a dev blog and a forum thread about it so far.

In a nutshell, it's supposed to me more involved and more strongly tied into the rest of the game than the current system. Artisans won't just be icons in your inventory anymore, but actual NPCs employed by you in a workshop. And crafting is supposed to become more meaningful, so that people won't just level up by gathering wood five hundred times anymore because nothing else is worth it.

So far, so good from the sounds of it. The important thing for me is that existing progress will be carried over, as I have four characters with all their professions maxed out, with more working their way towards the same goal as we speak, and that has already been confirmed. Whether it'll actually be more fun and more rewarding remains to be seen.

Nine Slots

Even though I have several alts that have nearly all professions maxed out, I never unlocked all nine profession slots on any character. The reason? Because the 8th and 9th slot cannot be unlocked through normal gameplay and require you to acquire higher quality profession assets which only come from the various random packs from the cash shop. This has always annoyed me and I refused to support it out of principle.

However, other day I decided to finally give in after all, specifically because I felt that I was wasting resources by only ever getting rank 1 results from a specific mission, and the assets I needed were actually going for fairly cheap on the auction house.

Looking at it now, I almost feel a bit silly for handicapping myself for this long when I could have simply bought the things I needed from another player all along. Even better, since they don't bind on use, I can now send them around to all my alts and use them to fully unlock the profession window on all of them.

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.

Life After the AD Changes

Cryptic implemented the announced changes to the leadership profession and to astral diamond gains a little less than two weeks ago.

The leadership changes were a typical Cryptic hack job - they literally just removed astral diamonds from all the missions that gave them as a reward and didn't replace them with anything worthwhile. (I think some of the missions had their XP output increased, but who does leadership for the XP?) The result is that there are a lot of high-level missions now that are very much not worth doing as they simply offer no worthwhile reward whatsoever, while often taking twice as long as comparable low-level missions. There's also at least one rare mission that does still reward AD, which might have been an oversight.

On the plus side, this has inspired me to start levelling some other professions which I never paid much attention to previously. I'm not sure if anything good will come of any of it, but if nothing else it might allow me to unlock another profession slot.

The demand for astral diamonds on the ZAX has remained high, so that one Zen is down to being worth less than four hundred AD by now - never thought I'd see the day.

At least Cryptic took the effect on the economy into account fairly quickly and drastically slashed the prices of marks of potency, which are one of the main astral diamond sinks in the game (they are an expensive reagent required to upgrade high-level enchantments and gear).

I haven't done any dungeons or skirmishes in a while, so my max-level characters are down to an astral diamond income of 3000 per day, which is exactly what they get from invoking six times a day. For the moment that's enough for me since I don't have any major outgoings, but I don't know what I will do when/if the day comes where I find myself running out of in-game currency.

No More AD From Leadership

General chat caught my eye today because people were arguing about a change that had been announced on the forums but nowhere else so far: the removal of astral diamond rewards from the leadership profession (and the foundry).

The driving force behind this is an unbalanced economy caused by "AFK-playing" and botting. Leadership rewards astral diamonds just for logging in and pressing some buttons, and Cryptic wants to stop that. In fairness, some players have taken this to pretty insane levels, farming leadership on fifty alts or even multiple accounts. Cryptic wants people to gain AD by actually playing the game, and I can't blame them for that.

However, I still think that the proposed changes are terrible, because after this the only ways of gaining astral diamonds will be dungeons, skirmishes and PvP (plus the pittance you get from invoking these days). But that's only a small part of the content! In practice this means that a lot of players will effectively have no source of AD anymore.

Take me as an example. I've found dungeons and skirmishes at max level to either be extremely dull or unforgivingly hard to the point that they are a pain to do in pugs. And PvP in this game is terrible in my opinion. Nonetheless I rack up a considerable amount of hours playing each week: I do dailies in the campaign areas and work on my guild's stronghold. None of this awards astral diamonds. If anything, things like unlocking campaign boons and upgrading your stronghold cost AD. Where is that currency supposed to come from in the future?

This seems like another one of those changes that hasn't really been thought through at all, or is simply driven by blind greed. ("If we minimise the ways of gaining currency in game, people will spend more money, right?")

Levelling Leadership by Recruiting

If you don't buy any green or better quality profession assets from the auction house or random packs, levelling up the people to actually run your profession missions is pretty time consuming. My characters generally have six of the nine available profession slots unlocked, so if I want to run six high-level leadership missions, I need six rank three minions. Since each of them requires four guards to be trained, and each guard requires four mercenaries, that adds up to a whopping 96 mercenaries that need to be recruited.

With my control wizard, I decided to plan ahead for once and initially dedicated all her time and resources to recruiting. It's not like the low level missions give great rewards anyway. By the time I'd recruited all 96 of my mercenaries and converted them into 24 guards, she was up to leadership level ten from doing that alone. Sadly that's not high enough yet to actually train rank threes, but at least there are already some decent missions at level ten that give astral diamonds and which I can keep re-running to level up further.

Leadership Level 20

I was starting to doubt that it was ever going to happen, but this morning I hit level 20 in the leadership profession on my cleric. Based on the amount of Ardent Coins I've accumulated, this took me 239 days. On most of these I just logged in once in the morning to invoke and re-queue my professions. Admittedly I probably could have halved that time by doing this twice a day. Speeding things up any more than that would have been difficult however - at least without real money entering the equation - considering that most of the good missions take 8-12 hours. All I can say is: that's one hell of a time gate.

Rise of Tiamat

Neverwinters 5th module, Rise of Tiamat, released today. How did I know, apart from the giant patch and the fact that it's been advertised on the launcher for weeks? Because I logged in for my daily profession update and noticed that they redrew the icons for the treasure chests! OMG! Somehow that reminds me of the Blizzard joke of old about how every set of patch notes contains a bit about Mage Armor having received a new and exciting icon.

But yes, I'm still in "just doing my daily round of invoking" mode. Nonetheless it's nice to see Cryptic add new content at a steady rate. Means that there'll be all the more for me to do when I get back into the game properly.

Playing Without Playing

The reason I haven't been posting on here as of late is that SWTOR's housing and associated features have sucked me back into that game without leaving much time or enthusiasm for anything else. So I just log into Neverwinter for five minutes at the start of each day to invoke on all three of my characters and to work on their professions.

It's never good if interest in an MMO drops to the level of "just logging in to do the chores". I sure stopped playing WoW quickly when I realised that my brief re-visit there had deteriorated into paying a sub just to grow some vegetables for no real reason. However, Neverwinter is free, doing the "chores" doesn't take long and they are very rewarding for the amount of time invested. I'm pretty sure that eventually my interest in the game will be rekindled (presumably when SWTOR hits its next major content slump) and then I'll be all the happier that I kept working on it and that I will be that much closer to getting my purple companion for 365 ardent coins.

Professions

Professions in Neverwinter are a "click and wait" game, similar to the duty officer system in Star Trek Online or the companion crew skill system in SWTOR. Your character doesn't do anything herself, she just sends out her minions and reaps the rewards after a few hours.

The thing that feels weird to me is how your "minions" in this case are just really generic items that sit in your crafting inventory and can be traded on the auction house. At least the duty officers in STO have names and personalities, and it makes sense for a starship to have a large roster. As for why my half-elf cleric and my tiefling rogue have random guys doing all their work for them... who knows.

Professions are also really grindy. While levelling my cleric I focused pretty much exclusively on leadership, while ignoring all the other professions. Yet after two and a half months of playing and logging in every day, her profession level is still only 16 of 20.

The profession system is also one of the areas of the game where spending real money will give you huge advantages. Special workers who can cut a mission's time in half are only available from random packs that you buy for real money, while training up the basic white quality workers that offer no speed bonuses takes literally days and weeks of time.

While leadership at least is a very useful profession to have (I don't really have enough experience with any of the others to judge them), it does have a strong pay-to-win flavour to it that can be somewhat discouraging if you get a chance to compare your progress to that of someone who paid real money to gain advantages.