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.

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.

Farewell to Old Sharandar

One thing I didn't immediately realise when the new Sharandar module was announced was that this also meant that the old Sharandar was going away: currency obsolete, zones and quests gone, campaign removed. I still don't know why Cryptic felt the need to do this to be honest, as there are precedents for having more than one version of the same zone in the game, e.g. Helm's Hold the levelling zone and Reclamation Rock the Elemental Evil zone, which are both the same place but at different points in time.

I'm not too torn up about it right now, seeing how I completed the old Sharandar campaign on eight different characters and have plenty of memories of the place. But I'm not generally a fan of removing content from MMOs, and occasionally I do get all sentimental and experience cravings to revisit.

For example one of the new Sharandar quests mentions that Kehl Skywatcher now has a plaza named after her and is missed by everyone or something like that. This then made me go "oh no, did she die" and suddenly I wanted to do nothing more than be back in the Witch Fen and be asked to disperse magical fog or torch giant toadstools.

Finale

Neverwinter isn't the greatest MMO for story, both because of the quality of the writing and the way it is delivered. That said, I just want to give them credit for continuously trying to improve. I won't deny it, the ending of the Path of the Fallen campaign was neither particularly surprising nor original, but it sure managed to give me the feels. Well done, Cryptic.

Legacy Campaigns

When the level cap was raised to 80 with Undermountain, most old campaigns were awarded "legacy" status and not updated. I'm not sure what the selection criteria were, considering that the old Elemental Evil is still considered "current" while the much more recent Ravenloft has been designated a legacy campaign, but I'm guessing it might have simply come down to avoiding the hassle of re-scaling content where it would have been required.

With those old campaigns stuck at level 70, quests there can be completed with much more ease than previously now. To what end though? Cryptic were clearly asking themselves the same question and decided to add new weekly "legacy campaign quests" that ask you to either do quests, kill mobs or run heroic encounters on those old maps and that reward a special currency that can be used to purchase certain desirable items which were previously very hard to come by, such as companion upgrade tokens and high level enchanting stones.

This is one new feature I really love, as I'm both a fan of giving old content a new purpose and I really benefit from this new, more casual avenue to accessing those rare items.

All legacy campaign quests also reward currency for the campaign they are related to, plus bonus currency for a campaign of your choice (e.g. you could complete a quest to do Icewind Dale heroics and get both Icewind Dale currency as well as Chult tokens). This is useful to help get alts through campaigns you don't like as much and to get extra tokens that are required for stronghold upgrades.

I think this is really great design as it has also worked to greatly reinvigorate some of the old maps and especially the larger heroic encounters on them, which many people had previously lost interest in due to lack of rewards.

Expeditions

One thing I like about Neverwinter is that it rarely tries to reinvent the wheel in terms of gameplay, usually "just" reiterating from one module to the next to make certain pieces of content more fun or at least fun in a different way.

In Undermountain they did this in the form of expeditions, which appear to be that module's solo to small group endgame content. At its core they are lairs (soloable mini dungeons), with the fiction being that you venture forth into the depths of Undermoutain to explore and discover treasure.

Each lair consists of three sections randomly drawn from a limited selection of caves and populated with random sets of mobs to create variety.

A mechanic ported over from Ravenloft's hunts is that you can add a handicap to increase your rewards, though the effects aren't as interesting as they were in Barovia: mobs merely get stronger and some traps appear that can debuff you.

The (to me) most interesting twist is that you are encouraged to find three relics in each section to boost your rewards, which tend to be hidden away in corners and nooks. I would expect this to somewhat discourage speed-running, as rushing through makes it easier to miss them. Rather on the contrary, this particular content feels quite well-tailored towards people like me who prefer to amble along at a more stately pace while taking in the sights. (Typically though, I then found out that the other expedition "types" that Cryptic added later contain no such relics, presumably because the mechanic wasn't popular.)

Unfortunately the lack of variety in terms of the dungeon building blocks and mob mechanics causes the whole thing to get old pretty quickly.

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!)

Delving Into Undermountain

Remembering that most of my best times in Neverwinter involved playing the game with my husband, I convinced him to reinstall it as well and dust off his oathbound paladin. At first he was very reluctant, but already a few hours in he didn't want to stop playing again because he was really enjoying himself and wanted to see how the storyline we were playing through was going to end.

In fact, his enthusiasm was so overwhelming that we ended up playing through almost the entirety of the Undermountain campaign in a single Sunday afternoon session. This was made possible by it being the first campaign that didn't feature any time gating for story progression or boon acquisition. I don't know if it was like that at launch or if this is something Cryptic implemented later, but it made for a pleasant discovery either way.

The gameplay was a mix of the usual "kill x things over there and click y things while you're at it", but that's what we we're here for, isn't it? I did notice that some missions involved the use of some newfangled temporary abilities, but they were integrated into the UI in an unobtrusive way and not annoying.

The story was also enjoyable, in usual D&D fashion involving a mix of the slightly tragic but often silly. We were curious to see where plot developments would go throughout the whole thing and kept chatting about it while doing the quests. "I really want to know who that mysterious woman is!" Or: "I wonder what we're going to do with this guy; I mean we're working with him right now but he's evil, right?"

I may have been very annoyed with his module for all its system changes, but in terms of story they certainly did a very good job.

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.

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.

Icewind Kindness

This past weekend was an Icewind Dale bonus weekend, so I decided to take it as an opportunity to do some quests there on my three characters that haven't completed that campaign yet. Two of them hadn't even started yet, and it occurred to me that with their low gear levels, Biggrin's Tomb wasn't going to be very fun to do on my own.

I often see people looking for groups for it in zone chat however, so I figured I'd find myself one or more other not too well-geared people and we'd do it together. Somewhat to my surprise though, both times when I answered a call asking whether anyone needed Biggrin's Tomb, I actually ended up in the company of a seriously overgeared character who was just rushing through for their own weekly anyway and who had just felt like offering someone else a free ride while they were at it.

I was really surprised by those random acts of niceness and I'll try to remember to pay it forward next time I go in there on one of my own better geared characters.

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...

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.

Buggy Morlanth

This past weekend I repeated the Shroud of Souls quest line for the first time since it first came out. And whoa, was Morlanth (the last boss) ever bugged! Specifically, she didn't do anything when I attacked her - which would have been fine by me, except that this "not doing anything" also included "not dying". She just kept standing there at zero health.

When I googled the problem I only found this off-hand mention of someone else having the same issue and apparently circumventing it by attacking her really, really slowly (once every ten seconds by their own account). I Alt+F4ed to reset the fight and tried this, but without much success - if I waited too long between attacks, she would kill me (rogues aren't made to just stand around while being hit in the face), and if I tried to attack a little faster she would freeze up again.

Fortunately, after Alt+F4ing for the fifth time or so, I suddenly loaded back in to find the giant dragon that she summons at some point into the fight in front of me, and that one acted like a normal enemy, so when I killed that the quest completed. I'm just putting this here in case anyone else struggles with this bug...

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.

Ravenloft Story

Having finished the Ravenloft storyline (bar the dungeon, as usual), I've got to say that this is probably the best story that Cryptic's ever done. Not that this was a very high bar to clear, and I'm sure it helped that they pretty much just ported a beloved classic adventure into the game wholesale, but still...

Aside from a general lack of investment into the story (e.g. stuff like characters talking without moving their lips in cinematics), Neverwinter's biggest problem with story at endgame is that it tends to just... fizzle out. You go into a new area with a grand plan to handle X, do some dailies to help things along, until eventually, you get sent into an epic dungeon with a high gear requirement to defeat the big bad. For many the story ends right there because they can't keep up with the investment required to be able to participate in high-end group content, but from my limited experience even completing the dungeon doesn't usually provide a lot of closure, with no aftermath or epilogue.

They didn't exactly solve that problem in Ravenloft, but at least they have a noteworthy solo instance that has you deal with the immediate threat and which features some fun mechanics. Yeah, you're still supposed to do Castle Ravenloft afterwards to actually defeat Strahd, but at least you've achieved something if you never make it to the end. Plus the Sunsword was just a riot.

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...

River District Retrospective

While Storm King's Thunder was the last of the "old" campaigns where I still had boons to finish, I had some leftover business in the River District for the last couple of weeks as well. I couldn't help but think about how my opinion of that campaign area has changed.

My initial impressions of it were really positive - and I still think that the map is very nice for example, and that its weekly quests are inventive. However, what I initially considered a nice variety of daily activities unfortunately ended up feeling pretty dull over time. With no particular reason to do one thing over another, it eventually just became a matter of doing whatever's easiest/fastest until you've reached your daily goal. From my recent experience the most popular choice for this seems to be running the small heroic encounters - there are often "trains" going for them that just run in circles doing one after the other, and even a small group is enough to make them go down quite fast.

That's not exactly a bad thing, but after a while I really started to miss the direction provided by quests. Without them your daily goal just feels too much like random mob grinding. Chult had this problem too to some extent, and I'm glad to see that Cryptic seems to have back-pedalled on this, with Barovia once again offering a nice amount of quests to provide structure for your daily adventures.