Epic Trial Queue

I braved the trial queue for the first time since hitting level 80, on my warlock no less. Inspiration was a double Tyranny of Dragons currency event and me trying to earn some Linu's Favor for her.

I tried queueing for a random at first, but the randomiser was insistent on throwing me into Assault on Svardborg (repeatedly). I'd never actually completed that one before but apparently it's a lot more doable nowadays. My first run was still a fail, from what I could tell because one or even both of the healers just dropped group mid-fight (even though it was going fine until then), so we wiped, and since we weren't getting any more backfills at that point the group fell apart. I got it two more times though and those other times we completed it successfully. While I didn't have any of the keys for the chests on that character, I was still pleased with the AD payout (I'd forgotten just how much you can earn from doing the random trial queue every day, 40k+ a pop).

I eventually got into some Tiamat runs as well by queuing for that specifically. It felt a bit odd to see it downsized to ten people - to rebalance for the lower numbers they made it so that the middle cleric is permanently under a shield and doesn't need defending anymore. What I did like was that they changed the dragon souls to work with the special ability hotkey they added in Undermountain so that you don't need to worry about manually dragging a soul onto your bar mid-fight anymore. Otherwise the experience was similar to how I remembered it, and we always killed all the heads in one to two phases.

Dragon Mastery

So, another thing that I never thought would happen... happened: I completed the last boon from the Well of Dragons campaign. Once I realised how easy Linu's Favor was to gain through doing Temple of Tiamat, it was only a matter of time. I wasn't joking when I said I only needed to do it fifteen more times: That's exactly what I did, one day at a time.

Mind you, most of my runs weren't quite as fast and smooth as that first one, with most of them needing two or three "head phases" to get Tiamat down. One time it even took a full five rounds; I was very surprised that we didn't hit some sort of enrage or fail state considering for how long that fight had been dragging on by that point.

It also took me an embarrassing number of deaths to I figure out how the dragon souls and the five heads' various breath weapons work. On top of that, it wasn't until I did these runs that I realised that the hoard in the Well of Dragons actually has a purpose in the form of buffing the combatants and increasing your chances of good loot! I'd always thought that it was just some leftover from the old days required to originally "unlock" the Temple of Tiamat.

I could see myself doing this on some of my alts now... though not immediately; two weeks of slaying a giant five-headed dragon every day are quite enough for now.

I Killed Tiamat!

Only took me... three and a half years?

As part of my current project to get my main caught up on unfinished campaigns, I've been adding to the hoard in Well of Dragons to gain Linu's Favor, but it's just ridiculously grindy. Everyone says that doing the epic trial to kill Tiamat is much better for gaining this currency, but I'd never done it.

I wasn't really deterred by my recent terrible experience in Assault on Svardborg, as I knew that my pet tank and at least one other guildie had completed this particular trial successfully many times before, and if they could do it, then so could I! I quizzed my pet tank about tactics and he reckoned that - considering that this was the very first epic trial added to the game and has been around for years, so people mostly know the fight quite well - my chances were probably pretty good.

And indeed, I got lucky. It took a little while for the queue to pop, but once I got in I was just following a raging horde of experienced players around who killed everything in seconds. The top damage dealer finished the instance with nearly 150 million damage done! The tactics didn't even seem to matter much - for example I had often been told about how you need to kill Tiamat's many heads at roughly the same time (within a timed phase) to prevent them from respawning, but in this group they were dying so fast that the whole group just ran from one head to the next, killing them one by one, and then the boss was already dead before the next phase could even start. Meanwhile, I managed to die once by accidentally jumping off a cliff.

But I did get one Linu for my efforts! Now, if I can repeat that about fifteen times, it won't have been too terrible a time investment overall...

Well of Dragons

Since my pet tank and I finally managed to unlock the Well of Dragons dailies, we've been doing them whenever we can, in order to work on our campaign progression. I haven't been impressed.

Up until Tyranny of Dragons, I felt that every new campaign was an improvement or at least a fresh new take on the way the game does dailies. But the Well of Dragons... meh.

Scenery-wise it feels like a rehashed Dread Ring with dragons instead of zombies, coloured brown instead of grey. The dailies can take freaking forever if you happen to get a bad set, about three or four times as long as a round of Dread Ring, and the heroic encounters don't seem to draw much interest.

I wonder though how much of this is the fault of Elemental Evil's level scaling and increase in difficulty. After all, I used to love Icewind Dale, but since the level increase questing there has been pretty damn tedious as well.

More on Level Scaling and Content Order

I realised only yesterday that my approach to the new module has been all wrong. I thought that since I haven't played properly since Icewind Dale, it would make sense to go through everything that has been added since then in order of its release (Tyranny of Dragons - Rise of Tiamat - Elemental Evil).

The problem is that all the old level 60 content seems to have been levelled up to 70, and the level scaling doesn't work very well. I was willing to chalk up my great weapon fighter's bad first experience to my lack of gear and skill, however when my pet tank and I went into the (now also level 70) Well of Dragons area from Rise of Tiamat with our reasonably well-geared guardian fighter / cleric duo, we still got trounced by the mobs there, even as a team. If my cleric got hit by anything, she would die in 1-2 hits, and some things even one-shot my pet tank. We tried the instanced solo quest to rescue some prisoners and eventually had to give up on it as the boss at the end just seemed impossible to overcome with the constant risk of one-shots.

After that experience my pet tank suggested that we should have a look at the new Elemental Evil content, and lo and behold: that was actually level 60 and allowed us to progress. So if, like me, you have come back to the game for ten more levels and some fun with Minsc and Boo, forget about all the previous campaigns for now - fighting level 70+ mobs is just too much of a pain in the arse at level 60, with or without level scaling. Just stick to the Elemental Evil content to level up - and maybe the early dailies from Tyranny of Dragons (which are in low-level zones).

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.