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.

Random Queues

Considering that Neverwinter had an automated group finder since its launch back in 2013, it's quite baffling that it went without any kind of random reward feature for more than four years. Blizzard realised from the beginning that this was something that was going to be needed to keep queues popping and the actual dungeons varied, back when they introduced the first dungeon finder of this kind in WoW. As it stands, Neverwinter players at endgame just ran the same couple of dungeons for years, since their daily rewards were granted for completing any dungeon, and people naturally gravitated towards what was easiest.

It was only a year ago, in the Swords of Chult module, that Cryptic introduced random queues (which are a separate thing from just ticking all the options and seeing what you get), and with Ravenloft's launch they gave them a revamp that involved a re-shuffle of the categories and changes to the rewards.

I'm still not much of a dungeon runner in Neverwinter but I'll admit that the random queue system has made me somewhat more amenable towards them. Especially for casual players it's extremely rewarding since the payout is heavily weighted towards your first run of the day per account (and as a casual you won't be running much more than one anyway). That and I'm liking the entertainment factor of the randomness. Sure, some dungeons are more fun than others, but either way it beats having your guildies constantly ask if you want to join them for their 360,867th Cloak Tower.

Signet of Patronage

The Swords of Chult module introduced a new quality of life feature that I managed to miss completely until I saw someone bring it up in a random reddit thread: Signets of Patronage.

Basically these are tokens that you can craft with campaign currency once you have completed a given campaign and which you can then pass on to your alts in order to reduce the amount of time and currency it will cost them to complete the campaign, by doubling reputation gains and cutting the cost of most campaign tasks in half.

This is great because completing campaigns on alts is a massive grind (to be honest, it tends to be a massive grind the first time around, but we tend not to mind so much when everything feels new and exciting), and up until now Cryptic's only concession to this has been to give people the option to buy campaign completion with real money instead of playing. Yeah.

As someone for whom the latter is completely out of the question, I'm pleased to finally have an in-game way of speeding things up for my alts. Mind you, compared to similar features in other games, such as SWTOR's legacy perks, the signets' benefits still feel pretty anaemic, especially since they are single-use consumables, so you'd have to craft a new one for every single alt for every single campaign. Still, it's better than nothing.

I've crafted one for Storm King's Thunder and one for Cloaked Ascendancy for my rogue and we'll see how much of a difference it makes. So far progress feels quite swift, but then it always does in the early stages.

The Merchant Prince's Folly

This skirmish that came with the Swords of Chult module is possibly the best one Cryptic has created so far. My pet tank and I have been running it a lot to gain the associated campaign currency (called totems) and it's always good fun.

It lives up to the format's promise of short and fast action, but manages to not completely limit itself to combat. I'm always keen to be the first one to rouse the guards or repair the weapons in the courtyard, or to raise barricades outside, because it makes me feel so much more useful than my piddly cleric dps.

The only thing I'm ambivalent about is the giant T-Rex outside. Since it would take most groups a while to kill it, the common tactic seems to be for one person to lure the big dino away into a corner while the rest of the party completes the escort, thereby increasing the group's chances of finishing with a gold medal. The only problem with this is that if the T-Rex isn't far enough away, it likes to keep people in combat, and while in combat you can't click the portal to exit. I've previously gotten stuck inside with the dino blocking the portal to the point where I had to hit Alt+F4 to get out. If there is a better way of escaping, I don't know what it is.

Refinement Revamp

It's been quiet on here because I've been off Neverwinter for the last few months. As usual, I always come back though, which in this case started with trying to make sense of the changes that were made to the refinement system with the Swords of Chult module launched in October.

I had actually already read about both the inventory and the refinement point changes beforehand, but seeing them live was still something else. I can't deny that they look good on paper, and also that it's super convenient to be able to identify all the greens in my bag with one button click and then refine the lot of them with another. However, right now I also can't help feeling like I'm missing something. It all seems a bit too easy. Surely there must still be some trick to deciding what to refine and when? It just seems strange after the previous complexity.

What's also interesting is that it seems that the amount of RP you get from green gear drops has been buffed, relatively speaking. It used to be as much as a white pearl per item, now it's as much as a peridot, which is five times as much! Combined with the new ease of turning these drops into refinement points, this has had the funny side effect of my pet tank going from ridiculing me for picking up all the "junk" to actually wanting said junk for himself. I can't quite decide yet whether I'm happy that he's now helping me hoover up all the shinies after every fight or annoyed that he's suddenly competing for the loot.