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.

Barovian Hunts

I wasn't too fond of the hunts in Chult, so I was less than thrilled when it was announced that the system would be included in the Ravenloft module as well.

In practice though, the hunts in Barovia are so different from those in Chult that they might as well have given them a new name. No more grinding mobs for a chance at a chance at a chance of a drop (seriously, we've spent weeks in Omu by now and apart from the Razortyrannus Spines we haven't seen a single trophy drop from the rares we killed).

All you need to go hunting in Barovia is a wanted poster - admittedly those are still random drops, but fairly common ones at that - and off you go on a fun little romp in an instance that takes 10-20 minutes. Getting higher rated wanted posters requires you to complete the basic ones first and you're not guaranteed to get an upgrade so there's still some RNG there, but it feels more natural and more like a logical progression system than Chult's randomness.

The hunt target itself again isn't guaranteed to drop much in terms of a reward either, but this is where the zone's tarot card feature comes in, as you can use them to give yourself up to three handicaps per hunt (such as decreased damage output or extra mob spawns), with each one adding a guaranteed reward at the end. Even though Ravenloft has only been live on PC for less than two months, I've already done more hunts in Barovia than I ever participated in in Chult because they are just that much more fun.

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.

Angler of the Soshenstar

I don't know what possessed me this weekend, but for some reason I decided to go to Soshenstar River and do some fishing, something I still hadn't even tried in Chult before then. I didn't know what purpose it was going to serve, I just wanted to do it.

It didn't turn out to be very useful (the fish can be traded for Chultan riches, but over an hour spent fishing didn't really make me particularly wealthy), but by the time I had used up all the lures that I had accumulated while questing, I had managed to catch one of every fish available, which earned me a new achievement and title. I call that a win I guess?

Hunts

I've been holding off on writing about hunts because I didn't even understand how they work for ages. Unfortunately the system is unusually poorly explained in-game. Fortunately Neverwinter Unblogged's guide came to the rescue.

The basic idea of a hunt is that you spawn a mini-boss with a lure and this boss then has a chance of dropping some nice loot.

However, to trade for a lure you need both a trophy and a T-Rex fang. Trophies have a chance of dropping from rare mobs, which in turn have a chance of spawning in various spots on the map where the regular version of that mob usually spawns. So you could find a sabertooth in a tiger spawn point for example. A T-Rex is the rare version of a regular Tyrannosaur, of which there are only ever a couple on the map. Both the regular version and the rare T-Rex are incredibly tedious to kill if you don't have high dps.

So the result is that if you want to participate in hunting, you need to run around the map killing mobs for a chance of getting a rare spawn, kill that for a chance of getting a trophy, and use that for the chance of getting a drop from the summoned mini-boss.

Unfortunately the jungle is an aggravating place to be and the whole system is just one layer of randomness after another. As a more casual player I can only give it a thumbs-down.

Chultan Heroics

In what is quite a departure from previous modules, the Chultan jungle only contains two heroic encounters, and they are both of the big kind that requires a decent amount of players. Considering that Chult is a pretty hostile environment to begin with and heroics tend to crank up the hostility levels to eleven, that means that hardly anyone ever does them. Which sucks when you're still relatively new to the zone and just got a weekly quest to complete a heroic encounter.

Not that I can blame anyone. With these types of big bads you can't just make a start and hope that more people will join in as the fight progresses, and nobody wants to be the first person to run in and get annihilated. (Only someone well-geared and somewhat tanky really stands a chance anyway.) The encounter at Camp Vengeance also features the additional hurdle of having a step where you need to carry a certain amount of supplies from A to B but you can only carry one at a time, necessitating a certain minimum number of players to make sufficient progress before the timer runs out. Though I don't know if the encounter fails entirely if you fail that one step.

My pet tank and I did get Camp Vengeance done once by grabbing a guildie who plays dps and simply making a start on the not-too-deadly first step. Once we reached the supply carrying phase and others could see that there were multiple people working on it and actually getting somewhere, they slowly started joining in as well, and by the end we had sufficient numbers to complete the encounter successfully. Nothing attracts additional players like success, but it's hard to get things off the ground.

Selfie with giant dino in the back.

With King of Spines we got lucky as we noticed a player who was in the same instance shouting about wanting more players to take on the heroic. We figured that since we were already in the same instance, we might as well join in, and the group eventually grew large enough to successfully start and also complete the fight.

I'd love to know Crytic's thoughts behind this change though.

Ecosystem

I usually don't give much thought to whether my virtual fantasy environments make sense, probably because they wouldn't really stand up to closer examination. Could a forest of this size really sustain that many wolves? Etc.

However, the situation in the jungles of Chult is particularly jarring. You can't take two steps without being assaulted by packs of predatory beasts, yet there isn't a single herbivore in sight. Whatever do all those raptors and tigers and tarantulas and giant scorpions even eat? Each other I guess.

Cheap Artifact Gear For Everyone!

I've mentioned before that if you follow an MMO only casually, updates can be full of all kinds of surprises. Both my pet tank and I went all wide-eyed when our Alliance leader told us that there are now craftable artifact weapons and off-hands which are better than the ones that we were using before, even in their most basic green state as they start at item level 415. And the best thing? People are selling them on the auction house for (what feels like) ridiculously little, less than 20k AD a pop!

They probably have some downside to them that makes them less than ideal for min-maxers, but for more casual players like us this is absolutely amazing. I immediately went out and bought a set for every single one of my max-level alts, who were usually still sporting purple versions of their Elemental Evil main and off-hand at item level 390.

New daggers for my rogue.

It's a bit sad to have to start refining from scratch again, but it does feel a lot better with the new refinement system. I'm just not sure what to do with my old weapons now, as they took out the bonus that allowed you to transfer most of your progression from old to new. Another downside is that I'll be losing a lot of nice looks unless I'm willing to completely destroy the old gear to preserve it: For example my great weapon fighter was using a weapon skin from the winter festival, and my control wizard one from the summer festival. Oh well, they will come around again.

In-Joke

When my pet tank and I encountered our first tyrannosaur in the jungle, we initially weren't sure whether we were meant to fight or flee. It hardly seemed to take any damage at first - until we knocked it over, which seemed to temporarily apply a massive damage buff.

"It's Kephess!" I exclaimed.

That probably won't make sense to 99% of my readers, but I wanted to write it down for future reference anyway.

(Boring explanation for anyone who really wants one: In SWTOR there is a reptilian (Trandoshan) raid boss called Kephess, who got revived repeatedly after being beaten several times. Thanks to this, it became a running joke that he's everywhere, secretly responsible for everything etc. In his second incarnation, one of the fight's major mechanics is to knock him down to do increased damage to him. The similarity just struck me as quite amusing.)

Chulty Story

Playing through the introduction to Chult was strangely amusing. My pet tank and I kept shouting at each other throughout. To paraphrase just a few things that were said:

"Oh no, I can see where this is going..."
"There's always a guy like that in your party, isn't there?"
"Oh god, we crashed the ship."
"Ship-wrecked in an RPG - typical!"
"I don't think this one's going to live much longer..."

It's funny to me how enjoyable Neverwinter's story can be in that way. The writing isn't particularly exciting, the voice acting is unprofessional, and the graphics with NPCs who are unable to even move their mouths remind me of the sort of cut scenes that might have featured in an RTS fifteen years ago.

But it's also... so earnest and fun! It reminds me a bit of whenever I visit my Mum and sit down to watch one of her soap operas with her, and even though I never watch them unless I'm on one of those visits, I can always immediately tell what's going on and have a good laugh about how clichéd it all is (while secretly also wondering just how the current episode's plot arc is going to resolve itself).

Log Logic

One change I already love about this latest module is what they did to the quest log. As far as I'm aware Neverwinter has never had a limit on how many quests you can pick up, so it hasn't been uncommon for any of my max-level characters to have dozens of them in their log at any time.

The problem was that they weren't sorted in any way that made sense. Quests from the same area were generally grouped together, but newer quests could be listed before older quests for example, and it was all in a single, long list. Every time I did dailies with any of my guildies, it was a nightmare to figure out who was on which quest and what still needed completing. I eventually pretty much gave up on even trying to consult the quest log at all and mostly tried to rely on the quest-associated map markers.

Finally having things sorted into categories is therefore, while it might seem small overall, a huge QoL improvement for me.

Sunset

You can tell that the devs were excited about Tomb of Annihilation because they changed the character selection screen again! I do like the different lighting it provides now, even if it isn't very flattering for all of my characters... but at least they don't have to be cold anymore.

Also: I created three new characters in less than a year? Dang.

Dino Time!

As a commenter on the YouTube video so aptly put it: "That was extremely informative. Thank you, Mr. Dinosaur."

Whatever else you want to say about Neverwinter, there is no such thing as content droughts in this game. Even four years later, they just keep on churning out those modules at an impressive pace.