The Protector's Speech

I wrote about the Protector's Speech skirmish last year. I've been running it on all of my alts again this year, not because I particularly care about any of the rewards, but because it's fun.

Most runs are smooth and very quick. I don't know if Cryptic's matchmaking is actually that good or whether it's just luck, but almost every run I get into has at least one guy in amazing gear who smashes everything in seconds while everyone else can more or less tag along. It's even more pronounced this year since they didn't level the skirmish up to 70 but are instead scaling max-level players down to 60, which makes them seriously overpowered compared to the mobs.

I only had one run that didn't go so well, where my great weapon fighter in her paltry greens had to slowly solo most enemies because the rest of the group seemed to spend most of its time milling about it confusion on the other end of the map. We missed all the bonuses by a mile. When we left the instance, I noticed that two of the other group members were level 11 and 13 respectively, which explained a lot.

For fun, I recorded one of my runs with all sounds turned off except for the NPC voices, so you can actually listen and pay attention to Lord Neverember's speech. Enjoy!

Protector's Jubilee

Neverwinter currently celebrates its one-year anniversary with the Protector's Jubilee event. There is a skirmish associated with the event called "The Protector's Speech". Before running it for the first time with my pet tank, I joked that it was going to consist of us standing around for fifteen minutes just to listen to Lord Neverember talk. Of course this didn't turn out to be true; you actually have to repel a series of random attacks on Protector's Enclave. (It can't be very well protected with all these random baddies showing up at once...)

However, Lord Neverember does hold a speech throughout the whole thing, unperturbed by all the fighting behind him. It takes over ten minutes and is therefore probably the longest single piece of voice-acting I've encountered in an MMO yet. If you do the associated daily quest for the wizard Elminster, he quips that Lord Neverember tends to be quite long-winded. Too bad nobody is actually going to have much of a chance to listen...