Fishing Farewell

Hey, the winter festival is back! I may be feeling a bit meh about the game in general, but I always enjoy this event.

Unfortunately I immediately ran into another downer when I went to do some ice fishing and found that the ice on the lake had been smashed and you are now supposed to just fish there using the same mechanics as in Sea of Moving Ice and Chult.

Now, I like that fishing mini game, but I kind of liked ice fishing more. More importantly, the latter was just a completely different beast from "regular" fishing, a fairly fast-paced mini game that was more about racing across the ice effectively and beating other people to the good fishing holes than about anything else. Now you just stand around and fish for ten minutes.

Also, they trashed all the fishing poles that I crafted last year and are making us start over with a new and crappy pole, because for some reason these things are never allowed to carry over from one activity to the next. Not happy.

Simril Success

Despite of my earlier complaints, I finished this year's Winter Festival on a positive note, by achieving both of the goals that I had set myself initially, which were to earn the seasonal weapon skins for both my great weapon fighter and my paladin.

Funny thing is, I haven't even used the one for my fighter yet, because the one I used to "temporarily" turn her new artifact weapon back into a sword is actually quite nice, so I decided to just save the new skin for whenever I need to change weapons again. (ETA about two years?)

I do love my pally's new look though; I find that the sparkly theme fits the class particularly well. The only thing that disappointed me a little is how small the new appearance makes the shield look, as I always found it quite humorous to see my petite elf disappear behind a ginormous shield wall that she'd probably never even be able to carry.

Fishing for Treasure

Early on while participating in this season's Winter Festival, I noticed that I would occasionally fish up "treasures" during the fishing contest. As treasures are usually what Neverwinter calls vendor trash, I didn't think too much of it.

They weren't marked as vendor trash however, so I eventually looked them up and learned that there is a vendor who trades these for various campaign currencies. He's located on a pedestal behind the daily quest giver in Twilight Tor and has a somewhat unusual-looking face, which immediately made me wonder whether he was modelled after a real person... But I still shrugged it all off - I'm generally fine just playing through the campaigns the normal way.

Then, two days before the end of the event, I learned that ten fished-up Treasures of Tiamat can be traded for one Linu's Favor, the annoying-to-come-by campaign currency that has stopped me from officially completing the Tyranny of Dragons campaign to this day. And this option has been in game since 2016???

I went on an emergency fishing spree on my main, but even with the top fishing pole it took forever to get enough of the right treasures, so I eventually gave up on it again. I briefly considered buying a few sabiki rigs from the Zen store (special lures that increase your chance of getting a good catch), but then told myself that this wasn't much less "paying to win" than just buying full campaign completion.

Maybe I'll remember to start fishing on my main in time next winter...

Twilight Rage

I've been spending some time at the Winter Festival this season after giving it a pass last year and it's still surprising amounts of fun! But the sheer bugginess of the Twilight Run has sent me into a rage more than once.

Okay, level sync getting removed when you collect one of the bonus baggies is just funny and doesn't affect the run itself.

Lag and rubberbanding making you miss objectives is super annoying but hardly new.

However, what's with the gates and the quest bugging out all the time and not giving proper credit? I once managed a run where I only got 10 points for the slalom gates, and no, I had not managed to miss every single one of them bar one.

The quest getting stuck entirely is even worse - most often I had it suddenly stop at one of the rally gates and then just complete after the run is finished, but twice it also managed to bug out at the very end, saying I had failed to reach the finish line and staying that way until I did another full run for zero points (at that stage, even running over a bonus bag would give me nothing) to run over the finish line a second time.

Winter Warrior

The Winter Festival gave me a reason to grind towards a specific goal for once: the icy weapon skin for great weapon fighters (called Sparkling Long Sword of Winter). I tend to not care about cosmetics that much unless I'm trying to get rid of a particular look that I don't like, and this was the case here as well - I hated that axe. It's not that it's hideous by itself, but I just couldn't stand fighting - flourishing, stabbing - with a great-axe all the time. It looked silly.

So this was a great opportunity to get something more stabby and yet still sparkly. Plus, you know... scarves. Finally I can show my "cape" without it getting in the way all the time.

Winter Festival

I decided to check out the currently running Winter Festival event, since - like the Summer Festival - I had never really looked at it before. Like the Summer Festival, it has its own map with dailies and contests that include several non-combat activities which are pretty fun.

My favourite is the race down the icy mountain. I always thought that sliding across that slippery patch of ice in Icewind Pass was funny and that they should do something else with the physics involved in that - turns out that they did! The ice fishing is pretty enjoyable too.