New Sharandar Episode 2

This week saw the release of the second sub-zone of New Sharandar. Mostly it's more of the same slightly awkward questing, but they changed the tuning now so that things are actually somewhat hard to kill again.

Also, for some reason it's apparently crash-tastic right now. On our first attempt at the new large heroic encounter as a guild group, the game crashed for four out of five people simultaneously, and we went on to suffer more crashes throughout our play session.

Trot

About two years ago, I made a point of doing the Siege of Neverwinter event on my paladin to get her the Neverwinter Champion's Charger, an armoured horse mount that, among other things, stood out for its funny walk. Instead of galloping like most horses, it ran at a very fast trot, which was not completely unique - the Jubilee Parade Horse uses the same animation - but rare. It made the rider look a littlie bit uppity and just a tad ridiculous, which suited my pally just fine.

Well, image my horror when I had to discover this week that they apparently patched that out! Now my charger gallops just like any other old horse. I am disappoint. What an odd change to make.

Experience Overflow

Overflow experience is a feature that I've liked from the start, however at level 70 it used to take quite long to level up. At 1,785,000 XP a pop, it took me quite a few play sessions to level up even once, and for that much effort the rewards often felt lacklustre.

Since Lost City of Omu was released, I noticed that I was suddenly levelling up much more quickly. At one point I managed to get three level-up rewards in a single play session! A quick Google search revealed that as part of this latest update, Crypic smoothed out the XP curve from 60-70, which apparently also reduced the XP requirement to level up at 70 to a measly 100,000 XP. That's less than 6% of the old requirement!

And I'm absolutely loving it. It makes playing at max level feel so much more rewarding, even more so as you have a chance of getting the 30,000 rough astral diamonds reward multiple times a day if you're lucky. For me that's a considerable cash flow addition!

Of course, knowing Cryptic's modus operandi whenever it has been too easy to earn AD in the past, I expect that this will be nerfed again soon, but I'll definitely enjoy it while it lasts.

Injuries And Mending

If you die or step into a trap in Neverwinter, unlike in many other MMOs, you don't accrue repair bills on your gear. Instead you suffer a growing amount of injuries, which - depending on the exact type - can have effects such as slowing your run speed or reducing your maximum hit points. If you are past a certain rank of VIP, you become immune to injuries. Otherwise, the only way to heal is to use an injury kit from a vendor or to stand next to a campfire for a certain amount of time.

This relatively minor setback can still be amazingly annoying to the casual player, as you may forget to buy kits from the vendor and find yourself unable to treat an injury out in the field, or - despite of gold being virtually useless as a currency for anything else - you might balk at the expense for the kits and waste a lot of time standing around near campfires to save money.

Recently however, I was pleased to find that the amount of time required to heal an injury "naturally" by the fire was radically slashed from 3 minutes to 30 seconds. This is a great quality of life improvement for non-VIPs. Where 3 minutes pretty much meant an AFK break, 30 seconds are as good as over by the time you've even had time to get your bearings after resurrecting at the campfire, meaning that you can get right back into the action.

Gear Deluge

Two problems I have while playing Neverwinter as a casual player are that 1) my gear is never all that great (I'm still not even allowed to set foot into the dungeon that was added in the last module because my gear score isn't high enough) and 2) I'm not always up to date with what's new.

Both of these reared their heads yesterday when I took a look at the gear vendor in our guild stronghold and was pleasantly surprised to find that he suddenly (?) sold gear that was better than almost everything any of my characters were wearing, for the low price of a few thousand guild marks per piece.

Fortunately I had a whole bunch of said marks saved up, meaning that I could kit out my cleric, my rogue, my great weapon fighter and my wizard in new armour all at once. I'm excited to try out their new gear sets to see how much of a difference the power increase will make.

Admittedly I was less excited by the new looks - I think wizard gear for example looks terribly gaudy most of the time, but fortunately it's easy enough to just paste the look of the old set onto the new one. Some of the new stuff doesn't look bad though, just different. For example my fighter's new winged helmet makes her look a bit like Lans from the Maze Engine in my opinion.

Campaigns = Quests

Remember last year, when I wrote about a change to the campaign window I didn't like very much? They actually managed to make it worse!

With the latest patch, campaigns are now just another tab in your quest log, which means the campaign window is still as cluttered as ever, but even less informative now. I immediately got confused when I wanted to progress the Tyranny of Dragons campaign on an alt, and it suddenly showed as "0% progress" and with a padlock on it even though I was a fair bit into it already. Just no.

It also kind of makes you think about what actually makes different types of content stand out. I mean, what's the real difference between a quest to kill ten rats and a basic rat killer achievement other than presentation? Treating the campaigns as just another bunch of quests somehow makes the game feel poorer in my eyes.

Counterproductive

In most MMOs the release of new content is a time to celebrate and to get back into the game if you've been away from it for a while. In Neverwinter, last week's release of Sea of Moving Ice has just made the game (temporarily) completely unplayable for me. I get disconnected almost as soon as I log in, and if I somehow manage to stay on for a little while, I suffer thirty second lag spikes and rubberbanding up the wazoo, making it unpleasant to impossible to even do something as simple as a couple of dailies.

Maybe I'll actually get to check out the new content in a month or so.

Endgame Drama

Via Neverwinter Unblogged I found out that there's been drama about an upcoming change to endgame gearing. Basically players require keys, which (among other things) can be bought from the Zen store, to unlock the reward chests at the end of a dungeon run. The rewards in these are random, and currently you have the option to decline the reward and retain your key for the next chest in hopes of a better roll. This will be changed so that the random reward is instead forced on you as soon as you decide to open the chest.

I honestly have no feelings about this because I'm too casual about endgame in Neverwinter to ever have worried about this kind of thing. (When I get to a dungeon chest, I open it and take the rewards no matter what because who knows when I'll see the next one? I always have way more keys than I'll ever need.) But it reminded me of the current SWTOR outrage about the planned changes to endgame loot in Knights of the Eternal Throne, which will also suddenly leave people at the mercy of RNG.

It's strange to see to see a similar situation from the point of view of an uncaring casual player, and makes me once again wonder about the respective sizes of the more outspoken (and often angry) parts of the player base.

Life After the AD Changes

Cryptic implemented the announced changes to the leadership profession and to astral diamond gains a little less than two weeks ago.

The leadership changes were a typical Cryptic hack job - they literally just removed astral diamonds from all the missions that gave them as a reward and didn't replace them with anything worthwhile. (I think some of the missions had their XP output increased, but who does leadership for the XP?) The result is that there are a lot of high-level missions now that are very much not worth doing as they simply offer no worthwhile reward whatsoever, while often taking twice as long as comparable low-level missions. There's also at least one rare mission that does still reward AD, which might have been an oversight.

On the plus side, this has inspired me to start levelling some other professions which I never paid much attention to previously. I'm not sure if anything good will come of any of it, but if nothing else it might allow me to unlock another profession slot.

The demand for astral diamonds on the ZAX has remained high, so that one Zen is down to being worth less than four hundred AD by now - never thought I'd see the day.

At least Cryptic took the effect on the economy into account fairly quickly and drastically slashed the prices of marks of potency, which are one of the main astral diamond sinks in the game (they are an expensive reagent required to upgrade high-level enchantments and gear).

I haven't done any dungeons or skirmishes in a while, so my max-level characters are down to an astral diamond income of 3000 per day, which is exactly what they get from invoking six times a day. For the moment that's enough for me since I don't have any major outgoings, but I don't know what I will do when/if the day comes where I find myself running out of in-game currency.

Happy Patch Day

The new Strongholds module officially launched yesterday. Cryptic has a very old-school approach to patch days, which is to say that the game never comes back up in time or actually works when it's supposed to. First they had to keep extending the scheduled maintenance, and then when the servers finally came back up, they immediately crashed again.

The game also has this weird thing going on where the launcher doesn't actually seem to do nearly as much patching as it should. Which is to say that the game told me it was fully patched up and ready to play, I logged in, and the first loading screen took ten minutes while the game was telling me that it was patching another 1100 files... better not be in a hurry to invoke!

More Invocation Changes

When they changed the invocation system a couple of months ago, one of the new perks of the multiple invokes per day was that one of them would grant you a refinement stone of some kind. What was funny about this was that it was initially randomised which kind of stone you would get, but then you would get the same stone every day, forever.

The result of this was that if you were lucky and got a useful stone the first time, you would continue to get something useful every day. This was true for my cleric and my rogue for example. If you were unlucky, you might end up like my great weapon fighter, who has a pile of over fifty stability stones (bound to character of course) and no stability artifact to use them on. This system seemed rather odd and like it was probably bugged.

This seems to have been confirmed with the latest patch, since they "fixed" it now so that invoking grants a goodie bag instead, which will then contain a random stone. This is good news for my great weapon fighter, but bad news for my other characters, who now suddenly have a chance of getting something useless. Worse, since you can now get something different out of a whole selection of useless items, it's going to hurt your inventory space, and much worse than those 50+ stability stones ever did.

Also, never one to leave out an opportunity to monetise, Cryptic seems to have programmed the system in such a way that you also get a coupon for the Zen store from every single one of those goodie bags, which I find quite annoying. I don't mind finding them out in the world on occasion, but having multiples of them dumped in my inventory every day seems kind of... pushy.

I know it won't happen, but I kind of want that bug back.