Endgame Viable

Word has come down that Neverwinter’s “launch day” (June 20) will bring major balance and gameplay changes. This coincides with the 1-month-after-launch massive patch that every MMO always does to address issues that arise after launch. To me, this also seems to be the time when the developer actually implements a lot of the feedback they got from their beta period. They hardly ever change anything but major breaking bugs between beta and launch. (897 words.)

My GWF dinged 36, so I can’t queue for Lair of the Mad Dragon anymore with him. Instead, I queued for the Throne of Idris, which I think is a level 38 dungeon. Idris is a bit easier than MD, in that it is actually finishable. I’ve done it twice, and finished both times (though it took two tries on the last boss both times, too). And it’s very short, which is awesome. (I hate long dungeons. No gaming event should ever take an hour. 20 minutes tops, I say.) However some parts, including the final boss, have something that no previous dungeon encounter has: It matters how you pull the monsters. There are places where you should tackle a few monsters at a time instead of charging into the middle of the room - mainly, the final boss, which is a dude surrounded by 500 smaller monsters. (286 words.)

I see a lot of people on Neverwinter forums complain about the “artificial difficulty” added to boss encounters. The argument they use is that bosses aren’t difficult to kill, but the adds that spawn make it difficult to focus on the boss, so this was a cheap and lazy way for Cryptic to “artificially” make boss encounters hard. This logic makes no sense to me. Most of my instance experience comes from Rift, but I’m led to believe it is typical of what you might find in other raids and dungeons like from, say, WoW. Usually there is a boss which has some “mechanic” that makes it more difficult than just standing there pouring DPS into it. For example, it has a big cleave that will kill anything in the way, or it will drop a bomb that must be focused or the group will wipe, or there are lasers on the ground that you have to avoid, or sometimes you have to stop DPS so it doesn’t reflect back on you, or something like that. (510 words.)

My current favorite class in Neverwinter is the Great Weapon Fighter (GWF). This came as a huge surprise to me, because when I sampled the five classes, the GWF was absolutely godawful in the first four newbie levels, and for a supposedly DPS class, it had terrible, horrible damage output. Even the Guardian Fighter did better, and tank classes are traditionally pretty terrible at damage. Perhaps partially because of the challenge of it, I went back to the GWF to see what it could do. I wanted a pure DPS character for dungeon delves and honestly the Trickster Rogue (TR) gets on my nerves. For one thing, everyone plays it, and for another, it is so ridiculously overpowered at first that I found it insulting to my intelligence. Because it does such ridiculously high damage early on, it has to get worse as you level, right? Whereas the GWF does terrible damage at first, so it has to get better toward the endgame. Such was my thinking anyway. Also, the GWF seemed to have more skills for hitting more than one target at once. (403 words.)

I forgot to mention my theory for why Lair of the Mad Dragon is so difficult. I think it’s to get people to buy resurrection scrolls, plain and simple. When you’re sitting there dead on the floor, there’s a button that says “spend X zen to get life scrolls!” I expect that if everyone could rez after every death, the dragon would be a lot easier to defeat. That being said, I do expect them to nerf Chortlefax at some point. The difficulty increase from even the previous boss in the Lair to Chortlefax is just ridiculous. (97 words.)

Failed again in Lair of the Mad Dragon with a PUG. (I think that was the 6th failure in total.) Group composition was a guardian, cleric, GWF (me), and 2 rogues. No control wizard, but it seemed like a balanced group that should have had the tools to tackle Chortlefax. Unfortunately we struggled through most of the dungeon. I’ve noticed that the only people who queue for Chortlefax are people who seem like they haven’t done it before. The guardian was only 30, and the rogues were 32ish. Me and the cleric were 35, but the cleric acted like he had never experienced that level of madness and was still under the illusion that he could throw out heals like candy. (331 words.)

With apologies to Billy Joel. I had a minor revelation for my Airworld story last night. It occurred to me that things would work out much better if the location of the Council of Life is known when we start out. For some reason I had set it in stone that Naobi was leaving Motiva to search for the Council of Life. Now she is leaving to visit the Council of Life. With that minor variation, some other things fall into place nicely. Mainly, it removes “finding the Council of Life” as a condition for ending the story. I was having major problems with the ending because it wasn’t symmetrical with the beginning. (113 words.)

I’ve read and heard a lot about how difficult the Lair of the Mad Dragon is (a level 34 5-man dungeon in Neverwinter). I’ve attempted MD five times in PUGs now, twice as a cleric and three times as a GWF (Great Weapon Fighter), so I have some thoughts of my own. For comparison, MD is the third dungeon as you’re leveling. The first is the level 16 Cloak Tower, which is simple enough that anyone can do anything and still get through it. The second is the level 24 Cragmire Crypts, which is noticeably harder but still requires little strategy. (1089 words.)

About those Neverwinter Feats. Is it just me, or is it really hard to get excited about spending points that only increase your damage/whatever by 1%/2%/3%? I mean, statistically speaking, there isn’t much difference between a 3% increase and a 0% increase, right? It seems very … anticlimatic. Two clerics side-by-side, one with 3% increase, and one without - you won’t be able to tell the difference. “Woohoo, I leveled up after all that work, now I get to increase my damage from 500 to 505 points! That’ll make all the difference in future combat!” (154 words.)

When I read the Neverwinter forums, I get the feeling that the only people posting have either a) never played anything but PnP D&D, or b) never played any other MMO, or c) have never played in PUGs before. I can understand some people fitting those criteria, but *everyone*? It’s like nobody has ever seen a “need or greed” loot system before, and they think they are the first people to notice it’s not a very good system. Yeah, no kidding. It’s been terrible ever since it was invented. But it sure beats the first come, first served loot system. And people have survived all the other MMOs that have implemented it. I ran dungeons a lot in Rift and got all the loot I needed without any fuss. Doing the same in NW. It’s easier in NW actually, because each boss only drops like 2 possible things. (148 words.)