Neverwinter Online: The return of Rothe can Hell Pit

Dipped my toe back into Neverwinter Online recently as the Hell Pit event is back on and has been adjusted back to levels where I can actually participate (unlike Dragonslayer, but that's currently end game so it's fine for now), which is a good sign. It had previously become too costly to be worth doing (because some moron thought the enemies needed to scale for power creep) here's hoping more things are toned down back to fun levels.

I was also surprised to find Rothe Valley had made a return having previously been removed. What's new? Other than the extra dragon area being gone and two new heroic encounters which are pretty tough, it's actually exactly the same as before - right down to the campaign path. They are getting more foot traffic through it at the moment thanks to the "battle pass" going which give some currency from those aforementioned heroics, but once that's done what are they going to do? Close the area again? Yeah, probably.

Neverwinter Online: Dragonslayer

There are some nice freebies that come with this and even more (time limited) freebies with the current Jubilee event that are worth logging on to collect.

Dragonslayer itself is a continuation of the Draconic Rage / Dragonbone Vale which is easily summarized as "there are more dragons that need killing". Thus a group of Dragonslayers have setup shop in a small new segment of the city and are offering dragon hunts which in theory are pretty cool. Especially since you're supposed to get good gear from it, and the item level requirement to participate is pretty low (18-22k). 

As someone with characters on 44-45k item level I'm here to tell you that's a lie. To start off, you must kill two baby dragons (one at a time) who both have 26 million hitpoints. Sure, the fight might not be so hard but expect to be bored for the next 15+ minutes (per dragon). Also, you MUST SOLO THESE to progress.

After these are the adult dragons who you can face with two friends. Now if you have strong friends and are strong yourself this is fine. If you are doing PUGs, good luck. As expected the adults are far stronger than the kiddies and come with new moves, many of which are denial of play abilities which in design terms are the most terrible decisions you can put into a game. In a board game that would look like "skip a turn or skip half your turn" while waiting to participate.

Here, the dragon roars and you are stunned / can't use abilities or attack for 3 seconds. Or it eats you and you can't do anything but take damage for 3 seconds. (Both of which they can spam)  Or you get killed, get booted from the fight, and must wait until everyone else dies (or wins) because you cannot rejoin at anytime. And with fights that last this long, you can expect to be waiting and/or be undermanned for a long time.

Curiously, each fight consists of three phases - between each the dragon flies off and you must chase it to fight a handful of little minions. It's almost like the designers KNEW the dragon fights were so dull that there needed to be something different in between, but alas as it stands it's still a piece of shit garbage content that I can't believe got put to live.

On the flip side, people with already high item levels seem to be enjoying the (5 man) ancient dragon hunts (unlocked after killing lots more adult dragons) which leads me to believe this mod is really targeted at them and not at pleb level players like myself. Anyway, since you're logging in to claim the freebies (right?) give it a try. You'll know right away if this is for you or not.

In my case its definitely not. I'll just wait for the next lot of free catch-up gear should it ever arrive, because if you keep making content for end level players - you'll end up ignoring everyone else. Good luck with that.

Neverwinter Online: Draconic Rage (and Siege lock)

Using the least amount of effort to keep players in game.

If Draconic Rage isn't the least inspired content Neverwinter Online has offered so far, it certainly is the laziest (or thriftiest) development wise. "A World First" is an odd title to this first chapter which has zero story. While similar in format to Echoes of Prophecy where you are trying to fill a progress bar to unlock loot before time runs out, Cryptic has taken the approach of not adding any extra filler in this time. No extra quest boards or NPCs in town to visit. All you have to do is run skirmishes and dungeons.

This is great it you already do that anyway to get your daily astral diamonds as it means your usual grind already counts as participation! For those of us who don't do those however, bleh! The time investment to run those dungeons is annoying, and I'm not sure the prizes are worth dragging myself into skirmishes to clear it. I'm wondering if Cryptic is regretting their decision to kill some of their content because even me - who doesn't play these much at all - finds the handful of skirmishes quite repetitive. I wish they had a bigger pool of variety to choose from, then I remember that they DID.

Just to hammer home the point that they want you to login and stay in for metrics, the latest Dragon Siege event has a notable difference: the "daily" defeat 2 dragons and beat 3 heroic encounters now fails if you log off mid way and forces you to start again where as before I could happily jump between my two characters to finish those gradually as I saw fit. I don't know who keeps making the decisions there, but they are doing a great job in making their MMO steadily inferior to everything else.

Neverwinter Online: Dragonbone Vale

Where Cryptic removes something else!

For those who have been doing the Echoes of Prophecy temporary "campaign" this is the culmination of your efforts! For those that didn't, well - Elminster needs you for a war against the Cult of the Dragon. Or is it just another battlefield in an ongoing conflict? Whatever. The Thayans and silly cultists are trying to raise dracoliches in what feels to be a shinier replacement for Dread Ring, except this time you can cosplay as Spiderman while treasure hunting! Don't worry though, the Dread Ring is still there (for now).

Magic grappling hooks for everyone!

What has been removed was the old enchantment system which went from rank 1 to 15 and needed absurd amounts of work / pay to get to the higher ranks. For those who don't play the game, each character is decked out with around 30 of these. Upon this modules release, congratulations! All those are now garbage! Well at least the ones from rank 1 - 9 which was the bulk of mine. If you have rank 10s and up you can trade them all in for points to get one or two of the NEW enchantments (at rank 1). Joy!?

I can just imagine the guys at Cryptic going "please work hard on ranking these ones up too (because its way more work / pay), we promise not to remove them in the future...", hiding the fingers crossed behind their backs. It boggles the mind why anyone gives these people money with all the shit they pull / remove but hey, as a free to player - I can just enjoy the ride!

NWO: Sharandar Episode 3 - The Odious Court

So that's where the bad smell was coming from.

It's safe to say that this final chapter of New Sharandar is the best, despite the new area being less visually appealing than the previous ones because its basically a swamp. That said, props to the very vertical Grung village which is always an extra pain to code NPC pathing. A few things make this one stand out: first it has an early and fast 25 currency repeatable, which is my  favorite of all three zones since it's literally step through portal, take ten steps over there and fight a boss.

Easy to access and no mobs make it perfect, much like Baphomet's weekly. Next up the repeating tasks are less painful this time around since some of them send you to the other areas. These allow for some breathing room from the repetitiveness. Lastly, the final story instance has some really pretty rooms, which kinda counteracts the ugly swamp it sits in. The finale also makes a good story end, much like Barovia's quest line where you feel you "won", prior to entering any dungeon.

The best area in the entire episode.

Those really are my favorite type of story structures. I absolutely hate stories where everything leads up to a ten man instance because suddenly the same enemies you've killed thousands of are more heroic than you. That absolutely kills the vibe for me. Lastly to keep players around, you can hunt not-so-rare critters in each of the three zones to gain some companion gear which is a decent lure if you don't already have said gear.

All up, not bad - but the release structure for New Sharandar simply sucked balls. Here's hoping it doesn't happen again.

Insight: The final repeatable quest lets you skip straight to the hag fight, which means you don't need to go through the earlier stages over and over.

NWO: Sharandar Episode 2 - The Lazy Devs

Erm, I mean "The Soul Keeper".

Carrying on from the last episode, this elves decided to open a gate to an even SMALLER adventure area with mad redcaps (mad caps) and oni who both raise the ancient dead and corrupt a few of the living. Each week, prepare to grind out around ten repeating tasks which you can only carry two at a time for the most part and are mostly variations of each other (per alt), to eventually encounter a semi-cheating mini boss who can hide and damage you for decent periods of time.

The zone and inner instance dungeon bits look great once again and sure the displacer beasts are nice, but there's almost nothing to do here. Story wise I don't think this would even count as filler. So many poor decisions, such lazy devs. Or maybe not lazy, simply reassigned to Magic: Legends.

The biggest problem is you only unlock the weekly (25 currency reward) towards the end of this campaign. I might have been less negative if it was one of the first ones like in the previous chapter. Anyway, if you ever wanted to experience a beautifully polished turd of a release, this would probably be pretty close. Can't believe we lost the old Sharandar for this garbage.

Insight: Ugh, this is so stagnant and repetitive you may as well do what I did and try out Black Desert Online (or literally any other game) instead.

March 2021 Review: Goodbye Muffin

Just a short one this time as I'm a bit down. Muffin, Jim's pet malamute, passed away yesterday. She was a good dog. :(

Gaming wise, I know I told myself I'd be doing less story posts but I simply can't help it when I play a game like Pillars of Eternity which is what's kept me busy for most of this month almost to the exclusion of everything else! The same goes for the crazy board game known as Cthulhu: Death May Die so expect to see some of that coming up soon.

BLOG STATS

One Year Ago

Like many others I got locked down by COVID. I also started posting about my adventures in Enderal.

Five Years Ago

I started playing Thea and was enjoying foundry quests in Neverwinter Online, most by content creator master Eldarth. Needless to say he long gone since the foundry got shut down, as are his epic creations - much to Neverwinter's detriment.

Most Viewed Posts in the last 30 days

February 2021 Review: Hello and Goodbye Sharandar
Longmire
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion

That's a first, having a blog status post take the top spot. I guess the mix of Sharandar news and a Wordsworth poem is a winner! The other two are understandable as both Longmire and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion are quite popular pieces of media.

February 2021 Review: Hello and Goodbye Sharandar

Where the heck did this month go? Not only did my work load get heavier but I've hit the common problem that occurs when you can suddenly download a whole bunch of backlog games: too much hopping, too little progress. To top that all off, I'm now working on the New Sharandar release in Neverwinter Online. 

Nothing like some Wordsworth to say good bye.

Like Shintar, I'm a bit sad at the loss of Old Sharandar and more annoyed that Cryptic has removed yet another piece of content from the game. Anyone keeping a tally?

So far I've got: Original Sharandar, Original Castle Never, Gauntlgrym PvP (Delzoun vs Luskan), Fardelver's Crypt, Dwarf King Crypt, Foundry, Gateway (where you could send your companions on adventures), language support for Polish, Portugese and Turkish, the old craft system, the hourly events, intergame chat (you could talk to friends playing STO) and arguably all the dungeons in "Tales of Old".

Let me know if you can think of anything else...

 Lose 1kg this month (fail)
 Web comic ("I should just restart")

BLOG STATS

One Year Ago

I was playing through Sekiro and LISA: The Painful RPG while Neverwinter went to hell Avernus.

Five Years Ago

I posted a request to help Louie. Alas, that was a battle he did not win. I was also playing Star Trail and Shadows over Riva while Warhammer: Vermintide and Helldivers kept our co-op game nights busy.

Most Viewed Posts in the last 30 days

GTFO: R4C2 - Pabulum
Mortal Engines
Metal Gear Survive: The Lord of Dust

The GTFO walk through and the Metal Gear Survive boss posts I get. Not sure how or why Mortal Engines is up there. Guess it's more popular than I gave it credit for? :P

NWO: The Redeemed Citadel

Competitive grinding.

Hot on the heels of Path of the Fallen, players are now tasked with helping celestial forces in reclaiming their stronghold which surprisingly simply entails killing a boat load of devils and demons, and occasionally retrieving lost angel gear.

It's not much to look at.

The type and number of rats to kill vary per immediately repeating quest though you will gain more currency by doing the one off weekly challenges (or relentlessly hunting the BHE apparently).

There is a leader board that will show how far from the top 100 you are - all those players at the end will be getting a shiny vorpal enchantment in addition to whatever tier of support/favor reached. Theses are spaced out in denominations of 7000. Having played around six hours, I got 1600 for two characters so... yeah. Guess I'm missing out this time!

Insight: If you are serious about the ranking stuff, you'll need to chase that Avernus BHE down regularly.

Neverwinter Online: Path of the Fallen

Introduces cars to D&D.

Continuing on from the hell-bound Vallenhas Stronghold, players can explore more of Avernus is this mod which supposedly has the blood war between devils and demons raging. What's it like? Surprisingly a lot like Borderlands 2 actually, especially when it comes to the design of vehicles, wasteland and domiciles.Yes. Vehicles. Soul-powered vehicles.

 You get a car, you get a car, everyone gets a car!

It's not as terribly genre breaking as I initially feared and it's quite fun to race around the wastes. They do take it a step further with the radio though. Yep. Hell radio has talk shows, ads, and a lot of heavy metal music. Devils have electric guitars apparently.

What they don't really have is the blood war, instead letting the player base dictate which side "wins" per cycle by just keeping track of the type of mobs they camp. I do like that there are a bunch of quests that you can accomplish without combat though, or easy enough combat to progress the campaign. Big plus for that.

Also, I agree with Shintar that while most of the campaign is ho hum story wise the finale is pretty good. All up this mod isn't great but it isn't too bad either (unless you are trying to win the blood war to get a rare boss to spawn, in which case happy grinding).

Insight: Try to kill cambions first as they summon those very damaging flame circles.

---

Blaugust Bonus: "If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?" -Belghast

Despite it not being too bad, I still would have preferred it if cars and more modern stuff didn't get shoved into the realms of Dungeons and Dragons.

Neverwinter Online: The Rage of Bel

Some like it hot, but this is just confusing.

Since the hell spawn are experiencing continued failure at Vallenhas (and most likely in the Hell Pit), Zariel the lord of Avernus has sent her best general - the titular Bel - and his legions to turn the tide... which results in a ridiculous failure, not just for the demon army but for the programmed design. Every two hours you can enter a dark rift to fight his troops.

That section currently lasts around 10-20 minutes (thanks to today's patch as it was much shorter previously), afterwards it closes and you can fight Bel himself for an hour (there's a handy timer on the top right part of the Avernus map to help you plan your day). The hardest part of his fight is basically not stepping on any spot you or your team have previously stepped on. Melee centered characters need not worry too much, as the idiot will teleport to you if you move far enough away but ranged DPS will certainly have an easier time in his last phase.

Don't like a team? Bel is quite accessible for solo players too. His only "tricky" part is the catapult section, where he patiently stands still while waiting to get shot. If you have a blue flame on your head, you are the one that needs to find a magic rock and bring it to the catapult which is easy enough. If you are in a team and don't have the blue flame, your job is to keep clear of any loading zones and catapults which often means slow lazy circles while evading the sky fire.

Casually strolling with blue boulders while Bel waits patiently.

Oh well, as usual its a bit short on the story and quite heavy on the grind for the new upgradable buff item. There's also a bit of waiting thanks to somewhat moronic design but I wouldn't expect anything better from Cryptic. Thumbs up though for once again jumping straight into the boss fight. I quite like that!

Insight: Load up on some demonic overloads from your stronghold gem shop if you have it to make your life easier. Probably a good idea to have them for the hell pit too!

Neverwinter Online: Hell Pit - Lazy Rogue Guide

Are you not entertained!?

The Hell Pit event is back as a prologue to the next module episode: the Rage of Bel. Since it seems this is going to happen quite frequently, I thought I'd put a quick guide of how I go through it as a "lazy" rogue. By that I mean my free to play build and gear is nowhere near BiS and while I'm currently at 22k iLevel, the event drops you down to 20k anyway so it shouldn't really matter. I'll just be going through the basics here which is enough for me to get by so, let's get started!

The objective in the Hell Pit is to survive a number of rounds which last 2 minutes each. To be precise 2 minutes of devil or demon mobs endlessly spawning until you can wipe them out when time is over. During the first seven days it is 5 rounds. The next set adds bonus rounds with harder enemies that literally turn most of the ground red and eventually you get boss rounds too. Every round a random power up is dropped into the arena. When invoked they each last 30 seconds (other than the Nuke which is one shot):

-Speed looks like a boot. If you don't have anything better then use it as soon as you get it. Mostly worthless, but it fills up your action points fast for daily power spam.
-HP Regen looks like a heart. Another use ASAP if you have nothing else - don't expect the regen to keep you alive.
-Nuke looks like a skull. More useful than the two above as a crowd cleaner, but takes time to channel and aim. Be in stealth when you use this.
-Invuln* is a shield. It is the best power up and one you should save for the later rounds. Feel free to use it if another shield power up shows up.

*I call it invuln as it certainly makes you feel that way. On the bonus and boss rounds though, it'll help keep you alive but you still need to be on your game.

Required "BYO" Gear: Health stones or health pots. Being lazy I don't dodge everything. If you play the game for long enough (and don't go into dungeons - I'm lazy) it gifts you with enough free health stones to have a decent supply. Health pots are cheap enough with gold but obviously aren't as good. Ideally you always want to heal early - around half health you should be spamming that quickslot heal button. And yes, I mean spam. Lag will sometimes miss a keypress that can lead to your demise. Spamming works just fine as there are cooldowns on all those items preventing you from double drinking.

My basic strategy is: kill the ranged guys. You want to drop your attacks on them or in their vicinity. If your powers are on cool down, feel free to stealth/dodge/run away without attacking to simply heal up until you are ready again. Mobility is key here - you are a fighter plane doing strafing runs. You don't want to get stuck attacking in one spot for too long.

Abilities I use (Executioner path):
Sly Flourish - used sparingly as a finisher, avoided for most of the fight as it roots you in place
Cloud of Steel - ranged "pew pew pew" attack. Useful for attacking at a distance, especially when safe inside a smoke cloud
Smoke Bomb - enemies in it cannot attack, making you safe from most melee guys. Ranged foes can shoot into it though so drop this beside the ranged scum!
Blade Flurry - decent damage to the area around you, best used when mobbed within smoke bomb
Path of Blades - AoE attack that keeps going while you move and/or are stealthed. Perfect as mobility is key.
Shocking Execution - when you want something dead, but I rarely use it in favor of...
Hateful Knives - not the best daily power for rogues but what it has greatly is RANGE. Need to get out of a melee swarm or a sea of dangerous red zones? Target the ranged dude half an arena away and watch as you effectively teleport to him and stomp on his face.

I can teleport to the furthest guy behind the mob of cultists with Hateful Knives.

That's really all there is to my method. I'm sure more "pro" players can do it without using any heals of power ups but this way suits me just fine.

Neverwinter Online: Infernal Descent

Hell introduces the Hangry Meter.

With the Vallenhas Stronghold pulled down to Avernus, the first layer of Hell, it has become the staging site of great battles between man-lings and demon kind as well as the best place to hunt a giant gorilla with a mace for a hand. Most importantly it now holds one of the best vendors in the game, Juma, who you will find conveniently locked away in the courtyard, instead of on the jumping puzzle rooftop where he was initially.

For new comers this place is tough! Special attention has to be given to the little pips/dots on enemies too which is their new difficulty rating - what I like to call their Hangry Meter. The more dots, the tougher the fight. As an example well fed Hell Hounds have 1 while ravenous hell hounds have 4. Juma's surprise bags will eventually drop the gear you need to thrive.

Even the blue dragon wants a piece of the ape!

I also quite like that there are a lot of evadable patrolling groups which adds some life to the place and the teleport glyphs save lots of travel time to the heavily modified stronghold map. For squishy characters, remember to use cover as there are a lot of ranged enemies - they won't shoot if they can't see you and they like turning corners blindly. In addition, try keep all fights in a small area to avoid extras from joining in.

Infernal Descent is a tough mod but one that gets my tick of approval.

Insight: If you are under geared, chase the +ape for a bit for the currency to buy Juma's bags. With luck, you'll get the stuff you need in short order. Also, don't be afraid to use zone chat to let people know an ape is on your channel to get reinforcements.

NWO: An Ode to the Forgotten Adventurer

There once was a man who helped those new to the shores of Neverwinter reach the city, but since the retooling of the intro quests he has been removed with Makos taking the spotlight, possibly having gone back through history to change the timeline.

While Cryptic would prefer this person to be forgotten, we will never forget Private Wilbur Winfred Wally uh... Dave. For those who don't know, Private Dave "the Dude" was an amazing ally. He heroically fell to Valindra about 5 minutes into the intro quest and would much later return as one of her officers since he managed to woo the lich despite being dead.

"It is I... Dave the Dude!"

Everyone even remembers his favourite battle cry, "For the Nashers!" which he learned as a member of the Cult of the Dragon. It is a little known fact that he was a member of all the cults, and was a master of disguise, his favourite being a kenku as he mastered their "Cacaaaww!" cry, - even before being transformed into a tiefling when he equipped an unidentified item. As a result, all of Faerun (monsters and gods included) agreed to never have unidentified items ever again.

Wanting to lift his curse our favourite guy began studying magic under an alias starting with M. Marcos or Madros or something, and became a master of all the schools of magic. At one point he even became the Queen of the undead in Ebon Downs. Many look back fondly at fighting him in the Throne of Dave dungeon, which Cryptic has also removed, yet to no avail as it keeps coming back like some olden tales. Dave "the Dude" is now everywhere and everything. He is sometimes a five headed dragon, other times a charlatan named Elminster.

Dave's worst adversaries came in the form of Great Weapon Fighters though, and on more than one occasion he called them barbarians. Now everyone else calls them barbarians too! To train up against this threat, he's practiced their two handed ways and joined the recent Hell Pit event under his super secret alias "Wilfred". See Cryptic, you can never be rid of "the dude", because we know you work for him. The proof is with the Githyanki who still yell "For the Nashers!". I'm sure they learned it from Dave.

Neverwinter is going to Hell

Isn't it already there? Lol.

There's a new event up in Neverwinter Online called the Hell Pit which is likely the precursor to the next module: Infernal Descent (which in turn I assume will be loosely based on Baldur's Gate: Descent to Avernus, but maybe without the Mad Max cars).

You must survive the solo level 80 arena for a few days to be able to buy some nifty rewards, one of which is a legendary mount which is awesome for free players like myself! The bad news is these wins are tracked at the account level, so only one character per account will have enough time to earn it. Also the horses bonuses aren't great compared to other legendary mounts available but hey, beggars can't be choosers right?

Update: Looks like Cryptic made a devilishly sneaky adjustment... now if you want the horse, TOO BAD! Only 1 Token of Achievement will be awarded during Hell Pit. Subsequent events throughout the year will each reward 1 Token of Achievement for minimum participation PER event. 

Yeah, and it's anyone's guess how far apart those events will be time wise... so that's a massive "F-U" to your alts! Nice one Cryptic, showing once again you are the king in stupid design decisions as this has pretty much killed all my excitement for doing this event!

Just to clarify, that's like doing 75 days of work (split up into 5 across the year, without any pre-warning of when they are) in which you will only get paid after all 75 days of work are done. You miss even one and tough luck buddy! No main reward for you!

Oh well, I've survived without a legendary mount this far, and it doesn't look like I'll be getting one from this bullshit either.

Insight: If you are still interested, you'll need 15 wins to earn the "main" token.

Neverwinter Online Uprising: In Space, there is NOTHING

Uprising shouldn't even be called a mod, that's how shamefully shit it is.

The only good thing are the beautiful Stardock zones, which seems to be a plugin to an otherwise Undermountain focused war that heavily reuses previous environments. Apart from that, it's basically a non-event that doesn't even have a graphical representation of campaign progress and leads to a general feeling of not actually achieving anything.

At least everyone can breathe in space!

This is mainly due to the poor setup that immediately throws players into a grind even worse than the Heart of Fire. I should mention there's a new playable race, the Gith, and a new and supposedly really tough trial at the end.  While those don't interest me, hopefully they are fantastic for the people that do - otherwise this whole thing was just a big waste of resources. If they're lousy too then I have to wonder, why do people keep paying for this garbage?

Neverwinter Online: Tales of the Old - Dread Vault

Tales of the Old is an interesting event that revives some of the previously removed dungeons with some updated foes and challenges, all to earn tales currency to buy rewards. Unlike normal runs you are limited on time, unable to use consumables (no heal pots), and have a party wide total deaths limit for starters (because you can make it harder).

I don't have any problems with that, though death is annoying due to the run distance from the campfire but I think that mainly stems from dungeon design - and one of my main gripes about lengthy dungeons.

In Dread Vault your team must work your way down a lengthy cavern to ultimately fight an elder brain. Unfortunately the whole journey is just move forward, kill trash, repeat over and over for more than 10 minutes. Even without the enemies it will take a decent amount of time just to walk from point A to point B.

Prepare for more of the same thing!

While some players like Syncaine enjoy massive instances dungeons, I personally find them to be fucking boring. Sure you have mini bosses before the main villain but that makes what, 20% of the dungeon interesting? And then you are expected to run the entire dungeon over and over? That just reeks of dumb design and I'm starting to see why Cryptic removed it in the first place.

The only place massive dungeons have in MMOs is if they are not instanced at all, so that you are able to randomly encounter other players and not the automatons that are the NPCs. They did this right in the general Undermountain zones.

Meanwhile instanced content works best when it gets right to the point. Tiamat, Demogorgon, and Baphomet (my favorite) all drop you right into the boss fight itself. I'd much prefer a similar event centered on those, though obviously "Tales of the Old" wouldn't be a suitable title.

Better still, just hold a Boss Rush event with the option of soloing. There are enough bosses and mini-bosses in the game to pick from now to make that happen. Anyway, Tales of Old - thumbs up. Dread Vault - also thumbs up, but only for the boss fights. The rest of it is just a waste of time.

NWO: Everyone should be Equal... Equally Crap

While the full version can be found here, this is the short version:

Players - Hey, we noticed that 3 of the available classes are much weaker than the others and much less fun to play probably due to some math bug. Can you please fix them so they match the others?

Cryptic - Oh yes, there is a math bug! We will fix it by making all the other classes weaker and as much less fun to play too!

Me - Way to remove fun and add more artificial challenge. Also, don't you guys ever test stuff before going live? -_-

I like challenging games but only if they are that from the outset. If a game starts out as easy, light, and fun then extremely ramps up the difficulty or has a clear design shift to just make things harder I get very annoyed.

Neverwinter Online: Undermountain

It's a big, deep hole.

You might be wondering why my review of Undermountain is so late since the next module is just around the corner, and the short answer is simply I haven't been playing it much (have you seen my back log list? lol). In fact it took Shintar to remind me about it!

It doesn't help that there were sweeping changes to characters which pretty much killed the enthusiasm of a lot of players. Why be unique when the only way to be efficient now is to be the same as everyone else? Sigh.

Well, that aside, the Undermountain campaign itself is really good. Players find themselves delving into the realms of Halaster Blackcloak using the Yawning Portal as a forward base. The feeling of going down, down, down is well done and some of the later zones are really beautiful. It does suck to run into a level 80 mimic though.

One of the coolest parts!

The mandatory repetitive section comes in the form of expeditions which involves 3 randomly generated maps, a bunch of easter egg hunting and a variable difficulty setting. Surprisingly, these are quite fun too though I must admit I've not been hammering them daily. So content wise at least, Undermountain gets a thumbs up from me!

Insight: If you can stand on top of a chest it is fine. If you seem to always be pushed off, it is a mimic!

Neverwinter Online: Goodbye Foundry

Life support: Off.

Cryptic has decided to pull the plug on the Foundry, which is a real shame since that was the one feature that got me playing it in the first place. It doesn't really come as a surprise though as the Foundry has pretty much been "dying" for years due to lack of official support.

This move also affects Cryptic's other MMO - Star Trek Online and much of what Contains Moderate Peril mentions on his post about this rings true for the NWO side as well, with players abusing the system and Cryptic not doing a good enough job to make the program more robust.

Players have until April 11 to enjoy player made foundry adventures for the last time before they are lost to the void. I'll be visiting my ones and DL's for sure, just for one last goodbye.