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Neverwinter new pics - OH GAWD ITZ HEAVAN

Vaarna_Aarne

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about once per week i have the thought "maybe i should reinstall neverwinter", but then "but it's crap, don't do it", and i don't.
a shame because i really wanted to like it.
I really did like it, but Mod 6 onwards ultimately broke me.

To me the point of no return was when doing that demon invasion campaign dailies and realizing I was just constantly angry and pissed just from idling in the game.
 

A horse of course

Guest
I forgot to mention the tiddy size slider was broken when I made my character. Apparently this hasn't been fixed for MONTHS :terrorist:
 

A horse of course

Guest
I hit level 70. After 60 I did the Elemental Evil intro questline, the Dwarf King intro quests and a handful of the Maze Engine quests, but after that I had to grind through Elemental Evil area 1 and some of 2. Now I've hit the cap the grind in front of me looks insane. It seems as if rather than make old content obsolete, they just keep piling extra dailies on top of one another. I thought about targeting Valindra's Tower from Mod 2 as my end goal as a free player, but it looks to me as if I'm going to need to grind like crazy just to meet the minimum gear score for that (not to mention I tried the Mod 2 intro questline and died to the lvl 72 trash mobs).

Should I just say "fuck it" and end here as a free player?
 

Gerrard

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It's not like you could buy better gear with real cash, they moved to having everything past generic blue drops be bound to account/character.
That being said I don't know what is the go-to gear for fresh lv70 characters nowadays.
 
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Vaarna_Aarne

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Technically speaking that's where the Artifacts and raised enchantment maximums come in. You can have a respectable gear score from regular play, but the truth is that it's those people that shelled out thousands of bucks (or exploited in some manner) who will still have only a bit higher effective GS than you but who will have IIRC three times your stats (and as a part of Mod 6 they practically removed diminishing returns from stats).
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Technically speaking that's where the Artifacts and raised enchantment maximums come in. You can have a respectable gear score from regular play, but the truth is that it's those people that shelled out thousands of bucks (or exploited in some manner) who will still have only a bit higher effective GS than you but who will have IIRC three times your stats (and as a part of Mod 6 they practically removed diminishing returns from stats).
 

A horse of course

Guest
It's not like you could buy better gear with real cash, they moved to having everything past generic blue drops be bound to account/character.
That being said I don't know what is the go-to gear for fresh lv70 characters nowadays.

Technically I think you can - you can get level 405 Dusk gear from Tamalune (sp?) Trade Bars, which come from dropboxes, which are opened with keys, which are bought from the Zen Store.
 

Gerrard

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It's not like you could buy better gear with real cash, they moved to having everything past generic blue drops be bound to account/character.
That being said I don't know what is the go-to gear for fresh lv70 characters nowadays.

Technically I think you can - you can get level 405 Dusk gear from Tamalune (sp?) Trade Bars, which come from dropboxes, which are opened with keys, which are bought from the Zen Store.
Technically, you can get Zen without spending money, unless the game is so dead the exchange has dried up when I wasn't playing. And I'm pretty sure that gear is nowhere near the top of the line (I think I actually had some along with the demon campaign gear).
 

Gerrard

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:necro:

So a while ago I jumped back in to check out what has changed in the game and the new stuff, and from what I gathered the situation was reaching critical mass again, and I thought another "reset" soon was inevitable.
Guess I'm a fucking prophet. Except this time they plan to basically redo the gameplay systems completely: stats, class powers, feat system, paragons...

At the core of Neverwinter’s gameplay are our classes. This makes class balance an important part of how fun our game is to play. Neverwinter has evolved and changed over the years through so many updates. All of that change has moved the abilities of each class, relative to each other, up and down to where now some classes have developed clear advantages and others have fallen behind.

While we had been working towards balance with smaller changes in each update, we decided there were enough changes needed that the pace was too slow to get balance where it needed to be and that it would be best to tackle the majority of the changes in one big push.



Class Names

With this update we are moving away from the 4th Edition D&D pre-defined build classes. Classes will now be known by their core names that are very familiar to anyone who has played D&D.

  • Cleric
  • Fighter – Previously Guardian Fighter
  • Paladin
  • Ranger
  • Rogue
  • Warlock
  • Wizard
  • Barbarian – Great Weapon Fighter is now known as a Barbarian. When looking at the classes in 5th Edition, the Guardian Fighter more closely fit with the typical Fighter role and the Great Weapon Fighter was actually much closer to the Barbarian class with its fighting style and rage mechanics. Barbarians will continue to be able to equip all of the types of armor and weapons they currently can and will still have the powers you’ve come to know and enjoy.

We will be rolling out blogs over the coming weeks which will give a deeper dive into each specific class. This post will be a look at the overarching changes to the classes as a whole.



Feats

While feats are a system which allow flexibility and uniqueness to choose different character builds, how it was implemented and balanced made for a lot of undesireable feats and powers. Often times an entire feat tree wasn’t worth taking.

This was a feature where we examined a lot of options. Ultimately we decided to make some pretty significant changes. The Feats tab on the character sheet is no more and Feat Trees no longer exist.

Instead, each paragon path will have 5 pairs of feats where you get to choose one of the two feats in each pair to customize your play. With this change we can offer more unique choices that have a distinct impact in play instead of sprawling feat trees where the majority of the feats have no real impact on how you play your character.



Paragon Paths

One of the goals of our class rework was to create more distinction between the paragon paths. We started by splitting more of the powers between the two paths, including the new powers added to accompany the level cap increase which is covered in another blog.

Each paragon path now has:

  • 2 unique At-Wills
  • 2 shared At-Wills
  • 5 unique Encounters
  • 5 shared Encounters
  • 2 unique Dailies
  • 2 shared Dailies

And as mentioned above, each Paragon has 5 pairs of Feats where you can choose one from each pair to customize your build.

Currently Neverwinter has role based queuing for content based on the class with only one exception: Paladin. We liked the versatility that Paladin has and wanted to extend that option to more classes as well as expand which classes could be a tank or healer.

Paladin:

  • Tank
  • Healer

Cleric

  • Healer
  • DPS

Fighter (Guardian)

  • Tank
  • DPS

Barbarian (Great Weapon)

  • Tank
  • DPS

Warlock

  • Healer
  • DPS

Ranger, Rogue, Wizard all have two DPS paragon paths.



Power Points

At this point you may be wondering how Power Points will tie into these changes.

Power points will be removed with this update. Ultimately they hinder play, especially while leveling, and put a blocker on players being able to fully experience their characters at end game. Without power points, players will have full access to their powers and feats the moment they unlock them by level and will have them available at their full potency instead of having to upgrade them before they are worth slotting.



Tanking and Healing

We are making significant changes to tanking and healing in Neverwinter. These changes will be covered further in future blogs that discuss changes to underlying mechanics. This will include information on the removal of Life Steal from the majority of sources in the game. More in depth information will be listed in the specific class blogs that have healing and tanking mechanics.

We still wanted to give an overview of the changes and goals as they relate to the overall class changes.

Healing is not much of a factor in the current state of the game. This is because life steal has become so powerful that often times players can self-heal making any minor or moderate amount of damage negligible. In turn this has necessitated boss mechanics that increasingly do more and more damage which often results in either having a full health bar, or being dead.

In order to create enjoyable content, we needed to fix this problem, both to give combat a more dynamic feel where the health bar moves up and down throughout the course of a fight, and to give healing a more prominent role in group play.

Paladin and Cleric now spend their Divinity on powerful healing spells and have new Divinity earning mechanics in their play. Warlock uses their Soul Essence (formerly Soul Shards) and also have new mechanics for earning Soul Essence in combat

Paladin, Fighter, and Barbarian all have a redesigned guard which provides a shield equal to their maximum hit points. Their guard absorbs damage until it is depleted at which point the damage hits the player directly.

For example: a Paladin has 200k hit points. They raise their shield and take a hit for 30,000 damage. Their guard now has 170k hit points left. If they take another hit for 200,000 damage, then their guard is depleted and they take 30,000 damage directly.



Thank you for bearing with me through this long blog post.

Classes are how we all identify with our characters while adventuring in Neverwinter. Our goal with all of these changes is to bring a solid and fun level of balance to the game as well as bring out what makes each of these classes unique while making sure that no matter what class a player ultimately chooses to pick, they have a great experience playing it.

Jared Sears
Lead Systems Designer
Seems like an impossible task knowing Craptic. Might explain why there hasn't been a new class in years though.
Either this will "fix" the game, or kill it for good.
 

Bliblablubb

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Craptic said:
In turn this has necessitated boss mechanics that increasingly do more and more damage which often results in either having a full health bar, or being dead.
I gave up any hope of their "balancing" abilities when they made enemies deal a fuckton of dmg to force players into aquiring new gear. Not because of increased defense stats or something, that stuff simply had +XXXXXX HP as a buffer on it.
And what is their glorious idea how to balance the need for heal, without forcing players into dedicated healer roles? The guard ability now works exactly like that armor upgrade: as a hitpoint buffer.
So all they are creating with this is a second "health bar" that moves down until depleted (and then gets refreshed), but being unaffected by lifesteal. How does that mitigrate the "need for increased damage dealt by enemies"? Plus you can bet your bacon there will be items/abilites that create guard on hit, acting as a new "lifesteal".

Craptic, Craptic never changes...

Also:
Craptic said:
Fighter (Guardian) - DPS
:hahano:
 

Sharpedge

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Sep 14, 2018
Messages
1,061
I was 1 of the players invited to alpha test this new module. In total there were 19 of us who were testing this in advance and in my opinion, the player -> dev ratio of feedback+responses was very high overall. My best piece of advice when looking at this module is to treat it as a new game. The classes will not feel the same or play the same, this is not just a generic reskin of them. Healing does matter, tanking does matter. It isn't just another module of press 1 button and delete the boss. My biggest concern however is that some of the classes now feel bad to play. Not all of them got equal attention, some of them were tested very thoroughly by players and others were basically not tested at all. For example, I spent most of my time testing the Cleric and Wizard. The Cleric overall was represented by the most players in the test group and the Barbarian was only represented by a single person who gave almost no feedback.
 
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Vaarna_Aarne

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So given they're dealing away with Lifesteal entirely now, do they have actual intent to prevent the previous problem that you were either in the critical mass of buffs and healing effects that you took no damage and dodged what would overwhelm even that, or do you actually have some reaction time to health loss now? Sudden death was the big design problem and IMO the biggest gate to random groups finishing dungeons after Mod 6. Been a while since I checked, so these might be changes done after I quit, but did they change Ranger's dodge to work in a sane and normal manner, and did they do something about Warlock's dash being distinctly subpar as a defensive move?

Another underlying problem is really just that the guild system is scaled for way too big groups over way too big timespans.
 

Sharpedge

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So given they're dealing away with Lifesteal entirely now, do they have actual intent to prevent the previous problem that you were either in the critical mass of buffs and healing effects that you took no damage and dodged what would overwhelm even that, or do you actually have some reaction time to health loss now? Sudden death was the big design problem and IMO the biggest gate to random groups finishing dungeons after Mod 6. Been a while since I checked, so these might be changes done after I quit, but did they change Ranger's dodge to work in a sane and normal manner, and did they do something about Warlock's dash being distinctly subpar as a defensive move?

Another underlying problem is really just that the guild system is scaled for way too big groups over way too big timespans.
You have some reaction time to health loss now and as far as buffs are concerned they (largely) no longer exist. I expect there will be major butt hurt about the second point, but having boss and player health pools that are no longer existing in binary states is in my opinion a refreshing experience. I cannot answer for specific changes that were not already addressed in the blog posts due to signing an NDA, but I can address more general concerns. For example, on the alpha at the moment, the Wizard, Warlock and Paladin are currently the classes which perform the best. The Rogue and Barbarian perform the worst and other classes are somewhere in between. This however, will be changing next week (I am not sure in which way). I am not too concerned that they can't get classes relatively even, I think (and I might end up eating my words here) that they can get them in the same ballpark this time. The thing is, the Rogue and the Hunter just feel bad to play and even if they did perform the same as the top classes, that wouldn't make them feel any less crap.
 

Gerrard

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They actually DID fix ranger's dodge so that it had iframes that matched the animation and not 2 seconds after. But that was only like last year if I remember correctly from looking over patch notes.
 

Drakron

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Sudden death was the big design problem

Its fucking Cryptic and you know they wont, they dont playtest their own games and they are still fucking over 4th Ed (that I know barely about) by thinking they know better ... they know jack shit, its amazing how the fuck they even think they can do better at a ruleset that fucking Wizards of the Coast, not that I dont have complains about then but damn, those people are payed to work on ruleset system for a living and then we have "game developers" thinking they can do better by doing retarded shit like "you dont want to select spells, we do it for you" ...
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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ANYONE can do a better ruleset than the bloated mess d20 systems are. In general I'm opposed to actually using the systems of a PnP license, since PnP systems are almost always shit or near-shit.
 

Grunker

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GMing Tomb of Annihilation right now and almost considering reinstalling this to check out what they did with Nyanzaru.
 

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