Difficulty & Dragons

There's never a shortage of players waiting to take on Charthraxis in Neverdeath, but that's not always true of the later dragons. With no one else around I tried to take on Venfithar in Rothe Valley solo, and did get him to half health before being overrun when the nearby cultists started to respawn.

I'm reminded of a time on a previous character when there was only myself and one other player in Rothe Valley for that fight. I'd say 'we' won, but really it was the other player - a well geared level 70 - who did it, being so in control of the fight that they even took time to rez me midway through it.

Win or lose though it's a terrific fight. Neverwinter does exceptionally good boss fights – interesting, challenging and always driven by a suitably exciting soundtrack.

So the boss fights are challenging, but how about the rest of the game?

At level 3 rogues get an encounter power called Blade Flurry. It's a fast animating and hard hitting PBAoE that is very good at dealing with lesser mobs. If you cast it while Stealthed it has a wider AoE and no cooldown, which means you can fire it off twice in a row and be confident that the second attack will kill anything in your immediate vicinity that wasn't already dead from the first attack.

For the first thirty levels this was so overpowered it felt less like a combat ability and more like a developer console command – press X to delete Mob. At times I found myself not using it because I wanted to let a fight last long enough to enjoy it.

This changed around level 35 with the second half of Ebon Downs, when I started to die enough to retreat back to Helm's Hold and level up a little before returning. Since then the difficulty has went up and down from zone to zone – I don't think I fell even once in Vellosk or Pirate's Skyhold, but Icespire Peak and The Chasm were a different story.

As is Rothe Valley, where I've died a couple of times to mobs below my level. Not my best or most focused play for sure, and the tight confines of the zone's narrow streets and narrower tunnels are a challenge for a class whose primary mitigation is dodge rolls. Mobs are hitting harder and dying slower. Stealth > Blade Flurry > Blade Flurry is my standard opener and it's still effective if nowhere near as devastating as it was.

So the game definitely is harder than it was before Undermountain, and my only criticism of that – in itself – is that it could kick in earlier on in the levelling experience. Most MMOs take the gloves off at some point, and they usually get more interesting when they get do. Most also do it a lot sooner than Neverwinter does.*

*It's often around level 15. That's when you start needing enhancements to deal with diminishing accuracy and increasing endurance usage in City of Heroes. In Secret World Legends it's when you leave Kingsmouth and start to encounter faster and more varied enemies. In Fallen Earth it's when enemies with actual guns start to show up.

So it is harder, but is it too hard?

I have more experience of playing a rogue in Neverwinter than I have of playing just about any other class in any other game, and if I'm dying to levelling content on this character then I can see why people say it's too hard. I've gone back and forth on this one over the last couple of days but for now I'll say no, I don't think it is.

I've said before that I consider the late 90s my formative gaming era, on the PS1 when death was common and save points were rare. Some of that was fake difficulty – you didn't die because the game was difficult, you died because the controls were imprecise or unresponsive or because the third person camera wasn't able to keep up with the action* – but some of it was by design.

MMOs have always leaned toward the lighter end of the difficulty scale than singleplayer games (new or old) and that's not surprising. The further back in gaming you go the more you'll find single player games that are willing to stop you dead if you're not smart enough or fast enough or lucky enough to deal with whatever it's just thrown at you. This isn't something MMOs are going to do since they need players to keep coming back – month after month, in the classic subscription model – rather than quitting in frustration, so the only time an MMO will make content hard to complete is when it's being stretched out until the next content update comes along – i.e. endgame dungeons and raids.

The key difference between an MMO and a singleplayer game is that 9 times out of 10 in an MMO you can level up until you're able to simply brute force your way through whatever has been holding you back. It's like saving all the ammo of your best gun for a boss fight, except in an MMO you can also go and grind out more ammo, or an even better gun, and you can always do that.

I can't say Neverwinter is too hard now, at least in the 1-60 levelling experience, because there's basically nothing that I or any other player can't beat by levelling up. Indeed it's more difficult to stay on-level for a zone than it is to out-level it with the speed of levelling in this game.

I've died 17 times in the last 12 hours but most of those have been due to me consciously seeking out difficult encounters by entering zones I was barely on-level for or soloing dungeons designed for 5 players. When I do die to on-level enemies it only makes me think more about what I'm doing, and be more alert to my surroundings and to the enemies I'm facing.

That's 1-60. Whether or not I'll think the same once I hit the level scaled campaign zones remains to be seen.

*I think that's part of what I love about MMOs. They don't actually play like the third person action-adventure games of the PS1 played. They play like I remember them playing.