I remember a time when I was invited to join a friend's D&D group. This was back in the early 00s, and I hadn't so much as looked at a D&D rulebook in at least 15 years. When I sat down and flipped through one of the numerous rulebooks on the table I realised that things had changed. A lot. I didn't know this game.
Returning to Neverwinter, even after what's only been a few months, can be a bit like that. A character in this game is made up of a lot of moving parts - stats, skills, weapons, armour, artifacts, companions and mounts and all play a part in how they perform - and Cryptic frequently makes adjustments to how it all works, when they're not rewriting parts of it altogether.
Not every change that's made is for the better - looking at you, crafting workshop - but most of the time it works, and it ensures that older content doesn't become obsolete. Just about every piece of endgame content in Neverwinter is still worth doing, and that's unquestionably a good thing.
This time around I return to a revised mount system, and my inventory is suddenly full of free stuff to ease me into the new set up. I'll have to do some reading up on this, and on any other changes I've missed, so that I'll know what to do with it all.
Later. Neverwinter is an action MMO in the most literal sense, and diving back into the game I've put my homework on hold while I get back to what's actually important - running around and killing stuff.
Last time around I finished up at level 68, and within an hour or so of logging back in I hit level 70, so I now have a dizzying array of adventures to choose from. As I said, content doesn't go obsolete in Neverwinter, and at level 70 - the old level cap - it drops a ton of it onto you.
Underdark
Dread Ring
Storm King's Thunder
Icewind Dale
The Cloaked Ascendancy
Jungles of Chult
Ravenloft
That's in addition to all the campaigns that opened up prior to level 70 and which are still ongoing.
Tyranny of Dragons
The Maze Engine
Sharandar
Elemental Evil
There's no shortage of things to do in this game once you reach (what was) the endgame levels, is what I'm saying.
In theory it's all open to me now. In theory. As a newly minted level 70 with an item level of less than 8K most of the 70+ content is out of my league right now. I did make it to Dread Ring (just) but watching the health bars of even rank and file mobs barely move as I unleashed my attacks on them makes me think that I'm not quite ready for that zone yet, and I did well there compared with my initial foray into Bryn Shander, which kicks off Storm King's Thunder.
This is a huge relief to me. When Cryptic raised the level cap from 70 to 80 and recategorised the old endgame campaigns as legacy content I was worried that they'd be rendered if not obsolete than at least much too easy. This doesn't seem to be the case, and that's vital for Neverwinter. This isn't a game like The Old Republic which has enough else going on to distract from mediocre combat. Neverwinter is all about the action, and for that it needs good combat, which the older campaigns are still delivering on.
For now. I'm still curious about how the levelling from 70 to 80 will impact this. Will I find I'm outclassing these campaigns by the time I reach 80? I don't know, but the last new content I experienced in this game was Ravenloft, and I'm looking forward to seeing what came next.
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