The mobs in Chult are level 70, but the recommended item level is 16K, which is more or less where I was upon finishing Undermountain at level 80. Character level or item level - which actually matters?
In some MMOs - perhaps most of them - character level is all important. This is most obvious in combat, where it's mainly a question of how much of a disparity thee can be between levels before an encounter beomes unwinnable for the lower level combatant. Some games are more forgiving than others - I've killed mobs way above my level in Lord of the Rings Online and Fallen Earth - and the dividing line does become more blurred at higher levels, and especially at max level, when build and gear can have a big impact.
In Neverwinter, in Chult, the 10 levels of difference between my character and the mobs I'm facing feels essentially meaningless.
(Probably. I can't draw a direct comparison as I didn't enter Chult until after I'd hit level 80. Would my experience have been different if I'd entered at level 70 but still with a 16K ilevel? Perhaps, assuming it's reasonably possible to attain that item level at 70.)
It does beg the question - yet again - of what the point was in raising the level cap in the first place. It's something that Neverwinter does only rarely, unlike many other MMOs where an increase in max level is a given with every significant expansion to the game. In this game I've always felt that item level does a better job of offering meaningful endgame progression - seeing as it ties in to a wide range of advancement options rather than being linked solely to accrued xp.
Still, I'm neither a Cryptic dev nor a well informed number cruncher, so I'll concede that perhaps there was a good reason to raise the level cap to 80, even while I'm sitting up here in the cheap seats catcalling over how it worked out. At least these last two campaigns* haven't been as diminished by the increase as the others before them.
*There's a couple of campaigns I haven't touched upon during this overview, due to them being really more akin to extended story arcs or side stories.
Jungles of Chult
There's an argument to be made that aside from the story beats there's not a lot to Jungles of Chult. It's an impression that's underlined somewhat by coming to Chult directly after the more involved River District.
Like Cloaked Ascendancy this campaign has a fairly long series of story quests before getting into the dailies, including a fun intro sequence. It also changes up the campaign formula - as they all do, to Cryptic's credit - and mostly eschews Heroics in favour of repeatable instances and monster hunting.
We're deep into pulp adventure territory here, with jungles and lost cities, witch doctors and dinosaurs. Soshenstar Rver is at its best when you just go with the flow and let the bouncy, energetic music sweep you along the dense jungle paths, getting into fights that quite often spiral into frantic brawls with multiple groups of mobs due to the thick foliage making it very easy, while fighting one group, to stumble into a second.
Roaming Tyranosaurus Rexes add to the unpredictability of the zone, as do the Allosaurs, which appear to have an unusually high aggro radius and come out of nowhere to catapult the unsuspecting adventurer into another group of mobs before piling in themselves.
Soshenstar is a great looking zone, and there's some excellent and atmospheric lighting in the underground ruins that make up many of the instances. The mobs are almost all new as well, with the Batiri goblins stealing the show as much as their Redcap cousins do in Sharandar. This game does great goblins.
As I mentioned above, Chult has a recommended item level of 16K, and since I'm currently sitting on about 16.5K this zone is a good fit for me right now. I've died - mostly to ill-advised attempts to solo T Rexes - more during this campaign and the next than in everywhere else I've been over the course of this 24 hour run combined, and I'm more than okay with that.
Perhaps Chult is style over substance, but it's such good style it hardly matters.
Ravenloft
Curiously, although it followed on from Jungles of Chult, this campaign now has a recommended ilevel of only 14K - 2K less than its predecessor. Even allowing for that Ravenloft isn't as tough as Chult, and while there are a few tough opponents in Barovia - the Honor Guard are a lot deadlier than I remember them being - it has a more open layout that makes it easier to control what you're fighting than in Soshenstar.
Ravenloft - based on the legendary D&D adventure of the same name - plays up its gothic setting for all it's worth. The voice acting in Neverwinter, and the writing, usually leans more toward functional than anything else - this isn't Secret World Legends or The Old Republic - but in Ravenloft everyone is having a great time indulging in lurid eastern european accents that would be right at home in a Hammer Horror film. It's the kind of genre mash-up that D&D lends itself to far more readily than some other fantasy settings, and it works very well.
The music - as always - is terrific, with particularly good themes for the Hunts, which are one of the highlights of this campaign. This is where the zone layout - which is even better than that of Dread Ring - comes into its own, as you chase your quarry from one location to another across the entire map in an attempt to finish it off before time runs out. It's exceptionally well done.
Throw in a day/night cycle - unusual for this game but how could you do a vampire themed zone without one? - and Ravenloft is undoubtedly one of the most atmospheric of the campaigns, and equally undoubtedly it's one of the best.
One thing that returning to these campaigns has brought into sharper focus is just how underwhelming Undermountain was. It's not the worst module - that's probably Uprising* - but, quite aside from the problems that have arisen from raising the level cap, it comes up short in comparison to most of what came before it. A return to linear levelling zones is a step backward from the innovative designs of the campaign zones, and like Elemental Evil before it once it's done it's done, and there's not much to be gained from returning - as shown by Uprising's rather strained reuse of these locations.
*On the other hand I've never done Heart of Fire/Acquisitions Incorporated, and from all I've read and heard of it from other players it's probably no better than Uprising. At best.
It's the sense of natural progression that I miss the most. There was a genuine sense of achieving something when, after spending time in Dread Ring and Well of Dragons, I was able to move on to Bryn Shander and Icewind Dale, and from there to the River District and eventually onward to Chult and Ravenloft. Now all of this content is dropped into the player's lap at once, and the experience is rather like being given eight of your favourite films to watch, only you have to watch them all at the same time... and several of them are stuck on fast forward.
Anyway, I've spent a fair amount of these last two runs of Neverwinter talking about the ways in which Mod 16 misfired, so this can be my last word on that. When I next return to this game I'll delve more deeply into Infernal Descent, alongside further progression through the older campaigns as the mood takes me.
For all that I said I was going back to these campaigns while I got a little more geared up for Infernal Descent I haven't actually raised my item level by much these last few days. Completing the campaigns is an essential part of powering up a character, but it's not a fast part - even if it is faster now than it used to be. There are far more efficient ways to gear up, and these mostly involve the dungeon/skirmish/trial queues, which I've not been spending much time in recently.
(It also involves the auction house. A lot. Also lockboxes. Arguably a lot. I'll get more into all of that some other time.)
So I'll still be under-geared for Infernal Descent, and that's fine by me. My best experiences of Neverwinter have often been when I've been pushed to the limit during my first few hours in a campaign zone, and only gradually coming to a point where I can handle everything that the game throws at me.
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