On the level

I'm tiptoing through a minefield of item level boosts. Luckily, I've got a map.

The post-20 content - and there's a lot of it - is very easy to navigate in Neverwinter. The journal lays it all out, divided into adventures (story arcs) and campaigns, as well as the legacy campaigns, which is pretty much all of the ones I've done in the past up to and including Ravenloft, and also Avernus. The recommended item level is given for each of these, which is extremely useful since I'll be able to use that as a guide for the order in which I get started on them.

Some of the opening quests are gated behind a minimum item level, but others are not. At just over 18K I've been handed quests to start Avernus (IL 26K) and Menzoberranzan (IL 55K!) but I'll be ignoring those for now.

It's not all as clearcut though. Dragonslayers claims to start at IL 18K, but after completing the intro I entered the first regular dragon hunt and saw a message saying my item level had changed. I didn't think much of it until I started the fight and immediately saw that my damage output was way below what I expected it to be. Fortunately the fight is broken up into multiple phases, and after the first stage I had time to look at my character window and saw that I was being scaled up to about 50K Item Level.

To give credit where it's due, this upward level scaling is probably the best I've seen in an MMO - at least as good as that of Guild Wars 2 and possibly better - but while I got through the fight it did take a hell of a long time and I burned through a lot of healing potions along the way. Tweak the raw numbers however you like, it's not taking into account the gear and bonuses I'll actually have when I reach that level.

So Dragonslayer goes on the back burner for now. It'll be fun to revisit ocassionally as I increase my IL, but it'll be a while before it's a regular activity.

At 18K I did have a few other options open to me. Undermountain beckoned (and oddly Undermountain now has a lower IL than any of the content that came before it) but I didn't feel like revisiting those zones, not for now anyway. Instead I finished this run by starting the first of the legacy campaigns in one of my favorite zones in the game: Dread Ring.

I love Dread Ring. It's just so well made, with a layout that allows you to race from one quest location to the next quickly but without losing the feeling of moving through a dangerous place. It's been close to three years since I was last in this zone, and more like five years since it was a regular part of my daily rotation, but it wasn't long before I was riding to my next objective via familiar routes, and leaping off cliffs into the demonic melee below like it was yesterday. Dread Ring is a model of what a daily zone can be - eschewing story and subtlety in favor of a fast moving adrenalin rush. There's not much to the quests beyond kill 'em all, but it's an absolutely fantastically well designed version of what it sets out to be and I love it to bits,

All in all, this has been my favorite run of Neverwinter since my original experience of the game in 2018. I was wary of coming back to it because I felt very iffy about the changes, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how well it works. Yes, there are a few things I'll miss, but balancing the entire game around Item Level rather than character level has been a resounding success. So long as it stays like this Neverwinter is firmly back among my favorite MMOs. Long may it remain there.