Throne Alone

This time the story in Ebon Downs has an ending.

Three years ago, on my last Neverwinter character, the zone story in Ebon Downs ended in something of an anti-climax. After building up to a showdown with the big bad of the zone... I went back to Protector's Enclave, because the dungeon, Throne of Idris, had been pulled from the game years earlier and never put back in.

Well it has now.

It's a good finale, and it's also quite a tough finale. Like Gray Wolf Den in Vellosk, the numbers have been tweaked to make it soloable but the mechanics of the encounters have not. There's a ton of adds in some of these fights, and any player who hasn't worked out how to deal with that is in for a hell of a time.

It's worth saying that these encounters are probably slightly harder for me than they need to be. Whilst I picked up my first companion during the post-Neverdeath info dump, I've taken advantage of the fact that you no longer need to level them up to leave them unsummoned. However I doubt this has actually made much difference to my damage output - this isn't The Old Republic after all.

It's hard to say exactly why I've been choosing to run solo. I often find companions distracting these days, and this is a big part of why I've yet to roll a Mastermind in City of Heroes, even though that used to be my favourite class back on Live. Aside from that, my companion was drawing aggro while I was in stealth and that messed up my mob placement as I prepared to PBAoE them to death on coming out of stealth. Still, sooner or later I expect I will have someone (or something) by my side.

Maybe once I hit 20, which at this rate will most certainly be sooner. After Ebon Downs it was on to Icespire Peak, which is better than I remember. It is very linear, even for this game's levelling zones, but that mattered rather less than the fact that with my Paragon Path selected, my character now plays a lot closer to how I remember. I'm still one or two powers short, but the combat in this zone was fantastic.

Like the previous two zones, Icespire Peak ended with a solo dungeon run, and in this case the mechanics of the first boss fight have been changed up to make it more solo friendly. Strangely, in all three of these dungeons the music is missing - the only instances (literally!) in the game where that's been the case.