As part of our massive preview of Neverwinter’s upcoming module “Ravenloft”, I’d like to go through some more quality of life changes today. On our first roundup I’ve already covered the Character Select Screen, Home Page Facelift, Item Levels, and Insignias, but there’s a lot more to come!
In the first version of this article overstated the nerf to Retraining Tokens. The revised version now more correctly lines out the change. Thanks to dupeks for providing the information in the comments!
Enchantment Visuals
Let’s start with a big one, because a longstanding request will get filled with Module 14. Weapon and Armor Enchantments were a pain for some players, because their visuals could severely mess with a character’s theme. It was basically a hardcoded feature and you had to live with it. Since pretty much all of them feature dominant effects and colors, this even led to situations in which players picked the enchant fitting to the toon’s visuals instead of picking the one that made most sense in terms of gameplay. This fortunately will be ancient history in Ravenloft because you can finally switch off the enchantment visuals in case you don’t like them. Just like for the head pieces the context menu will have an additional option that let’s you turn off visuals.
This feature is also a classic example of stuff that takes time even though the devs really wanted it to happen. Thomas Foss repeatedly stated that it’s on their agenda, but it required the software team to come in and actually rework the code. So it wasn’t something the game designers could do on their own.
Retraining Changes
The next one might be controversial as you could label it a nerf. Retraining Tokens will no longer retrain the whole character, but only either attributes, powers, feats, or boons. Alternatively you can spend 60,000 Astral Diamonds to reset these areas. On the one hand this is great, because you have much more choices and no longer need to click through all powers in case you only want to tweak your boons. But obviously the tokens themselves got nerfed, because respeccing the full character will require four tokens in Module 14. To compensate for this change, tokens will be reduced from 300 to 100 and all single tokens that players already own will be converted into packs that contain three tokens instead.
It’s still a 33% nerf, but I nonetheless think it’s a good change. Retraining Tokens are neither expensive nor hard to get. And realistically you rarely respec all areas of a character anyway, making the new system more flexible and cheaper. Only in some limited cases respeccing will actually get more expensive.
New Scaling Mechanic
Did you know that Uncensored runs the biggest Discord of Neverwinter? Come join our team, streamers and hundreds of players to talk the site and all facets of the game!Neverwinter Ravenloft will feature a more intelligent mechanism that should tackle scaling much better. The current situation is that level 70 toons, especially endgame ones, are completely overpowered when scaled down. On the contrary lower levels have a hard time while scaled up. This is a change that makes sense, but players rightfully fear that it will make the leveling dungeons inside the random queues too much of a pain. Speedrunning through them is a major part of the daily AD generation. On the other hand new players were having a hard time keeping up with all the 70s in low-level content and it’s hard to challenge that the leveling dungeons should more cater to their needs.
That’s the theory, but on preview the new scaling was hardly noticeable. My endgame toons are still rushing through the maps just like before. If at all then you can probably experience a little drop in overall damage, but that’s about it. So this might not be the end of the road as more tweaks could be coming. Now that the system is in place the devs will have an easier time adjusting it on the fly.
Quest Path Prioritization
Last but not least the quest journal will get another upgrade. Quest path prioritization and party mechanics are reworked in a way that you have more control over how the quest path is chosen and what quests show up in the tracker. All tweaks can be looked up in the feedback thread I linked above, but the most important one imho is that you can now not only prioritize quests, but also completely prevent them from showing up in your quest tracker. That way you can hide outdated ones (tutorials etc.) that you won’t likely need any time soon. It’s a well done feature that will mostly benefit new and low-level players that mainly rely on the quest path to bring them to their next adventure.
What’s your take on the mentioned quality of life improvements? Do you like them or should the devs have spent their time differently? Share your thoughts and experience on our social channels, in the comments below, or visit the corresponding thread on our message board!
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The post Neverwinter Ravenloft QoL Roundup II: Enchantment Visuals, Retraining Changes, New Scaling & More! appeared first on Neverwinter:Unblogged.