I don’t have a lot of personal free time. I spend my morning and early afternoon working, which admittedly does include playing some video games [which is awesome]. My afternoons and evenings are, generally speaking, filled with live streaming. That’s most of my evening, and that’s fine because I enjoy doing it. But we have a pretty strict schedule, and I can’t always just stream whatever I want because we’re a team. That and the other half of the team has to catch up, as far as Neverwinter is concerned! And that’s the focus of today’s piece: Neverwinter. It’s a game I’ve really grown to enjoy. I love Forgotten Realms/Faerun anyway and have been playing D&D since the late 80s/early 90s. I’ve been trying to gear up a Greatweapon Fighter, my Drow. That’s where I’ve run into some issues. Well, not issues, but learning the ins and outs of the game. I’ve missed a lot of content. So many of the modules are things I have not done since I’ve only been level 70 for about a month or so. So when all of this stuff was regular content, I was not playing, or just dicking around at a low level.
So I tried to do the Cloaked Ascendancy module because it was the latest content at the time of me hitting 70. My… gear was nowhere near ready for it. I’m in a pretty good guild and a pretty good Alliance, and so we grouped up and I unlocked the River District. Alas, I can’t solo anything in that area. Most people have told me that you don’t solo that stuff, you group for it. That’s where I guess I run into my first issue. Lots of people in my Guild/Alliance, but I don’t really know any of them, so I have a hard time asking them for help. I run into the roadblock of “I don’t want these people to think I’m terrible at Neverwinter, or that I can’t do anything without help”. I realize that that’s counterproductive to being in an MMO, but I can’t help feeling like that. So I did ask for a little help with advice in getting situated, and starting to move forward, and figured out a few things. So what have I done? Instead of trying to do Cloaked Ascendancy and immediately run towards Shroud of Souls, I have learned that that’s just not feasible. I’m going to be behind probably the rest of this year, I think. I don’t really have the time to do all of the dailies in all of the modules every single day. Lots of MMO playing each day hurts my hands and wrists, due to my desk not being all that comfortable. So I have to really plan out my day!
So my result was I picked two or three of the modules. Stuff that’s pretty low on the item level requirement, that I can just bulldoze my way through. I do the dailies for these in the morning, or afternoon, whenever I have the time with the goal to acquire Boons. Those are the source of power. Boons are my goal. After talking to a lot of long-time players, those ought to be my goal before I worry about what’s current. It’s going to take some time, and while I don’t have a lot of it, if I budget just a bit of time every day, I can move ahead in a decent amount of time. I wanted to try and level something else, but that absolutely has to be on the backburner now. My Great Weapon Fighter and her adorable little Ioun Stone take precedence because time spent leveling something else is time spent not getting better at the game. Speaking of Ioun Stones, that’s another thing I learned: How useful certain companions are over others. Companions that offer stat buffs to your character, those are insanely important. Just because I want to do Shroud of Souls doesn’t mean that I can’t. All I’m going to gain by forcing my way through Cloaked Ascendancy in my current state are more hurt feelings. So the plan now is to go area by area, gaining the Boons for each zone before I move on. For now, it’s Shandalar and the Maze Engine to see how I handle them. The Boons as a whole are incredibly potent and are a must-have for progression. I love Neverwinter, and I do appreciate that it’s not easy. I want to cover the game more, but to do that I need to really explore the world. I need to really get a feel for the day to day. But it does come highly recommended from me; there are tons of things to do in Faerun.
