The Gaming Den

So there's a new race.
To be honest, I assumed the next race in would either be the Assmart (which would be a slightly different Tiefling) or the Dragonboobs (in a game that already has the Half-Orc and the Dwarf).

Nope, they've actually decided to do something different: you can play a Dragon. That is your race and your class, and you start as a Wyrmling, then grow bigger and scarier as you gain levels (here's some justification: dragons grow bigger and scarier with experience, not age. They gain experience with age, but by actually doing something rather than sitting on their fat arses all day, they gain more experience). It's been a month since I've logged onto it, but I might tjeck it out just to see if it actually plays differently from the others and is fun. Pretty sure I have a spare character slot, after all. I imagine the moment I sign in, I'll find hundreds of other dragons wandering around Neverwinter, and Lord Nasher won't be shitting himself in terror at the invasion.

Also there's a 4-day event that involves playing a tabletop game or something, and prizes can include the in-game equivalents of Doritos, Mountain Dew and... I think Red Bull.

Huh. I'll have to check it out as well.

We should all make dragons and guild together under the name The Gaming Dragons.

April Fools?

Ah, I hadn't considered that possibility. I tried connecting yesterday but it just froze and crashed. Twice. I'll give it a shot later, but if "Neverwinter actually does something interesting and different despite being an MMO" is indeed a joke, then that's really disappointing.

Koumei wrote:Ah, I hadn't considered that possibility. I tried connecting yesterday but it just froze and crashed. Twice. I'll give it a shot later, but if "Neverwinter actually does something interesting and different despite being an MMO" is indeed a joke, then that's really disappointing.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news... but aroun 1:18 there's a dragon "riding" a horse. The joke about being OP in PvP and the damage numbers shown really early in the video were good give-aways, too.

Here's a picture of the dragon on a horse

That's a pretty good April Fool's joke, though.
Almost as sweet as the ACTUAL pokemon catch-em-all thing Google did with Google Maps. (Totally collected all 151 >.>)

In that case I am really disappointed. They could have done something different from all the other pay-to-win cookie-cutter games, something interesting, and they chose not to, to instead just make it a joke.

This game is dead to me.

Koumei wrote:This game is dead to me.

They could have been like Google, or, and I hate to say this, Bad Dragon*, and made their April Fools thing something real that's humourous, actual content. Instead they did put a bunch of time that could have been spent doing that into instead making a video with shitty jokes.


*their April Fools thing this year is a silicone d20 half the size of a coke can. I'm really tempted to waste some money on that.

I'm thinking of trying out Neverwinter as a free player, specifically as a wizard. How would it be recommended to build a wizard in this game, as I'd rather not sink hours into it only to shoot myself in the foot as a primarily solo type player?

You can find a lot of build guides online. Neverwinter is actually fairly solo-able, given companions. It's also, however, aggressively linear, and tries very hard to get you to play with a group. Because the MM part of MMO apparently can't cover "doing my own thing in a world full of other players rather than bots and AIs" without someone coming along and shitting over it.

It's fun, it just gets a bit boring.

Welp, Neverwinter just got about another month of my interest. They're introducing warlocks.

Oh, and dragonborn. I'm sure the two don't have any real synergy and, to my mind, demon-fueled caster>>>>dragon pipple, so it's hard for me to care about the latter.

Yeah, I reinstalled (I still have the old password), I'll make a Warlock and dick around a bit until I get bored again.

Dragonborn require spending money, and I'm not really willing to do that. Mind you, it's about frigging time they added Warlocks.

I plan on making a warlock tomorrow as well. I'm currently trying to get a cleric through the dread ring/sharandar campaigns, and doing the occasional raid, so the original campaign is almost like a change of pace.

My question is, since I'll be deleting a character (in that this game doesn't get a single cent from me) how can I most easily transfer Astral Diamonds? I'm currently assuming I have to launder it through the Auction House, but if there's something a little less shady I'd love to hear about it. If the email ads I get are any indication of actual exchange rates we're talking about less than .5 USD, so it's not a big deal either way.

Put them on the Zen market. You can put them up for trade asking for something stupid like 1:1 Zen:Diamond, in which case nobody will bite, change characters, then retract the offer.

Alternatively, do an actual trade for Zen (which IIRC is universal across your account), then change characters and trade your Zen for Diamonds. It may work out better or worse, depending on market fluctuations.

Yeah, basically the above. When one cancels a zen bid the diamonds go into an exchange account, which stretches across characters. I wish I had seen that earlier, and would likely be a little further along in dread ring.

I just started a warlock, which seems like it will be fun. Of the three main paths (DPS/Pet/Heal via DPS) I think I'll mess with the second, since the soul puppets look fairly cool.

What are the main stats for it? I assume Charisma is the primary stat, but what's secondary?

(ie "What race do I automatically pick?")

Con and Int are secondary, so Half/Moon/Sun Elf or Tiefling.

Cool. I'll play around, but seeing as I have Moon Elves unlocked, it seems sort of a waste not to go with them and their sexy pale asses.

I just made my warlock another tiefling. I know nothing about faerun elves, other than that most adventuring drow are manufactured clones of Driz'zt.

Starting this thing up again, I'm reminded of two of my biggest annoyances- the complete lack of first person view (I'd even accept over the shoulder, it's better than "ten feet back and above") and the uniform starting area. This game really needs some more quests so that you're not on rails the whole fucking time

Having got my warlock up to 40, I have a couple of thoughts.

I HATE that they got rid of the cleric disciple companion, and exchanged it with a healer's apprentice. This is entirely due to the sound bites the companions use. It sounds like the HA is saying "I have one word for you: peaches!", and if I hear that one more time I will go berserk.

As cool as having 8-10(not counting crap like ioun stones) spheres fly around you looks, I'm not sure how scalable the early attacks will prove. Pillar of Power is nominally neat, since it looks like a Black Tentacles effect when it triggers, and can boost power of ranged attackers who stand near it beforehand.

Since I normally play solo, and am secondarily concerned with PvP, the damnation track (pet) seems neat. However, this means that feats from 40-50 are largely underutilized, since you need the capstone (permanent soul puppet) ability before they largely matter.

Given how well the temptation path seems to work for group healing, particularly involving bosses without a lot of additional adds, a party of 3-5 warlocks seems entirely viable.

Wait, did they completely replace it, or can you just no longer buy the cleric disciple?

i just checked, to make sure, and one can only currently buy a cleric disciple for ~200K astral diamonds. That is essentially outside casual play (1M A.D.=~$5). I very much wish I had purchased one to pass over when it was just purchaseable via gold, since it's the only free-to-play healer.

Does anyone play this anymore?

I don't.

Don't think so - once you hit a certain point, the game stagnates unless you do their clunky guild thing (assuming you're into PvP) or pay loads of money for top-tier equipment and do the big-ass dungeoncrawls and boss fights.