Game Rants 3: Neverwinter: Part 3: Endgame

Endgame is when you hit 60, right after all the leveling content becomes extremely hard to solo with the stock level 15 companions (yay). I put in the majority of my time here before running out of things to do and quitting.

Part 3: The End Game
Pros:

• Lots of dungeons to do via the inclusion of epic difficulty.
• PVP gear is easy to obtain, so it doesn't devolve into "full pvp geared player crushes noob" for too long.
• Zone events become very much worth doing as soon as you aren't farming mobs to get enchantments. This gives you some modicum of reason to go back to the last 3 zones.
• Astral diamond acquisition becomes solely a game of playing the auction house (also a con).
• Combat is dynamic, if limited. PVP engagements can be skillful, but they can also be painfully RNG (so also a con).
• Professions and worshiping are long run, low commit engagements to keep people logging in.
• Gearscore requirements on epics mean you won't get undergeared players ruining runs.

Cons:

• Weapon / Armor enchants are purely pay to win. With 1% success rates, but a Greater Tenebrous enchant adding upwards of thousands of DPS to your output, more than any blue -> epic upgrade, and the extreme rarity of any weapon or armor slot enchantment, you end up with absurd AD prices on the AH that normal players can't realistically obtain. 
• In PVE, there are only 5 mans. The queue system still doesn't insist on a healer (even though they are mandatory) so you pretty much have to make premades or take a hella long time queuing, getting borked group compositions, and requeueing again. Gauntlgrym should be out this month, and fix this, so it isn't that bad.
• What is bad is that every single PVE encounter with a number of exceptions I could count on my fingers is exactly the same, even at epic difficulty. Don't stand in red areas,  constant add spawns, with boatloads of adds at 75 / 50 / 25%. Repeat. That is it almost every single boss fight. The PVE is very flat in that it mechanically is rote.
• Like in every other freaking MMO ever, health does not scale on gear relative to raw damage increases from weapon upgrades. This means unlike the pvp at any other level, max level pvp in epics is very zergy with opportunities to one shot players. This never happens while leveling because the ratio of base health to damage on weapons that were green or blue was in check, but at max level this will get even worse since only select gear gives minute max health increases, but weapon damage (and the raw bulk of other dps stats combined) increases burst and dps significantly each tier.
• Mounts completely break PVP. This is really bad at 60, where you end up doing a lot of bgs, and keep cursing at the pay to win nonsense that is 110% speed mounts. They give you a tremendous competitive advantage when you can backcap over and over all game and nobody can keep up with you because you spent real money on a mount to win bgs.
• Players by max level obtain absurd amounts of CC, and there is no DR on any of it. As a consequence, almost any 2 v 1 engagement is always going to be one player being unable to move while dying in seconds. The existance of latency makes it completely random if someones dodge ability is making them immune to some spell now, or making them immune 5 seconds from now. People get so many evade rolls they can just spam it until they get away. The lack of any choice paradigm in ability usage means you just unload your encounters, maybe a daily, run away, recharge, repeat. You have no reason to stay engaged in a fight, especially if you unloaded on someone who hasn't been able to retaliate yet.
• Gearscore requirements on epics are very stringent and I feel excessive - most of these dungeons have no enrage timers, and the only requirement is people not get killed by avoiding damage. And avoiding damage doesn't come quicker with more gear. The gearscore requirements in effect artificially gate content by making you run lower level dungeons for gear not because you need it to defeat bosses but because the game says you have to do attempt those bosses.
• Converting astral diamond from zen isn't that bad. I'd prefer Cryptic to make the money off a "gold" selling industry (since in effect, astral diamond is the gold of NW). The problem that is bad is that every single pve dungeon drop is BOE, which means you can pay to win buy a full set of the best anything for real life money. This breaks the morale of any competitive PVE scene possible and makes progression pointless. 
• Astral diamond prices in-game do not reflect the reality of AD acquisition rates. Nightmare lockbox horses, that are a tiny chance to get and $1.50 a key to unlock, sell for as much as 80% mount speed training and half of 110% speed training, and give you both, plus the mount. The combined cost of both mount skills purely through AD and not considering the real economy valuation of zen to AD puts just getting mount training at almost 3 times more expensive than buying a 110% mount that gives you the skill. This is pervasive of anything that costs diamond - respecs, scrolls, etc - all cost an order of magnitude more than they should, at least. This disconnect cheapens the experience and dissuades players.
• Likewise, zen prices are absurd, and completely out of hand. $40 companions, $50 mounts, $10 single bags on one character. Outrageous, and if Cryptic doesn't make fistfulls of money on NW, it is because they priced the item shop so poorly it alienated a huge portion of the playerbase from buying anything. Not only did they give away all the work (the leveling content) for free, and make it fun, the end game doesn't keep you engaged for long and you can walk away, just like in SWTOR, taking the bulk of their effort with no incentive to pay for anything. That is a recipe for disaster.
• Aggro is still broken for clerics, who will instantly pull aggro doing anything and then never lose it. Tanks are optional, but healers are not.

So overall, the pve is predictable and dull, without any raid content yet. The dracolich fight in Castle Never is, surprisingly, killing adds again. Go figure. PVP is the only real challenge, and that is entirely pay to win between the buying of Tenebrous + armor / weapon enchants, and the mounts. Damage outscaled hp and control abilities became too abundant, so you get two shot without being able to play. Clerics have limited pvp utility - they can use their blue shields to prevent you from taking almost any damage, but require pay to win levels of itemization to keep someone alive through healing.

The real problem is that there is no carrot. Tier 2 gear might take a long time to get farming epics (heroics) but you don't even need it to clear anything. If not for the gearscore requirements, you could do every instance in blues (unless your dps is so low you can't keep the add waves down) because there are no enrage mechanics, nothing that has to be tanked, and clerics pull all the aggro anyway.

You can get full pvp gear in a day, realize it requires absurd pay to win nonsense to get the epic enchants, and quit.

There was a lot of potential ruined by the pay to win aspects and an excessive focus on the leveling process. But once you see the zones once, you are pretty much done - there is no alternative progression path, the story and zones are linear. So you play to max, play a few days, do the dungeons and pvp, and you are completely finished. Which is never a good thing for an MMO.

I'm hoping added content and balancing make Neverwinter good again, but some very fundamental mechanics - spammable immunity dodges, 8 buttons max, aggro mechanics that don't focus on tanks holding threat, the ability to just dodge spam avoid almost all damage, the lack of CC DR, and an excess of CC at that, contribute to some pretty big flaws to keep the game from reaching its potential.

Because the setting is great. The atmosphere is ok (it doesn't come close to Baldur's Gate quality atmosphere, but that had a lot more work put into characterization - with the lack of NPC persistence in NW, and your companions just being dumb meat bricks, you have no overarching engagement besides this distant threat of Valindra).

I'd like to see a refactoring of player abilities to prompt more choice paradigm behavior - making in combat decisions on what to do besides "hit the button and get rooted or not" and beyond picking a daily to use. The best MMO mechanics evolve from players have to chose between offense and defense, burst or sustained, etc, in combat - not just outside it when you pick your spells. The cooldown based usage and obvious situations to use encounter powers cheapen the gameplay. The ability for everyone to avoid so much damage and go immune to effects so often cheapen role specialization. Every dpser gets some aoe (even if rogues aoe sucks), they get some control, they get some utility, etc - it makes them jacks of all trades where you should have aggressive specialization and dependence on other players to form bonds of engagement. Especially in D&D, where you classically needed a bunch of different roles to realistically combat a wide array of threats.

It was the most fun MMO I've played since SWTOR, so props. But it is still full of holes I can't wait to see filled (I'd love to become a lead developer on an MMO some day to put my ideas to the test).