Unofficial Mod16 Feedback thoughts and feelings

bpstuart

Ok Mod16 has dropped and here is a place you can discuss your feelings be the positive or negative. I have a few of both.

First off my positive:

The new environments are wonderful and the new quest is a cut above previous modules. The Newer models look fantastic and the world feels a little more alive.

Now the negative:

While the world feels a little more alive, the way you are able to engage with it feels soulless. The system changes cut out all the things that intrigued me about this game. You no longer get to chose from a whole tree of powers, you are assigned them from a linear list. You are also allowed a more limited number of powers as now the powers are carved up and distributed into the paragon paths when before you got a few paragon exclusive powers. Builds are now defined for you and you can no longer pick what suits or intrigues you. You can no longer roll for your stats, a spiritual staple of Dungeons and Dragons as was power selection and freedom of build. The official reason for this is they " Want to eliminate wrong choices" and also wanted to reduce toxic discussions over the meta. In doing so they have taken away the freedom to express yourself in your build and pick the feats that suit you. This weakens you and forces you to play a predefined role when half the fun was growing into your own take on your class and being anything you wanted.

They have additionally increased cool down times to ludicrous degrees making it so much harder to stand on your own against the challenges ahead of you. This is another thing. A marked hostility to the solo player. The design choices made both in system and in the environment of under-mountain have the effect of penalizing the solo player with bullet spongey foes, long cooldowns, poor loot drops, weaker gear as rewards and decreased effectiveness of in game available healing items has made the game tedious and frustrating to play alone. I am getting a "Group up, pay up or get out" vibe from the game now.

The system is also in many places less informative. Before, we got damage estimates and you had an idea of what your powers did and now there is the Magnitude system which if it has been explained somewhere i have no idea how it works and have to do calculations to figure out optimal output even if i did knew how it worked.

Pace. The pace used to be engaging and i would have lots of fun being an arcane machinegun and picking from an entire tee of powers to help myself get through things. It was fun to run back through all zones using different powers and having a quick romp with my new abiilities. Now fights are so tedious and draining i don't want to even go into new areas let alone revisit old ones. The fun is gone. The fun has been removed for me.

and if you are just gonna tell me to group up my freinds all dropped the game in 2015, i have been happily playing solo since then and have been playing over all since 2014. I have a long term attachment and i am not sure whether or not i am ready to let go.


What do you all think about mod 16?

epiccrit

As far as the skills go, I do kind of like the change. I don't think we need to choose skill points, since there were only 4 skill points per skill and so many skills you can equip at a time. However, Too many of the feats focus on skills I do not want to use. Even worse are a handful of skills that rely on you using 2 skills, this at will buffs this encounter, or visa versa. Really narrows your builds. Also, rather than doing a this feat or that feat, they need to seriously increase the number of feats available, like 3 or 4 at each tier with this system, and at the higher tiers, allow you to pick a lower tier feat instead of picking from the list for this level only.

robai

The worst part of U16 is removal of heals from companions during combat (they give 100 times less heals, i.e. nothing).

This is what U16 did:
1) all companions became useless
2) Lifesteal was removed (it should be just nerfed instead)
3) all powers has huge timer (Recovery was removed)
4) mobs in low lvls became much stronger (more hp, more dmg, and they are MUCH faster)
5) Almost all speed bonuses were removed (and mobs became much faster)
6) Boons are much weaker now
7) plenty of bugs (Hulks in Throne, shadows in VT, mobs instakill in Tiamat during cleric phase, etc. etc.)

This was fun game for solo play and do dungeons in groups (harder dungeons when you feel you need a challenge, easier dungeons when you want just daily AD and relax while playing).

I don't get it, why the scaling was needed? Why it was a problem when a high lvl player go to low lvl area to chop mobs for fun?
For example, what was the point to make it much harder to do quests and HEs in Dread Ring?

zyronax

To my sensibilities, Mod 16 is a train wreck of a dumpster fire. I've been following the preview developments for Mod 16 over the past 2+ months or so, and other than being able to have any summoned companion (a la our mounts), and the location of Undermountain, nothing in Mod 16 is a step in the right direction. It's as if there was a secret meeting where the topic theme was how to make NW as un-fun as possible.

Since years' worth (starting in late 2013 followed by a 3-year hiatus and been back since late 2016) of grinding, farming, running dungeons & raids, completing all the campaigns and their associated boons, Chultan hunts, Barovian hunts, etc. and becoming a 17.5K GWF (my main - my other 13 toons range between 10-15K IL and cover all of the classes) are now effectively wasted time, effort, and a not insignificant amount of real-world money, I neither feel nor see any sound reason to continue contributing to the player population of NW, nor filling Cryptic's and Perfect World's coffers. The past 1-1½ years have seen a persistent, focused effort by Cryptic to nerf the means by which the playerbase can acquire AD in a reasonable amount of time (I choose to define that as a time period less than what it takes to train combat troops - i.e. 4 months - and certainly far less than earning an advanced college/university degree - i.e. 2-4+ years).

This is no longer Neverwinter. It is Neverwinter in name only, and frankly, if I am to be nerfed in to the ground and see years' worth of effort and money go up in digital smoke, I may as well pick a different game with a more modern engine, more extensive and up-to-date UI options, better quality of life measures, and from a company with a superior reputation in regards to how it treats its customers/playerbase.

I'm out (and no, none of you will get my stuff. I earned it and/or paid for it - it'll stay mine even if that means gathering digital dust until this game and the servers it's hosted on die).

franzdh

Storm King's Thunder is impossible to complete now until fishing is fixed in SOMI. Good thing I did the entry quests a month ago.