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Back from module 6, a few questions.
pandoratanaka
Member Posts: 40 Arc User
Hey all. So I quit this game around the middle of Elemental Evil. The game is installing now and rather than asking "Is this game worth coming back to?" I'll ask the following:
1. How is the economy right now? Better or worse than back in module 6 ?
2. Can someone like me, who just came back, catch up in around a month or two? (I don't mind paying ZEN or campaign completion tokens).
3. Is being in a Guild absolutely necessary right now? I'm planning on coming back with a friend and have us Duo things (+3 pugs for dungeons, I guess)
4. I was mainly a PVP player, I would queue every single day back then. Is PVP still alive or is it mostly dead since it wasn't that much focused on?
Thanks.
1. How is the economy right now? Better or worse than back in module 6 ?
2. Can someone like me, who just came back, catch up in around a month or two? (I don't mind paying ZEN or campaign completion tokens).
3. Is being in a Guild absolutely necessary right now? I'm planning on coming back with a friend and have us Duo things (+3 pugs for dungeons, I guess)
4. I was mainly a PVP player, I would queue every single day back then. Is PVP still alive or is it mostly dead since it wasn't that much focused on?
Thanks.
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Comments
2. You can hardly fully catch up in a month or 2.
3. Absolutely? No. However, an good guild with established Guild Hall makes life a long easier. It helps your #2 a lot.
4. No comment.
Thanks for your answer.
Wait! You pvp. You may need the BiS stuff. I don't pvp.
Prices have technically crashed since Mod 8/9, thanks to the key update (which means: you can't look into the dungeon chests, but you have a random chance to get loot from anywhere in the game's history).
However, AD income has been severely reduced. Whereas in classic NW you could sell gear pieces for a good sum, in here, the dungeon loot is pretty awful. You mostly get some salvage for your efforts, although the risk of losing dungeons is low (unless you pug), so technically it balances out? In addition, leadership and invoking AD have been removed (invoking now gives a "bonus" to AD generation so you have to play the game instead of just invoking 20 characters).
So... sort of worse?
(by the way, if you have any leftover Sword Coast Companion Gear/Loyal (x) Gear, you can sell those for a hefty sum on the AH). Doubly so if it's a Loyal Avenger/Striker item).
4) Out of order, but this directly affects the other questions. (I'm assuming you were primarily a PvP player).
PvP is on life support.
Massive gear gaps and general cheese have reduced the PvP community to a small, but loyal band of players.
3) It's a your mileage may vary. If you aren't in a guild or are in a guild with low-level guild boons, you will find yourself at a disadvantage against the high itemlevel dedicated PvP players.
And it is possible to do PvE without guild boons, although guild boons give your character a huge flexibility boost.
2) All in all... I... don't think so...
Not unless you have 16 free hours a day to run around an complete a bunch of campaign quests for 1-2.5 months...
My only concern right now is the Refining stuff for artifact and artifact weapons.
How long would module 7 to 11 take me to complete ?
Mod 6 Campaign (yes, EE got a campaign... in Mod 8!): Possible to beat within a week if you're fast (it's level 61-68 content, should be a cakewalk if you are moderately geared, but it's boring).
Mod 7: Strongholds, doesn't count
Mod 8: Underdark. Can use campaign completion token.
Mod 9: Maze Engine. Can use campaign completion token.
Mod 10: Storm King's Thunder + Sea of Moving Ice: Your biggest time sink. It's going to be rough for a player who only has Mod 6 gear, as it brings back "not black ice damage", "not black ice", and a long grindy campaign with marginal rewards.
(If this sounds familiar, I'm essentially saying it's Mod 3 redux).
Mod 11: It took me about a month and a half to near completion, although I skipped days for other things. If you're shooting for the weapons, you need to kill your campaign/boon progress. And vice versa.
There are a few other things which would speed up your progress. For one, the Tradebar Store has some decent "starter" gear which holds up quite well in endgame. There is also PvP gear, but I'm not sure how useful it is in PvP.
You can buy a decent artifact weapon (Drowned and Burning. Howling and Earthen... not so much) for about ~200k AD on the AH. Or, you can craft it yourself out of Weaponsmithing/Artificing.
You can buy R8 enchantments for about ~40k a pop (prices may vary).
So is AD mostly made by daily quests from PVP/PVE now ?
The EE one actually is the easiest one now for the campaigns after mod 6. EE campaign used to be very bad but they changed it and I think I finished that in 3 days (for my alt). For the campaigns after that, they are time gated.
So Mod 10 is "Not Icewind dale".. got it.
So rank 8's got cheaper. That's good news. I currently have rank 9's and 8's.
Oh yes! What's the average item level now? I think mine was between 2.6-3K.. something along those lines.
1. VIP
2. AD bonus (from invocation)
3. Mount stable and mount insignia
4. bonding runestone.
5. weekly AD quests.
By the way, remember how Gearscore was reworked to Ilvl in Mod 6?
In about 27ish days, it's getting reworked again to include Boons, comps, and mounts.
So, we went from GearScore -> current Ilvl -> total ilvl, which, numerically, will be similar to old gearscore.
Out of curiosity: what class are you? Because it will help you with figuring out your gear. Ah yes, forgot about some other stuff.
VIP is like a subscription: you can get bonus features for buying a VIP for a set amount of time with Zen. The biggest draws are the free once per day lockbox key (!!!), the HP bonus from VIP, the travel signpost/salvage anvil, the anti-injury bonus of VIP, and then followed by the minor AD bonus and other stuff.
I don't remember if it did this in Mod 5, but some weekly quests can give around 7500 AD for merely completing. These include Arcane Reservoir (Sharanderp), Red Wizards (Dread Ring), Biggrin's Tomb (Icewind Dale), Protecting the Portal AND Rewards for the Hoard (Tedium of the Dragons), and Ballad of Baphomet (Maze Engine).
I think that's all the AD quests available. Underdark lacks an AD quest, but makes up for it by being able to generate AD out of leftover campaign currency (I personally would rather turn the campaign currency into keys and do the Demogorgon stuff for chances at +5 rings, if I don't get it, turn the junk into salvage).
Speaking of Sharanderp, one of the tasks now awards powerpoints on completion. I think the production is about one per week, but if you need to stock up on powerpoints, best head off to Sharanderp.
Bonding Runestones have replaced Augments in the "buffing your character with extra stats" department. At higher quality Bondings, they give way more stats than an augment, and you get the companion's attacks to boot (some companions, like the Dancing Shield or Sellsword, have really useful attacks).
Mounts now come with a special bonus or stat (ex: Tenser's Disk gives 4000 Recovery and has an attack which buffs your stats)
Mounts also have their own "set bonuses" formed by picking up insignias (mini enchants). The best insignia bonuses are Gladiator's Guile (on foot speed buff), Wanderer's Fortune (gives better/more consistent drops than all the dungeons), and Protector's Friendship & Protector's Camaraderie (extra Power/Def when your comp attacks, use in tandem with Bondings).
In other words, Cryptic is trying to turn the mounts into Pokemon.
Underdark is roughly 30 days, I've never counted all the squares. There are some intro quests but no dailies. The gating comes from doing a 20 hour campaign task, but the currency canbe farmed as quickly as you like.
Maze Engine is timegated to 30 days. There are story quests separated by 5, then 10 then 15 days of randomized dailies. None of it is particularly hard and it gives some ok boons and a lot of the weird titles you may see people sporting. There is a separate prequel questline that can be done in a couple of hours thay os mostly just titles.
Storm King's thunder takes a month for the basic campaign. The extra boons extend the time needed considerably but are skippable. Content is rough, as bad or worse than mod 3 at its launch. 2500 IL, with extras (guild boons etc...) it is doable. Below that and you will struggle. Source of BiS (for what its worth) weapons for DPS classes at the moment.
Cloaked Ascendancy is not quite as rough. Very freeform, what you want out of it will affect the length. Mobs are same strength as the nastiest part of mod 10 but no cheesy bonus damage. Nashers are back witj a vengeance and the amount of AoE when fighting them is hard for some classes to deal with. Source of second choice DPS weapons (easier to get and less finicky IMO)
Sadly, you are looking at about 160 game-hours (a month of playing the game eight hours a day, five days a week) just to catch up on boons and get yourself so you last more than 30 seconds in domination. Or spend about $1,000 on gear and campaign completion tokens and mounts.
End game (60-70+)PvP is in the worst state that I have seen ever. Barely existent PvP population, and the only ones left are bis guild premades and hapless new level 60's who dont know any better or are that desperate for the ad during pvp hour.
Unless you pay up for the best gear money can buy, you can forget earning enough glory, ever, to buy the bis PvP gear sets. My experience is you que for PvP at prime time and if you are lucky, the que will pop within a half hour and you will have the pleasure of either being on a 3-4 man premade and watch the other team stand in their spawn area (a win!), or you end up with 3-4 pugs and can enjoy standing in your own spawn area for the match (a lose).
It is either that or the que doesn't pop after a few hours and you begin contemplating if continuing to grind repetitive pve content is really more fun than a prostate exam and just log off and post how NWO has gone in exactly the wrong direction since you quit in mod 6.
All of the reasons I quit NWO at mod6 are things that not only have gotten much much worse but are things that the entire game is based on now. PvP is a horrible mess.
They removed more dungeons than they have added and replaced them with soul draining grind-campaigns. Good news is you buy more stuff though and that even if you beat one of the few end game dungeons, you can't even unlock the good loot chest if you don't buy a key for it from the zen store, and even then you are going to get absolute garbage gear from the paid for chest because the RNG makes it like buying a lottery ticket. Better luck next time!
There is a reason NWO lost over half its player base immediately after mod six dropped, and why it continues to lose more and more of it's population every day.
We were the lucky ones who got to enjoy this game when it was good. Here's to the memory of that long dead game we loved, who's current form is a severely rotten zombie of its former self.
On the bright side, if you still have a lol set and wheel of elements already to at least purple, and a greater + weapon enchant of anything other than vorpal, and if you have a greater+ negation, these are all as good in some cases or far better in others, than ever, and already having them will put you way ahead in terms of "catching up". So its not all bad news
There was at least some sort of sportsmanship before (Where the players let you take a base when you lose) but now they take pleasure in attacking on sight. And these were the same scrubs I used to slap around before in mod6.. lol.
Anyways, the queue times were long indeed. I guess it's time to become what I feared the most: A PVE only player.