Mod 6 Preview & Analysis – New Enchantment Ranks

Today we are looking at the hottest topic of the latest preview patch: The new enchantment ranks! Every Runestone and Enchantment can be refined up to level 12 and Weapon and Armor Enchantments are getting new Pure (level 11) and Transcendent (level 12) ranks that have additional powers on them. I originally wanted to give you guys a preview of all Pure and Transcended versions, but since I’m currently unable to upgrade them on the PTS and some of the stuff obviously isn’t finished, here’s just a sneak peak at four.

There are more screenshots in this thread.

Let’s start with the normal Enchantments and Runestones. It seems the rating allocation is still unfinished, because some Rank 9s are giving more stats than others and stuff, but you can already tell that enchantments will take a step back in the progression of a character. A Rank 12 Radiant currently gives +600 Power, which means a fully equipped char with 13 slots will get 7800 additional stat points. While that seems like a lot, relative to the stat points you get from gear it’s actually less than in Mod 5. Currently 13 slots mean 3900 stat points which is about 15% of the characters progression. Because the new gear more than doubles the old gear in stats, enchantments should only account for about 10% of the character’s progression. Probably even less in upcoming modules.
That’s not a bad thing. Most players struggled to get to the higher levels because of the RP grind and the AD cost, so this should cater to the casuals.

There’s one major “but” though. Just like the stats curves, they didn’t sit down and rework the whole system, but just switched how upgrading works for R11 and R12. So far, you need the same enchantment as reagent to upgrade to the next level. This requirement is discarded for the new levels. It means that upgrading from R10 to R12 is comparably easy while the grind to R10 remains the same. I originally wanted to dig deeper into the topic, but I’m gonna just forward you to this excellent topic in the official realms that more than covers the issue. Please support the changes proposed there, it makes a ton of sense!

Neverwinter: Elemental Evil

For Weapon and Armor Enchantments, the Terror rework looks really strong. Actually, the prices for Terror Enchantments on live went up heavily in the wake of the patch. It should instantly become BiS in PVP and overtakes the debuffing top-spot from Plague Fire for PVE as well. Vorpal is also getting a debuff on top of the DPS, but that’s unfinished. With the Regen and LifeSteal rework also Lifedrinker makes a lot of sense for builds that aims towards survivability or tankiness.
For Armor Enchantments Negation looks nice as it can add a lot of additional DR now.

Overall, I like what they are doing here. They reduce the need to go all the way up to BiS on the Enchantments and are adding tons of useful stuff to Armor and Weapons Enchants. I hope though that this is not the last balancing pass, because some Enchantments are still way stronger than others and you definitely have to fix the issue that R11 and R12 offer way too much for their cost.

Thanks for reading and stay uncensored!

j0Shi

j0Shi plays the Neverwinter MMORPG since the open BETA in 2013 and is a regular contributor to the blog and the whole UN:Project. Originally a Guardian Fighter, he has built up ALTs of all classes and plays on BIS/near-BIS level.