Neverwinter Ravenloft Preview: Castle Ravenloft Dungeon

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As part of our massive coverage of Neverwinter’s upcoming module “Ravenloft”, I’m going over the new Castle Ravenloft endgame group content today. The dungeon slightly raises the bar both in terms of general and boss mechanic difficulty and provides players with a completely new challenge. As such, it has the highest item level requirement of any content with 13,000.

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Unlocking and Requirenments

Unlocking the dungeon follows a basic script. You get access to Castle Ravenloft by completing the last campaign task of the main progression path, which should roughly take three weeks. It’s an account unlock by the way. So getting there with one of your characters means you can enter the content with all of your toons.

Castle Ravenloft features two end chests, one that can be opened with the normal chest keys and one that requires a new key from a corresponding campaign task. The dungeon introduces a new type of seal, the Seal of the Crown. It’s used to buy item level 550 armor sets. All bosses (there’s three), drop ten seals each and both chests 20 each. The end chests additionally feature Seals of the Brave, pieces of Legacy Transmute Gear and Refining Points. In terms of rewards it’s worth noting that the dungeon can drop shards of a new Prominence Enchantment.

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Structure and Bosses

Castle Ravenloft – Developer Blog

The dungeon has a certain “raid” feel to it, because you fight little actual trash mobs and the focus is clearly on the bosses. Queuing into the content you basically immediately face the first boss, and the mobs before the second and third boss are manageable as well. It’s really interesting how dungeons in Neverwinter have evolved over time. In the original Castle Never and Dread Vault you could spent up to an hour fighting trash mobs while the Mod 14 dungeon barely features any.

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The bosses themselves are well designed and feature little mechanics we already know (no platforming ya’ll!). The first boss requires separating three sisters to avoid an immunity buff. The second one, a giant Arcolith, is mainly about avoiding some lethal AoE attacks and Strahd himself surprises adventurers with a flurry of different phases and mechanics, including fighting with a “Sunsword” that has unique At-Wills, Encounters, and Dailies. We’ll get into the full mechanics soon enough, but for this preview article just know that the fights are fun.

There’s one downside to Strahd however. The boss has long immunity phases, which makes timing buffs and DPSing really difficult. I’m not sure the devs hit the sweet spot between challenge and annoyance here. I’d much rather prefer a boss that offers challenge without artificially stalling the fight, but I guess that’s hard to achieve within the current meta.

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Environment

Developer Blog: The Art of Castle Ravenloft

The Castle environment is well done. If the devs reused assets (which they sure did), it’s not too apparent. You get flashbacks of the original Castle Never here and there, but since not a lot of players from that era are still around, it’s certainly not something that should take away much of the experience. And it’s rare anyway, the dungeon has a very unique feeling to it. Another minor note: Too often in the game you feel like the buildings are unrealistically small. Most in Protector’s Enclave are, plus the map itself is hardly the size of a ‘city’. Castle Ravenloft on the contrary doesn’t suffer from that. I really like the dimension of some rooms.

I additionally think the devs did a decent job capturing the original Ravenloft theme here, although it’s not something I can fully judge. The dev blog mentions how they had plenty of sources to play around with, so players that come from the D&D campaign should immediately feel at home.

Overall this makes Castle Ravenloft a great group addition in terms of challenge and visuals. Players can definitely look forward to challenge Strahd in this unique dungeon. It requires teamplay, filling distinct roles in boss fights, and could even force teams out of the full support meta.


Have you tried or even completed Castle Ravenloft on preview? What are your impressions? Share your thoughts on our social channels, in the comments below, or the corresponding thread on our message board!

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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.

One thought on “Neverwinter Ravenloft Preview: Castle Ravenloft Dungeon

  • June 11, 2018 at 9:19 am
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    actully they did use a lot of assets the entire dungeon only has a spot or two wich are newly made if any i’d say the stairs they used are from the shard of night quest wich we had also seen in start of the game but can’t recall spot exactly the entring area up to first boss are from castle never and the very first entering the dungeon i beileive is from stronghold ( i think this one got mentioned in dev blog)

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