Neverwinter Ravenloft QoL Roundup II: Enchantment Visuals, Retraining Changes, New Scaling & More!

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As part of our massive preview of Neverwinter’s upcoming module “Ravenloft”, I’d like to go through some more quality of life changes today. On our first roundup I’ve already covered the Character Select Screen, Home Page Facelift, Item Levels, and Insignias, but there’s a lot more to come!

In the first version of this article overstated the nerf to Retraining Tokens. The revised version now more correctly lines out the change. Thanks to dupeks for providing the information in the comments!

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Enchantment Visuals

Let’s start with a big one, because a longstanding request will get filled with Module 14. Weapon and Armor Enchantments were a pain for some players, because their visuals could severely mess with a character’s theme. It was basically a hardcoded feature and you had to live with it. Since pretty much all of them feature dominant effects and colors, this even led to situations in which players picked the enchant fitting to the toon’s visuals instead of picking the one that made most sense in terms of gameplay. This fortunately will be ancient history in Ravenloft because you can finally switch off the enchantment visuals in case you don’t like them. Just like for the head pieces the context menu will have an additional option that let’s you turn off visuals.

This feature is also a classic example of stuff that takes time even though the devs really wanted it to happen. Thomas Foss repeatedly stated that it’s on their agenda, but it required the software team to come in and actually rework the code. So it wasn’t something the game designers could do on their own.

Retraining Changes

The next one might be controversial as you could label it a nerf. Retraining Tokens will no longer retrain the whole character, but only either attributes, powers, feats, or boons. Alternatively you can spend 60,000 Astral Diamonds to reset these areas. On the one hand this is great, because you have much more choices and no longer need to click through all powers in case you only want to tweak your boons. But obviously the tokens themselves got nerfed, because respeccing the full character will require four tokens in Module 14. To compensate for this change, tokens will be reduced from [sc name=”zenicon”]300 to [sc name=”zenicon”]100 and all single tokens that players already own will be converted into packs that contain three tokens instead.

It’s still a 33% nerf, but I nonetheless think it’s a good change. Retraining Tokens are neither expensive nor hard to get. And realistically you rarely respec all areas of a character anyway, making the new system more flexible and cheaper. Only in some limited cases respeccing will actually get more expensive.

New Scaling Mechanic

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Neverwinter Ravenloft will feature a more intelligent mechanism that should tackle scaling much better. The current situation is that level 70 toons, especially endgame ones, are completely overpowered when scaled down. On the contrary lower levels have a hard time while scaled up. This is a change that makes sense, but players rightfully fear that it will make the leveling dungeons inside the random queues too much of a pain. Speedrunning through them is a major part of the daily AD generation. On the other hand new players were having a hard time keeping up with all the 70s in low-level content and it’s hard to challenge that the leveling dungeons should more cater to their needs.

That’s the theory, but on preview the new scaling was hardly noticeable. My endgame toons are still rushing through the maps just like before. If at all then you can probably experience a little drop in overall damage, but that’s about it. So this might not be the end of the road as more tweaks could be coming. Now that the system is in place the devs will have an easier time adjusting it on the fly.

Quest Path Prioritization

Last but not least the quest journal will get another upgrade. Quest path prioritization and party mechanics are reworked in a way that you have more control over how the quest path is chosen and what quests show up in the tracker. All tweaks can be looked up in the feedback thread I linked above, but the most important one imho is that you can now not only prioritize quests, but also completely prevent them from showing up in your quest tracker. That way you can hide outdated ones (tutorials etc.) that you won’t likely need any time soon. It’s a well done feature that will mostly benefit new and low-level players that mainly rely on the quest path to bring them to their next adventure.


What’s your take on the mentioned quality of life improvements? Do you like them or should the devs have spent their time differently? Share your thoughts and experience on our social channels, in the comments below, or visit 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.

7 thoughts on “Neverwinter Ravenloft QoL Roundup II: Enchantment Visuals, Retraining Changes, New Scaling & More!

  • June 18, 2018 at 7:11 am
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    “respeccing the full character will require four tokens in Module 14.”

    What the FUCK?

    What the ACTUAL Fuck?!?

    So, the ones I farmed across multiple characters in Winter Festival etc have that ARE needed by me, now they are suddenly 1/4 as useful?

    So are they dropping the price by 75% on the Zen Market? If not, this obliterates the good they did with Race Re-Rolls.

    ~

    Glad about the Journal, though. I am sick of quests marking THEMSELVES as ticked and making themselves the target of the sparkly path.

    I wish there was a button to open all areas and UNTICK everythingn with an X, then I can activate the ones I want. I’m fed up of having to manually check them all.

  • June 18, 2018 at 8:50 am
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    I don’t remember which patch notes or blog it was mentioned it, but I think that they said they were going to split the tokens into 3 and cut the cost the same. So 100zen, and anyone who has a retraining token gets +2 per when the patch goes live.

    Assuming I remember that right, then retraining gets 33% more expensive, but a lot more flexible. Seeing how often I had to respec my whole toon when I only meant to adjust one element, I expect my overall cost to even out over a few respecs compared to what we have now.

  • June 18, 2018 at 9:11 am
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    Cheers, Dupeks.

    “Players who already possess **purchased** Retrain Tokens will be granted two additional tokens for each that they own.”

    What about the BtA ones I got from Winter Festival etc? Do they count as “purchased”?

    I forget how many I have, but say I have 30. In Mod 14 I’ll have 90? Or 30? Usually, a purchased Retraining Token is not an inventory item.

    So I have to spend four to retrain Powers, Attributes, Feats and Boons?

    What a Crock.

    But what does this mean?
    “In addition, individual boon trees can be retrained separately.”

    So we choose which points to remove and replace, so a DC can take a point from Virtuous and put it in Righteous etc?

    Swizz. If it takes four tokens for a full respec, they should cost 75 Zen each, not 100. Now, instead of fully respeccing all my characters if I want, I’ll only be able to do half-a-dozen. This kind of negates the value of giving us a free 2nd load out.

    Sure, it’s not such a problem for people who have max power points and don’t want to move their Attribute scores around, but for new players it can be a bit of a bummer. Craptrick screwed up again. Just when they had done so many good things recently.

    😡

  • June 18, 2018 at 10:59 am
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    https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1240663/will-bta-respec-tokens-be-split-edit-yes-they-will/p1

    The BtA tokens become BtA packs workth 3 respec tokens on opening. So they did it right *gasp*.

    And as was pointed out in the argames thread, 1 of the 4 respecs will now be for powers, which for many players is desireable. So unless you’re short power points, an all-but-the-powers respec costs the same as a full respec did before (and involves a lot less awful clicking)

    • June 18, 2018 at 2:48 pm
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      Oh, well, that’s good news! Panic Over! Thanks for that thread, Dupeks!

      So the character that opens the BtA pack will get three respec tokens bound to them, and they’ll be in the currency tab. Got it.

      I can see that for advanced characters with 124 Power Points this will be simpler, especially if you want to change just your Boons, or Feats or Stats (EG GWF might just change DEX points to CHA when they get 100% Crit Chance with Bondings). Several of mine are very close to that already, due to the massive reduction in post-70 XP but no apparent drop in chance for a Power Point (they did reduce the chance of 30k AD after about a month, though). But I don’t think basing the cost of a 3 out of 4 Respec on long-term players is a good thing. It was long-term players who wanted faster AD farming, and look what happened with random queues and parts of dungeons being blocked off.

      I don’t know, ever since the Dragonborn Pre-Release For Cash Non-Sale Scam, the Leadership nerf, Invoking nerf, Coal-gate, Key-gate, Random Queues, the incoming AD Refining/Alt Salvage Nerf and multiple other things, people always seem to expect the worst with Craptrick (ahem…)

      Strongholds was the only one I was not concerned about, until I saw those rings and drains in PvP. A lot of people thought they’d have to have guildies online 24/7 so their guild wouldn’t get trashed by PvP rivals, but I was like “Oh, come on! Even Cryptic couldn’t be that daft!”

      But sometimes, they give with one hand and take with the other. But they have made a lot of improvements over the last year or so, in between the screw ups.

      As always, thanks to j0Shi for these informative blogs.

      🙂

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