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Yesterday the developers Asterdahl and NoWorries participated in a scheduled “Systems Design Reddit AMA” on the official Subreddit. Usually these AMAs are not the place for breaking news, but nonetheless are one of the rare occasions where players can actually get some questions answered. So thanks to both devs and Community Manager “Nitocris” for being available.

Since this doesn’t happens frequently, we unfortunately have to start with talking about the overall structure of the thing. User Janne pointed out that it’s not optimal to open the AMA thread on the minute. So you actually have to be awake to participate, which might be hard for anyone not sharing the devs’ timezone. Overall it certainly would be better to allow players to submit questions beforehand. If we’re not mistaken that was the case in past editions, but not this time. But anyway, since AMAs only tend to happen every so often, only a fraction of questions get answered anyway.

Talking about answered questions, let’s quickly go through the most important stuff. I won’t touch on every answer, but you can look up Asterdahl’s and NoWorries’ profiles on reddit for a full compilation.

Class Balance and Poor TRs, DCs

The devs put a big emphasis on pointing out that balancing the current classes is their main objective, and will continue do be in the near future. There are a lot more changes coming in Module 16. This is obviously great, but doesn’t seem to help TRs and DCs short term. Both nerfs to Rogue’s power looping and DO DC buffing seems to be on of those cases where the devs nerf first and introduce fixes later. NoWorries said it was time for a significant tweak to be able to move forward with balancing. So I would expect the changes to go through.

Dungeon Design and Group Synergy

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Asterdahl shared some of the struggles they currently have when designing dungeon content. He said that the difference in power levels between endgame and casuals is just too big. Since they only have resources for one piece of content, it obviously has to cater to all tiers of players. One culprit is the buff/debuff mechanic and they seem to be working on reworking that thing. Also related to the struggles is that fact that players at any time pretty much are either dead or at 100% health. Which means that current mechanics have to either kill someone instantly or are not challenging. They are also trying to make item level more accurately represent player power.

Bugs, Responsibilities, and Workflow

NoWorries did comment on dealing with bugs and was very open in sharing some of their struggles. First of all they are sometimes overwhelmed with the amount of things they need to track, which leads to them simply overlooking issues. I think you can relate to that, but at the same time a proper project management and QA should be able to handle that. It still explains why bugs sometimes make live that clearly shouldn’t. They also said that they do not try to allocate blame elsewhere in such a case. They are responsible and working as hard as they can to prevent these things. This is certainly an interesting comment regarding the recent events of Huntgate, although this was not directly related to it.

Rework of Mod 12/13 Trophy Drops

There’s some good news for those that haven’t gotten to a capstone Hunt in Chult yet. It seems like in Module 15, all rare mobs and Hunts will always drop a Trophy. So getting to the King of Spines or Tyrant should be a hell lot easier in the “Heart of Fire”. This also means I would put all farming activities on hold for now and wait for the update.

Quick Bullets

No plans to raise Guild Halls, they are aware of guilds and alliances running out of coffer capacity though

No new class in the foreseeable future

No plans to raise the daily Astral Diamond cap

Perfect World is looking into Twitch Loot Drops

That’s our summary of the most important things that were said. What’s your take on their answers? Share your thoughts on our social channels, in the comments below, or visit our message board!

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