Cryptic's D&D-based MMO officially launches today after months of beta. Ragar brings us his opinion on the state of the game.

Chain-Applying Debuffs Is What Makes Tanking Fun, Right?

While not all of the boss encounters in dungeons and skirmishes I ran were like Chartilifax, this fight really illustrated some of the aspects of the tanking system that bother me.  As a Guardian Fighter, the bulk of my threat came from Marking targets, whether through pressing Tab to manually do it or as a secondary effect from abilities like Enforced Threat (which doesn’t actually say it does this in the tooltip) or Threatening Rush. This Mark serves to not only increase threat you generate when striking your enemies, but it also debuffs them to take extra damage and the Mark can be enhanced through one of your passive powers to generate even more threat when hit as well as do so passively. In other words, those Marks are kind of important. This isn’t what I have a problem with – tanks are used to debuff management. The problem lies in what causes the debuff to fall off; if you are struck by your Marked target, your Mark will be cleared from it. The way you prevent this is by using your Guard ability. This has the dual purpose of absorbing the incoming damage as well as preventing the mob from clearing its Mark. Sounds simple enough, right? Keep up your Guard, spam Aggravating Strike / Shield Slam, and let the Marks carry you to victory? There’s just one small little problem with that plan: the Guard Meter.

As a Guardian Fighter, you’ll notice a blue curved bar to the left side of your character with a shield icon by it. This is your Guard Meter. Whenever you are struck by an attack, a portion of that Guard Meter is drained away. If the meter is empty, then you take the entire hit, your mob clears his Mark, etc. regardless of whether or not you were holding down Shift. To replenish the meter, you have a few different options. You could just wait, but since this usually only happens when you’re in combat, there are various abilities that will replenish your Guard Meter partially: Enforced Threat, Tide of Iron, Shield Slam and Iron Warrior. You can even specialize through feats to reduce how much each Guard consumes, boost your Guard meter through the Shield Talent passive power, or pick a race with a high starting Strength for a larger Guard Meter. With the exception of Shield Slam however, all of these attacks require you to let go of Shift long enough to use the ability as Encounters and Dailies cannot be used while Guarding. Against a boss, doing this while maintaining your Mark wouldn’t be a problem – you wait until he’s recovering from an attack animation, pop Enforced Threat or Tide of Iron, go back to Guarding, rinse, repeat. Now picture doing this with tons of adds. I’m surprised some of those add packs stay marked as long as they do.

Honestly my main issue with the Mark system isn’t the fact that it’s really designed for a game with significantly fewer adds per fight than Neverwinter employs. My problem with it is more because the Mark system doesn’t line up with the idea from 4^th Edition D&D. This was the first time Wizards of the Coast had really attempted to put in a threat mechanic into a game that’s human-controlled, so the mechanic needed to be less “the orc attacks Bob the Fighter because he taunted it” and more “the orc attacks Bob because Bob’s breathing down his neck, making it harder to strike the cleric and whacking him every time he tries”. To give you some examples, a Fighter’s Combat Challenge in 4E gave the target a -2 penalty to strike anyone other than the Fighter as well as giving the Fighter a free opportunity attack against the target if it tried to shift or hit anyone but the Fighter. Another example would be the Paladin, who gave the same -2 to hit anyone other than the Paladin, but if the target tried to hit anyone else they would take radiant damage as a reaction. In other words, it was more than just a required part of the tank’s rotation – there was some thought that went into who you Marked and when, especially the Paladin since he had to engage his Mark next turn or it would clear and the power would go on cooldown. The way Marking is implemented in Neverwinter feels more like Vanilla WoW’s Sunder Armor: there’s a graphic with no numbers to go with it, it’s not really satisfying to apply, but you have to do it to be effective.

Gateway: You Got Your iOS Game in My D&D!

I'm a crafting nerd, so I can't really finish this review without talking about Neverwinter's crafting and Gateway. Crafting in Neverwinter is fairly simple: there are four crafting skills (one for each tier of armor) and Leadership (ZAM Note: Alchemy is being added into the game on launch day, but I have not had the opportunity to test it during beta). For anyone who's played Star Wars: The Old Republic, Leadership is pretty similar to Slicing - missions are more about getting you gold, experience and lockboxes filled with random items. As for the crafting itself, that shares some in common with SW:TOR as well, but the best comparison I can really think of would be iOS/mobile "spend your energy/moves then wait a few hours" games. You have task slots to split among all of the trade skills you're leveling, you have resources (consumables) and assets (tools/personnel) that each task requires, and then you have a scaling time period for each crafting task to finish. The iOS comparison really shows when you look at the Finish Now button. Don't feel like waiting for this job to finish? Pay us a few hundred/thousand Astral Diamonds and you could have your stuff right now. I don't recall the AD price being too terribly steep, but I'm notoriously cheap in MMOs and ignored the button. That meant a lot of waiting, especially for those 8-hour jobs I've been getting lately. Normally these would end up being 24-hour jobs due to that whole "work won't let me log into Neverwinter on company computers" thing, but that's where Gateway comes into play.

Gateway is Neverwinter's web portal for those who can't log into the game, but still want to take care of things like auctions, crafting, mail and guild matters. We've seen similar options from other games like WoW and Rift, but so far as I've seen this is the first game to offer crafting outside of the game and to offer these features through a browser rather than an iOS/Android application (cue ZAM’s entire readership posting comments telling me how I'm wrong). I haven't had the chance to test any of the guild features since not enough of my group of friends jumped in Neverwinter to make a guild, but I have tested the other features and each works quite well. There are a few quirks in Gateway that still need fixed (e.g. Next Page arrows that occasionally won't load, non-Blue tasks that won't load after you've started another Blue task, some issues with button interaction on mobile browsers, etc.), but Gateway has been improving ever since it came out during Closed Beta and most of these problems have been improved upon since launch in frequency and/or severity. Hopefully, with a few more improvements, Gateway will fix the remaining problems and serve as an example to other MMOs of what to do when it comes to offline player interaction.