Garrundar The Vile Event Review

A weekend full of Call-to-Arms action and dragon killing comes to a close today. For the second time adventurers were able to battle Garrundar the Vile and revisit one skirmish they had lost on their way to 70.

The downspiral of the format continued with this installment as I personally feel CtA lacks to offer most players enough incentive to participate (I already discussed it after Battle for the Bridge). I did nostalgic runs on some of my chars, but didn’t even get too deep into farming for my lowbie. It doesn’t really feel worth it if you’re not after the cosmetics or collections and the Shaman is even one of the higher selling prices you can get from CtAs. Upgrading the enchantments didn’t add much to the Cache as well.

Next to rewards the overall challenge keeps to be the major issue. Even my lower characters ended up having over 40k health and 10% lifesteal, which makes them invincible at 60. Assuming that the scaling works the same for other character aspects you get why scaling up means losing some of your power and scaling down means getting a lot. Back in Rise of Tiamat not even BiS would get most classes to 40k HP, so good scaling should set a 100k toon to approximately 30k at 60.

CtA essentially has come down to how much repetition you can take. No one is doing premades any longer, because it probably takes more time to build a group than rolling through the content with a pug. It’s still a good event to mix in runs if you have a few minutes to spare while waiting for Demogorgon or Tiamat for example.

Maybe a short-term solution would be to offer an advanced version with a mob-level of 73. That would set the difficulty to the minor Heroic Encounter level (Bronze tier in Underdark) of Icewind Dale and the Well of Dragons. But this would most definitely have to come with a change of the reward structure as well, because nobody is going to get longer runs in just because. It could also exclude lower levels too much.

Anyway, the event weekend largely took place without me and I think future additions won’t change that. Maybe except for Orc Assault because I really like the weapon skins.


What are your impressions of the weekend and the CtA in general? Write it in the comments below or visit our message board!

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 “Garrundar The Vile Event Review

  • January 18, 2016 at 9:16 pm
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    I keep saying that if they want more participation all they need to do is put that rare event companion drop as purchasable for 300 CtA tokens. Just make the purchasable one account bound.

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