Protector’s Jubilee Event Review

After the Summer and Winter Festivals, the Protector’s Jubilee is the third biggest annual event. The second anniversary brought interesting rewards including cosmetic gear, a new mount and the popular thrones. Let’s jump in and look how Neverwinter’s birthday compares to other events in the calendar.

Protector's Jubilee Event
Protector’s Jubilee Event

The quest and reward structure is as easy it gets. Although the fetch quests are not very innovative, grinding the event with multiple characters didn’t feel as annoying as other events, or Vigilance tasks, because the quests are quick. They also fixed Beachcombing, which was a major annoyance last year as only one player at a time could interact with the quest crate in Blackdagger Ruins and the respawn timer was like two minutes. That led to folks piling up and waiting for their turn at the beach. The problem shifted to the Xbox though, cause their version does not feature the updated Beachcombing quest. I also haven’t run into another bug from last year that caused Elminster to hand out quests taking the adventurers to campaign areas they hadn’t already unlocked. I might just have been lucky or that one got resolved as well.

A solid plus of the Jubilee is that the random nature of both the daily quests and the tasks inside the skirmish do not make the event very bottable. I’m also pretty sure you could get the additional two Figurines last year without completing the skirmish, but that also makes the event a bit more annoying if you’re running it with a lot of chars.

*** UPDATE *** Apparently I misremembered that part and you only got the final reward by doing the skirmish last year as well. (thanks to beckylunatic for pointing that out)

Throne of Boo
Throne of Boo

To get all the unique rewards with a single character you need to complete all the dailies every day and do the skirmish 74 additional times (gold bonus). That’s nine times per day unless you luck out and get a Throne from the end chest. You could bring in some ALTs of the same class and let them farm the cosmetic armor set, which binds to the account, in case you can’t get Figurines on some days. Looking at the times you need to complete the skirmish it’s safe to say that the event is designed to be a multi-year project, especially for more than one main character. Overall CTAs are a bit less grindy, but at least this one is entirely based on a token system.

The skirmish itself is nothing fancy and suffers from the same problem as any scaled content. It’s much too easy for well-geared 70s and a pain for lowbies. Because there are different reward tiers, players also choose to leave and requeue in case they fear not getting the gold reward. That’s rare however, cause one competent DPS is enough to fly through. The speech is a nice theme, but after a few runs I had to mute Lord Neverember. It gets kind of annoying pretty fast.

One major issue I have with the event is that it offers no progress and the AD-making potential is low to non-existent. I actually mostly skipped the Jubilee with my lowbie project, because it offers nothing beyond cosmetic value. BoE stuff is gated behind the usual low RNG and I would not advise to farm the skirmish unless you want the event currency anyway. You should be getting the Garden Key in any case though, the compilation of NPCs up there just makes life that much easier. Also the massive ZEN gifts and sales shouldn’t be discounted and are unique to the Jubilee.

Overall I had a good time at the event, got some keys for my ALTs and the new stuff for my mains. I don’t however look forward to this one like I do to other events. The Summer and Winter Festivals offer cooler activities, Call-to-Arms is a tad easier to grind and Gifts of Waukeen, Simril or Tymora net more ADs and/or progress. That makes the Jubilee a bit underwhelming, especially since you’d think the annual birthday should be something special. In my eyes they also miss the opportunity to use the anniversary as occasion to reward loyal players. Make some BoP rewards from the event store like the Throne of Boo exclusive to participants of the first anniversary or hand out special titles. That’s nothing major, but still a nice feature for the more dedicated.

See you next year!

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.

3 thoughts on “Protector’s Jubilee Event Review

  • June 26, 2015 at 11:36 am
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    You misremember about the figurines last year. It was necessary to complete the skirmish to get the final reward. It was also necessary to complete the skirmish and collect the reward in the garden for the other daily quests to reset, so you couldn’t even do an easy 2 figurines per day, at least last year. I didn’t do the event this year with any characters I wasn’t willing to skirmish with.

    • June 29, 2015 at 12:04 am
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      Most of items were bound to account, so I made new GF (lvl 6) over and over to make 2 simple quest and gain rewards. To bad that bug with xvim belts were not fixed since last year. Prizes of this item went down from 250k to 10k. gg

      • June 29, 2015 at 7:31 am
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        Willing to specify the bug? Regards!

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