Ravenloft Preview: Barovia Zone Quests, Heroic Encounters & Solo Instances

As part of our massive preview of Neverwinter’s Module 14: Ravenloft, I’m going over the zone and campaign quests, Barovia Heroic Encounters, and solo instances in this article. As mentioned in the campaign preview, there are four primary quest givers in the zone that hand out the weeklies and rotating zone quests. I would love to report intriguing new quest designs, but Barovia unfortunately features much of the same old. Nonetheless let’s go through the quests and Heroics and see what Module 14 has to offer!

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Dailies and Weeklies

The dailies and weeklies are pretty much standard fetch and kill quests. Here’s a list of some quests and their objectives so that you get an idea:

  • Company of Wolves (Weekly): Complete Kiril’s Cave Lair
  • Dark Heroics (Weekly): Complete Yester Hill Heroic Encounter and three minor HEs
  • Lighting the Fires (Weekly): Resupply camps
  • Dire Consequences: Gather meat from deer along the Ivlis River & lure and kill Alpha Wolves
  • Dishonorable Dead: Slay Honor Guard and Undeads around the Ruins of Berez at night 
  • Rituals of Corruption: Recover ritual components and knock over profane cairns in the Whispering Wood
  • Straw Man: Recover Demonic Essence from Scarecrows around the Cursed Meadow

As you can see, there’s nothing fancy about the quests at all. On the bright side however, none of them are particularly hard or annoying to complete. Most of the time you can even stack them in a way that you can complete multiple ones at once. Some quests use the new day/night cycle in Barovia and certain objectives can only be completed during specific times. That being said, I’ve yet to run into situations on preview in which I really had to wait for a quest. Usually you can just do other stuff instead and then come back later. Some weeklies also lead to new solo instances. They are well designed, but nothing special either. Depending on your item level you might need to group up for those as the bosses can be challenging.

Zone Quests

Especially in Omu, but also Soshenstar River, random quests that dropped from the world were a significant part in the progression. Those quests handed out additional campaign currency while you were doing daily stuff anyway, and made reaching the Weekly Haul much more convenient. In Ravenloft, this doesn’t seem to be the case as much. I’ve only come across one zone quest called “Collector’s Blinsky” so far that requires you to find three dolls. There might be more though that I haven’t found yet.

Heroic Encounter

There is one interesting Heroic Encounter in the zone that’s called “Yester Hill”. You’ll come across that one because it’s included in one of the weekly quests. It features two phases in which you first have to stop blight mobs and then druids from empowering “Thornspur”. The first phase adds damage resistance to the boss, the second one HP. With few players we had some trouble on preview beating the encounter. When fully empowered it’s super hard to kill, but I assume on live it’s going to become the usual zerg party with little to no challenge.

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Talking about no challenge: The minor HEs are fairly standard as well. You have to kill mobs, protect merchants, and free prisoners. One annoyance on preview is that the small HEs tend to get stuck and not spawn the last wave of mobs. Sometimes it just takes some time, but sometimes you can’t complete a HE at all. One interesting aspect that we’ve already talked about related to the random queue changes is that Ravenloft HEs hand out Seal of the Brave, making all items attached to those seals much more obtainable. Ravenloft uses the “master controller” of earlier zones that makes sure that new heroics spawn as soon as others are completed. So you can pretty much infinitely farm the HEs and I expect the usual “trains” on the first days of the release.

Conclusion

The stuff you’ll run daily in Barovia isn’t too annoying. In my opinion nothing should become too repetitive since the campaign is fairly easy to complete and the overall time commitment rather small. The new instances tie into the story and add fresh elements for a limited time as well. Additionally the Seal of the Brave dropping from HEs is a major catch-up mechanic that should help new players to get to 510 item level gear fairly easy. That however doesn’t entirely mask the fact that the devs didn’t really strain themselves. You shouldn’t expect any innovative quests in Ravenloft.


Have you tested Ravenloft on preview? What’s your take on the Barovia zone quests and Heroic Encounters? Share your thoughts on our social channels, in the comments below, or 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.