Revisiting Blog Posts: A Brief Look at the first Mod 6 Build

Browsing through content from years ago is both embarrassing and tons of fun. It’s mostly nice to read old opinions on certain topics and take a stroll down memory lane. But there are obviously also some bold predictions that never happened or stuff that makes you cringe because you can’t believe that it was actually posted. This column was created to uncover everything! We revisit old posts and discuss both the topic and the content in hindsight!

A Brief Look At The First Module 6 Build (Link)

In hindsight we as site started covering the game at a very bad time. Elemental Evil was the huge release coming early 2015 and as we know today it would develop into one of the worst module to date. That’s why it’s particularly interesting to look back how we felt about the content almost four years ago.

[su_quote][…] if you are not exploiting the foundry for RPs like everyone else […] add more RPs to areas the bots can’t touch[/su_quote]

First of all it’s hilarious to look back at the state the game was in. Elemental Evil obviously brought that huge level and refining cap raise, and you were unable to discuss the RP economy without bots and foundry exploiting. A stack of Rank 5s went for under [sc name=”astralicon”]5,000 on the Auction House. That’s less than today even though the availability of RPs has drastically increased over time. Bots just unloaded hundreds of stacks on the AH per day, completely oversupplying the market.

[su_quote]Let me start by saying that the refining system isn’t all that bad, what makes it bad is the fact that not enough RPs are rewarded by simply playing the game.[/su_quote]

Talking about supply, one of the issues with bots was that they were the major source of RPs. Taking them out meant that farming to upgrade your enchantments to the new levels was an insane task. There were legit discussions on the official message board whether bots actually make the system bearable. From today’s point of view it’s almost a comical assessment, but it was a real concern back in the day.

Overall we seemed to be a little too worried about the upgrade costs however. Refining progression never really turned out to be much of a struggle, at least not compared to other issues Module 6 had.

New Stats and Progression

[su_quote]The second thing they revealed are stat changes and the way Life Steal and Regeneration works. For DPS classes it means that DoT and AoE/proc-heavy builds will have an advantage, because now you want as much outgoing attacks as possible to take out the RNG of the LS heals.[/su_quote]

The second thing we pointed out also seems a little overblown in hindsight. Life Steal and Regeneration never became the issue we first anticipated. The reactions on the official forum were even more extreme by the way. Players predicted the end of tanks, but the changes didn’t have as much of an impact. For a very short time, healers had to heal. That was all. And the stat progression quickly make Life Steal as efficient as it has been anyway.

[su_quote]The new stat curves are interesting as well. If you can go deep into a stat without severe diminishing returns, tanks can go real tanky and builds that get a lot of utility from certain stats like crit can also min/max more than before.[/su_quote]

On the contrary, we were spot on on the new stat curves. We predicted that min/maxing would become more extreme and a couple years later all builds are indeed capped in all relevant areas. I still wonder whether the devs initially envisioned that the current progression would last that long though. The devs got more and more creative of offering progression that doesn’t involve as much power creep, effectively working around the fact that most builds can’t make as much use of more plain stats. Given that the first level cap raise wasn’t as much of a success, I could definitely imagine that they got more hesitant over time of trying it again and are now stuck with the model Elemental Evil introduced.

And the Dungeons?

I don’t really remember whether the new dungeons were already fully patched to preview when writing the article. As we know it would need the devs almost four full years to bring back all dungeons that they removed with Elemental Evil. So it’s a little surprising that the post doesn’t mention that topic at all. It could very well be that we didn’t feel like it was as much of an issue at the time. Anyway, it’s always fun to take a trip down memory lane and look back to what we felt were key topics when Elemental Evil first got to the preview server.


Do you remember your first impressions back in 2015? Share your thoughts and experience on our social channels, in the comments below, or visit 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.