The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 6: Difficulty Changes

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Welcome to a new project, experiment, challenge or whatever you wanna call it. Normally experiencing the content with well-geared toons, I figured it would be quite interesting to approach the game from the perspective of a casual player. How does it feel starting at item level 1,600 and build up a character without the help of your mains? How long does it take until you are geared enough for T1/T2 and where do you get all the RPs from? Welcome to the Lowbie Diaries, it should be fun!

Before doing the diary I’d like to touch on a recent gameplay change that targets exactly the type of character I’m playing here. Because folks reported that some content, especially the lvl73 campaign zones Icewind Dale and Well of Dragons, had become too difficult, they finally adjusted by lowering overall damage but boosting hit points of all mobs starting at lvl61.

I went to different campaign zones to get a feel for the new changes and it’s a mixed bag. I am able to quest in all areas now, but the combination of time needed and difficulty at least makes IWD and WoD still not viable at the moment. Although it’s great that more toons should now be able to solo content, the tradeoff is huge, because those areas you already were able to solo now take even longer and surpassed the point where it gets really annoying. That’s why, for this char, I’m not really in favor of the change. Going forward however it might pay off.

Since I hopped on and off the lowbie char last week unregularly, I’m going to skip the daily notes and will just summarize. I really wanted to get my Artifact Main during the x2 and therefore changed the pattern of four Vigilance Tasks per day at max and just completed the campaign. Due to the new gameplay change mentioned above, it took much longer than usual and I’m really glad I only had twelve more quests left. That puts Spingrind Rise behind me for good for a foreseeable time and I can’t say I’m going to miss it. I refined the Artifact Weapon to blue, gained about 200 damage and a lot of power, and am really looking forward to whether this will be a significant improvement in the yellow and orange numbers.

I mostly skipped the Jubilee, because it didn’t offer any progress for the character. I did however do the dailies, bought the Parade Horse and claimed the Neverember Guard off the ZEN store. That’s only the second companion for the character and cause it’s blue, I chose to make this my summoned one. The active bonus isn’t perfect, because I actually could use something to take aggro off me, but it’s not like I have a better alternative in store.

PVP went as usual. Won some, lost many more, but I’m rapidly approaching the first 100 tokens for gear. Also lowbie trash talk has surprisingly been few and far between, opposing players however do gun for kills even after GG if they realize I’m an easy target.

In the next week I plan to move forward to Sharandar and start completing the campaign. So long!


The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 1: Setting Up The Char
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 2: The First Week
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 3: To Kessell Or Not To Kessell
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 4: Rethinking & New Patch FTW!
The Lowbie Diaries Vol. 5: Events


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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.