Leveling up in Neverwinter

Gelatinous Cube!!!

Leveling in NW is surprisingly fast.  Combat doesn’t give a whole lot of xp per mob, but there’s a lot of combat, so it adds up quite quickly.  Beyond that, most quest turn-ins seems to give a percentage of your next level, not a set amount, so that makes it go quite quickly as well.  I did a few quests recently where I was told I’d get 2900-ish xp upon turn-in, but I leveled up “out in the field” and when I came back they each awarded 3200-ish xp instead.  Makes me want to run back and do some of the zones I’ve skipped to see if the quests scale their rewards there.

Nice entry to the a big tomb

I was playing my Trickster Rogue the morning of the big rollback a few weeks ago, so I lost a couple of levels of progress.  I haven’t played the rogue since other than crafting and daily logins to Invoke for coins, and just that has been enough to get me 3 levels.  “C&I” gives a surprisingly high amount of XP.  My Guardian Fighter has gained 5 levels from the last time I played it, so it’s level 25 now.  I also started playing a GWF with a friend who started a cleric.  We’re both at the same stage in the main story of the quests, but since I’ve been doing C&I daily and he hasn’t, I’m now level 21 vs his level 19.  I’ve slowed down the crafting on that character in order to not get too far ahead. . . .

Cleric Armor gets a nice appearance upgrade at level 40

This past weekend I decided to focus on my Cleric and am now level 49 on it.  1 more and I get “the game changer” skill of Astral Shield.  Frankly, I thought that level 30 getting me Forgemaster’s Flame was quite a game changer.  I’ve only done solo work, so I’ve not seen the whole “clerics are tanks due to aggro being all borked up” issue that’s all over the forums, but I guess it’s not far off now.  As a result, I’ve been building toward a “Tank/Regen” build that’s been posted in the forums.  It’s quite survivable and still does decent dps output while solo, so I like it quite a lot.  That said, I took my control wizard out for a spin this morning to get that last little nudge to get to 40 and was surprised at how fast I was killing things with it . . .

Control Wizard popping her shield off

So anyway, I’m still enjoying the game quite a bit.  Weeknight playtime is very limited anymore, but I’m still getting some decent sessions in on the weekends.  Another friend’s started looking into Rift, though, so I might be playing some more of that soon and mentoring down.

Great Weapon Fighter at Level 16