The recently announced Undermountain expansion coming to Neverwinter this spring will be bringing big things with it, and not just the titular subterranean realm; it’s also going to include sweeping changes to the game’s stat and itemization systems as well as major adjustments to the game’s classes and balance, all of which the are expounded upon in a series of recent dev blogs.
The stat system is receiving some of the biggest changes, as a handful of stats are being removed or consolidated to incorporate the new(ish) opposing rolls system. Notably, one of the stats being removed is Lifesteal, which the devs say was “problematic in that it invalidated most soures of healing and created a situation where a player’s health bar was typically in one of two states: full, or dead.”
In addition, item levels are being standardized to make each piece of equipment’s item level more representative of the stat ratings it provides. Whereas on live, two different pieces of gear could have identical item levels but provide vastly different stat numbers, following the Undermountain expansion, one item level will be directly equivalent to 20 rating points, which should make it much more straightforward to compare items and figure out which is better. Level scaling is likewise being adjusted, and it will now scale players down “to a target item level.”
And last but certainly not least on the list of changes is a massive overhaul to classes and class balance. From the Undermountain expansion onward, Neverwinter will be “moving away from the 4th Edition D&D pre-defined build classes,” meaning that classes will now be known only by their core names — Guardian Fighters are just Fighters now, for instance, and the class formerly known as Great Weapon Fighter will become the Barbarian.
The most significant changes, however, are to the feat system, which has been gutted and redesigned, doing away with feat trees and instead giving each paragon path “5 pairs of feats where [players] get to choose one of the two feats in each pair.” That really only scratches the surface of the class overhauls, however, as it will also include drastic changes to paragon paths, the wholesale removal of power points, and massive adjustments to tanking and healing mechanics. If you want to read up on all the fine details, you can find them in the dev blogs on the game’s official site. And here’s the trailer from yesterday one more time!
