In the previous post is a picture of my character.  The purple items are tier 1/2.  As you can see, there are a few slots that I need to fill out.  The cool thing about the Queue system (very similar to LFG) is that it tells you up front what to expect as loot in a given dungeon.  Seeing as how I need a belt and a rings, I queued up for Cragmire Crypts.  I also queued up for a few more dungeons (you can queue as many as you’d like) but CC prompted me before I had a chance to add too many more.

A side note here, the game has ongoing events during the day that add extra rewards.  Sometimes it’s extra PvP currency, sometimes extra XP from the Foundry and a few more.  One in particular is called Dungeon Delves.  This one guarantees a personal chest at the end of a dungeon, if you ENTER the dungeon during the event.  Could take you 4 hours to finish but the chest will be there.  I’ve only done one, but it gave me a decent ring.  The ring was bind on pickup though, hopefully this isn’t always the case.  Would hate to trash repeats when I could put them on the auction house.  (gamer says do this, the design freak says this is a bad idea).  Without the event, there are only 2 drops a dungeon.

I had mentioned a few times in the past that grouping in Neverwinter was tough in that a few items were quite different than the standard WoW seems to have put up.  Threat is extremely hard to manage on multiple enemies.  During boss fights, Cleric will take nearly all the attacks because of this.  The days of just AE blasting enemies are gone since boss trash are practically mini-bosses in themselves.  Also, the group finder tool is incapable of balancing groups outside of a healer and a tank.  I had one with 3 rogues, two of whom dropped right away.  The queue system is also unable to add more people to an on-going run and since you can’t teleport people to the group, it effectively kills any run as soon as someone drops.

So, grouping is harder since people have to pay attention.  Healing is tougher since you’re going to get hit a lot (I healed nearly 3 million the last run and average HP is ~20-25K per player).  Chaos is higher and you need to better use your skills or things will go bad and go very very bad.  The thing about today is that the players at 60 are not casual.  To be at 60 today means you put in a fair amount of time and that raises the skill bar a tad.  I am certain this will change with time, as it has with every other game.  Bell curve and whatnot.

This run went well.  Very well in fact.  Enemies died quickly.  We only had 3 people die to bad luck.  The last boss was a mess mind you but he died and none of us did.  The entire run at max level took about 40 minutes.  I remember doing it while leveling and it took well over an hour.  Made some new contacts, had a blast.  Would do it again in a heartbeat.

And here’s the real kicker.  The Queue system works instantly during a dungeon delve.  If that event is not active, you could wait 30 minutes.  It’s crazy what incentives will do.