Spellplague Caverns Death March

• MMORPG

• Neverwinter

So I hit level 52 on my GWF and decided to try Spellplague Caverns again for a Dungeon Delve event. That turned out to be a huge mistake. Do not ever go into this dungeon. Ever. It is just not worth it. There’s no way the loot justifies the time spent.

We had a GWF (me), cleric, wizard, and two rogues. At first. Somewhere before the first boss, one of the rogues disconnected and someone had the brilliant idea to kick him and get another from the queue. Except that once you go beyond a certain point in a dungeon, it bugs out and doesn’t pull in new people from the queue anymore. It would have been much better to wait for the disconnected person to come back, because they usually do. So we only had four for about 98% of the dungeon. And no tank.

This dungeon is really long. I mean holy crap long. It must have taken us two hours to get through it all. Even if we’d had five, I still think it would have taken an hour and a half. Just when you think you can’t take the constantly spawning plague monsters anymore, you get to the first boss, and you think to yourself, “omg there are *two more* bosses after this??”

I think we probably would have given up on it except for the fact that we were in a DD event, which means you get some gauranteed loot if you make it to the end. And we were making steady progress - slow, tedious progress, but steady.

At least the spawn pits went away after the first boss. That’s something. But good lord those plague thingys that knock you back are super annoying. Especially because you only get about 50ms to react because of lag. So many times I ran out of the effect only to get knocked back anyway because the server didn’t register my movements in time. And they kind of hurt, too.

So we finally slogged through to the final boss, which was actually the most interesting boss I’ve seen to date. Unfortunately by then you’re so tired of the dungeon that you just don’t care anymore. Not only do you have to dodge all the AoEs but four times during that fight the floor disappears from under you. If you’re standing on it at the time, you die. We wiped the first time because it was a surprise to all of us. The second time, the mouthy “top DPS” rogue didn’t move in time and we lost him (typical deeps!). So we had to finish off that final boss with three people.

Basically I pounded on the boss while the CW and DC dealt with the adds on the platform behind. They had the harder job by far. I really just had to stand there and swing, occasionally dodging an AoE, and moving when the floor was about to disappear. I hardly ever took any damage, so I could have done that all day. And it felt like it took the better part of a day to wear down that boss. But we finally did, and in a touching moment of gamer solidarity, we all rolled Greed on the last boss loot. Then we got our DD loot. I didn’t even look at what it was. There was just no way it could be worth the effort.

I don’t think I’ll be returning to Spellplague Caverns anytime soon.