So whats the real cost to play?

[Festus]

Its F2P until a certain lvl or region from reading previous posts. So what is the cost after that? Is it monthly, dlc, pay to win?

[Wolverine]

Well, you can F2P through the whole game, it takes more time (for exchanging in game currency into item shop currency for buying stuff from the store) and some planing to do so, but it's possible.

I've a Level 80 Fighter with an ItemLevel of 30k closing in on 31k, finished all 4 Milestones (kind of an event) in Avernus (latest campaign area) and i'm not spending money on the game atm.

Besides, there's no real "pay to win" here, since there's allways more new content to play through and better/fresh equipment to go after in the future, "paying to progress/get somewhere faster" is more accurate.

And it's more important to join a decent guild
https://forum.arcgames.com/neverwinter/categories/guild-recruitment-pc
and being part of a good group for the more challenging content.

There're a few "DLCs" in the item shop that are worth buying, but you don't need them right from the start.

[SeanBotha]

Major pay to win changes incoming i will monitor and see if it is as bad as players think before investing on game!

[Festus]

Thanks for the responses. When is the pay to win expected?

[Ancalagon]

Originally posted by Templar Dude:

Thanks for the responses. When is the pay to win expected?

Hello, ask when there will be the pay to win ?

But you have at least once really tried to see the game market where you buy things with ZEN (obtainable or with Astral diamonds by playing or bartering items in the game auction, or simply if you can afford it USING REAL MONEY).

In the game market if you do not want to spend days acquiring Astral diamonds daily and if you are willing to pay to have all the runes to the maximum degree, in addition to mounts and MUCH MORE just go to the GAME MARKET and spend a lot of REAL MONEY to have ZEN with which you then buy what you.

By buying runes if it is not "clear" as an argument I mean that just buy the keys to open the various chests that you can find in the game or buy from the market

The game has been like this FOR YEARS and NOT WEEKS.

[Wolfhound]

Originally posted by Ancalagon:

Originally posted by Templar Dude:

Thanks for the responses. When is the pay to win expected?

Hello, ask when there will be the pay to win ?

But you have at least once really tried to see the game market where you buy things with ZEN (obtainable or with Astral diamonds by playing or bartering items in the game auction, or simply if you can afford it USING REAL MONEY).

In the game market if you do not want to spend days acquiring Astral diamonds daily and if you are willing to pay to have all the runes to the maximum degree, in addition to mounts and MUCH MORE just go to the GAME MARKET and spend a lot of REAL MONEY to have ZEN with which you then buy what you.

By buying runes if it is not "clear" as an argument I mean that just buy the keys to open the various chests that you can find in the game or buy from the market

The game has been like this FOR YEARS and NOT WEEKS.

lmfao

[ytre]

minmaxed endgame is heavy pay to win

weapon enchantment
armor enchantment
offense enchantments
defense enchantments
utility enchantments
mythic mount bolster
mythic mount colars
legendary insignias
companion runestones
mythic companions bolster incoming

each item on the list is worth many hundreds of USD. some items of the list are rather in thousands of USD such as mythic mount bolster and collars, insignias if you require specific subtypes only to minmax and the companion bolster will be another thousand USD sink

below are grind items
companion gear
artifacts
artifact gear
non artifact gear slots
overload enchantments
armor kits

[Wolverine]

King of Spines, account-wide mythic mount, 10% mount bolster, 2.9m AD
most legendary account-wide mounts, 5% mount bolster, 4m AD

most legendary mount insignias, 200k AD (legendary insignia choice pack 500k AD)

mythic mount collars are around 30m AD and give you a 5% specific boost, legendary ones 4m AD for 4%, epic ones 800k AD for 3% - beside the fact, that one can upgrade those collars with in game resources, why would anyone sane pay that much more AD for 1-2% stat increase? you can also only equip 1 mount collar per type with a total of 5.

42 days until the next Harvester of Nightmares event, then everyone can get at least 2 (or more, depending the amount of tokens you have left from the previous events) free Legendary Insignia Choice Packs, plus one free legendary account-wide mount after playing the whole event series for 5 times.

and they gave away 2x R15 Bonding Runestones to everyone this year, plus at least 1x R15 Enchantment - worth "many hundreds of USD" by you... not to forget the free Heart of Fire (R14, offensive) enchantment you can get from the AI campaign.

and i still have hundreds of Companion Upgrade and a few Mount Upgrade Tokens banked from events/promotions plus the weekly haul from Avernus, but i'm not going to touch those, until the new companion system is in place.

Energon, 24k HP bonus on epic, is around 10k AD
one of the best active companions atm., Abyssal Chicken, is worth 100k AD,
Deepcrow Hatchling, 6k Power on epic, is currently around 2.5m AD,
grind AD, and you don't have to pay any real money for them.

but feel free to get online and ask some of the Milestone 4 Leaderboard winners if they've sunken "hundreds/thousands of USD" into the game to get where they are today...

i mean, i can understand spending some money on the game for the Race Packs and ViP after reaching Level 80 and being sure of sticking around, but why pay real money for anything else, when you can get that much out of the game for free?

anyway, thanks for that "calculation" post, i really had a good laugh from it.

[Nain]

i payed real hard earned money at the start of the game to some of the accountwide packs, just to have some mounts or companions and bags for every of my chars.

nowadays none of those are BIS, but you could argue that with the bolster boni i have a slight advantage on never chars or somesuch nonsense.

anyways, since then ive spent exactly ZERO money in all those years, and why would i?

rushing to get BIS gear/ench/stones/etc does exactly nothing, because the next mod will invalidate half of my progress anyway, and the remaining half will be subject to change or nerf, depending on how cryptic wants to "butter up" their monetary gains.

just get yourself in an alliance and have fun, you do not need to spend any money if you have a community thats friendly and helpfull. once you are level 80, you can basically cheese your weapon and gear itemlevels with the avernus map system. and that is almost enough to be able to run all random queues (some exceptions may apply).

all that remains is getting mounts, companions and enhancment/runestones, and basic rank8-9 are so dirt cheap and enough at the beginning that you do not have to worry for some time.
and mounts/companions can be optained in vallenhas trough yumas lootbags, up to epic quality. sure its random, but why spend 15bucks on a mount when you can do some quests and have a chance on epic versions?

people complaining about p2w all the time are mostly those that do not want to put a minimal amount of effort into the game and want to be carried, but when theres all of those likeminded in a queue and it fails, then the frustrated ones come to scream "whaaa whaaa i cannot finish demogorgon because p2w"...

[Graveside]

*DO NOT DO IT* - I am okay money wise; however sinking over $600 for the fun of it was silly. The game pushes you to buy things in order to get better overall gear stats. A big thing you will see is that (WARDS) are a must buy if you don't want to lose your mats for a 1% chance to increase the item level.

Fun = f2p - stay in the low lvs and just restart over and over.
End Game = Real Money...more than $15.00 a month.

I can name a few games that for $15 a month that you can get the entire game and 99% of the content with only buying expansions. Arc has reap the benefits from me for this month; however I will now only play f2p since I bought packages that boosted me to a year or 12 Rank in the game.

The upcoming updates will crush some players gear stats and item lvl all in the name of balancing and forcing more to pay real money.

Do not be fooled by players saying you can farm AD to get Zen. This is a joke, you can put 1000 Zen up on the house market @750 to 1 AD and get it instantly; however AD for Zen is another story. AD for Zen is like on a 3 month back log because there were 49 million AD waiting to be exchanged for Zen at @750 to one. Players waiting since October to get Zen for their AD.

I am not trying to bash the game. I enjoy the game and what it has to offer in the realm of D&D but I can find cheaper things than this.

Good Luck all and mainly ARC with your upcoming patch or MoD 20.

[Wolverine]

Well, spending money on the game or not is a choice everyone has to make for themself, i've spend roughly 30$ here over several years of playing, and i think i got my moneys worth back in entertainment for sure.

Exchanging AD for ZEN isn't a joke, it's simply based on Supply and Demand, and yes it takes a very long time now, but it's still working and i have 2 Legendary Mount Choice Packs, the Aasimar Race plus a whole list of "DLCs" and ViP to prove it.

Funny thing about this change, this update will actually increase your ItemLevel, while your stats will remain more or less the same. Don't believe me? Not a problem, go ahead and test it on the Preview Server for yourself. My Fighter went from IL 30k to 36k without changing anything, and fighting around Avernus on Preview felt more or less the same as on Live too.

Coalescent Wards -> from invoking
Preservation Wards -> from invoking, Winter Festival, The Bleeding Citadel in Avernus,
or just buy them from the AH with AD, their prices go down when there's a ZEN shop sale.

Anyway, the companion changes are pretty much like the mount changes, and i'll just wait for the dust to settle before i start adapting my characters to this, for now i'll simply keep on playing with what i have and i can get for free.