Neverwinter – Scourge Warlock First Impression

By accident I noticed that Neverwinter released a new update called Tyranny of Dragons, in which they added the very cool-sounding new class Scourge Warlock.

In terms of gameplay, however, I found the SW a little on the “meh” side. I feel like they might have borrowed a lot from the Control Wizard because it felt very similar to me. (My first level-cap character was a CW.) The main attack is the same kind of triple-bolt spell that the CW uses.

I was considerably more impressed by the gameplay of the Hunter Ranger class a while back. (I just now realized, as I went to look for a link to my previous post on the subject, that I never actually posted anything on the Hunter Ranger. Oops. Oh I remember now: I did a stream of it which I didn’t save and is now lost to time.) So if I had to pick one of the two new classes, I would go with the HR.

I will say that the SW does a crap-ton of damage in the first seven levels. It’s sort of like the Trickster Rogue in that regard. You just walk into a room, spam the mouse buttons and a couple of encounter keys, and everything dies around you. Unlike the TR, however, the SW uses a lot of colorful animations to do it.

Speaking of animations, has anyone noticed that the human running animations in Neverwinter are awful?

Overall I was a little disappointed in the Scourge Warlock, at least through level 7. It sounds like it should be a lot cooler than it actually is. Perhaps it gets better later on, but for me, the gameplay wasn’t interesting enough to go through the same repetitive Neverwinter quests again. I still stand by the Great Weapon Fighter as my favorite class in the game.

If you’re wondering, I did not spend the megabucks to try out the Dragonborn race.

P.S. If you are like me and can’t remember how to take screenshots in Neverwinter, you have to /bind it to to the printscreen key manually: /bind sysrq screenshot_jpg. (Of course, you can bind it to whatever key you want.)