In the upcoming Neverwinter: The Maze Engine, mounts are getting a major overhaul, and it’s been a long time coming. They’ve started discussing improvements to our mounts shortly after the game launched, and have worked on numerous designs for them for almost two years now. The game dev’s are excited to be able to finally get these changes for hunting in Neverwinter Astral Diamonds.
Changes in Mount System in Neverwinter Astral Diamonds Hunting
One of the most common issues they’ve had with the existing mounts, is that once you get a Rank 3 or 4 mount, all of the lower speed options are effectively unusable – you may really like that sweet Armored Ghost Horse or Blue Ribbon Pig that you got, but it’s tough to justify riding it around when it’s so much slower than your Medium Armored Horse or Stormraider Clydesdale. And while you could upgrade a specific mount to higher speeds… it was a bit tough. As such, one of the main goals for our changes to mounts was to separate mount speed from mount appearance. With this new system, you select your mount, and then can attach the speed you want, based on what you’ve acquired.
With some of the recent offerings, we’ve also introduced the concept of passive powers and active powers on certain mounts. While these have had a great reception, they’ve already started hearing some of the same concerns being brought up – you really want to summon your Coastal Flail Snail in combat, but you still want to ride that Blue Ribbon Pig, naturally. So, they took the same functionality added for mount speed and applied that to the actives which is now called Mount Combat Powers.
New Uses of Mounts to Hunt Neverwinter Astral Diamonds
The game dev’s also be introducing a way to make all of your mounts useful to you with the Stable, where your various mounts can be equipped with new items called Insignias, providing various small bonuses innately, as well as access to the new Insignia Bonus Powers – like small set bonuses for acquiring appropriate Insignias – but we’ll talk more about those later in a more in-depth blog about Stables & Insignias.