As the majority of our readers most likely know by now, Neverwinter's latest expansion, Tyranny of Dragons, went live about a month ago, introducing a plethora of new features to the acclaimed F2P action MMORPG. Among the new content also was the long awaited playable class of the Scourge Warlock, a magic wielder able to manipulate dark magic and soul powers in order to support his allies and annihilate his foes.
Curious as we are by nature, we entered the game for a hands-on with this brand-new class to share our first-hand impressions with. Are you ready? Then, let’s get started...
The Scourge Warlock incorporates multiple unique mechanics and sub-mechanics, making it a pretty interesting and delicate class to play. It’s neither possible to just stand in front of your target exchanging blows with it, nor to use a standard "rotation" effective in any situation. Players therefore need to pretty carefully think about which skill to perform first and which one later, as those have so many different effects and interact with each other to an extend that they will often be forced to improvise and adapt their tactics to trigger a certain effect or another.
The Scrouge Warlock’s at-will skills, which are bound to the player’s left and right mouse button by default, are Eldritch Blast and Dark Aura, the former being their basic attack and bread 'n butter combo, which launches three eldritch flame globes onto the enemy from a reasonable range, with the third hit inflicting splash damage to those enemies near to the target. Dark Aura is the first of the classes unique mechanics: when using this skill while aiming at an enemy, it will generate a globe of energy (called Dark Spiral), which starts floating around the character and will stay with it until it is used. Clicking the right mouse button while you having one or more dark spirals around you, will launch it/ them onto your target inflicting a high amount of damage and earning more action points. When inflicting a killing blow, the character will generate another Dark Spiral. There are even further ways to generate them with other skills, e.g. killing a cursed enemy, thus making the management of your Dark Spirals an essential aspect in playing the Scourge Warlock for they represent a nice source of DPS.
Another interesting mechanic is represented by the Warlock’s curses: enemies can instantly put under a curse by clicking tab to have them suffer from a 20% increase on received damage. Warlocks are able to put up to three curses on their target, the damage bonus will be split between them though, which is important as many skills interact with curses and trigger various useful effects. For instance, the Vampiric Embrace, a power which steals life from your enemies inflicting damage on them and healing yourself, will be far more effective on a cursed target and provide your Warlock with a temporary boost to hit points but will spend the curse, or as already mentioned, killing a cursed enemy with Dark Aura will reward you with another dark spiral.
The Scourge Warlock even has another interesting mechanic in form of the Soul Puppet to offer. The first power your Warlock receives is Killing Flames, a simple high-damage attack, which when used to kill an enemy will spawn a Soul Puppet, a kind of floating ghost that stays at your character’s side for 120 seconds or until landing five attacks. And in case players manage to land another killing blow with that skill, their Soul Puppet’s damage will be increased by 20%. There moreover exist other ways to spawn your Soul Puppet while one of the class’s paragon path, damnation, is heavily focused on making your Soul Puppets a lethal weapon and a reliable addition to your party.
Another power we gave a shot during our trial was Infernal Sphere, which is more common but not less fun or powerful. Upon casting, it creates a variable number of green and black flaming spheres (more spheres for less HP and up to four or five sphere, we can’t recall the exact amount) which float around your character and automatically attack the enemy when entering a battle.
Although we were only able to reach level 11 during our trial, the Scourge Warlock granted us the opportunity to try a pretty comprehensive array of attractive skills as you can see. And we have to state that we had a really good time. While in many MMOs the magic classes have a pretty slow-paced start with only a few available skills that don’t differ too much from each other, we had a blast playing Neverwinter’s Scourge Warlock class with its intriguing mechanics that interact with each other.
The class allows players to create stunning combos and to inflict an incredible amount of damage if they’re aware of what you are doing. However, it is required to use your brain and your coordination, and to avoid spamming random skills in order to not get killed in a jiffy. Players have to know how and when to summon their Soul Puppet and what to do if it disappears at the wrong time.
Regarding the graphics, the Scourge Warlock is a pleasure to watch, with the mix of purple dark spirals and infernal spheres floating around the character, the ghostly Soul Puppet at its side and its shadowy rays from Vampiric Embrace and Eldritch Blast. The class’s moving and dodge animation moreover resembles a glide on shadow trails - pretty cool.
Developers did a pretty good job delivering a tremendously well-made class with both excellent and polished graphics and animations as well as mechanics. The Scourge Warlock is fun to watch, fun to play and you should definitely give it a shot.
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