Sharandar - A guide to staying sane

How To Do Sharandar Without Losing Your Mind

Let me start by saying that Sharandar has some really nice moments and the boons can be a real, erm...boon. It is one of the most visually arresting areas in the whole of Neverwinter with its bright, almost psychedelic palette. I also don’t claim to be any sort of expert here. I am just passing on my own experience in the hope that it is of some use. I am more than happy to accept any feedback or suggestions which would allow us to improve it. I am sorry it is long, but there are a lot of nuances to this area which I felt should be covered.

This guide may be a little clinical so if you want to discover the content with the developer’s intended awe and wonderment then it may be best to just figure it out for yourself and stop reading the guide before I spoil it for you. There have however been a few people in guild chat discussing the best way to do Sharandar, which is why I decided to write this.

When Sharandar was released I threw myself into it, religiously doing my dailies and when new ones opened up I would do them too. I got through it, slowly, but by the time I was half-way done it really started to feel like a grind. When I was near the end I also realised I had a lot of surplus materials from the first 2 areas. I don’t believe it has to be this way if you approach it in the right manner. I also didn’t have the Dread Ring available to me while I was running Sharandar, so there is a lot more variety available for you to mix things up now in terms of your daily activities.

Anyway, I will break it down into key areas of interest and again, please let me know if you feel any of this content is inaccurate.

Currencies

More so than any other area of Neverwinter, Sharandar’s Campaign is a game of currency balancing.

The 6 key currencies are:

• Feywild Spark: Used to unlock quests in the second and third area.
  

• Vibrant Seedling, Abjuring Charm, Iliyanbruen Blade: These three currencies you can get from the daily quests from the three areas. Seedling is the first area, Charm is the second area, and Blade is the third area.
  

• Gold Crescent: General currency. You will rarely ever run out of these, if at all.
  

• Fomorian Concoction: The area’s Bounty drop, for use at the Bounty Merchant in the central Sharandar Hub
  

You have to do the daily quests to unlock boons and advance to subsequent areas. The most important thing I learned when doing Sharandar is that:

¸.·´¯`·¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.The currency you will always be short of is Feywild Sparks¸.·´¯`·¸¸.·´¯`·.¸..

My advice then for Sharandar, is try not to focus too much on the dailies which don’t offer Feywild Sparks. The completionist in you may want to go and finish all of your dailies every day and you may well enjoy it for a while, but by the time you reach the end you will regret it.

My Quick Sharandar Progress  Checklist

• Pick up ALL of the daily quests available to you, particularly Battle for Sharandar & Arcane Reservoir. Arcane reservoir is worth 50 Sparks and is available weekly. It is vital you do this as often as possible if you want to get through Sharandar quickly.
  

• Pick up your free Key from the nearest Leprechaun (there is one in each of the 3 areas of Sharandar off the main central hub). Each area has a mini Dungeon with a chest which you can access with these keys. They are all pretty easy to solo for anyone, but you can rip through them at a pace with a little help. Grab these keys every day for reasons which I will explain later.
  

• If you have it, run Arcane reservoir as soon as you can. Next, pick off one daily quest at a time until you have enough Feydark Crystals to hand in the Battle for Sharandar quest.  At this point, STOP DOING YOUR DAILIES. Release your feywild energy, hand in the Battle for Sharandar quest and you are done. Come back to this the following day to start the process again.
  

• Why Stop? There are 3 quest-givers in each area. Each of these gives 1 random quest per day. If you stop as soon as you are ready to turn in ‘Battle for Sharandar’, you will reach a point where you have all/most of the quests available in your quest log. So once or twice per week, you can run through the entire area and complete them in one go. You will have an area packed full of activities so you will clear them quickly. If you do it this way, you can spend 10 minutes per day on a character to do what you need to do for steady progress. There is a lot of crossover in the quests, so you may find that in doing some of the quests in the first area, you start to collect items you need for other quests (Cyclops Eyes, Arbor Keys) without even trying.
  

• Keep an eye on your progress requirements in the campaign window. There is no point in hammering the first area when you reach the point of no longer needing any Vibrant seedlings to progress.
  

Mob Loot

There is plenty of loot in Sharandar. Health pots, Identity scrolls and Altars will drop like confetti when you are doing your dailies. You will also get a lot of blue gear. As a general rule, I consider any Lv60 greens to be of no value. I don’t even identify them I just sell them to the Vendor (ID scrolls are worth more than the gear). I identify all blues and any T1 blues I also sell to the vendor (T1 = armour/weapon which is a “+4” or rings/belts/neck pieces with 100 points for each of their 3 stats). T1’s are not really of any value and we certainly don’t need these items in the guild bank so do with them what you like.

Essentially, when you reach Sharandar your days of buying identity scrolls are over. You will almost always have a surplus of them. The same can be said for most potions, you will start to build up good stacks of them here.

Gold Crescents and Fomorian Concoctions

You will get a lot of these. I would love for somebody to point out a better use for them, but early on in the campaign I couldn’t see much worth buying with either of these currencies other than maybe to transmute your gear if you are particularly into fashioncrafting.

However, when you unlock the 3rd and final realm of Sharandar you will be able to purchase a couple of new potions using the gold crescents.

• Potion of Fey Healing (5 Crescents): Heals for 8,500HP and adds 850 Temporary hit points
  

• Potion of Heroism (15 Crescents): Increase your primary and secondary attributes by 1 for 1 hour
  

Both of these seem to be of some benefit, so I use all of my Fomorian Concoctions to buy Gold Crescents, and all of my Gold Crescents to buy these potions.

The Mini Dungeons

I got very bored of these very quickly. You can pick up a good amount of Rank 3 & 4 enchantments by running these dungeons and if you are a completionist, you will get a chance for the lliyanbruen gear drops from the chests at the end. There are 2 pieces for each Dungeon and while they are ok if you just hit 60, it certainly won’t be your long-term gear-of-choice so you will end up salvaging them before long.

There are 3 key bits of info for these dungeons which you should use to decide which to do and when:

• Each one will drop a weapon or armour enchantment shard unique to the dungeon. The enchantments themselves are all pretty weak and almost certainly not worth wasting a Coalescent Ward on, but you can use the shards for 1,020 refinement points which is decent. The other option is you can save up all of your shards and try to combine them without a ward. You will have a 1% chance to succeed, but we managed to get a couple of them to work in the past. I’d only recommend doing this if you have no use of the refinement points (which means your character is insanely powerful and you almost certainly aren’t reading this guide)
  

• The final Mini-Dungeon you will unlock (Celadaine’s Tower) seems to have a pretty decent drop rate for the Blink Dog companion (Thanks to Asphyx for letting me know about this, it seems to drop within 10 to 15 runs). The blink dog is a green level striker companion which sells quite well on the AH. I got around 65,000 AD for the last one I sold.
  

• Don’t buy the Keys, just take the daily free ones. The best you can hope for is a Blink dog drop. If you are only ever running Celadaine, you may average a return of about 5000AD per run. Most of the time though, you will get a piece of blue gear so you will be annoyed that you wasted 5000AD buying a key.
  

Personally, I tried each of the first 2 dungeons a dozen or so times as they are quite good fun, but I started collecting all of my keys and saving them so I could do multiple Celadaine runs. It is a decent way to pass a little time and the rewards are certainly better than for the other 2 dungeons. The only reasons I can see for doing the others is if you want to refine your artefact quickly, you want to complete the lliyanbruen Armour set for your collections, or you want the XP to level a companion.

When you have finished

You may want to come back to get more of the potions if you have run out. The daily quests are also a great way to earn XP if you are trying to level a new companion. I still try to come to Sharandar to pick up my daily Key and if I have a bit of time to kill, Celadaine’s Tower is still something I like to run for the AD rewards from Salvaging any purple gear drops or selling the blink dog.

Thanks for reading

I hope this is of some use to somebody. I will work on something similar for Shadowmantle content but I am still making my own mistakes in this area so I don’t know how useful my knowledge would be. It certainly looks like you can accept and stack up the daily quests in the same way as Sharandar, but the Shadowmantle Mini dungeons look like they need to be done every day if you want to progress quickly. My current approach is to do the Daily mini Dungeon every day if possible and pick up the other daily quests to complete when I find the time. It seems to be working ok, but I started this area quite late and other stuff keeps getting in the way of me actually doing it.