The server
A Dawn of Heroes is a persistent world for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Characters live on the server, not on your disk, and everything below is ours rather than the base game's.
What is different from stock Neverwinter Nights
- 33 playable races with subraces on top, 27 classes, and a level cap of 40.
- You start at level 3, not at 1 - see Game client.
- Forty dungeons in four tiers, instanced per party, with their own bosses and their own loot.
- Spells and feats are rewritten. A large number of them do something different here from what the base game's description says; where that is true, the page states what the code does. See Magic.
- Its own economy: tokens, an account-wide vault, a player trade post, crafting and gathering, sockets, housing, mounts and pets.
- Hardcore, for players who want a death to be close to final.
- The armory, which publishes character sheets, dungeon clears and a bestiary out of the live server.
The test area
A place to try a build before you commit to it. Every race, every skin, end-game gear and a target dummy are free there.
You get in by naming a character. Any character whose name contains TEST becomes a test character the first time it logs in, and is put in the test area.
The area is sealed both ways. A test character that reaches anywhere else is sent straight back, and an ordinary character that ends up in the test area is sent to purgatory. So a test character never leaves, and nothing it gathers can follow you out.
What is different inside:
- Levelling has no overflow limit, so experience past the next level is not thrown away.
- Dying costs nothing. You leave no corpse and do not go to the Fugue; respawning brings you back healed and cleaned of effects, at the area's own respawn point.
- The vault is switched off, and says so when you try it.
- You cannot queue for battlegrounds.
- Chests are empty. You get a message and nothing else.
Reboots
The server restarts once a day, around midday server time, once it has been up at least twelve hours. It warns two hours ahead and again one hour ahead. Everyone is saved and disconnected as part of the shutdown, so nothing is lost by being online for it - and the daily armory publication happens in the same window.