The City of Crows

The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays.  Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts.  However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom.  So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it.  Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day.  I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later.  The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way.  I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties.  In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts.  I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel.  One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form.  Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday.  I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai.  Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here.  The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons.  If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra.  If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture.  There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes…  but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r.  Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for.  I am however happy enough to be moving on.  The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again.  Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things.  This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore.  I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable.  In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here.  The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location.  It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine.  This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place.  If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled.  If you are into mages and such you should really like this place.  In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals.  You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive.  From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind.  The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms.  The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear.  The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game.  First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system.  It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it.  Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking.  To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up.  So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would.  Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business.  As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24.  Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie.  I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely.  This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear.  At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly.  Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be.  It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level.  Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting.  If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level.  If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy.  You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai