Cyrodil Excursion

Turning a Corner

WildStar64 2014-05-14 17-55-10-794 I am still not overwhelmed with excitement about Wildstar, but I am maybe starting to turn the corner on this game.  Last night I opted to work on the warrior a bit more, and it turns out the area I was languishing around had no actual quests for me.  One of the frustrations with the game is that the quest advisement on the minimap makes zero sense to me.  I keep trying to figure it out, but end up just hopelessly lost as I keep opening my main map to find the objectives.  I know there is some sort of a golden path system that you can turn on to get advisement but I find that whole process frustrating.  All I really want is a blip on the edge of the minimap showing me where I should head to get to the next sequences of quests.  Additionally I had mobs that I simply could not find.  There was an NPC in town that no matter how many times I moved through an area, never seemed to be where the quest turn in location was marked on the map.

WildStar64 2014-05-14 17-57-17-635 All of this said, in my flailing I happened to stumble upon an instance of sorts revolving around trying to save Outpost M-13.  I was woefully underleveled for the content but found it extremely enjoyable anyway.  I entered the instance at level 10 and all of the creatures I stumbled across were 13 to 14.  You start the mission as a hired shiphand on a cargo freighter delivering crystals.  You are boarded and it is your job to try and protect the freight.  I did fairly well here until it came time to fight the actual boss, and then I struggled a bit… having to try two or three times to get past him.  Finally we land on a planet, that is absolutely gorgeous.  You roam around with a 1950s style spaceman helmet, exploring what appears to be an asteroid with minimal gravity.  What is awesome here is that when you jump you get hangtime like you would expect in lower gravity.  Finally you wind your way around to Outpost M-13.

The next sequence of events plays out like the movie Aliens as you explore the base and subsequent mine looking for either survivors or the cause of the catastrophe.  Mostly if more content like this exists in Wildstar…  I might be happy to play it.  While I simply could not chew through the hive queen boss, and will likely have to return “at level” I had a blast doing it.  If nothing else this sells me on their universe, because stuff like that is really fun.  The game still feels rather awkward at times, and I still have my problems with the warrior overall, but at the end of the day I am a melee player.  While running around as a Chua with a shotgun was fun, it just doesn’t feel like “me”.  So while I am still having issues with their UI design a bit, I am hoping I can fix most of that with modifications.  I need to do some searching to see if I can find a serviceable mini-map replacement.

Cyrodil Excursion

eso 2014-05-14 21-57-13-118 For roughly a week I had on the Anook Alliance of Awesome calendar an event called “Faffing About in Cyrodil”.  The idea was to grab as many guildies as we could and head to Cyrodil looking for whatever we could do.  When we pulled together and finally coalesced we had roughly a dozen players, and not the most balanced party… but we worked with it.  At first we made a valiant attempt on Fort Glademist, that was currently being held by the Aldmeri Dominion.  However we struggled to even take the Lumbermill.  This was partially because we mostly just charged in aimlessly and spread ourselves too thin, but even more so that we were a group of bolstered to level 50 characters… and it was being guarded by actual veteran rank players.  The problem with bolstering is that it levels you to 50… but the base stats for a 50 without the benefit of armor increases or anything of the sort.  This means as a whole we represented a pack of level 50 paper dolls for someone to rip through.

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After making a couple of attempts we got tired of the running back and decided to shift focus to what my original goal was… collecting skyshards and beating bosses.  The cool thing about Cyrodil is that it is pretty much a normal questing zone in addition to being a zone full of PVP objectives.  So we wandered around the zone, often times aimlessly, collecting the various skyshards along the way.  At the end of the night I was up three skill points and had dinged 49, and various other folks in the party had dinged as well.  The dungeons in Cyrodil are really good experience, not to mention insane amounts of loot.  It is somewhat sad that instanced dungeons are rather pitiful experience if you are not completing the quest, however you can gather up a group of friends and roll through the Cyrodil dungeons for hours and almost level exclusively that way.  The respawn is fast enough that we were constantly having to fight our way back out of the dungeons as stuff was popping only one or two packs behind what we had just killed.

I was streaming last night and captured almost the entire thing, and as always posted it up on my youtube channel.  It seemed like folks were having a good time, even though we didn’t really have any success at the PVP aspect of cyrodil.  It is my intent to do this more often, and I will likely be trying to schedule another one of these nights for next Wednesday.  However I think I am going to try and start it a little earlier in the evening.  As the night drug on, you could tell that most of us were barely holding in there.  This is the negative side effect of being a guild almost entirely made up of 30 somethings… and mostly LATE 30 somethings and 40 somethings.  Five thirty in the morning comes really early, so I personally try very hard to head towards bed by at least 11.  For our east coast folks that had a lot of them staying up til midnight or so.  Hopefully with time we will find a happy medium that works for both the east coast and west coast contingencies.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #WIldstar #Cyrodil

14 thoughts on “Cyrodil Excursion”

  1. The quest you did was a so-called Shiphand Mission, and they’re one of my favorite things about Wildstar. They scale with group-size, so you can either solo them, or take along up to 4 of your friends. I duo’d the one you did with a friend, and it was so much fun.

    There is a shiphand mission in every zone as you level. I have only done the first two, but had a lot of fun with both of them. I think once you get to the group content, like Adventures and dungeons, the game will likely grow on you. Most people consider that Wildstar needs til around level 20 to truly become great.

    Which is a bit problematic, alright.

  2. There are little neon blue arrows For if you click jectives off the minimap. Also, if you click the objective in the quest list in the lower right, a directional arrow and distance appear in the HUD around your character.

  3. I totally spaced on this event. I was at my desk and finished work by about 10:30 PM and could’ve jumped in, too. /sob

  4. Good times, indeed! I’m totally hitting extra coffee today before I head into more meetings.

    Nice screenshot of the impulse nuke, too. 🙂 Let’s totally do it again.

  5. Wish I could have made it last night, but since it was a nice evening with the wife, I’m not really sorry I missed it either 😉

    I’m mountain time, but I tend to play later, so a start time of 9:00 Mountain is just about perfect for me. Looking forward to future events!

  6. . I pre-ordered Wildstar last night.
    2. I wish I could attend the guild events but it always seems like they happen on weekdays. It’s not your guild, it’s a common thing in MMOs. I simply can’t play that late at night during the week. It will screw with my sleep schedule horribly. I always feel a bit frustrated about weekly raids or events. I sit there scratching my head wondering who the heck stays up that late during the week? Well, I do get up at 4am everyday so a 11pm end time would get me a nap before I would have to work. It also makes me wonder what is wrong with the weekend? Why is the weekend always the time people solo? Is there some written MMO rule I don’t know about that states, the weekend we shall no groupith and we shall go forth during the work week to henceforth deprived thine self of sleepith!

  7. Is there anyone on the west coast or closer to west coast time that could run a parallel event? Weeknights are going to be difficult for everyone when it spans timezones (I had intended to participate, but I was just head-desking it around 10PM last night). If possible, splitting it up might help.

  8. Cyrodiil was great fun! Still think this should happen around maybe 8pmEST on Saturdays. It would be able to go for a few hours and folks could filter in and out of the group as they needed.

    Also- look at me in your first ESO even w shot!

    Also also- DRAGON LEAP IS ALWAYS NECESSARY!

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