Elder Scrolls Online Archives - Page 12 of 41

Shornhelm Resident

June 25, 2018 by Belghast

When I play an MMO a curious thing seems to happen. There will be one town or public area that I tend to gravitate towards. In World of Warcraft that was Ironforge which makes sense given that was the location of the only Alliance Auction House for years. However long after that fact I still visit it pretty often because as far as a city goes it just feels comfortable. Even when I hang out in Stormwind as the later expansions have pushed us… I tend to hang out in the Dwarven Quarter because again… it feels right for my character. I am sure if you were to ask me to cobble together a roleplaying back story it would involve the fact that Belghast was a human living among Dwarves in Iron Forge as a sort of adopted son.

In Elder Scrolls online… my home is Shornhelm located in the Rivenspire zone of Daggerfall Covenant. While I chose to play an imperial for the bonuses… in my mental canon I am from Shornhelm and grew up there. It doesn’t hurt that I absolutely love the look of this town, but in truth what drew me to it in the first place was the ease of crafting. There is a Wayshrine a few steps from the Smithy and Lumbermill and around the corner from that is the bank. A few steps away is the entrance to the thieves guild, and the only thing that is inconvenient is the Enchanter for breaking down my enchants and jewelry. All told it is just a simple and convenient way to get into town and do my business without needing to run all over the place.

I spent the better part of the weekend playing Elder Scrolls Online chilling on the sofa. At this point I have gone through at least half of Deshaan which appears to be a very large zone in the grand scheme of things. Once I got past CP160 my overall champion rating doesn’t really seem to matter anymore but I believe I am somewhere around 230. This is nothing compared to the players I see roaming around in their 700s. One of the things I find interesting about this game is the fact that the champion system helps to buffer things… but if you are not paying attention and get too much hate from too many targets… you still can pretty easily die. I of course have Green Dragon Blood cheats which helps me recover from dumb things… but it isn’t like I can reliably solo the zone mini boss type mobs yet.

I am still largely playing the same way I always have as a sword and shield dragon knight favoring stamina a bit, but in truth a fairly balanced character otherwise. There are many builds that appear to be faster at killing things than mine, and I am sure I could swap stuff around to get to one of those. However this one makes me happy and it involves me charging in… debuffing the target and then just wailing on them with my weapon. I am perfectly fine with that style of gameplay. Now were I dipping my toes into PVP I am sure I would quickly be confronted with my inadequacies.

The system that I stumbled onto yesterday that I had never experienced before was the Outfit Station. I have largely been wearing an disguise that I picked up from some crates since I really dig the whole platemail robes thing that the World of Warcraft paladins had going on. As a result I have not really worried too much about what sort of gear I was wearing, but eventually wandered past a machine I had not seen before. This allows you to change the appearance of every slot you are wearing and set three levels of color dye. One of the things I deeply appreciate is that the same regions on every piece seem to be the same dye slot. In both GW2 and Rift there are times where the primary item may represent the metal pieces… but in other items it could be the secondary dye slot. In ESO it seemed to be reliable that the first slot represented the metal bits, the second the highlights, and the third any underlayment.

Ultimately what this tells me is that I need a lot more dye pots, but I am not really sure how one gets those apart from buying them on the in game store when they are offering up a color scheme you like. I cobbled together something I am largely okay with however. That said… the real win for the night was learning how to dye my disguise so that I could keep wearing my plate robes appearance but just change up the color scheme a bit. I am having yet another renaissance with this game, and I am wondering how long it will last. As my friend Squirrel said… it will likely last right up until some other game catches my attention since I do tend to flit back and forth between every MMO I have ever played. Really enjoying the story of Ebonheart Pact and it is so much more “me” than what was going on over in Aldmeri Dominion.

One parting comment… if you are out there playing some ESO feel free to add me to your friends list. If you friend @belghast it will do so at an account level, making it easier to track if I am on an alt. The truth is however… I don’t really play alts.

Champion and Stonefalls

June 22, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to do enough greater rifts to push my three gems of choice to level 35… which means I have now finished the second post chapter of Season 14. I am now two steps into Destroyer where the challenges get harder as to the prize amounts. I feel like this is a reasonable place to take a break since my often partner in crime in this Diablo nonsense is having to deal with some real world stuff. I do however intend to keep running the occasional run to farm up some gold. I am completely flat broke at this very moment… or at least 600k gold which FEELS flat broke in the Diablo 3 seasonal post game. I spent a chunk of time transmuting gems for the purpose of trying to slot the best green gem into every item that would take one.

This will be essentially the last performance and damage output boost I can make that does not involving swapping item for item with an Ancient Legendary equivalent. You can see on the profile of my seasonal character that I currently have four ancient legendaries… but of those one doesn’t really count given that I am wearing nemesis bracers just for the purpose of burning through Rifts faster. I’ve been spending all of my blood shards with Kadala on chest pieces in the random hope of getting an ancient version of the Marauders chest, but really at this point it is just picking a slot and grinding on it until luck rewards me for my futility.

I also need to determine what conquest I will plan on going with this season, or technically conquests if I intend to go deep enough in to get the extra bank slot. The conquests available this season are…

Avarice – Complete a 50,000,000 gold streak while outside The Vault and the Inner Sanctum
Speed Demon – Complete a Nephalem Rift at Max level on Torment X or Higher within 2 minutes
Years of War – Reach Greater Rift Level 55 Solo with the full bonuses of Six of the Following Class Sets
Divinity – Reach Greater Rift Level 75 Solo
On A Good Day – Level three Legendary Gems to 65

Of those the two most obvious and probably easiest are Divinity and On A Good Day given that those sorta happen in the normal flow of the game. Figuring out which third one I want to do is probably going to be the biggest issue. Maybe Grace and I could get fast enough to do a T10 Rift together within 2 minutes, especially if we could find some more people to help us out and just sorta go in different directions during each level racking up kills. Avarice is all about building a specific set for it and then gathering up all of the trash in a specific area and trying to kill it all at once. I guess I should be holding onto those gold boosting items just in case I want to go down that route.

The other thing I did last night was run around in Elder Scrolls Online for a couple hours. I gotta say this game is really gorgeous and even thought Stonefalls is probably the worst zone in the game (though Ashgar would probably fight me and claim that Alakir Desert is)… it is still breathtakingly beautiful with its alien mushroom landscapes. I am trying to push through this area because Stonefalls is really the major impediment for almost all of my attempts to level through the Ebonheart content. As a reminder to my readers… I am stubborn as fuck when it comes to Elder Scrolls Online and am not willing to try any of the expansion content until I have beaten the original content. That means I started off in Daggerfall and leveled all the way through those zones. Then I entered the new game plus… which was Aldmeri Dominion on the same character and have leveled through all of that. Finally I am in the process of leveling my way through Ebonheart Pact at which point… I will happily begin gobbling up the expansions.

The primary reason behind this is that I know people who worked on this game and feel like I want to see every last bit of the original content. There is a town in the Rift area in Ebonheart that has namesake characters for myself, Ashgar, Warenwolf, and Audrae… and while I saw them during beta I want to see them legitimately with my main character. I feel like maybe I am ready to buckle down and start pushing through the content and finally reach that goal I have been working on since 2014. Ultimately Elder Scrolls Online is a game I have been playing off and on in one form or another since February of 2013, and the amount of effort that I put into beta testing probably stalled out my eventual post release progress. That said I am deeply proud of being a member of the Psijic Order… what they called the alpha testers and proud of what this game has ultimately become.

Lantern Light

January 25, 2018 by Belghast

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had originally intended. The initial goal I had in mind was to go home and attempt to pull myself back into a mindset where I could play Final Fantasy XIV. Instead I hit a few detours along the way the first of which being that shortly after I had finished doing all of the stuff that I need to do when I first get home… the power went out. Now I realize this is mostly an irrational fear, but the first thing that always goes through my head is… did you pay the bill? I am not sure exactly why I have this fear because we have never actually been disconnected from any utility, but it is still something that happens. I was already in my “not suitable for public” clothing, but I did stumble outside long enough to notice that all of my neighbors were also lumbering around by flashlight. I called in the outage and reported it through the menu driven system and then spent the next little bit trying to sort out how to see reported outages without logging into the damned electric company page with an account that I didn’t have. There is a local facebook group that serves as the closest thing we have to a city wide “water cooler” and my second place was to go check there knowing that there would already be a thread of a hundred or so posts about whatever was going on. The lights went out around 6 pm and if the group was to be believed the estimated time for the fix was 11:30 pm… which meant it was about to be a really long night living by lantern light. It was around this time that I remembered I had the Switch and grabbed it from my office settling into the sofa to play some games. I had played some Super Mario Odyssey and was about ten minutes into the Octopath Traveler demo when the power was magically restored at roughly 8 pm.

From there I did all of those things I had been avoiding… like opening the fridge to get a drink and settled down to play some Final Fantasy XIV. Upon logging in I got greeted by friends… roamed around Limsa Lominsa and then promptly logged out because I just did not have it in me to do the group activities I need to do in order to make any semblance of forward momentum. Instead I popped into Elder Scrolls Online and continued work on Stonefalls. This zone is like a giant immovable object for me and the sooner I get on the other side of it the better. It has singlehandedly killed every attempt at playing an Ebonheart Pact character because even though it has gone through a ton of changes since alpha… it still is not what I would call a good zone. The weird shape and geometry of the zone makes everything a bigger chore than it should be. Objectives that might look really close on the map instead require you to backtrack half the way across the zone to find the proper entrance into the region you need to go. All of this is just the functional reasons… but there is also the fact that it is bleak. The quake color palette and the constant smokey haze and falling ash make it not exactly the most visually exciting place to be. I did however feel like I made a bunch of progress in the zone last night and checked off a bunch of areas. I am not even sure where I am in the zones main story quest, and if I could change one thing about Elder Scrolls online I would make it so that those primary quests required to move to the next area were somehow highlighted differently in a FFXIV style manner.

The other thing on my radar is that at the time of taking this screenshot we were roughly 17 hours away from unlocking Monster Hunter World on the PS4. Granted I have no actual intent of staying up until midnight to play this game, but I do plan on playing Friday night. This is going to be my first real attempt at playing a Monster Hunter title while it is in the public zeitgeist and I am hoping that by doing so… I will be able to grok what the fuck is going on. I’ve attempted the PS Vita version and purchase Generations for the 3DS… but largely chocked up a lot of my problems to the fact that I am just not much of a handheld gamer. World however is coming to the PS4 which will allow me to play it on this nifty 43 inch 4k television (even though I don’t have a pro and can’t do the higher resolutions really) and my hope is it will be a much more compelling experience. I’ve always thought this was the sort of game I could get into if I had the proper introduction, because the core loop of grind random stuff to make yourself stronger to take down big bad monsters is one that I can likely get behind. I am hoping I can rely on those who have come before like Ashgar and Stormrazor to get me over the adjustment hump. I am also super excited that Arekkz is devoting a series of videos to easing beginners in. I most definitely need the assistance. Needless to say I will be on the PS4 giving it a whirl tomorrow.

Saving Bleakrock

January 22, 2018 by Belghast

Lets get this update out of the way. I am still struggling quite a bit with this death flu bullshit that has been going around. Here in my home state of Oklahoma there have been 45 deaths since the beginning of Flu Season, and I absolutely understand why. I religiously take the Flu Shot each year when work offers it, but some of the estimates I have seen say it is only 10-15% effective against what is actually out in the wild. Due to my case getting misdiagnosed as a sinus infection early on… it mean’t I lost that time window when something like Tamiflu would be useful. Now I am having to just slog through it in an attempt to get to the other side. This weekend things started feeling worse as it triggered my Asthma in a major way, and instead of podcasting Saturday night my wife was making a mercy run to Walgreens to pick up more medication that the on-call doctor prescribed. This meant that Friday night I wound up having to take six Prednisone pills in one dose in an attempt to shock my system back to normal. It is helping but going way slower than I would have liked, I am now starting day three of a dose pack and I am really hoping that today is the day that I start to feel more human again. Most of the weekend I was in this mode where I felt fairly reasonable so long as I was sitting perfectly still and not doing much of anything. The moment I would get up and attempt to do something simple like get a drink, or swap a load of laundry… and it felt like I had just finished some epic uphill slog through the tundra. I hate feeling useless, and I hate that this has continued to drag on as long as it has. Since the only time I felt reasonable this weekend was sitting on the sofa snuggled into a blanket with my laptop… that mean’t I spent most of my time playing games. With the current state of World of Warcraft feeling fairly awful until they make what is going to inevitably be a balance and tuning pass on World Scaling… I needed something else to hold my attention. I am still playing quite a bit of Neverwinter, but for whatever reason that game feels best to me when played in short focused bursts. It was around Friday that I started playing Elder Scrolls Online regularly and it managed to get its hooks into my psyche.

I have been extremely stubborn in the way that I play Elder Scrolls Online. For the uninitiated, the base game has a really cool feature of having a build in new game plus and plus plus modes. What that means is that as you beat your chosen faction’s content, you walk backwards around the ouroboros taking on the next faction in sequence while you play through all three. I originally rolled as Daggerfall Covenant, which mean’t my new game plus faction is Aldmeri Dominion and then new game plus plus would be Ebonheart Pact. Where we get into the stubborn part is that I refuse to play any of the “expansion” content aka Imperial City, Orsinium, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Shadows of the Hist or Morrowind until I have completed all three of the original factions. Of note each one of these factions is designed to be 50 levels of content and now we get into where I have stalled out… it takes a very long time to work through the original game three times. Aldmeri Dominion originally seemed like pure hell to me because of my severe distaste for all things elves… and that faction has both the Altmer (High Elves) and the Bosmer (Wood Elves). That said… I do have a very deep soft spot for the often times completely feral cannibal Bosmer, and I have always loved the moon sugar imbibing Khajiit… so I thought on those two elements alone I could probably make it through the content. What I was not expecting however was to completely fall in love with the storyline featuring a bunch of elves and their weird struggles to hold together what apparently as a very unlikely alliance. With elements of the Wild Hunt and crazy drug induced visions… Aldmeri Dominion turned out to be a really excellent ride and I am sure Tam is pleased as hell with himself because I know he was responsible for at least some of the content. This weekend I managed to finish up the main storyline in Reapers March, but I will admit there are a lot of side quests that I simply did not deal with over there that at some point I will probably revisit. Ultimately I would love to 100% every one of the zones… but that will take time and I did not want to burn myself out doing so.

As a result last night I finally started Bleakrock Isle and Ebonheart Pact. This is without a doubt the content that I tested most thoroughly over the course of the year or so that I was in various alpha and beta tests. It was the content I could essentially do in my sleep… along with Stros M’kai. The funny thing is… time had clouded my memories and left me with vague idea for how the flow of the zone was supposed to go… but left me struggling to remember how to get 100% of the refugees off the island. I realize I could have easily skipped the intro area and moved straight on to Stonefalls, but in truth I have always found the intro areas to be extremely strong content. I know they were a huge problem for players who wanted to log in and just start running amok, but for me personally… they were this great guided tour into the game. That is one of the things I constantly find myself amazed by is just how damned good this game really is, and how relatively shunned it was by the broader Elder Scrolls community. Each time I return I get immersed completely into the world and am right back where I left off mentally and wandering around completely interesting quests. That honestly is a double edged sword because what ultimately causes me to wander away is that it is almost at times too immersive. Much like playing the story in SWTOR I get engrossed in the game and have trouble doing anything else while playing it. There is always more dialog to listen to and more quest chains to complete, and my ability to binge Netflix and play this game is largely a nonstarter. If I want to Netflix… my game of choice is something like World of Warcraft that is so familiar and almost mind numbing that I can play it almost entirely with muscle reflexes. Elder Scrolls is largely still a game about muscle reflex for me… but still one that I need to accurately read the tells that the mobs on screen are giving me to be able to react correctly to in order to stay alive. I cannot simply blindly run around mashing buttons… or I will end up dead exceptionally fast for someone who has just shy of 200 champion points as of logging out last night. I know I am probably playing less than optimally, but I have a build that works for me and feels reasonably well and I am afraid to dig too deeply into it past that. Optimization is often times the path of misery for me and drains the fun out of the experience. I do however need to perform a little resource to figure out exactly what the gear level breaks are and how soon I should be looking to upgrade out of my 160 CP gear into something else.