Elder Scrolls Online Archives - Page 14 of 41

Be The Battery

February 10, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was a little more bleak than they usually are, and the bizarro thing is… I think writing it helped a lot. It helped putting the frustrations and dread into a single post and sending it out into the world. Its almost as if typing the words lessened the hold the malaise had on me. Then again the activities of last night helped quite a bit as well. However I will get to that shortly. First off I want to show off my home in Elder Scrolls Online. I went back and forth on a few different homes before finally settling on Mournoth Keep in the Halcyon Lake area of Bangkorai. I remember being extremely fond of the main campaign in Bangkorai so that fit for me as well as the fact that since I chose Daggerfall Covenant as my original faction… I wanted something to call home in the same area. In truth I have not done much with it since getting it, largely because I have not had much luck in getting pattern or furniture drops. I am being told that looting furniture seems to be the best way to do that. In theory I could resort to stealing, or instead just fine one of the many towns controlled by enemies and run amok looting there. I have a feeling through with the focus on housing there is going to be a lot of competition for lootables.

Now on to the events of last night and how they seem to have turned around my spirit. For awhile now Squirrel, Jex and myself have had an informal Thursday night thing where we go off and do small group content in Destiny together. Originally this was the night when we took on the Challenge of Elders, but more recently we have been running all three of our characters through the weekly nightfall. I have yet to get an icebreaker, so I largely think they are humoring me until I actually get one. Whatever the case it is a lot of fun, but due to the bizarre schedule since coming back from PAX it had been a few weeks since we last did one of these nights. In truth I had not actually played Destiny since probably January 19th now that I am thinking about it. I was extremely rusty, and by the sheer number of times that they had to rez me it showed… but regardless I think we all had a lot of fun. This week the Nightfall is Dust Palace which is something that has been in the rotation since year one… and that everyone has memorized at this point. As a result we were able to run through three characters worth of Nightfalls in way less than an hours time. During the Nightfall runs they asked me where I was on progress on the quest line to unlock the Outbreak Prime weapon, which requires you to group together in a fire team with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter to make forward momentum.

The truth is I had not really made it terribly far other than picking up the occasional progress from our Thursday night runs when the stars happened to be aligned and we wound up choosing to play different classes on a given run. Like they often do… they set out to change that and we ran a sequence of Archon’s Forge to finish out the step I happened to be on since those apparently count as “public events”. It was around this point that we realized that we did not have three characters with the devices needed to do the decoding step of the quest chain. There is a phase that needs to be completed in a social area where a titan, warlock and hunter input a sequence on this item that drops from the quest chain. If all three sequences are correct you can click through and get to the next step. After a little shuffling we realized that Jex’s warlock had already completed the quest, and Squirrel’s hunter was on the step I had just completed. So we continued on to catch Squirrel up in the process and ran a sequence of three heroic strikes, and then three public events to get us all on the same stage of the quest. After that back to the social area to complete the matrix and move on to the next step.

It felt like the night was still relatively young, so instead of hanging it up for the evening we pushed on into the next quest which involved collecting a bunch of SIVA tech by killing splicers. This also required us to run the Sepiks Perfected strike, which we knocked out in short order by simply doing the 320 light version. From there it was back into Archon’s Forge to complete three events, and farm up the rest of our SIVA Tech fragments. All of which went extremely quickly and before we had finished the three events, we had gotten 100% of our fragments. Watching those things scroll by 2 at a time on the right side of the screen was madness as we tore apart the forge event. Finally it was another trip back to a social space, this time to solve a four by five matrix. It took a half dozen attempts but we finally got the right numbers on all three of us, allowing us to move to the final step. Now both Squirrel on his hunter and myself on my Titan are on the step that requires us to simply kill any three bosses in the Wrath of the Machine raid. Then I will have my very own Outbreak Prime pulse rifle, and can do silly damage to SIVA targets with my nanites. All it all it was exactly the sort of concentrated fun that I needed to pull me out of my funk, and even though I am staring down the barrel of what will almost certainly be an extremely stressful day… I suddenly found a new packet of spoons with which to confront it.

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.

Honor the Green

January 17, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to wrap up Greenshade and move on to the next zone Malabal Tor. The funny thing about “leveling” through content in the post 50 game is that you lose all focus of how far you have actually come. When I started playing again recently I was sitting about Champion rank 115, but at this very moment after doing the introductory quest line in Malabal Tor I am sitting at 141. Both numbers seem like utter nonsense in the grand scheme of things, other than the fact that I am constantly getting incrementally more useful. That said the mobs around me are getting incrementally more crafty at all times as well, but I am uncertain where the theoretical “max level” at least for gear advancement sits. As of right now the highest level thing I have seen on any of the guild vendors is 160, which doesn’t really tell me if that is the actual max, or just the maximum that is reasonable to craft. I have done a shockingly minimal amount of research so far during this return to Elder Scrolls Online, because in truth… I had a path laid out before me already and that is to simply keep questing. It might be madness but I really would like to finish up Aldmeri Dominion and then quest my way through all of Ebonheart before starting any of the DLC content. Considering that the DLC lets you start it at literally any moment… I am guessing this is pure madness and not something most players do.

Back to the whole having no basis on how far I have actually come in progress… I was absolutely thinking that Malabal Tor was going to be the last zone in the AD content, and apparently I was completely wrong. After this zone I still have Reaper’s March which is fine by me because I am actually enjoying myself in this content way more than I ever thought I would. It is not exactly a surprise to anyone who has read my blog for very long… but I am not a huge fan of elves. My friend Tam has this theory that every player is inherently either a Dwarf of an Elf and the two paths rarely cross. I am absolutely a Dwarf and I tend to love all of the normal aesthetically wonderful things about Dwarfdom. That said the Elder Scrolls setting as a whole does some weird things with what is and is not an Elf… since technically both Dwarves and Orcs are elves in this setting. Essentially in Elder Scrolls you have the races of “men”, the races of the “mer”, and then the beastmen which probably have a similar name or at least should. Now in Skyrim… I go out of my way to kill Thalmor on sight… even if it is ultimately going to cause me issues. In The Elder Scrolls Online I find out that the Thalmor are largely a militant group of “Elven Supremacists” that most people don’t like… and often times actively hate. This subtle difference makes it significantly easier for me to actually like the elves while playing through the elf dominated content.

That said… I have also found a certain Kinship with the Khajiit… which was to be expected, but also the Bosmer which I was not entirely prepared for. I mean I have always liked the concept of the Green Pact and the existence of cannibal elves. However while actually questing through the Bosmer centric story content, it has been interesting to struggle with the same weird thin line that they do… of choosing what is common sense and what is honoring “The Green”. It is a testament to just how damned good the storytelling is in this game to get a notorious elf killer like myself… to convert to if not love… but at least a begrudging respect for the folks that don’t belong to the Thalmor. Of note… if given the chance I would still absolutely run around cheerfully slaughtering Thalmor. I am extremely happy though that the game has given me ample opportunity to at least embarrass a few of them for showing them to be the unsteady zealots that they really are. The only thing that I would have liked to have seen the game do… is throw in additional options for acknowledging the fact that you are an outlander while questing through the other two factions content. The highlight of yesterday however was dealing with Hermaeus Mora, one of my favorite of the Daedra… but also one of the more deadly. He presented me with a deal that I could not refuse… that I really wanted to refuse but felt the ramification of not taking it would be far worse. While at some point I know turtle mode will finish… I have a feeling that I will still remain engaged to the storytelling of this game for the near future and this is about to be my “off night” game of choice.

Deep Turtle

January 16, 2017 by Belghast

Lately I have been going through an anxiety ridden period where I just find it super stressful to be around people on a regular basis. This started over the break, and for some extent I pulled myself out of it a little bit around the time I went back to work. However increased stresses in that realm seems to have caused a relapse. As a result I am firmly back in what I refer to as “turtle mode” where I duck my head into my shell and largely forget the world exists. As a result I am taking every possible excuse to avoid doing things that have lots of people involved with them, and I missed both raids this week… both with completely reasonable reasons but reasons that I probably could have avoided were it not for my anxiety desperately clinging to them. Sure I had a window to fix, but I could have probably been done in time for the raid. Sure I dozed off on the sofa, but had I drank a monster or some coffee I probably would have been fine there too. The excuse was too convenient not to take it when the reality was I am simply having trouble processing existing around other human beings.

When I am in deep turtle mode it is all I can really do to exist on a daily basis, let alone have to pretend to be a normal human being. Which I realize is a bit odd given that I am generally a gregarious and welcoming sort, and have become famous for opting people. There are times where I just can’t be “rockstar bel” as one of my friends has referred to it. There is time when I just need to hide out and pretend the other human beings don’t exist. Generally speaking when I am in this mode I play a lot of Minecraft or Skyrim… or in the case of what has happened over the weekend return to playing an MMO that I really don’t have much of a social structure in these days. Awhile back I reinstalled Elder Scrolls Online and this weekend I stared playing it extremely seriously. I am enjoying myself immensely and other than the occasional message from folks who are also dipping their toes in as well and just happy to see a familiar face.

I have to say the game feels amazing coming back to it after a significant time gone. The game has released a ton of DLC/Expansion content since release and there are basically two ways of playing it. Either you buy the DLC outright, where there is a deal that can be had that includes the four major DLC packs for 5500 crowns… which is $39.99. The other option is to subscribe to the game which immediately unlocks all of the content… so long as you keep an active subscription. However there is another reason to go for the ESO Plus subscription option… because it magically fixes your bag situation. At launch one of my key problems was trying to keep enough bag space to be actively looting crafting ingredients, while at the same time picking up gear that drops from things I was killing. With the subscription plan it adds what seems to be a separate bottomless crafting inventory, that items simply go to automatically when you loot them. This means you can finally afford to loot all of those random crates and barrels full of fish and berries because it all gets whisked away off into the ether into a storage bin you never actually have to mess with.

The other awesome thing that has happened in the period of time I have not really be playing is that they have shifted the Veteran Rank system to be the Champion Point system. At first I thought this was a one for one swap over to a sort of Skyrim-esc celestial system based around the Thief, Warrior and Mage. However it seems to be way more than that, in that they are essentially an account wide system of alternate expansion much like the Planar abilities in Rift or Paragon points in Diablo 3. That means if you log into your level 7 alt like I did yesterday… I had 130 champion points to spend making me able to do some pretty insane stuff at low levels. Sure this greatly trivializes the leveling process for alts… but I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing. In truth it makes me far more likely to level alts knowing that I have a lot of the same benefits, on them as I do on my main character. That said the collections and cosmetic systems also exist at an account level so you can keep using your favorite mounts and pets… or anything you have unlocked through the crown shop. All in all I have been happy to fade quietly back into a game that I still fine immensely immersive at least from a single player level.