Cold Snap
The above photo is from this past Sunday evening, taken right before a massive line of storms blew in. During the day on Sunday it was around 80* outside and Monday morning it was 35 out. Over the night last night it dipped back down into freezing temperatures. One of the problems with living in Oklahoma is the constant and ever changing weather patterns. At this point I just wish it would realize we are in spring and not winter. When I went out to lunch yesterday… it was snowing. Not the occasional snowflake drifting down from above, but enough that I had to use my windshield wipers on a pretty high setting. It was of course melting the moment it touched anything, but it was more than enough to be annoying.
Down the road from Tulsa in Porter they are extremely concerned about this years Peach harvest. They had been talking on the news about planning on using helicopters to push warmer air down into the fields to keep the crops safe. That didn’t seem terribly cost effective but I am sure it would at the very least be interesting to watch. We actually had to turn on the heat again last night, and even this morning in my office that is normally the warmest part of the house it is really freaking chilly. Can it be spring yet please?
Crypt of Revenge
When I last stepped foot in the Crypt of Hearts I was level 26, and since then I have dinged 30 and upgraded a good chunk of my gear. Similarly the healer that was also 26 is now 31 and during the day yesterday we plotted our revenge on the dungeon. While it was enjoyable to get our asses handed to us the first time, this time around we wanted to wreck the place for taking our candy. I have to say the levels and the gear helped massively. In fact there were several moments last night where I ignored proper elder scrolls dungeon etiquette and just charged into the packs pulling everything at once. For the most part we could mitigate the combat with the fact that we had a 37 and 38 dps with us. The fights all still required us to pay attention to what was going on, and the mechanics were still very punishing, but they were not impassible.
The boss encounter above was probably the most brutal thing we had experienced to date. Even with the slightly overpowered damage it took us a few tries to get through it. Essentially the skeletal juggernaut alternated between two attacks, the first being a linear charge across the room, and the second being quite possibly the largest AOE attack I have seen to date. You have to avoid both successfully or you end up getting wrecked. The area of effect is so large that you have to be running in the right direction AND then dodge out to clear it. This means you have to save plenty of stamina in reserve to always have a dodge available. The damage you take seemed to lessen depending on how close to the edge you managed to get before the attack fired off. While punishing, it was still a really cool encounter to experience.
City of Ash
After defeating the Crypt we decided to continue our journey into the City of Ash. This dungeon represents and entirely new kind of dungeon crawl from the other ones we had experienced in Elder Scrolls Online. The back story for the dungeon is that you are trying to save a Bosmer city that is being assaulted by the forces of Mehunes Dagon. For those not familiar with the name, he was the big baddie that you were fighting during the course of Elder Scrolls VI: Oblivion. His plane of oblivion is one of fire and demons… and not surprisingly you end up fighting a lot of flame based Dremora inside the City of Ash. What makes the encounters interesting is when you reach the city and start the quest proper… you are given the choice of a healer npc or an archer npc to guide you.
We took the healer, because we assumed that any game that would offer you a healer… means you are just about to start taking massive amounts of damage. We were for the most part right as the encounters mostly pulled themselves for large chunks of the dungeon. I am not entirely certain if the mobs were actually linked, or if the healer bot was instead pulling for us. In either way the crawl through the burning “Ewok Village” was fast paced and frenetic. Bosmer architecture is really interesting, as they seem to be able to convince the trees to grow in shapes that support their city. Considering how seriously they take the Green Pact the inhabitants had to be freaking out when the first started around them.
This is probably going to go down as one of my favorite dungeons, in part because the zone looked amazing… but more importantly because there was a giant burning oblivion gate at the very end. Oblivion is probably the Elder Scrolls game that I have spent the most hours playing, and gave us the amazing Shivering Isles campaign. You could drop an oblivion gate in an otherwise boring dungeon and I would still have to go there just to defeat it. Fortunately the City of Ash is not a boring dungeon, and had some of the more interesting boss fights I had experienced to date. The games dungeons honestly just keep getting better. Each of them has a very unique feel and vastly unique mechanics. What I find amazing is how nothing really feels “recycled”. The bosses do what you would expect them to do based on how they are and what their environment is.
Arx Corinium
So during the course of the night, we had started in a skeletal crypt, moved to a burning bosmer city… and finished it in the Black Marsh. At each tier so far the different dungeon environments have been extremely varied which is a good thing. At this point in the evening I was starting to get a bit drowsy so might recount of the tales might be a bit spotty at best. The main mission here at Arx Corinium is to help a Nereid save her sisters from the Naga that control the dungeon. What this means to the players is that you are going to have to fight a ton of things at the same time. One of the more interesting things is that there are also huge Lurchers lumbering about the dungeon. These are not connected to the Naga packs and seem to be non-social. It gives them the feeling of a Big Daddy from the original Bioshock. Throughout the night we tried our best to either pull them before or after the rest of the pull. At one point one of them just wandered up from somewhere unseen, so they seem to have pretty long paths.
There are many of these “leap of faith” moments where you have to jump off cliffs and waterfalls hoping that you survive the drop. While we managed to survive each, there definitely seems to be a high chance that you might bounce enough on the rocks to kill yourself. There were fights in the dungeon that reminded me more than a little bit of Polaris from The Secret World… and not really in a good way. I am sure that over time we would be able to adapt to the encounters, but there were a few fights that we only made it through because Shiana is 38… and really good at kiting. On at least two of the encounters he was the last person standing and managed to drag us over the finish line. I felt bad for Waren and Shiana… because they were essentially just along for the ride and the repair bill. In Elder Scrolls Online you need to be within five levels of the encounters you are fighting or you no longer get loot. That said Tam and I managed to walk away with a lot of nice things and I think it was a great night overall for all of us.
#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #CryptofHearts #CityofAsh #ArxCorinium