This mornings blog post is largely going to be common knowledge for anyone who has been around the game for awhile, but given that this is my very first Jesters Festival I thought I would share it with my readers who might be returning to the game. Right now there is an event going that has a bunch of sub components, but the big one is a “Pie” that goes into your tool inventory that when used gives you a 2 hour long buff that effectively doubles your experience gain. There are a number of other activities that happen during this event and you can find the official blog post here. Also if you are so inclined there are numerous video guides going over the various activities and events. Since this only lasts a week I thought I should probably make this my Friday post in case someone else wants to do the thing that I am doing.
When it comes to MMORPGs I tend to be on the digital hoarder spectrum and my bank vault is littered with items that I have acquired but never got around to using. As such I had a number of Grand Gold Coast Experience Scrolls and Crown Experience Scrolls sitting there wasting. I’ve been slowly working on my Warden, given that I want it to be my next max level character. However while questing on him there has been a part of me that wishes I could just leap straight to 50 so that I could start gaining Champion Levels for my account instead of traditional levels. With this event already giving me +100% experience gain I decided to take advantage of this and stack an experience scroll. Technically were I wanting to take this to the extreme… there are a number of other experience bonus sources that I could abuse. Far as I am aware the best of each is as follows:
- Purple “Training” set gear 7 pieces plus weapon +80%
- Event Buff +100%
- ESO Plus Buff +10%
- Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia +150%
- Grand Gold Coast Experience Scroll +150%
- Pledge of Mara +10%
So if my math is correct that leaves you with a possibility of +500% experience gain. The challenge however is that you are going to rapidly outgrow a training set as you move from level to level which gets a little spendy resource wise for my tastes. Similarly Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia is expensive to acquire and currently going for in the neighborhood of 200k to 300k. Since I have a stack of scrolls and already subscribe to ESO Plus, I decided to go with those options for +260% gain. So the question is where do we go to grind? The answer is the same as it always is… Dark Anchors in Alik’r Desert.
For the uninitiated, there are three Dolmen in Alik’r Desert that are extremely close to three Wayshrines. By the time you have done a circuit of Dark Anchors, the very first one is respawning. The important Wayshrines in zone are as follows:
- Aswala Stables Wayshrine
- Goat’s Head Oasis Wayshrine
- Shrike’s Aerie Wayshrine
Folks doing the Dolmen/Dark Anchor grind tend to use an addon called AutoInvite that allows groups to be formed by typing some phrase in Zone chat. If you watch chat for a bit you are likely going to see the phase but so far in my experience it tends to be X, Y, Z, or G. If you are new to the zone, the easiest option is to find someone in guild chat that is also in Alik’r to get your first wayshrine. From there wait until the group ports and then teleport to a player in that group until you have collected all three shrines. From there just follow the pattern and reap a ton of blue jewelry, armor, weapons and a truly shocking amount of treasure maps all while watching the levels fly by. You might check the Fighters guild and see if there is a Dolmen quest for Alik’r because a side benefit is you are going to max out that skill line while doing this nonsense.
For reference I was level 22 around 6 pm and shut down for the evening around 9:30 pm gaining 19 levels. There was a break somewhere in there for food and a few to get up, stretch and hydrate but all in all it was a pretty nice ride. In theory this means I should be able to finish things up tonight and then comes the decision if I take this express elevator up on another character or not. The truth is I play this game differently than most and the enjoyable bit is randomly questing around the world, not rushing to the end game. However since I am already at level cap on one character… it benefits ALL of my characters to be at the level cap while doing that leisurely questing. So I am contemplating taking advantage of this express elevator while I have it.
Side note the current event only lasts until reset next week, but from what I understand the Anniversary event is right around the corner and lasts two weeks granting the same buff.