Elder Scrolls Online

Morning Friends! Once again I treat you to a post about Elder Scrolls Online nonsense. I mean if you have been around the blog for awhile you know that I tend to get stuck on these sequences of posts because I ultimately post about whatever the heck I am into at any given moment. Right now I am super into Elder Scrolls Online again and I have my friends Zuu and Bells to thank for it. Had we not been talking about them returning to the game after being frustrated with Shadowlands, I likely would not have also booted up the game and dove head first into it. It is amazing what a difference having people to hang out with while playing makes. Like we are not actually doing much of anything together, but just the presence of other human beings occupying guildchat brings me joy after the guild effectively being dead for years.

Another thing that I am known for is my weird tangents. When I approach Elder Scrolls Online I attempt to do so in a manner that reflects the order in which the content was released. I am not sure why this is super important to me, because it legitimately does not matter at all given that everything pretty much can be done at any time of your choosing or straight up skipped altogether. I think part of my logic here is that ESO has a deep structure that ends up lending NPCs a “memory” of sorts, in that they remember your actions previously in the game. Having played through the original three content blocks and a couple of expansions worth of story afterwards, I have noticed how characters that you meet in the newbie zone end up combining with characters that you meet in totally different faction areas, and all of them remember your interactions before.

As such it is my intent to play these in order for the most accurate representation of what it would have been like to do the content when it first released having consumed the content beforehand. Once again this is not at all necessary because every drop of content in the game scales and can be tackled at pretty much any time and has been this way since the Tamriel Unlimited patch back in 2015. However if you are weird like me, I cobbled together a rough content order sheet in an attempt to replicate what it would have been like to stay current with the content as it was released.

Your First Faction

When you start the game you are asked to choose a faction and a race. For the most part these are cosmetic choices unless you intend to pvp an awful lot, but for the purpose of this guide I am going to treat these decisions like they actually matter. The content flow order is going to vary a bit based on which faction you start with. Essentially to finish “Caldwell’s Silver” and “Caldwell’s Gold” you end up rotating through the factions in a specific order. I started as Daggerfall Covenant originally for example and my second faction was Aldmerri Dominion and my third faction was Ebonheart Pact. Basically the easiest way to remember this is if you look at the Ouroboros signet each head represents a faction Lion Daggerfall, Hawk for Aldmerri, and Dragon for Ebonheart. The faction order essentially flows backwards around the circle from your starting faction.

Since you no longer start in Coldharbour and since at some point they began the process of starting some folks in Summerset and others in Morrowind there is a bit of fiddling to get back on the original path. Generally speaking there will be someone with a boat in the first town you arrive at that can take you to the other starting areas. There will be a sequence that is faction specific and then once you end up in the DLC the path ends up merged together. So here goes nothing in trying to outline as close to the release order for content as one can really get these days.

The bits marked with * are for your first time through the content only. They won’t appear in subsequent factions.

Daggerfall Covenant Content Order

• Take the Boat to Stros M’Kai
• Stros M’Kai
• Betnikh
• Travel to Daggerfall
• Talk to the Hooded Figure*
• Complete Coldharbour Escape Quest Chain*
• Glenumbra
• Stormhaven
• Rivenspire
• Alik’r Desert
• Bangkorai
• Coldharbour Epilogue*
• Start Aldmerri Dominion

Aldmerri Dominion Content Order

• Take the Boat to Kenarthi’s Roost
• Kenarthi’s Roost
• Travel to Vulkhel Guard
• Talk to the Hooded Figure*
• Complete Coldharbour Escape Quest Chain*
• Auridon
• Grahtwood
• Greenshade
• Malabal Tor
• Reaper’s March
• Coldharbour Epilogue*
• Start Ebonheart Pact

Ebonheart Pact Content Order

• Take the Boat to Bleakrock Isle
• Bleakrock Isle
• Bal Foyen
• Travel to Davon’s Watch
• Talk to the Hooded Figure*
• Complete Coldharbour Escape Quest Chain*
• Stonefalls
• Deshaan
• Shadowfen
• Eastmarch
• The Rift
• Coldharbour Epilogue*
• Start Daggerfall Covenant

Combined DLC Content Order

• Imperial City – Cyrodil – PVP area skip if not your jam
• Orsinium – Wrothgar
• Thieves Guild – Hew’s Bane
• Dark Brotherhood – Gold Coast
• Morrowind – Vvardenfell
• Clockwork City – Clockwork City
• Summerset – Summerset
• Murkmire – Murkmire
• Elsweyr – Northern Elsweyr
• Dragonhold – Southern Elsweyr
• Greymoor – Western Skyrim
• Stonethorn – Blackreach
• Gate of Oblivion – Blackwood – Releases June 1st

Currently at this moment I am roughly a third of the way through the Clockwork City content. I would love to think I will be caught up by June with the latest content drops, but I sincerely doubt that will be the case. Each of those content blocks is pretty beefy as far as the amount of quests and world content that you would end up experiencing. My personal preference has been to focus on doing ALL of the content available including side quests so that I effectively turn the entire map from Black Icons indicating that I have not completed something to White Icons indicating I have done everything in that given area.

However doing all the quests is not everyone’s jam and thankfully Elder Scrolls Online has made adjustments for the “do only the necessary things” play style as well. In each zone there will be a main story through line and these are marked with a unique icon. As to WHAT that icon represents is up to your own interpretation. I think most folks seem to refer to it as the shield icon versus the arrow icon which works for me. If you follow the main story symbol you will take the shortest route through a zone and should encounter all of the characters that will have the most long term impact on your play through. That is not to say that the side quest character are not pretty excellent, but I am not remembering too many of those that I have seen again once I left the zone.

This iconography thankfully continues through each of the expansions allowing you if you choose to focus on only the most important story beats and progress through the content more quickly. Like I said before that isn’t exactly my style, at least not on my very first character. On subsequent playthroughs of the game story I am not sure what I will do. I have been weirdly resistant to “Alting” in Elder Scrolls Online since in theory I can do everything on a single character. The thing is experience is experience and until you hit 50 you are effectively trying to soak up as much of it as humanly possible before you begin your Champion Point grind. Because of that I personally don’t see much of a point in skipping the side content because it is all money, gear and experience.

Is this guide useful to anyone? Probably not. However I cobbled this together in spreadsheet form yesterday and decided to go ahead and make a full post today with it. Figured it was a reasonable way to close out the week.

Hey Friends! Over the last few days I have been posting an awful lot about Elder Scrolls Online. The game is in a great state and honestly has been for years, and now that I have a pretty regularly group of friends playing it has improved my enjoyment immensely. However all of this screenshot posting has lead to the inevitable question of “What mods are you running?”. So this morning I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about a few of the ones that I find most important for my personal enjoyment. However before we go down this road there are a few primers that you need to understand about Elder Scrolls Online addons.

Probably the first step if you choose to go down this path is to install Minion which is the addon client of MMOUI/ESOUI. This is pretty much the last remaining viable addon patcher with any real support for The Elder Scrolls Online and it is going to be your best friend for resolving any potential issues you might find along the way. Addons with ESO are way more the wild west than they are in games like World of Warcraft. The addons themselves are not updated nearly as often and as a result you end up using them in an outdated status way more often. The positive however is that the Elder Scrolls user interface does not update nearly as often nor does it have quite the penchant for breaking addons as the World of Warcraft one does.

When it comes to downloading addons, my personal preference is to click the “Find More” tab at the top of the Minion client and then search for the addons I am looking for that way. If your preference is to manually install addons then you are going to need to navigate to your documents folder, wherever that is stored on your system and within it there should be a folder structure that looks like this: “Elder Scrolls Online\live\AddOns”. One positive about the way addons work in Elder Scrolls Online is that you can fiddle with them while the game is loaded safely and then get your new changes by hitting the /reloadui command afterwards. This bit comes in really important when it comes to debugging why specific addons are not working.

From within game you can access a list of the addons that you currently have loaded and this is going to be beneficial because every so often the Minion client does not correctly install prerequisites and dependencies. For example at the suggestion of my friend Accomp, I installed the EasyTravel addon which in theory is supposed to allow you to jump to a nearby guild member in a specific zone and bypass travel fees. However I noticed this morning while sitting down to write this piece that I was missing a dependency, which gave me the ideal opportunity to talk about this problem. How I fixed this was to open up the Minion client and click the “Find More” tab and type in the name of the missing library, aka LibSlashCommander in this specific case. From there I was able to install this library and upon typing /ReloadUI the problem was resolved.

Addons as a whole for The Elder Scrolls Online are a whole lot more fiddly and slightly less predictable than they were in World of Warcraft. If this brings you pause then you might just be better off sticking with the default interface. I’ve installed addons in the most questionable of manners in the past for games that barely supported them, so for me it was second nature to get this up and running. The whole point of all of this is to make sure you are fully aware of what you are getting yourself into. The addons themselves cannot do any permanent harm to your experience that cannot be resolved by simply turning them off or uninstalling them however.

Bandits User Interface

The addon that becomes most noticeable when viewing my screenshots is my general Action Bar/HUD/User Interface replacement. There are a large number of these available and I have tried and probably the two most popular are AUI and LUI with the later being a pretty WoW-Like experience with Deadly Boss Mods style callouts. My personal preference however is Bandits User Interface because it is what I am used to and most comfortable with. For me personally it seems to be the ideal blend of configurability and information with the least amount of distractions. This addon is effectively the spiritual successor to Foundry Tactical Combat which was an addon suite supported the long defunct Alpha/Beta powerhouse site the Tamriel Foundry.

The thing I like about Bandits is just how easily configured it is. When you open your settings menu you will see an entirely new menu item just for this addon that allows you to configure all of the specifics on how exactly this behaves. Generally speaking if there is something that is annoying you, there will be a configuration option to turn it off or at least change it slightly. This addon suite began its life as being PVP focused, but evolved into being my ideal interface for the game in general. It also includes a number of simple automation tasks like the ability to repair each time you hit a vendor and those sort of simple quality of life improvements. It is a little slow to update but so far I have had no problem running it in “outdated” mode.

• Bandits User Interface – Download Link

Harvest Map and Tamriel Mapping Project

If you have ever used Gatherer in World of Warcraft to track the resource nodes as you collect them, then you are going to be pretty familiar with the basic functionality of Harvest Map. The idea is that as you roam around the world and collect resources, these nodes are being added to your map filters so that you can find them in the future easily. Going further than gatherer, Harvest Map puts little augmented reality sprites on your map when you get in range of them allowing you to veer just slightly out of the way to get those you would likely run past without paying attention. It might be a bit busy for you personally but I personally like knowing roughly where I have found nodes before in the past. Tamriel Mapping Project gives you a number of prebuilt filters loaded with node spawn information, essentially giving you a head start on finding things in the wild.

• HarvestMap – Download Link
• Tamriel Mapping Project – Download Link

Votan’s Tamriel Map

This one is an entirely personal preference but I enjoy it greatly so I am sharing it. As this game has grown in size I have personally found it harder and harder to sort out which zone is which on the large overworld map. The end result is this busy nonsense the forces you to vaguely remember which area of the world each zone is in. I did fine for years but wound up having to click into zones anyway to sort out exactly where I wanted to travel to. Votan’s Tamriel Map replaces all of that mess with a nice simple easy to read zone boundary map with the capital city of each zone highlighted below the region name. Sure you still have to click into the zone before you can teleport to a wayshrine, but I was doing this already and now it simply makes it much easier for me to find where I was looking for.

• Votan’s Tamriel Map – Download Link

Inventory Grid View and Tamriel Trade Center

One of the things that I do not love about the default Elder Scrolls Online inventory is that it is menu driven. Years of playing World of Warcraft and Everquest before that have made me extremely visual when it comes to an inventory. Inventory Grid View comes to the rescue if you also suffer from this affliction and it does exactly what the name states, organizes your bag and bank into a grid with rarity coloring around the outside of the icon. This image is also technically showing off Tamriel Trade Center but I think I am going to have to delve into more detail on that one with a close up segment of the screen.

At the bottom of my inventory item tooltip there is a section that starts with TTC Suggested. One of the weird things about Elder Scrolls Online is that there is no centralized auction house. I will probably go into Guilds and Traders in a future post, but suffice to say it is a distributed network of individual Guild Traders. Tamriel Trade Center is a website and series of tools that attempts to glue together all of these independent guild trades into something that is searchable. This functions by relying on both an addon and a system tray application that is constantly feeding Guild Trader activity and receiving updated pricing data. So the ring in question that I am hovering over has had a total of 2688 listings and based on data it is indicating that the sweet spot for moving this item quickly is somewhere between 2274 and 2843 gold. Largely I use this as a general indicator of whether or not an item has enough third party market value for me to mess with trying to save it and sell it on a guild trader or if it is something I should just vendor/deconstruct for materials.

So Many Addons

This is by no means a complete list of addons that I am currently running, but instead I largely focused on some of my personal favorites. My friend Accomp runs significantly more Addons than I do and has an updated list of what he happens to be running at any given time. So if you are curious I would check that out as well. The main reason why I am not posting a complete list is that right now I think I have multiple addons that are trying to fill the same role and as such in the coming weeks I am going to try and whittle those down to the minimum number of addons needed. If I actually do this thing I might post an update to this list with a full accounting of everything I happen to be using. For now however this should be a general starting place.

Yesterday I wrapped up Vvardenfell, which ultimately was the DLC that I had been playing through during my last ESO binge back in June of 2019. At that point I was already well behind the curve in content and they have piled on a significant chunk over the last few years. The thing is I have this habit of purchasing an expansion even if I don’t end up playing it because I know at some point I will return. I’ve talked about this at length before, but The Elder Scrolls as a franchise and I have a long and storied relationship and this involves a significant amount of emotional attachment to Elder Scrolls Online. Up until recently there was still a hidden forum dedicated to the original alpha testers which sadly has disappeared. I am however in a guild that formed from those first folks and we generally use it as a nostalgia bomb every now and then.

Finishing Vvardenfell meant that I would be moving on to the next piece of content. Since I am trying to follow the original content release order, that means the next step forward is to venture forth into The Clockwork City of Sotha Sil. The challenge however is that I had no clue HOW to begin the quest that would ultimately send me to The Clockwork City. I could of course just click on the map and go there through the wayshrine that was unlocked, but I my personal preference is to do the introduction mission whenever possible. When ESO first started releasing DLC content they would end up mailing you an item that took up bag space but ultimately started the quest chain. It seems at some point they evolved past this and now you can accept the introductory quest for any of the “Zone DLC” as they refer to it from your collections interface under Stories.

I have to admit this is the area of the game that I have been looking forward to the most because I love all things Dwemer, and while this is technically not a Dwemer city it shares a lot of the same characteristics. The city itself exists outside of time and space, but you get into it from a hidden location underneath Mournhold. So I spent last night going through that initial mission and then roaming around the Brass Fortress and surrounding area. I have not been disappointed in the least at the splendor of this area or to be truthful ANY of the DLC areas of Elder Scrolls Online. I mean the White Gold Tower/Imperial City area was a little sparse but it was also the very first DLC drop an they were trying to sort things out.

One of the questions I have been asked is if Elder Scrolls Online is still active. This is just a random snapshot of people coming and gone from the main portal in the Brass Fortress area of the Clockwork City. You can go to pretty much any city hub in the game and see a similar flow of people coming in and out of an area, and I’ve yet to be anywhere that was not a solo instance and not run into two or three other people completing the same content. I casually “grouped” with some other players the other night while doing a public dungeon which largely meant we were just following each other around and occasionally talking over say. The world feels alive and vibrant, which is pretty great.

This is hanging out waiting on a world boss to spawn and the folks who gathered in the meantime. Just like in any game you can see a lot of spell effects being fired off ahead of the spawn attempting to get a tag in. However unlike some games that mob seems to have enough health to be able to survive plenty of time for everyone who was paying any attention to get a tag in. From the moment the mob spawned in it was up for roughly a minute before we defeated it. This has pretty much been the case with most world encounters and there are a lot of times I roll up on a fight that has already started and am able to help out and feel like I actually did something rather than simply trying to get a single hit in.

Almost unbeknownst to me, the new champion system rolled in yesterday with a patch and as a result everything has been reset. Technically Zuu gave us a heads up Sunday night after I had already stopped playing for the evening so I was at least a little bit prepared. With the new champion system comes a lot of changes to the way champion points in general work. Most of the abilities now have a threshold of needing to spend a fixed amount of points before you see any benefit from it and some of them taking a massive dump of points to get abilities that have more impact. I think I more or less cobbled together something resembling what my previous build was and I am largely functional. I actually think the new version can burn through content a little faster, but struggles a bit with stamina regeneration.

The cool thing however is that right now and for the next two weeks, there is an event called Heroes Reforged that allows you to reset your Champion Points, Skills and Morphs and Attribute points for free as many times as you like until Monday March 22nd at 10 am. Side note, some of this will require you to travel to a Rededication Shrine and as such here is a link to the various locations. Essentially they are located in the original capitals of Mournhold, Wayrest, Elder Root and then in some of the expansion areas of Summerset, Vvardenfell and Elsweyr. The other big takeaway from last night is it seems like I am gaining Champion Points at a much faster clip than I did before now. Previously I would walk away with four to eight in a normal evening but last night I racked up fourteen in total. Talking with the guild there were folks who were feeling the same as well.

All in all I am still having a freaking blast. I’ve yet to really break into dungeons but I am hoping in the coming days I am going to start dipping my toes into those waters. Ultimately I am super focused on the story content and as such I have not really had room for dungeoneering as of yet. The story has been just compelling enough that I keep wanting to move it forward to see what comes next, but not so driven that there isn’t plenty of time for me to roam around aimlessly between beats.