That feel when you catch your character in a blink animation but don’t realize it until you go to post the picture.  Oh well..  you get sleepytime Belghast…  or maybe he is just frustrated that he has to kill another batch of cultists to close yet another anchor.  Last night I continued on with my journeys in Deshaan and wrapped up the main story.  There are still a few areas of the map that I have not explored and turned the black icon to white signifying that I have completed it.  So I fully expect to spend a night doing some basic mop of of quests but unfortunately that likely will not be tonight.  Tonight is the night I am meeting friends to play Magic the Gathering at a local restaurant…  that I am hoping is not terribly busy.  There is a group that meets there to play Dominos…  and I am hoping that it is going to be perfectly copacetic to sit there and play MTG.

One of the weirdest things about Elder Scrolls Online is the way all of the screenshots end up being my character off to one side and then showing off what is happening in the background.  I mean I could take a shot of my backside…  but this always seemed like a better option to turn and face the virtual camera.  There is always the option of zooming in to first person and stowing my weapons to take a screenshot, but I rarely actually do that.  Instead I do this sorta selfie mode where I have my character to one side of the screen and a pretty picture going on in the background.  In a way it feels more touristy than the standard screenshot faire, like “here is me at this place” sort of feel that I dig.  So much of this game is about me wandering around and finding interesting sights… and because of that especially it just sorta fits.

I have really enjoyed Deshaan as a zone goes with its main story arc, but I will say about the time I wrap up a zone…  I am more than ready to move on past it.  I honestly thought Eastmarch was next in the sequence but it seems like the quest chain is leading me to go start Shadowfen and check out some disturbance happening at Stormhold.  I am wondering if they shifted the order of things at some point or if I just don’t have a main story quest for the entirety of Eastmarch.  Whatever the case I need to sort out what my next destination will be, and I am still several steps away from The Rift where the Belghast namesake exists.  There is a driving force in me that wants to get past the Ebonheart content so that I can in good conscience start the DLC areas…  beginning with I believe Orsinium.  Still having an awful lot of fun and I guess my goal is to make a significant dent in the game before Battle for Azeroth inevitably and begrudgingly pulls me elsewhere.

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.