elder scrolls Archives - Page 9 of 19 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The City of Crows

April 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays. Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts. However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom. So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it. Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day. I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later. The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way. I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties. In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts. I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel. One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form. Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday. I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai. Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here. The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons. If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra. If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture. There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes… but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r. Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for. I am however happy enough to be moving on. The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again. Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things. This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore. I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable. In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here. The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location. It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine. This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place. If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled. If you are into mages and such you should really like this place. In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals. You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive. From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind. The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms. The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear. The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game. First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system. It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it. Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking. To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up. So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would. Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business. As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24. Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie. I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely. This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear. At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly. Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be. It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting. If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level. If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy. You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai

Point Paralysis

April 24, 2014April 24, 2014 by Belghast

Maybe I didn’t suck

For whatever reason this morning I am absolutely struggling to remain conscious. I feel like maybe I drifted into the “too much sleep” territory last night. We ended up with a heavily altered game play, in that when my wife got home last night we ended up taking our evening walk and combining it with some extra steps to go walk to eat dinner. This was awesome in that it meant that my playtime was not perforated last night by going out to walk, but I seem to have squandered the benefit by going to bed early. For whatever reason around 9 pm I got irrationally tired and after dealing with a few chores crashed out on the bed with two cats snuggled up beside me. Normally I get pretty much the same 6 hours of sleep every night, but last night I got a little closer to 8 hours and I feel groggy as hell.

Awesome thing happened yesterday, in that the podcast I was a guest on over the weekend published the episode. I feel humbled that I was offered to join in the fun, and the end result was really nice. I listened to it yesterday after getting out of our weekly staff meeting, and I have to say I was a bit scared to do so. I was worried that maybe I would have come off like an ass or something, but overall it seemed to flow really nicely. Every now and then podcasts will have a guest on that is abrupt and disruptive… and I am always afraid I will be that guy. Each podcast has a certain feel to it, and I was hoping that I was staying true to that. It is still really damned weird to hear my own voice, but after doing this streaming thing and our own podcast I am starting to get used to it finally.

Point Paralysis

Yesterday one of my guildies and fellow bloggers Werit posted a piece on something I think all of us have felt, that he calls “Skill Point Paralysis”. One of the big features of Elder Scrolls Online is that the game is not so much about how you play the game but how you choose to build your character. You can be damned near anything you can imagine within the frame work of the game. You want to play a spell slinging rogue, or a tanky archer? Sure you can build both of those in damned near any “class” as well. The problem is without a reasonable undo system, it gives a false sense of importance on every single skill point. It is a bit like playing a chess match and being afraid to make a move for fear it was the wrong one. I have had the benefit of playing this same character over a dozen times throughout the various beta test phases. Over that time I have refined exactly what I want to do, but still I will find myself with four points pooled up and not really sure where to spend them.

So I thought I would spend a few minutes this morning talking about the type of decisions I make. Essentially I tend to divide things up in my head into three categories: Active Attacks, Passive Buffs, and Utility. At the end of the day I can only have five active attacks on my bar at any given time, so as a result I tend to discount the value of choosing one of these. Also picking up a new active attack means I need to devote some time into raising it and unlocking the morph. After a point new abilities are not really as useful as old abilities until you can morph them. So that means I need to be committed to a new ability choice if I want to go down that path. I will occasionally pick up an ability if it sounds interesting, but if you notice in the above screenshot I have Power Bash at level 1… in part because I have not really used it much in combat.

Utility abilities are a special kind of actives, and I generally limit myself to only having one of these on my bar at a time. Sometimes these are survival cooldowns, self heals or group buffs… but most of the time I classify things into this category that are only “situationally good”. For example I love beyond love the Silver Bolts ability. However it is only really worth putting on my bar if I know I will be fighting Daedra or Undead… or now that I have the fighters guild rank 7 passive Werewolves. If it is an ability that I will use only 20% of the time, I greatly devalue picking that with my skill points. Sometimes however these abilities are useful for things other than their original intent. Even if you are fighting something other than the mob types mentioned above… Silver Bolts still becomes a pretty potent weaponless ranged attack if your character happens to be lacking one of those.

Always On is Awesome

The final category is where I tend to spend MOST of my points. If you look at the above screenshot I have every single passive ability that I can currently get in the sword and board tree. Similarly if you would look at my Heavy Armor and Imperial Racial trees their passives would be completely filled as well. If I have a useful passive to buy, I will almost always choose that over something else. Passives do not require me to change my play style to incorporate them in, nor do they require me to level them to make them truly useful. Instead they are a single pick that makes my character immediately and permanently better. In a game I will always favor something that gives me a permanent boost over something that gives me a situationally better boost. I like “always on” things, because if I can be awesome all of the time, it is better to me than being awesome some of the time.

Finally I have limited myself to a single tradeskill for the time being. Until the points begin to flow like honey later as I wander around the world collecting them… I have narrowed my focus to two weapons (sword and shield and two handed), three class trees (because really you want to cherry pick abilities between them), one armor type (heavy is the only choice I ever seem to make), racial tree, and a single tradeskill (blacksmithing). Now I will occasionally pick up some especially valuable picks like Soul Lock from the World tree, that gives you a chance to fill soul stones each time you kill a mob. Overall I have narrowed my focus to a specific set of abilities. The big thing I see players doing that gets them in trouble is trying to tackle more than one weapon at a time early on. I did not pick up a second weapon until 20 or so, well after I had the ability to hot swap between them. Trying to spread yourself too thin is something that will ultimately lead to making the game harder than it really needs to be.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #SkillPoints

The Impossible Plateau

April 23, 2014 by Belghast

Forced Fasting

This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it. In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee. I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible. I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part… but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt. I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that. I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time? What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me. The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass. If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick. We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished. So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning. I still think this entire process is bullshit. I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance? My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so. There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there. During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably. I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one. Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers. First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim. She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well. Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things. That is pretty much the subtext of my streams… me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning. Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses. Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use. Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go. I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops. Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear. Not sure if this is really worth it however. Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then. The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers. I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly. The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum. I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night. Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night. As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming. I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general. Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about. While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube… I really don’t watch twitch much at all. Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed. Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream… but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams. I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own. They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me. I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture. Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me. I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game. Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer. The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me. Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there. Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great. I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative. That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube. I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt. For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much. If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome… if they don’t… equally awesome. I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona. I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check. At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment. I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.

Easy Targets

April 22, 2014 by Belghast

Heartfelt Thanks

I want to lead off this morning by thanking everyone that responded yesterday to wish me well on my five year blogoversary. It still seems a bit strange that I have been doing this that long, well technically I have been doing “this” the whole daily blogging thing only a year. All the support you guys have given me has been awesome. I greatly appreciate you all in so many ways. I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing, but I just keep doing it anyways. At this point the blogging thing is so ingrained in me that I think I would continue to post daily even if I had nothing to talk about. Thankfully I always seem to be able to at least incoherently ramble, and that tends to fill a page faster than anything.

While we are on the topic of blogging and thanks, I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I have touched on this a few times over the last few weeks, but it is approaching quickly. May First is the official launch of the 2014 edition of the Newbie Blogger initiative, whether you are a veteran blogger or someone who has always wanted to create a blog… we need you. This year proves to be a really interesting run as things are changing up quite a bit. There are awards with prizes attached to them for various things. Additionally we will have a return of the Syl’s ever fun NBI Poetry slam, as well as some event nights. Right now a massive hearthstone battle royale has been confirmed, and you can check up the sign up information here. There is also a great idea for a League of Legends night, that I hope gets enough support to make as well.

The thing about blogging is for every one of us that are blogging daily, there are another batch that have either abandoned their blog or are sitting by the sidelines trying to muster the nerve to start blogging. I was one of those people five years ago, and a similar community got me started. I implore you to embrace this opportunity and either reignite your blogging passion or light a brand new spark. Folks are constantly saying that blogging is dead as a medium, but each of us that do so regularly are thumbing our noses at this concept. We need fresh blood to keep this gaming blogosphere alive and healthy and events like NBI shine a bright light on new talent. This will be my third year supporting the effort, and I look forward to seeing a new crop of bloggers step up and do a better job than I ever could do.

Lost in the Desert

Since I had not streamed on twitch in a few days I decided last night I would fire it up while I wandered around in the desert. Alik’r is an interesting zone and almost feels like two zones. There was a series of frenetic feeling quests in the town of Sentinel as you saved it from a zombie invasion. All the while doing so there was a call to purpose, a feeling that you had to keep moving or something horrible would happen. Now that I am out in the desert proper, the feeling of the zone has changed again. Now as I sift through the dunes looking for various points of interest, the feeling seems to be much more relaxed and similar to the way Stros M’kai felt. This is good and bad, good in that I feel like I can take my time through the content… and bad in that I am horribly prone to completely lose focus.

One of the things I am really loving are the creatures out here. The game does a really good job of disguising the fact that you are often fighting the same damned creatures over and over. The first time I really noticed this was in beta and playing the different starter zone experiences. In Ebonheart you had the fiery Shalk, Aldmeri you had Thunderbugs, and in Daggerfall you had Assassin Bugs. They were all essentially the same mob, but each performed slightly differently in the kinds of attacks they would do. In the desert of Alik’r I noticed that Dunerippers were essentially crocodiles but vastly different in appearance. They shared quite a bit of similarity in the base model and the sweep attacks, but also incorporated the mudcrab dig attack and a model swap. Noticed the same thing happening with the Jackals, that look extremely different from wolves but behave almost exactly the same.

All of this give a feeling that the world is related, and that the various creatures of Tamriel evolved from the same core at some point. I think that is the thing I love more than anything else, that everything in Elder Scrolls Online has a certain “sameness” to it. It all feels like it is part of the same world. While a Dwemer ruin in Skyrim might look vastly different from one in the Alik’r desert… they all feel like they were from the same race. This adherence to a “racial stylebook” makes the game feel amazing. One of my big fears with Elder Scrolls Online and the announcement of the three factions is that they would somehow destroy the natural diversity of the Elder Scrolls setting. However thankfully you are just as likely to find a Dunmer or Argonian NPC in the desert as you are to find a Redguard in Riften. The game has managed to maintain the jumbled mess that is the Elder Scrolls setting.

Easy Targets

After awhile hanging out in mumble by myself I was joined by the illustrious Zelibeli and Jabberant, who decided they were on their way out to Cyrodil. This was to be Zeli’s first foray into the frontiers, so I decided to halt my questing and tag along. I warned them that I sucked horribly at PVP, but still managed to love Cyrodil. In every conceivable way it is the Dark Age of Camelot frontiers. You have three different realms that border the region, with lots of objectives scattered around the map. Just like Dark Age of Camelot there are also numerous other things to do out there than just PVP. We attempted to meet up with one of the bigger conflicts at first, but ended up getting completely rolled by a veteran three player a few times. One of the interesting things about Cyrodil is that it instant levels you to 50 for the purpose of the content. The only problem is it bolsters you to the BASE stats of a 50… not a 50 with full gear. This means that a bolstered character will always be significantly weaker than a true 50… and even weaker still than a veteran rank player.

In large scale siege warfare this really doesn’t matter much since it is mostly a numbers game. In one on one combat… the difference is extremely noticeable. I felt like I simply could not deal enough damage to the veteran rank 3 player. While I out survived both Zeli and Jabb this was simply to my tanky nature more than anything else, and still even after having fought two other players the guy completely wrecked me. As a result we ended up varying our goals and we set our sights on a skyshard. One of the add-ons I have apparently shows the locations of all of the skyshards in Cyrodil, so I figured this would be a valuable excursion. So we made our way to this tower guarded by goblins, with the skyshard very clearly at the top. It took a few tries to finally reach the goal, as the moment we reached the tower initially we got attacked by several folks from Ebonheart also after the same goal.

One of the cool things is there at the tower we picked up a quest to deliver a doctors bag to a town there in Cyrodil. We did not do this however as the town in question was deep within currently Ebonheart held territory. That seems like a grand mission for another night. After a lot of faffing about we ended up picking up another guildie, Barose and heading to a dungeon. I think it is really awesome that there are full dungeons scattered around the map in Cyrodil. This one was a really nifty vampire dungeon and I ended up getting so much loot that I had to “mail bank” a ton of it to Rae. Apparently I ended up sending her 9 emails full of it before the night was up. The PVP dungeons seem to drop loot as though they were a group dungeon, but overall seemed easier in scale. I am guessing they are rewarding us for the risk of doing PVE content in a PVP zone, where any group of players could hop into the dungeon and slaughter us in the process.

Overall it was a really great night and there is talk of trying to create some sort of formalized guild Cyrodil night. If nothing else last night proved that there is plenty to do in Cyrodil even if you do not necessarily engage in siege warfare. While I am not opposed to defending a keep or claiming one for our guild, I also want to explore all of the other dungeons out there and collect more skyshards. For the longest time I had a point where I simply did not know where to spend points, but having leveled up a lot of abilities I seem to once again have more opportunities to spend them than points to spend. I had a great time and I hope Zeli and Jabb both did as well. Was really fun just hanging out and being horrible at PVP together. You should totally join us the next time.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Cyrodil #PVP #NewbieBloggerInitiative