elder scrolls online - THE SKY FORGE2024-03-29T11:29:17Zhttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/feed/tag/elder+scrolls+onlineQ3 Dungeon DLC Announced: Stonethorn DLC coming in late August 2020https://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/q3-dungeon-dlc-announced-stonethorn-dlc-coming-in-late-august-2022020-07-09T21:18:26.000Z2020-07-09T21:18:26.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2020/07/de8b5a6aa34705d68663f4e938234e9e.jpg" alt="de8b5a6aa34705d68663f4e938234e9e.jpg" width="648" height="318" /><br /> Greetings - A quick post to confirm the announcement of Update 27 and the new Stonethorn DLC for Elder Scrolls Online. It will be on the PTS for PC/Mac players starting (probably) Tuesday, July 14. Launch dates were not included in the announcement, but typically PC gets the update about 6 weeks after PTS starts, and consoles a few weeks after that. So expect this around August 25th ish.</p>
<p><strong>DLC CONTENT:</strong> As expected it is a dungeon DLC, the two new dungeons are called Stone Garden (bad guy is an evil alchemist making nasty creatures deep beneath Blackreach) and Castle Thorn (bad guy/gal is Lady Thorn and her vampiric army). These dungeons, and the gear you can get from them, are available to ESO Plus subscribers, and to people who buy the DLC outright (it'll likely be 1500 Crowns, which is roughly 15 bucks; pricing has consistently been 1500 Crowns for dungeon DLCs and 2000 Crowns for zone DLCs).</p>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2020/07/2da403956c9c077f573cf3b92ecfcb98.jpg" alt="2da403956c9c077f573cf3b92ecfcb98.jpg" width="642" height="361" /></p>
<p><strong>BASE GAME/UPDATE 27 CONTENT:</strong> Note that with each new quarterly release, ZoS also makes updates to the base game, which are available to all players and impact all players, whether they buy the DLC or subscribe.<br /><br />This patch, from what we know, will include further "performance improvements." This is a great game but it has really been frustrating to see ZoS launch quarterly performance improvements for the past year or so as part of a long-term plan, and for each one to actually make performance worse, not better. Hopefully things are getting better, Greymoor was better than Harrowstorm.<br /> <br /> The update will also include a bunch of changes to item sets--some for balance and some for performance issues. For example, they are removing a lot of "percentage chance to proc" features because of the additional load on the server these create. The complex calculations caused by "proc sets" are a definite performance issue, especially in Cyrodiil, and I hope this helps performance. </p>
<p>Finally, they are adding a very cool new feature to housing, basically navmeshing for your pets, mounts and assistants. You'll be able to program walking and activity paths for all of these folks, so your house will feel more alive. Very cool! I can finally let Tythis and Nuzhimeh wander into the wine cellar together and practice Dibellan rituals.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/58465" target="_blank">Here's the link to the ESO article announcing the new Stonethorn DLC</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/536538/update-27-combat-preview" target="_blank">Here's a link to the forum post where the devs preview some of the combat changes coming in Update 27 (that's this update)</a>. I will try to remember to update this post with the actual link to the PTS patch notes next week.</p>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2020/07/eaa77e6fda35b13a0539016ee103f8df.jpg" alt="eaa77e6fda35b13a0539016ee103f8df.jpg" width="652" height="367" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Excited? Terrified? Don't care unless they bring Naryu back? Talk about it in the comments!</p>
<p> </p></div>ESO Real Talk: Hardcore vs. Casual Player Conflictshttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-real-talk-hardcore-vs-casual-player-conflicts2020-05-24T13:26:37.000Z2020-05-24T13:26:37.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p>Greetings, and apologies for leaving so many weeks between posts. I’ve been super busy with work. Next week, we’ll start getting into more regular posts, and talk about new stuff in the Greymoor chapter.</p>
<p>Today I just wanted to briefly address a topic that has plagued ESO for the past several years. Despite my best intentions, it’s leaked into our SkyForge community and discord as well. The topic is the unnecessary, but very real conflicts that arise between “hardcore” players and “casual” players.</p>
<p>ESO has always marketed itself as a “play how you want” game. And it is! You can play it like a PVP game and focus on precision builds designed for Cyrodiil or battlegrounds. You can play it like a high-end PVE game, maximizing your DPS or tanking or healing for 12-man trials, learn to solo Vet Maelstrom Arena, push scores on the leaderboard. You can play for the stories and just quest without worrying about the “meta.” You can focus on housing, or fishing, or crafting, or trading/wheeling dealing. You can get deep into roleplay, whether that’s with a group of people, or completely on your own without ever talking to another player.</p>
<p>It has always confused me why people get in fights about the topic of playing how you want. Just…play how you want, right? And then I started hosting this group and now I think I understand it better.</p>
<p>I’ve been playing this game for more than six years, I’ve completed all of the content, amassed an absurd fortune of fake money, I play with some of the best players in the game (I consider myself to perform at the “low end of the high end”), I am focused almost completely on performance whether it’s in PVE or PVP. I am, in other words, a “hardcore player.”</p>
<p>I would like to say I can be super helpful to new players or folks who want to play casually—and I can be, and I have been. But at times my bias and mindset still creep in. I start wanting new players to be ready for some future I assume will come, when they’ll want to perform well and have a legitimately effective build for hard content. And I just lose sight of the fact that some people DO NOT CARE about that and would rather focus on roleplay, aesthetics or anything else besides the DPS they put out or their ability to complete the latest vet dungeon or wreck face in a battleground.</p>
<p>Many hardcore players are dismissive of casual players, many casual players find hardcore players insufferable and elitist—this isn’t new to gaming. I think it hits ESO really hard, because the game is such an attractive option for both types of players, and it’s hard for them to mix effectively. It doesn’t help that this game has an abnormally huge skill gap between high-end and casual players; in most MMOs, a top player might do 2x the DPS of a novice player, in this game it is more like 5x or worse. You also get anger when the quarterly combat changes come out, and it seems like they favor one “side” or the other.</p>
<p>Anyway, all of this has led to a lot of toxicity in the broader ESO community, largely unnecessary. My entire goal with this ESO effort on the Sky Forge was to push back on that toxicity, with a group that was coming in new to the game, and show that it was a great game for any kind of player. That’s why I wrote <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-creative-character-building" target="_blank">this post</a> and <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-join-some-guilds-to-cure-your-social-distancing-blues" target="_blank">this post</a> and <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-the-right-order-for-the-story" target="_blank">this post</a>, and why I’ve spent a ton of time with lots of folks to help them get started. But there were other people doing posts in this group about “What’s your favorite class?” and “Show off your outfit”; these are totally logical posts to engage new players, but they would never have occurred to me. And in the end, we still ended up having a recent dustup in our Discord because of this hardcore vs. casual issue.</p>
<p>So, we’ll just continue to work on it. One tangible change I want to mention: I’ve asked Tae-Rai to co-host this section of the site and our ESO Discord channel. Tae has been playing for years like me, she knows the game really well. She probably has a more diverse perspective in the game than I do; in addition to being a solid PVE player in vet content, she’s also a lead in a very active roleplaying guild. She’s also just cooler than I am. We’re going to work together from now on, we’ll both do posts and talk regularly to come up with a more diverse range of things to share and discuss on the site and in Discord. To be clear, we are not representing two “factions” in the game; we’re going to be partners in helping to cover all aspects of the game. You can expect to see some fun stuff from her and from both of us in the future.</p>
<p>Sorry if this is a bit of a downer, but it really bummed me out that this argument showed up here, when my entire motivation for hosting the group was to get away from this issue. Feel free to comment, or not—I’ve said my piece and I’m looking forward to getting back to game content next time. See you in game - Avi</p></div>Our guilds in ESO: The Sky Forge invades 2nd Era Tamriel! (PC NA, Xbox NA)https://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/our-guilds-in-eso-the-sky-forge-invades-2nd-era-tamriel-pc-na-xbo2020-04-13T19:44:27.000Z2020-04-13T19:44:27.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p><img class="align-center" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/By3nuy2CUAEHiSQ.jpg" alt="The Elder Scrolls Online on Twitter: "German #ESO guild Das Netz ..." /></p><p>A few months ago, Pixel and I posted announcements about the formation of Sky Forge guilds in ESO. This is a reminder post to let you know about the guilds and to encourage you to join us!<br /><br />PC NA: The Sky Forge - Guildmaster, <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/members/Hantz" target="_blank">Curse</a></p><p>XBox NA: The Sky Forge - Guildmaster, <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/members/Pixel" target="_blank">Pixel</a></p><p>Both guilds are small but they are getting more active as more members of the community get into ESO in 2020 (seriously, what took you guys so long?). If you play on either platform and want to join up, please post a note in the comments below or on <a href="https://discord.gg/BmZ36Sf" target="_blank">our shiny new Discord server.</a> with your in-game user ID or "at-name" (i.e., "@Edgelord127") and make sure to specify your platform as PC or Xbox. We can pick you up and shoot you an invite.</p><p>Hope to see more of you in game, and in these guilds, soon! - Avi</p></div>ESO GUIDES: All the Crafting Motifs and How To Get Themhttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-all-the-crafting-motifs-and-how-to-get-them2020-04-11T16:24:37.000Z2020-04-11T16:24:37.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p>Greetings and salutations, and I offer my apologies for the lull in posts. The anniversary event, social distancing, a very busy work schedule and other stuff has kept me away from you all. You cannot fathom the depths of my regret.</p>
<p>Today I thought I would do a post that is short on text and deep on information. Hopefully, many of you have been actively working the Anniversary Jubilee like a speedbag and grabbing dozens or even hundreds of reward boxes from writs and other daily quests. (I also hope my prior guides to help you prep for the event were helpful!) If you have, you've probably received a good chunk of crafting motif style pages. While the pure capitalist would sock these away for sale in 5-6 months when prices readjust, you might have the desire to actually have these motifs for yourself, so you can make yourself look cute/tough/weird/creepy/sly/whatever floats your boat.</p>
<p>If so, you are VERY likely thinking "Well, damn, I'm still missing eight of these XYZ pages and the event is almost over, how do I get the rest?" I've got you covered! The table below lists all 80 motifs that are (or have been) available in the game so far, with summary instructions on how you can earn the pages. Note: If any of our admins can help me convert an Excel file into a HTML table, I would be more than happy to replace this monster of an image file.</p>
<p>A few general notes about motifs:</p>
<ul>
<li>In any situation where you can get a motif page, there is a VERY VERY rare chance of getting the entire book. Good luck! </li>
<li>Almost all of these motifs are available for sale in guild stores at varying prices. They will be available at their cheapest prices of the year over the next week or so, in the wake of this event that floods the market with motif pages. I did not list "and also you can buy them at guild stores" on each line of the table.</li>
<li>Just a random suggestion if you are fairly new to the game: Set yourself a goal of trying out some, most or all of the activities described here. Like, not even for the motif pages--this list is a really good showcase of just how much stuff there is to do and try in this game. Every activity listed is a fun thing to try out (the vet DLC dungeons will be quite hard for you if you are new, but you can do them on normal and still have a lot of fun).</li>
</ul>
<p>Remember, the beast that we all pursue in the endgame is fashion, so happy hunting - Avi</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}4392662182,RESIZE_1200x{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" style="padding:10px;" src="{{#staticFileLink}}4392662182,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="4392662182?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a></p></div>ESO GUIDES: Join some guilds to cure your social distancing blues.https://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-join-some-guilds-to-cure-your-social-distancing-blues2020-03-22T15:57:34.000Z2020-03-22T15:57:34.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p><img class="align-center" src="https://geekandsundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/the_guild.jpg" alt="Image result for the guild" width="575" height="323" /><br /> <br /> Good morning, this week's post is short and sweet. Well, at least it's short. Like everyone, I am feeling the stress and worry of the current coronavirus outbreak, and spending a lot of time indoors and away from society. This seemed like a good week to re-emphasize the central role that guilds play in an MMO experience and why you will be SO much better off joining a few terrific guilds and making the effort to get to know people in them.</p>
<p>ESO is very playable as a solo player. You can do 99.9% of the quest content on your own (it's actually 100% but a lot of people struggle with Shada's Tear in Craglorn LOL), and you can use the dungeon finder for pledges, join pickup groups for dungeons and trials and PVP, play PVP solo...et cetera.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, there are issues with this approach. The biggest tangible issue is that you are leaving the quality of players in your group to chance. We have all queued for dungeons only to be grouped with a 10k health sorc with 47 CP, calling himself a tank. You just joined a vet Cloudrest group made of random puggles in Craglorn? Good luck. TThat group you just joined in Cyrodiil by typing "lfg" is probably not going to beat a PVP guild at anything. The better you get at the game, and the more you want to pursue no death achievements, hard mode completes, speed runs, etc., the more frustrated you will be without a strong bench of dependable players that are used to playing with each other.</p>
<p>The biggest intangible is, if you will forgive my cheesiness, that you are giving up on making some great friends and joining a great community. If you are reading this and you are an active member on this site, you already belong to a guild. This site is a guild, it is a community. People help each other, they joke around, they do activities like events and contests with each other--it's a guild. That's what you get from a good guild in an MMO--the only difference is that sometimes you commit mass murder on pixelated entities. Virtual communities like guilds are always a lot of fun, and when you are locked inside 24/7, these things can be a lifeline to help cure your isolation, loneliness, stress and all the other things we're all feeling right now.</p>
<p>SO JOIN GUILDS! And when you join, really join--participate, talk to people, and so forth. That is all. Here are a few recommendations for how to fill out your five guild slots, but picking guilds is highly personal, so keep trying guilds until you find ones that really click for you.<br /> <br /> <strong>JOIN A TRADING GUILD.</strong> As you play more and more content, you'll start collecting gear, crafting materials, style motifs, recipes and all kinds of other stuff that sells for thousands of gold pieces. Play some more, your best drops will be worth tens of thousands of gold; play still more and you'll get stuff worth 100,000s of gold. Unless you want to stand around hawking your wares in zone chat (and maybe you're a khajiit and you want to sell your wares, lol), you want a good trading guild where you can just list this stuff for sale and watch the money come in. Your best bets are the guilds with spots in: Rawlkha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Grahtwood, Vivec City, Alinor, and Rimmen. Those are among the highest traffic spots in the game. Look around at the guild names and try a couple out!</p>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/universeconquest/images/c/c7/WhiteWalkersHorseback.png/revision/latest?cb=20180719144009" alt="Image result for the white walker army" /><br /> <br /> <strong>JOIN A PVE GUILD.</strong> Maybe the most common type of guild? There are many, many guilds dedicated to completing endgame content. A few of these guilds span the gamut of skill and experience levels, but most of them cater to people at a similar level--there are beginner-friendly guilds designed specifically to teach people the ropes, midrange guilds that focus on pledges, vet dungeons and some easier trials, and high-end guilds that focus on leaderboard scores for trials and have tough requirements to qualify. If you want to get better at the game's primary "challenge" content--if you want to "see some gains"--join a guild with folks you like and that forces you to stretch a bit and helps you improve. <strong>Specifically, I strongly recommend a guild that is active in PVE content, because the vast majority of the best gear in the game--and a lot of the highest-value loots like new style motifs-- is locked behind difficult vet dungeons, arenas and trials, so one way or another you're gonna want a reliable posse to help you with that gear farming.</strong><br /> <br /> <strong>JOIN A HIGHLY SOCIAL GUILD WITH FREQUENT EVENTS AND ACTIVE VOICE CHAT. MAKE FRIENDS.</strong> I can't recommend this highly enough. This suggestion may overlap with any of these other suggestions--your PVE guild, trading guild, etc., may be the guild that you end up calling your "home" in the game. For me, it's my PVP guild, Fantasia--we are a tight-knit group and we talk every day, some of us have met in real life--the scientific term is "good buddies," I believe. Jumping in voice chat for the first time can be offputting for many people, but just do it. I mean, PLEASE I SUGGEST just do it.<br /> <br /> <img class="align-center" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-33P2Zf16JKM/UDu99eqiUtI/AAAAAAAADZw/pQVctISXM-g/s1600/The-Chronicles-of-Narnia-The-Lion-the-Witch-and-the-Wardrobe4.jpg" alt="Image result for army charging" /><br /> <br /> <strong> JOIN A PVP GUILD (OPTIONAL).</strong> This is, quite obviously, only if you are interested in ramping up in PVP. There are "zerg" guilds that just soak up warm bodies to swarm the battlefield and win with numbers; there are higher-skill groups (again, varying levels of skill) that focus on doing strong work with a limited number of people in complementary builds; there are guilds that focus on setting up one-on-one duels--lots to choose from. <br /> <br /> <strong>JOIN A ROLEPLAY GUILD (OPTIONAL).</strong> Like PVP, this is another activity that is a ton of fun for some but not all people. I don't have much experience in this area. We have a real veteran here in the Sky Forge community in Tae-Rai, and our fearless leader Curse is another big supporter, they've answered a bunch of my questions recently and can help you if you're interested. If you've played tabletop games before, you'll have a sense of what RP is like in the game--there are really creative guilds out there with darker themes, paladin "smite the wicked" themes and everything in between.<br /> <br /> I think that covers the basics--I feel like I'm forgetting a big category, but if I am, I'm sure that someone will unfurl their rage at me in the comments, this is the internet after all. ;) There are other specialty categories--there are crafting-focused guilds, there are even guilds that focus on getting fishing achievements in game. If you have a specific request for a guild suggestion, post your server/region/faction/category of interest/general level of skill and experience below and we can try to make some suggestions. Have fun!</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
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<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>ESO GUIDES: Getting Ready for the Anniversary Eventhttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-getting-ready-for-the-anniversary-event2020-03-14T14:12:20.000Z2020-03-14T14:12:20.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2017/11/699c4fe06d2526dc8ceec6000ec5a00b.jpg" alt="Image result for anniversary event eso" width="595" height="292" /></p>
<p>Happy Saturday, campers. In this week’s ESO Guide I am going to focus on a very practical topic: how to get ready for the upcoming Anniversary event, so you can maximize the rewards you extract from the event’s activities. Every year, this event starts on April 4 (the game launched 4/4/14). That's just a few weeks away, so time to get cracking!</p>
<p>DISCLAIMER: The event is a little bit different every year; so far, it’s always been structurally similar and based on the same general activities and rewards. But it could very well turn out that it is completely different this year and that this advice doesn’t end up being useful. I consider that unlikely.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:18pt;"><strong>THE JUBILEE EVENT</strong></span></p>
<p>Every year so far, the Jubilee Anniversary event has been a very general celebration of the game’s core activities. Very simple: every day, when each of your characters does a daily quest activity, they get a Jubilee reward box. Do a writ, get a reward box. Do a dungeon quest, get a reward box. Do a Cyrodiil daily quest, get a reward box. For a few years, you could get rewards for all of these activities throughout the event which lasted about two weeks or so. Last year, it was a five-week event, and each week there was a different activity that provided reward boxes.</p>
<p>So far, these reward boxes have NOT been parceled out via RNG—EVERY time you completed an activity, you got a reward box.</p>
<p>There will surely be event tickets and goofy fun cosmetics to be had—I am not going to cover those here. Just get your tickets each day, save your tickets and get some hats or pets or whatever. I'll also just mention that during the entire event, we all get double XP. Great! <br /> <br /> Today's focus is on the real prizes, those Jubilee reward boxes. Those boxes can drop ANYTHING IN THE GAME—rare motifs, gold upgrade materials, even Aetheric Ciphers (these things sell for like 1.5 million gold, I got two last year)—and the event generally allows you to collect HUNDREDS of these boxes across your characters. You can make a massive jump in wealth over the course of this event—IF you are prepared.</p>
<p>Below, I’ve provided a list of activities that have been included in the Jubilee in the past, what you’ve needed to do to get a reward box, and what you need to do for your character so they are ready to do that activity on the first day of the event. Basically, ANY event in the game that is started via a BLUE quest marker (that’s the game signal for a daily repeatable quest), is fair game to drop a Jubilee reward box upon completion, during some portion of the event.</p>
<p>As I said, we don’t know the length of the event or how many days any of these activities will offer rewards, but there’s a high probability that being able to do these will offer rewards at some point.</p>
<p><strong>THE MOST IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY: </strong>In my opinion, this event is a great reason/excuse to get ramped up on creating multiple characters. If you are a purely pragmatic player, focused on loot and lucre, this is a smart move because multiple characters offer more opportunities for lucrative loot. If you are a devoted roleplayer, this is also a smart move, because multiple characters offer more opportunities to create different stories for your personal enjoyment. And for anyone, it is a great way to sample the different classes and playstyles in the game, and figure out what you like the best (or alternately, prevent you from getting bored with just one playstyle.)</p>
<p><strong>GENERAL PREPARATION NOTES:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Between your characters and your bank, start investing now in inventory space. If you are active in this event, you are going to be collecting a HUGE amount of rewards loot and you need a place to store it all. Because...</li>
<li>Be patient, and sock away a lot of your loot, especially rare motifs. This event traditionally has been SO generous that it literally wrecks the game economy for a few months. Prices on motifs will plummet as the event gets rolling, so save any valuable stuff that you get until at least September/October. Prices will have recovered to some extent by then.</li>
<li>Finally, start getting some gold together now! As I just said, prices plummet during this event--if there's a crafting motif or something else you want to buy, but it's too expensive for you, chances are that it will be available at a quarter of the prices by the time the event is over.</li>
</ol>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:18pt;"><strong>ANNIVERSARY EVENT ACTIVITIES</strong></span></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"> </p>
<p><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong><img class="align-center" src="https://fextralife.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ESO-5-year-anniversary-event.jpg" alt="Image result for anniversary event eso" width="663" height="373" /></strong></span></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>CRAFTING WRITS</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Task: Complete a crafting writ. That’s it.</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Color Commentary: </strong>I went with this activity first because it is by far the most lucrative activity available in this event, as measured by "loot per minute of game time." A crafter character that does writs, does seven of them per day, one for each crafting skill. It takes about 3-5 minutes to do the writs. That’s 7 rewards boxes. <strong>On a prepped account with 9 characters doing writs, that’s 63 reward boxes per day. </strong>Ashamedly I have two accounts, one with 18 characters and the other with 9, I will be doing writs on 27 characters if I can bear it. 189 reward boxes per day. (NOTE: You can’t do jewelry crafting, or the associated writs, unless you own the Summerset chapter. All of this advice still applies in that case, you just get to do 6 writs a day instead of 7.)<br /> <br /> Importantly, in the past it has not mattered if your character is a master crafter or even has any skill points invested in crafting. All you need to do is be able to complete a basic low-level writ, and you’re good to go.</p>
<p><strong>The Preparation: </strong>You get nine slots for free, use them.</p>
<ul>
<li>Fill your account with your nine allotted characters. Depending on how involved you get, you can delete most of these later if you want, so don’t worry about creating the ideal heroes you love. “Pack mule #5” is fine.</li>
<li>For each character:
<ul>
<li>Level them to level 6.</li>
<li>Go to crafting writ boards in your faction’s starter town (Vulkhel Guard, Daggerfall or Davon’s Watch), accept quest.</li>
<li>Go talk to the NPCs associated with the quest (Millineth in the Fighters Guild, Danel Telleno in the Mages Guild). Each will certify you in three crafting skills, just do all of their tasks.</li>
<li>Go to Summerset (you need to own this chapter to do so), go to Alinor, head toward the crafting area, talk to a dude named Felarian near the entrance to the crafting area. Get certified in jewelry crafting.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>And that’s it. Getting a new character up and running, and certified in all crafting skills, might take a few hours. But once it’s certified, you don’t need to do anything else—just wait until the event is rolling, and when the event is offering reward boxes for writ completion, just do the daily writs on all of these new characters.</p>
<p>Obviously, you don't have to do this on nine characters if you don't want to. You can just get five characters prepped. Or three. Or ignore me entirely. :)</p>
<p>Another note: You are going to want to spend some time either harvesting or buying low-level materials to complete these writs if you don’t have a full craft bag. I would recommend starting today, to stock up on Jute, Rawhide, Sanded Maple, Iron Ingots and Pewter Ingots. If you want to buy them, they’re not expensive—yet (they will be more expensive during the event). If you want to harvest them, just bring a character out harvesting that DOESN’T have skill points invested in the main crafting skill (e.g., Tailoring), so that harvesting nodes will offer low-level materials.</p>
<p>For more on crafting and completing writs efficiently: <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/ESO-Crafting">https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/ESO-Crafting</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2016/11/b6508e0bcc4f2d65cdccf56cbd4f7254.jpg" alt="Image result for eso world boss" width="477" height="268" /></p>
<p><strong>DELVES AND WORLD BOSSES:</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Task: Complete daily quests to tackle Delves and World Bosses.</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Color Commentary: </strong>The quests that have counted in this category in the past: Fighters Guild and Mages guild dailies; Undaunted daily quest (from Bolgrul, the dude in the back of the tent who gives a simple delve quest); DLC daily quests (in every added DLC and Chapter, there are a couple of NPCs in major towns that offer daily delve and world boss quests). Do those. IIRC, you get a reward box for every quest, on every character…there are at least 10-15 dailies you can do every day for each character..so really this one is just mostly limited by how many hours you want to spend doing dailies! You will find that some dailies are less time consuming than others.</p>
<p><strong>The Preparation: </strong>Just get those nine characters leveled up a little bit, and get them in decent gear—simple crafted sets and trash jewelry is fine. They just need to be able to complete a basic delve quest; for world boss quests, you will mostly be able to just show up and spam light attacks alongside 30 other people who are all doing the same grind that you are! Vvardenfell, Summerset and Elsweyr are great places to hang out and do these quests—each zone offers 12 repeatable quests each day that qualify under this category.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong><img class="align-center" src="https://elderscrollsonline.info/images/site/pvp/pvp-objectives.jpg" alt="Image result for eso huge PVP fight" width="535" height="301" /></strong></p>
<p><strong>PVP/CYRODIIL:</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Task: Do daily quests in Cyrodiil, Imperial City, Battlegrounds.</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Color Commentary: </strong>Not much to say here; to complete actual PVP quests (given at the Mission boards at your faction’s home base), you can theoretically follow your faction’s zerg around, but unless you are a leveled up character, it will probably not be very fun or efficient. However, you can complete Cyrodiil town quests each day (there are quite a few of these) and don’t need a very powerful character to do these, they’re just basic PVE quests. I would go with a group and pick a low-population campaign to do this; there are always going to be terrible people who hide in stealth and gank unsuspecting carebears (that’s you in Cyrodiil if you don’t PVP regularly lol). That’s not very common, but it happens. <br /> <br /> <strong>The Preparation: </strong>Get to level 10 so you can enter Cyrodiil. To be better prepared for PVP, you can read my short guide here. <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-pvp-an-introduction">https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-pvp-an-introduction</a></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2020/02/c3217104a16bd648afc20dcdfb5f938e.jpg" alt="Image result for unhallowed grave" width="427" height="210" /></strong></p>
<p><strong>DUNGEONS/TRIALS:</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Task: Complete daily/weekly quests for these.</strong></p>
<p><strong>The Color Commentary: </strong>The last major category of daily quests is focused on the 4-man and 12-main raid content. Every day, you can get Pledge quests to complete a few 4-person dungeons. Weekly, you can get a quest to complete each of the game’s 12-person trials (AA, HRC, SO, MoL, CR, SS, AS, HoF—look ‘em up!). If you’re following this guide from a standpoint of “I have a few weeks to get a bunch of brand-new characters ready,” you really don’t have time to prep to prep more than one baby character to handle group content, unless you have REALLY nice friends that will carry you. But if you’ve leveled your Champion Points up decently and craft yourself some decent gear, you can take a level 30 character to complete Pledge quests on normal difficulty—again, you just need a group with at least one high-level and kind person that will largely carry the rest.</p>
<p><strong>The Preparation: </strong>Level your characters, gear up, have fun.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So what are you waiting for? More hands make less work. Get after it!</p></div>ESO GUIDES: GETTING READY FOR VETERAN DUNGEONShttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-getting-ready-for-veteran-dungeons2020-03-01T14:37:18.000Z2020-03-01T14:37:18.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p class="p2"><span class="s1">Today I want to talk a bit about getting ready for vet dungeons. (The title of this post may have tipped you off.) A post about “doing vet content” could cover hundreds of pages, but today I just want to cover a few things—not so much how to play, but how to prepare and most importantly how to interact with other players when you’re new.</span></p>
<p class="p1"> </p>
<p class="p1"> </p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/uploads/blogs/232ef4839eaddc36fe596c88fe24218b.jpg" alt="Image result for eso veteran dungeons" /></span></p>
<p class="p2"> </p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>PREPARING</strong></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">There’s three things to think about before walking into a vet dungeon—your stats, your player skill and your knowledge of the dungeon. Keep in mind that there’s no reason you can’t just queue up for a vet dungeon and give it a shot, but in many cases you will find it frustrating—and you will certainly frustrate the other 3 people!—if you are woefully unprepared.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Stats</strong>: Before you start trying to do these dungeons, you should have a sense of your sustained DPS, your sustained healing, your sustained ability to taunt and position bosses and adds. Your stats are only a part of this equation—two players with the same build can perform VERY differently!—but they are an important part. I’ll just offer a few guidelines here, others have already done the hard work of setting up character builds that are accessible to newer players. PLEASE, IF YOU ARE REALLY NEW AND CLUELESS ABOUT WHAT TO DO, JUST GO TO <a href="http://ALCASTHQ.COM"><span class="s2">ALCASTHQ.COM</span></a> AND LOOK UP HIS BEGINNER BUILDS, OR THE BEGINNER VERSIONS OF HIS TRIAL BUILDS. THEY ARE EASY TO MAKE AND THEY ALL WORK. There are other content creators like Xynode Gaming, Dottz Gaming and others that provide beginner builds for many classes; be smart and use builds that are verified to work!</span></p>
<p class="p1">Note that the stats below are guidelines; you could be wearing paper and if you have three friends who are all-pro PVErs, they can drag you through any dungeon. But why make them do that? It's not hard to get set up with a reasonable build.</p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">DPS: You should aim at doing about 15-20k DPS for a sustained period of time on a target dummy. That’s really low for veteran content but it’s enough for easier dungeons like Fungal Grotto I, Elden Hollow I and so forth. The stats to get this level of DPS are not hard to achieve—you should aim for unbuffed spell damage around 2k or weapon damage of 2700-2800; regen for your primary stat at 1000 or so; primary stat should be around 35000 if magicka, over 30000 if stam. Health is really important when you are new at content—you’ll see pro players running content at 15k health or less, don’t do that. Try to have at least 18-19k.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Healer: Ideally, your healer build for vet content will do some healing and some DPS. For a lot of dungeons a healer simply isn’t necessary, kind of sad but true. Your raw output is less important than your sustain, so for a rookie healer really focus on magicka regen in the 1800-2000 range. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Tank: Your resistances unbuffed should be in the low 20k range, when you buff up in the high 20k range. CAPPED RESISTANCE IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT STAT FOR TANKING MOST CONTENT. Blocking offers a HUGE mitigation in this game, and the most important thing is to be able to block, cast your abilities, and not run out of magic or stamina. Know your tanking build, know how to recover resources while you’re tanking and blocking. Block cost reduction enchants are usually important to have, as well as some sturdy-traited gear. For resources, if you have about 35k health and somewhere near 18-20k stam you are in the right ballpark, exact resources depend on whether you are a “mag” tank or a “stam” tank (usually tanks these days use a mix of resources).</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Player Skill: </strong>I guess I could just say “practice,” and be done with this section! You gotta practice anything to get good at it. So do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">This is especially true for a DPS role, where learning your rotation, measuring your results, figuring out what you did wrong and fixing it, measuring again—that’s the only way to know if you’re actually improving. Most guild houses have a target dummy or multiple dummies; avail yourself of this and start practicing. Helpful addons (essential?) include Combat Metrics, which will show you a detailed readout after any fight of your results, which abilities did what damage, your uptime percentage on various buffs and so forth; Light Attack Helper—this is a tracker of how many light attacks you do per second (the closer to 1.0, the better—light attacks are generally the #1 source of damage in a good rotation); Global Cooldown Tracker—basically a metronome; and, some sort of buff/DoT/ability tracker like S’rendarr that shows you when your various duration-based abilities are going to run out. Action Duration Reminder is another good one that puts the timers right on top of your ability bar. Practice with these as a DPS, get some basic advice from an experienced friend, and you really should be able to get to 15-20K DPS without too much practice. (LEARN HOW TO WEAVE LIGHT ATTACKS. IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS, GOOGLE "ESO WEAVING LIGHT ATTACKS," READ AND WATCH WHAT YOU FIND, AND THEN LEARN HOW TO DO IT.)</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><img class="align-center" src="https://cdn.bytesin.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/BestTESOAddonsCombatMetrics.png" alt="Image result for eso combat metrics" width="584" height="438" /></span></p>
<p class="p1" style="text-align:center;"><em><strong>aNAlysIs cOMpleTe --34.>#-3.- yOur dpS iS ... AdEQuatE 0-@#$3 </strong></em></p>
<p class="p1"> </p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">For healing and tanking, there is no way to practice on a target dummy. Just practice good technique in normal dungeons, get advice from grizzled players, watch videos, read up on the Internet. Practice, practice. Healing is largely a matter of keeping HoTs on the ground and on players, and saving pricy burst heals for when the tank or DPS flub something or there’s a dungeon mechanic that requires a heal check. Tanking is about resource management—pulling and taunting adds, keeping up block, running buffs for the group, and all while ensuring you don’t go dry. There are GREAT guides for tanks on the web, on <a href="http://alcasthq.com"><span class="s2"><strong>alcasthq.com</strong></span></a> in particular there is a beginner guide and an advanced technique guide, highly recommend checking those out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Knowledge of the Dungeon: </strong>This is probably the most important thing and so few players ever bother to do it. Just go online before doing content, and read about the content and watch videos about the content. Google is amazing. Reading is fundamental. Knowledge is power. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">If you Google “Elden Hollow I Guide,” you will find written guides and videos and walkthroughs for Elden Hollow I. You will see mechanics to watch out for with the trash pulls, and you will see the mechanics for all of the boss fights. You will see where and when the boss puts out damage; you will see the red on the ground and learn where to stand and not to stand. Just having a moderate amount of knowledge about what to expect will make a BIG difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2020/02/c23eab6f0edb99d12d572b98cbf525b1.png" alt="Image result for eso unhallowed grave" width="590" height="332" /></span></p>
<p class="p3"> </p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>INTERACTING WITH OTHER PLAYERS</strong></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">This is a shorter section but no less important. Your impact on the group’s performance and enjoyment, and their impact on yours, is what MMOs are all about. A vet dungeon can be a miserable event that makes you question the purpose of humanity, or a heavenly experience that makes you realize our purpose is the friends we make along the way. Or it can just be a Tuesday afternoon. There are two things you can do to influence this: control how you behave, and control the kinds of people with whom you group.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Things you should do and not do: </strong>When you join a vet dungeon group, if you’ve queued in and it’s a bunch of strangers, the first thing everyone does for 10 seconds is look at everyone’s champion point levels and stats, and immediately start judging everyone subconsciously. Don’t feel bad, it’s natural. Everyone is thinking “Shit I hope these people know what they’re doing.” As a newbie, the best thing you can do for everyone and yourself is just immediately say “Hey guys, newish player and this is my first time in here.” This will ease your anxiety. If the group is nice (and experienced) it can go into tutorial mode and help you, that sometimes happens. If the group is not nice, you may see people just immediately leave, or the group might be real dicks and vote to kick you. THAT ALSO SOMETIMES HAPPENS. Don’t let it get you down, the people you meet in life are a random dice roll. In my experience, this game has some trolly dicks but most people are pretty cool. So it’s better than real life in other words.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">As you go through the dungeon, ask a balanced amount of questions. Ideally you can just ask “OK what are the key things for this boss fight” for each boss fight, and people in group will tell you. You’re the newbie, it’s your responsibility to manage your newbness. If you are upfront and show you are trying to learn, people will appreciate it and you will (sometimes) be surprised at the miracles of kindness that occur. But again, sometimes people will be shitheads. You probably saw a shithead at Dunkin Donuts this morning, and you didn’t quit life, so don’t quit trying vet dungeons because you saw a shithead in one of them!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">THINGS TO NOT DO: Bitch people out for doing something wrong, queue for a dungeon as a tank to get in faster, when you a sorc with level 20 armor at 13k health, run ahead of the tank and pull the mobs because you have ADHD, ignore people if they say hello or try to communicate, vote to group-kick a newbie player once you learn the ropes and you are the grizzled veteran. Basically, DON’T BE A DICK. You may remember this being a key recommendation in my PVP guide. It applies in PVE as well. A pretty good rule to follow in life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Things you can do to control who you group with: </strong>JOIN GUILDS. MAKE FRIENDS. REPEAT. MMOs are all about goals and progression and getting to different stages, right? Have one of your goals be “Queue by myself for as few vet dungeons as possible.” There are LOTS of guilds that are friendly to newer players, and over your early months in the game, you can graduate or shift from one guild to another as your skill develops and you meet new people and figure out what communities feel the best to you. Get in voice chat with your guild mates. When you find a good tank, add that guy/gal/nonbinary pal to your friends list as fast as you can! This is a longwinded way of saying that dungeons are always fun, but they are a lot more fun with buddies, especially buddies that know what they’re doing. And if it isn’t obvious, they are a lot easier when four people are in voice comms together and talking to each other (“Strangler spawned in the east,” “I need a heal,” “Dude, WTF is up with that outfit”).</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">That’s all for this week. TL;DR: Git gud, make friends and don't stand in red. </span></p></div>ESO GUIDES: ADDONShttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-addons2020-02-22T15:25:04.000Z2020-02-22T15:25:04.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p>Good morning, time for another weekly ESO guide. Today, I am just going to do a rundown of my most valued addons. There are literally thousands of addons available for the game, I have only a small fraction of those addons and I feel like I have a lot. My choices are not necessarily a guarantee that these mods are the best at what they do, but the ones I’m listing all have a lot of users and generally great reputations. (I have a few others that I think I need to purge out before the next update, so obviously I am not listing those for you guys!)</p>
<p> <img class="align-center" src="https://altarofgaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/the-elder-scrolls-online-best-addons-craftstore.jpg" alt="Image result for eso addons" width="883" height="316" /></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><em><strong>The Craft Store addon interface(s). This is an older version, its even better now.</strong></em></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>HOW TO ADD ON ADDONS</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>It’s really easy. <a href="https://www.minion.gg/">Go here and install Minion</a>. Don’t worry this isn’t like installing Mod Organizer for Skyrim, you literally click download, it finds your ESO directory when prompted, and you’re good to go. This client is your search engine for addons, your download tool, your updater. Incredibly intuitive.
<ul>
<li>Also: there are no load orders for addons. You don’t need to worry about that. If addons conflict, the game will tell you and you can choose which addon to keep. Conflicts are rare.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Note: the one COMPLICATED part of using addons is that each addon these days require a set of community-shared database files called “libraries” to function. It’s not really complicated, just tedious, you need to look at the description of each addon, see what libraries are required, and download them. That’s all. The libraries are all searchable and downloadable from the same interface as the addons, and will just sit in your list like another addon.
<ul>
<li>The good news is that these are community libraries shared by many mods. So once you’ve downloaded about 20 or so of these addons, you are mostly covered for most addons.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>One final note: addons do take up resources from your rig. Depending on your setup and internet connection, you may find that some addons affect your game’s performance. I don’t really have a problem but I have a strong rig and fast connection. Best way to manage this is to add a few addons at a time and make sure everything still runs smoothly, then add a few more, etc.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>MY ADDONS</strong></p>
<p>Here’s the list. Why no links, Avi? Because they would be useless, you are going to need to look these up in Minion and download them. Each name will work as a search term. I’ve grouped some together where it seemed logical. Try these out, let me know how it goes, do NOT ask me for tech support (!), and if you know of better options or other addons people might want to try, please let us know in the comments!</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Alpha Gear </strong>– Super amazing addon that allows you save configurations of gear and skill loadouts, and switch to those loadouts with the push of a button. ESSENTIAL. Great for when you play your character different ways (healer for trials, DPS for PVP, etc.), and also great for advanced players who switch gear during a trial depending on the upcoming fight. Caution, only works out of combat, and if you try to swap while transitioning into out of combat, you may end up with the wrong skills or gear on your bar.</p>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://cdn-eso.mmoui.com/preview/pvw7693.png" alt="Image result for eso alphagear" width="368" height="307" /></p>
<p><strong>Champion Point Respec</strong> – Like Alpha Gear, but for Champion Points. If you are poor, you will not love spending 3k to swap your CP around constantly, but once you’ve played for awhile, that is a tiny sum. Using Alpha Gear and CPR, I can turn my character from a PVE DPS to a PVP healer in five seconds.</p>
<p><strong>Advanced Filters</strong> – gives you more things to use to search and filter your character/bank/storage inventory.</p>
<p><strong>Craft Store Dragonhold</strong> – incredibly useful and broad addon. This lets you track all sorts of stuff across all of your characters (you can see every character while logged into just one toon). Research timers across all of your characters, learned and unlearned recipes and motifs, crafting skill levels, horse training timers, you name it. Absolutely essential addon. It even fixes the terrible crafting interfaces for several crafting skills.</p>
<p><strong>Awesome Guild Store</strong> – like the name says, gives you a much better interface for guild store shopping—better search options by far than vanilla.</p>
<p><strong>Harven’s Extended Stats</strong>—shows you more stats in your character interface. Really important ones include your spell and weapon penetration (a MAJOR determinant of damage). TBH I don’t know if this is necessary anymore; it hasn’t been updated in 2 years and it works fine and just sits in my addon folder.</p>
<p><strong>Harvens Improved Skills Window</strong>—really helpful addon, does things like show actual percentages of a current skill level (e.g., 58.47% of leveling Soul Harvest II to Soul Harvest III), showing you the root ability and both morphs when you scroll over an ability, etc.</p>
<p><strong>Combat Metrics</strong>—definitive tool for tracking your performance in any engagement. Shows you your DPS or HPS (heals per second), breaks down your average stats, average uptime on buffs, damage done by various skills, light attacks per second…everything you need to help you as you practice, see where you need work, and improve.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="https://cdn-eso.mmoui.com/preview/pvw6556.png" alt="Image result for eso combat metrics" width="389" height="288" /></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><strong><em>Someone's Combat Metrics after-action report (not mine)</em></strong></p>
<p><strong>Dustman</strong>—highly customizable addon that will automatically slot things that you pick up as junk and sell them when you vendor, or even just automatically destroy some things you can’t sell.</p>
<p><strong>Easy Travel</strong>—really great addon if you have one or several large guilds. When you open a map, there is a list of zones on the right; you can right click on any zone, and if anyone in any of your guilds is there, you will fast travel to them for free without a wayshrine.</p>
<p><strong>Fence Data</strong>—puts a widget on your UI that shows you how much of your fence and launder limits you’ve used in a given day. Really useful for thief characters or when doing justice achievements.</p>
<p><strong>Lorebooks / Skyshards / Destinations / Harvest Map / Lost Treasure / Map Pins</strong>—All six of these addons make your map far more useful by putting things you need to find on the map. There is some overlap with a few of them, but I am 99% sure each of them has a few things the others don’t. Just grab all six. You can customize most of these addons to show or hide anything.</p>
<p><strong>Hide Login Announcement</strong>—it hides the login announcement.</p>
<p><strong>Inventory Insight</strong>—Essential addon that lets you view your ENTIRE inventory at any time—all your character’s inventories, your bank inventory, storage chests, guild banks, everything.</p>
<p><strong>Itemization Browser</strong>—lets you look up any item set in the game and see where it comes from and what its specific stats and bonuses are. Specifically useful for seeing quickly which monster sets are sold by which of the three Undaunted quest givers.</p>
<p><strong>LUI Extended / Greymind QSB / Srendarr</strong> – I’ve grouped these three addons together because they are my main UI overhaul mods. This is one area where you have choices; LUI, FTC, AUI, Bandit UI and others are all options for your primary UI interface, it comes down to preference which one you want to use. Some of these mods duplicate the features of Greymind (puts a potion/consumables hotbar on screen and lets you assign hotkeys to change your consumables) and Srendarr (comprehensive buff/debuff tracker). I use these three for my setup. Try these, try other UI mods, pick your favorites. All comes down to giving you information you need, in the way you want/need to see it.</p>
<p><strong>Master Merchant / Tamriel Trade Centre</strong>—the classic and the upstart. They don’t really compete, Master Merchant tracks all store sales in all your guilds, to provide you with price and volume history to help you when buying or selling. Tamriel Trade Center has the same purpose, but it pulls from current LISTINGS (not sales) from all over Tamriel. Both are useful info for trading effectively. Tamriel Trade Center requires you to run an .exe file every couple of days to receive up to date pricing information; I think there is an option on the TTC website for Mac users who can’t run .exe files or people that just don’t want to. Master Merchant is a pretty big resource hog, so you shouldn’t run it while engaged in “big” content like trials and PVP with tons of actors and activity happening.</p>
<p><strong>No Accidental Stealing / Vampire’s Woe</strong>: Two of my favorite small mods. No Accidental Stealing lets you customize rules for letting you steal something (double click, only with a confirm prompt, only when in sneak, etc.), so no more getting a bounty by fat fingering and stealing some trash from a table. Vampire’s Woe suppresses the Vampire Feed ability with a key toggle—REALLY great when you are trying to pickpocket or assassinate NPCs, as you might imagine if you’ve tried that as a vamp.</p>
<p><strong>No Thank You</strong>—another favorite small mod. It moves lots of annoying messages from your notifications screens or from the dreaded UI error screen, into your chat window.</p>
<p><strong>Potion Maker</strong>—helps you make potions. No instructions required, just download and thank me. Another in the long line of examples proving that Bethesda should outsource UI design.</p>
<p><strong>Raid Notifier</strong>—not important at all if you are not doing trials content, essential if you are. The cues in trials for incoming attacks and mechanics are often wonky and can be very hard to see even if you know the content well; this addon just flashes simple messages to warn you when something is happening.</p>
<p><strong>Rare Fish Tracker / Votan’s Fisherman / Votan’s Fish Fillet</strong>—essential if you are going for fishing achievements, useless if you are not.</p>
<p><strong>SuperStar</strong>—great addon, you just hit a hotkey, and a full interface of your character’s information pops on screen—skills, gear, enchants, traits, CP, stats, everything. Great for sharing your build information with other people, just screenshot and post on discord or wherever.</p>
<p><strong>Urich’s Skill Point Finder</strong>—great for when you are leveling. This small-font interface displays every skill point available in the game, lets you know how many you have, and shows you each skill point you still need and where to get it.</p>
<p><strong>Votan’s Minimap</strong>—my choice for minimap. There are one or two others.</p>
<p><strong>Dolgubon’s Lazy Writ Crafter</strong>—The essential tool for anyone who does daily crafting writs. Thank the Gods for Dolgubon! You walk up to the writ quest bulletin board, it automatically accepts all the daily writ quests. You walk up to each crafting table, it automatically crafts the required items. You walk up to the turn-in station, it automatically turns in the quest and picks up your prize box, and then automatically opens up all the prize boxes without you even needing to go the inventory screen.</p>
<p><strong>Writ Worthy</strong>—Fantastic tool for those doing daily writs, and specifically for those who want to use or possibly sell Master Writs. Gives you the cost per voucher to craft the writ (my rule of thumb is never craft anything over 500g per voucher unless you are grinding to get thousands of vouchers). More importantly, lets you “queue” master writs, and if you have the skills and materials to craft them, you just need to walk up to the crafting table and it makes the thing(s) automatically.</p></div>ESO GUIDES: THE “RIGHT” ORDER FOR THE STORYhttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-the-right-order-for-the-story2020-02-15T15:00:19.000Z2020-02-15T15:00:19.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p>(Updated July 2020)</p>
<p>Good morning, time for another ESO guide. As always, I’m trying to pick topics, or angles on topics, that you can’t find from many other YouTubers and content creators. This week’s guide covers something I don’t actually see in guides very often: the “right” order for the game’s quest content. Mild spoilers ahead.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>DISCLAIMER: THERE’S NO “DANGER” IN DOING CONTENT OUT OF ORDER</strong></p>
<p>When the game came out in 2014, content was leveled; you basically had to play the game on rails, following a clear path—mobs here were level 5, then over there they were level 9, etc. With the One Tamriel update, they changed all of that—now you can do anything you come across on any map, and the game auto-matches your strength to the enemy’s strength. Broadly, this move was helpful for the game and most people like it, but something was lost in terms of storytelling: most players now just run all over the place and don’t get a sense of the narrative the game builds over time.</p>
<p>Granted, most of the zones, chapters and DLCs have fairly independent storyline, and you don’t lose THAT much playing them out of order. But there are key NPCs that show up in the story earlier and later, building a relationship with you, and if you play out of order you miss out on that. And there was in fact a major story arc that extended over two years that, again, you’ll miss if you play out of order. Anything I skip in this guide, is content that you can do at any time without concern for continuity.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>WHAT’S THE “RIGHT” ORDER?</strong></p>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>Main Quest/Faction Quests/Fighters Guild/Mages Guild</strong></span></li>
</ol>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/uploads/blogs/a6d2d76fc2eb5a1a786ea18e1d55d928.jpg" alt="Image result for molag bal" width="470" height="220" /></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><em><strong>"Your pathetic Aedric trinket can't defeat me!"</strong></em></p>
<p>When you started the story before any of the newer “chapters,” the prologue started the main quest. This is the quest where you are taken to Coldharbour for the first time and need to escape. This prologue is still available as a quest in the game; you will see a “Hooded Figure” appear near your faction’s starting city wayshrine (Vulkhel Guard, Davon’s Watch or Daggerfall) and you just take it from there.</p>
<p>Once that’s done, you’ll be dropped in your faction’s starting/tutorial quest area. Each Alliance has a starter zone (1 zone for Dominion, two smaller zones for Pact and Covenant), and then five larger regions to explore in order. Along the way, in the olden days you would receive quests for the MQ every five levels, and do those in parallel with your Alliance faction’s zone quests (now you can do the main quests whenever you want, I personally like spreading them out when leveling a character).</p>
<p>You also complete the <strong>Fighters Guild</strong> and<strong> Mages Guild</strong> stories as you go from zone to zone in your faction—one of each of these quests pops up in each of your Alliance’s five zones. It still basically works this way, but since the game doesn’t make you do content in order, you can often squirrel off the path. (Note: leveling these skill lines has nothing to do with the quests. You rank up in Fighters Guild by killing daedra/undead, and in Mages Guild by reading lore books. Do both of these as you go along, there are some really powerful skills in these lines that you're going to want.)</p>
<p>Here’s a basic chart of how the base game story content works. I included approximate levels at which you’d reach various content, assuming you just did these quests and weren’t using XP boosters. Obviously, these numbers can vary wildly.</p>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}3863792341,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-full" src="{{#staticFileLink}}3863792341,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="3863792341?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="624" /></a></p>
<p>If you are new to the game—I recommend going through this experience! It’s…like…the game. At least it’s what the original game was. Strong consensus among players that Rivenspire and Reaper’s March were the best stories. I cannot lie and tell you all 15 zone stories are great. Some are not. But they’re all, at minimum, “good.”</p>
<p>A final note: when you conclude the main quest, in the epilogue you get a “quest” from Cadwell to “see what it’s like for your enemies”—this is an absurd handwave to give you a reason to go through the other two faction’s quests. If you are an extreme roleplayer, you would not want to do this. But the content is all fun and interesting, they do a great job bringing the nine races and cultures to life, and there’s millions of XP and hundreds of skill points to be had. And come on, like why not just be a free agent and help these other folks out? None of the three factions is evil, they’re just doin’ the best they can. Anyway, “Cadwell’s Silver” will ask you to go through the five zones for a second faction, and “Cadwell’s Gold” sends you through the third faction’s quests.</p>
<p>Without spoilers, I will note that beloved NPC characters from each of the three faction questlines, as well as the main quest, are brought back on several occasions throughout the game’s future chapters, so it’s kind of nice to know when you were supposed to have met them and what you did with them. (The game does in fact give you different dialogue choices in the later chapters, depending on whether you’ve met and adventured with these folks.)</p>
<p> </p>
<ol start="2">
<li><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>Early DLCs: Imperial City, Orsinium, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood</strong></span></li>
</ol>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2015/10/7796152804036feb7793271423040992.jpg" alt="Image result for orsinium" width="466" height="217" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>So…that’s the order that these DLCs were released, so it would make sense to do them in that order. They are for the most part independent stories, with minimal connection to what came before or what comes after, so you can mix this up if you want. (Murkmire belongs in this group as well, but it literally has no plot connection to anything else in Tamriel so you can do Murkmire whenever you want.) <br /> <br /> A few notes:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Imperial City</strong>’s setting is somewhat related to what is happening in the Main Quest—the story is not linked, but what is happening there in general will make more sense if you did the main quest.</li>
<li><strong>Orsinium/Wrothgar</strong> is REALLY great. Love this story. At the very end, there’s an Easter egg for a long storyline to come—this Easter egg was almost two years ahead of the start of that plotline, which is kind of cool.</li>
<li><strong>Dark Brotherhood</strong>: If you complete EVERY SINGLE QUEST available in the Gold Coast, you will get a secret bonus quest, “The Sweetroll Killer.” Do this one after you have completed the Dominion and the Pact storylines. No more spoilers.</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<ol start="3">
<li><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>The XXXXXXX Wars</strong></span></li>
</ol>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://i.gyazo.com/51e8e8e66775e4868afbdce48d5faef6.png" alt="Image result for daedric wars eso" width="390" height="248" /></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Even the name of this epic storyline is a spoiler! Luckily the instructions are fairly simple. After you have completed Orsinium (and if you REALLY want to be completionist, the “Sweetroll Killer” quest in the Dark Brotherhood content), do this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Morrowind Chapter (main quest, and DEFINITELY do the Balmora quest chain, it has relevance later on)</li>
<li>Clockwork City DLC</li>
<li>Summerset Chapter</li>
</ul>
<p>That’s all I will say. These three proceed in order and a long and amazing tale comes to a pretty fantastic conclusion (and a VERY disappointing boss fight) with Summerset.</p>
<p>Note: around this time, ZoS started releasing prologue quests to all of their story DLCs and Chapters, about a month before they come out. These are fun teasers for what’s to come, but the content is never really that important to the overall story. You can do them for fun and XP, and usually they reward some emote or pet or other silly bauble for your collection.</p>
<ol start="4">
<li><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>Season of the Dragon</strong></span></li>
</ol>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://www.vgr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Elder-Scrolls-Online-Elsweyr-Prologue-Quest-Cover-924x520.jpg" alt="Image result for elsweyr quest" width="492" height="277" /></p>
<p>OK, I will relent on spoilers. The 2019 content was in Elsweyr and it had dragons. I think anyone reading this guide probably knows this. 😊</p>
<p>Starting in 2019, ZoS switched its content strategy so that the content for each year would all be related. The pattern they are following is: Dungeon DLC in first quarter, Main Chapter in second quarter, Dungeon DLC in third quarter, and Story DLC in fourth quarter. The DLC dungeons are even related to the main story for the year. They also add a concluding story arc in the final DLC, only available when you finish the preceding content.</p>
<p>So, pretty simple:</p>
<ul>
<li>Do the two Q1 dungeons, Depths of Malatar and Frostvault</li>
<li>Do the Elsweyr chapter questline</li>
<li>Do the two Q3 dungeons Lair of Maarselok and Moongrave Fane (these are not really important for the story)</li>
<li>Do the Dragonhold DLC questline</li>
<li>After completing the Dragonhold quests, you'll open up another shorter quest chain, which is the epic conclusion to the Year of the Dragon story. </li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<ol start="5">
<li><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>The Dark Heart of Skyrim</strong></span></li>
</ol>
<p>Vampires, Blackreach, lots of callbacks (call-forwards?) to TES5--what's not to love? As of this update to this guide, we are in the middle of this content. It is following the same pattern so far as 2019--Dungeon DLC, Chapter, and we expect another Dungeon DLC in August and a concluding story/zone DLC in November.</p>
<ul>
<li>Do the two new Q1 2020 dungeons, Unhallowed Grave and Icereach. Unlike in 2019, these dungeons actually do have very close ties to the year-long storyline.</li>
<li>Do the Greymoor chapter questline.</li>
<li>????</li>
<li>????</li>
</ul></div>ESO Guides: Creative Character Buildinghttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-creative-character-building2020-02-08T15:36:37.000Z2020-02-08T15:36:37.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p>Happy Saturday, campers! In this week’s ESO Guide, I thought I’d do something a bit different and talk about “character building” in Elder Scrolls Online, in a way that can help folks from this site transition from character building in a game like Skyrim.</p>
<p> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}3853828658,RESIZE_930x{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}3853828658,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="3853828658?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="560" /></a></p>
<p>Disclaimer up front is that I am writing about the game as an MMO. There is nothing stopping you from doing new playthroughs every month or so, as a solo player from scratch the way you do in Skyrim. The game isn’t designed with that in mind, but you can do whatever you want!</p>
<p>To me, there are a few big differences to keep in mind.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>This is a continuous game, not a finite story. </strong>Your goal in building a character isn’t generally to complete a set of quests and “win.” Additionally, a build that reaches a certain set of gear and skills in 2017 may be completely nonfunctional in 2020 because the game’s combat system evolves every 3 months. And, you can completely reset your character with a few thousand gold pieces and some new armor and weapons. As such, character builds aren’t as much of an evolution, as they are a current configuration.</li>
<li><strong>Components that drive builds are different in ESO. </strong>In Skyrim, gear choice is moderately important for some builds, and meaningless in others. You have no character class, so any character can have any combination of abilities and characteristics. Perk choice means everything to the characters’ flavor.<br /> <br /> ESO is very different. In ESO, gear and class choice are everything. Your class determines whether you can sneak at will and teleport around the field (nightblade), fling lightning around and summon daedra (sorcerer), call on nature for animal allies (warden) and so forth. Gear choice is also essential, it determines where you focus your stat development (big resource pools? High crit chance? Super-fast resource recovery? Intense armor penetration?) and plays a huge role in the special abilities you are bringing to the fight. Finally, Champion Point allocation LOOKS LIKE Skyrim’s perk tree, but it merely a system for buffing your character’s damage, defense and a few other stats—with a few exceptions it does not determine your abilities or the nature of the build.</li>
<li><strong>Finally, the goals are different. USUALLY. </strong>The purpose of a character build for most players is to maximize their ability to perform a specific role. Damage dealers in trials groups want to maximize damage per second, or DPS. Healers want to max out HPS. Tanks want to not die. PVP players, generally, are looking for burst damage—stacking several sources of damage to all land at once on an enemy.<br /> <br /> This leads to pursuit of “the meta”—at any given time in the game, there are a few build setups that objectively perform better than others. Builds offering “flavor” or “cool different stuff” or “fun” will usually underperform, and in the hands of less experienced players, they will underperform significantly.</li>
</ul>
<p>With all that said, I’ll get to my specific point for this article. For a lot of content in the game—PVP, good 12-person trials groups, veteran DLC dungeons—you need a strong build that pursues objective performance goals, but there are plenty of exceptions. If you seek creative building, you can do it in ESO, you just may want to pick your activities selectively. I’ll give a few examples below, and offer a proto-build idea for each activity to show how you can start to combine gear, race, skills etc. in creative ways.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>A PROTO-BUILD FOR THE JUSTICE SYSTEM</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong><img class="align-center" src="https://www.mmogah.com/Public/news/eso_justice_system_guide1.jpg" alt="Image result for eso justice" width="471" height="220" /></strong></span></p>
<p>One of the coolest differentiators of this game vs. other MMOs is the Justice system, which allows you to break into homes, crack open strong boxes, pickpocket NPCs and, if you’re into that kind of thing, straight up murder NPCs.) The base game includes core thieving mechanics, and the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quest lines add new abilities and passives (including the Blade of Woe for assassination of NPC). Those DLCs also add new missions called Heists and Sacraments to test your dark-hearted abilities.</p>
<p>You can make a thief/assassin character setup that is just for this content. Strong damage or armor is not important here, this is not a combat activity. The key attributes are all about sneak: reducing the stamina cost of sneaking, and reducing your detectability radius.</p>
<p>So what is one way to maximize your build for this? Well, if you are a magicka nightblade with decent magicka regen, you are all set, you can just cloak permanently and zoom around invisible. What if you aren’t a magicka nightblade?</p>
<p>Race: Khajiit. With max racial passives, your detectability radius is reduced by 3 meters. You also get a small 5% bonus to pickpocket chance.</p>
<p>Class: Nightblade. For the simple reason that nightblades can cloak into invisibility in a pinch. This setup can work on other classes too (and is probably needed more for other classes that CAN’T cloak).</p>
<p>Gear: 7-pc Medium Armor. Among the passive bonuses, your stamina cost for sneaking will be reduced by 28%, and your detectability radius reduced by 35%. The specific sets below are the perfect match for this stack, and all are either craftable or very cheap in guild stores.</p>
<ul>
<li>4 pieces of <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/vesture-of-darloc-brae" target="_blank">Vesture of Darloc Brae</a>: the 4-piece bonus of this set reduces detectability radius by 2 meters, and reduces sneak cost by 10%.</li>
<li>5 pieces of <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/night-mothers-embrace" target="_blank">Night Mother’s Embrace</a>: Reduces detectability radius by 2 meters, and reduces sneak cost by 25%. (This is an overland set, not to be confused with the crafted Night Mother's Gaze set)</li>
<li>3 pieces of <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/night-terror" target="_blank">Night Terror</a>: reduces detectability radius by 2 meters, and reduces sneak cost by 27%.</li>
</ul>
<p>Skills: Max out the Legerdemain passive “Improved Hiding” for -40% sneak costs, “Light Fingers” to make pickpocketing viable (the +50% bonus to success chance is additive, so without the skill you might have a 40% chance to pickpocket someone, with it your chance is 90%) and “Trafficker” (triples the number of stolen items you can fence and launder each day). Optional but very helpful is the Thieves Guild passive “Swiftly Forgotten” which lets you shed your bounty for crimes much more quickly.</p>
<p>That’s the basic setup. Standard NPC detection radius is not a disclosed figure, but I promise you that with this setup, even when you are not cloaked, you can be in stealth and pretty much be right in front of an NPC before they see you.</p>
<p><br /> <br /> <span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>A PROTO-BUILD FOR HARVESTING MATERIALS FOR CRAFTING</strong></span></p>
<p><strong><img class="align-center" src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2016/11/544cdb606ee0a29c547eaa15641f3c6c.jpg" alt="Image result for eso harvesting" width="437" height="246" /></strong></p>
<p>As noted in <a href="https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/ESO-Crafting" target="_blank">this previous post</a>, crafting is one of the bedrock activities of ESO’s economy, and if you plan to play the game extensively, you are going to want a master crafter that can handle all craft skills.<br /> <br /> To craft, you need materials to craft with, and one of the ways to get them is by simple harvesting of these materials in the wild. Running around anywhere in the game, you will constantly come across metal nodes to mine, wood to chop, alchemy plants to pick, runestones to crack open for enchanting runes. While this isn’t an exciting activity, it is relaxing while you watch Netflix and you can make a lot of money and/or build up your crafting inventory while doing it. It also gives you lots of chances to harvest or refine higher-level and pricier items.</p>
<p>A good harvesting setup is focused on two things: speed and stamina. You may think that you want to move around by horse, but you don’t – it takes 4 full seconds to dismount and then mount again, and by the fifth dismount you will be back here looking for this setup.</p>
<p>(Note: These setups are also useful for a specific PVP activity—“scroll running,” which you may do if you are taking an Elder Scroll from an enemy temple or retrieving your own from the enemy.)</p>
<p><strong>Race: </strong>Any race can play a stamina-based class, but a few are more optimized for it. Orcs run faster (+10%) and lose less stamina sprinting (-12%), and a big stamina bonus (+2000), they are probably the ideal race for this activity. A close second would be Bosmer, with big stamina and stamina recovery bonuses, and a boost to speed after roll dodging.</p>
<p><strong>Mundus Stone: </strong>Steed stone, increase sprint speed by 10%</p>
<p><strong>Class: </strong>Nightblade, again so you cloak at will through enemies and avoid them (you can’t harvest nodes while in combat, so you want to avoid aggro whenever possible). Wardens are Ok also, their netch pet returns stamina to you even while you are sprinting.</p>
<p><strong>Skills: </strong>Max out your medium armor passives, run cloak if you are a nightblade. You can slot skills that will help with you stamina recovery, but with this build you won't need it.</p>
<p><strong>Gear: </strong>7-pc medium armor. Increases sprint speed by 21% at max medium armor level. All in the well-fitted trait, and run a shield so you can have 8 pieces in well-fitted (each well-fitted piece reduces sprint cost by 5%).</p>
<p>When you have the transmute stones, transmute the jewelry you’re using in your setup to the swift trait (increases speed by 5% for each jewelry piece).<br /> <br /> Several choices of five-piece sets will work really well here. My personal favorite setup is the <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/cowards-gear" target="_blank">Coward’s Gear</a> and <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/jailbreaker" target="_blank">Jailbreaker</a> sets, the former grants Major Expedition (+30% speed) while sprinting, and the latter grants Minor Expedition (+10% speed) at all times. Jailbreaker needs to be farmed in a dungeon, you can’t buy it. So, other options that work well instead are <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/darkstride" target="_blank">Darkstride</a> or <a href="https://eso-sets.com/set/prisoners-rags" target="_blank">Prisoner’s Rags</a> (both of these are purchasable). Both grant 50% reduction to Sprint; Prisoner’s gives the added bonus of returning Magicka to you while you sprint, this is especially useful for nightblades looking to use cloak more frequently. (The additional sprint cost reduction is honestly overkill for farming, but it is nice to know that you will never, ever, EVER run out of stamina.)</p>
<p>This setup is also quite cheap to put together. I highly recommend trying it out, the first time you hit the sprint button you will just start giggling as your character takes off like the Roadrunner.</p>
<p> <a href="{{#staticFileLink}}3853838676,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}3853838676,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="3853838676?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="566" /></a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>That’s all for this week kids. There are many other activities for which you can build creatively. When you are talking about just running through general quest/story content, you have enormous flexibility with your build because the content is quite easy to complete. In PVP, when you get to a fairly high skill level, there are build creators like Kristofer ESO who have been developing amazing, creative unique builds for PVP in all classes for years. They are hard to play but super fun. If I can leave you with one thought: you don’t have to feel enslaved to the optimal, “meta” build that everyone says you must run—the game offers you the chance at total freedom, so take it!</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>ESO Guides: Cash Money Money in 2nd-Era Tamrielhttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-cash-money-money-in-2nd-era-tamriel2020-02-01T18:09:28.000Z2020-02-01T18:09:28.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p><strong>People of Riften, heed my words - </strong>it’s time for another weekend guide to ESO from your old Uncle Avi.</p>
<p><strong>Tamriel</strong> <strong>runs on money. </strong>Things cost money. Things sell for money. You want money. You want money? Let’s make some money. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>As always, this guide could go on for 50 pages or more. But it won't. Below I provide a list of the major currencies in the game, and then a list of key money-making activities with some basic tips on how to get going.</p>
<p> <span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>ESO CURRENCIES</strong></span></p>
<p>If you go to your Inventory Screen (“I”) and click the coin icon above the interface, you’ll see a list of all in-game currencies and how much you’ve got. Some of the totals are account-based, but some are just based on your current character. There’s TEN DIFFERENT CURRENCIES on the page (and at least one other not listed). What the actual ****, amirite? Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it seems.</p>
<p>There are multiple kinds of currencies:</p>
<p><strong>Fully liquid currencies</strong>: <strong>Gold. </strong>There’s only one. You can buy things in gold, sell things in gold, pay players directly in gold. Primary currency of the game.</p>
<p>There is a second fully liquid currency called “Key Fragments,” they are earned and used for a very limited group of Imperial City gear sets. I’m excluding them from this discussion.</p>
<p><strong>Partially liquid currencies: Alliance Points, Tel Var Stones, Writ Vouchers. </strong>You can’t trade these with players directly, but you can buy things with them and sell some or all of those items to players.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Alliance Points: </strong>earned from Cyrodiil PVP activities, some Imperial City activities, Battlegrounds</li>
<li><strong>Tel Var Stones</strong>: earned from some Imperial City Activities</li>
<li><strong>Writ Vouchers: </strong>earned from completing Master Writs, which are in turn earned from doing daily crafting writs.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Illiquid currencies: Undaunted Keys, Transmute Crystals, Event Tickets. </strong>You can’t trade these with players, nor can you trade the items you buy or create with them. Earning this currency is ENTIRELY about being able to get things for yourself. These are earned gradually through game activities at a semi-fixed pace; I won’t cover them for the most part in this guide.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Undaunted Keys: </strong>earned from completing daily Undaunted dungeon pledges. Keys are required to get the shoulder pieces of the 2-piece head-and-shoulder “Monster” armor sets. So do daily pledges, stack up keys, and then go diving into the Undaunted chests for your chance at your desired shoulder piece.</li>
<li><strong>Transmute Crystals: </strong>earned through various in-game activities like trials, pledges and PVP. 50 Crystals let you transmute a piece of gear from one trait, like Invigorating, to another trait, like Divines or Impenetrable. You can only have 200 at a time, but you can keep unlimited Transmute Geodes (not yet converted to Crystals) in your inventory, taking us an absurd amount of space. It’s AWESOME we can transmute gear now, but this currency system is a big pain in the butt. <strong>Best way to earn these: </strong>Join a 30-day PVP Cyrodiil campaign with a character, earn 25,000 AP on that character (should take no more than an hour, with some luck 5-10 minutes). At the end of the campaign, you’ll get a 50-Crystal Transmute Geode that you can keep in inventory until you need the crystals for transmuting. You can do this on multiple characters and save as many as you can hold.</li>
<li><strong>Event Tickets: </strong>earned from, you guessed it, daily activities in events. Also capped, you can only hold 12 at a time, and you use tickets to buy items at the event-specific vendor, usually costing 5 or 10 tickets. System is designed to make you log in on daily basis. If you don’t care about cosmetics like mounts, outfit styles, etc., you can essentially ignore this currency.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Monetization currencies: Crowns, Crown Gems, Outfit Change Tokens.</strong> These are essentially obtained through real-word money, and I am excluding them from this discussion.</p>
<p>Note that you can arrange to get many Crown Store items by “buying” crowns for gold—you arrange with a player to gift you a crown store item and pay them gold; the current exchange rate is around 170-200 gold per crown. HIGHLY recommend you only do this with someone you really trust, and ideally through a guild like Tamriel Crown Exchange.</p>
<p><strong>Finally, I should mention the 12<sup>th</sup> and perhaps most important currency: Raw and Refined Crafting Materials. </strong>These are essentially gold, in the form of natural resources. On my main account, I have about 27 million gold right now, my craft bag of core armor materials, alchemy ingredients, enchanting glyphs, gold upgrade materials and so on, is worth about 65 million (an addon called “Wealth Evaluator” will give you this number based on current guild-store prices).</p>
<p>If you use an addon called “Inventory Insight,” you can see all your items held in your bank, in storage chests, and on each of your characters, this goes for money as well. From left to right you'll see the four main "wealth" currencies of Gold, Tel Var, Alliance Points and Writ Vouchers. These, along with your crafting bag of materials, are the primary components of in-game wealth. And, of course, the friends you make along the way. </p>
<p> </p>
<p><span style="font-size:14pt;"><strong>HOW TO MAKE MONEY</strong></span></p>
<p>Now that you know the currencies you’re after, how do you earn them in vast quantities that essentially spill from the vault in your private, Cayman Islands compound?</p>
<p>I’ll break this up into things you can do immediately and things that probably require some more experience (in terms of both character strength and player skill).</p>
<p><strong>Note that an essential ingredient to making money for most activities is being in a good trading guild. </strong>Go to Rawl’kha in Reaper’s March, Mournhold in Deshaan, Wayrest in Stormhaven, Elden Root in Grahtwood, Vivec City in Vvardenfell, and Alinor in Summerset. These are debatably the most heavily trafficked trading hubs. Write down the names of all the trading guilds in these locations, start doing some research and find one that seems like a good fit for you. Unless you want to stand around for hours in cities peddling your wares in zone chat (some people do like doing that!), a good trading guild should be your new best friend.</p>
<p><span style="font-size:12pt;"><em><strong>Things You Can Do on Day One:</strong></em></span></p>
<p><strong>1) Just vendor the trash you pick up in your adventures.</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Leveling a new character? Running through public dungeons for skill points? 95% of what you loot is trash, but it all sells for cash at any regular game vendor. Collect it and sell it. I think if you just sell everything you pick up from a 1-50 leveling cycle, the cash from quest rewards and from vendoring comes out to about 70-80k gold.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>2) Farm for raw materials. </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Go to a place, find a circuit that takes about 3-4 minutes to complete, harvest the raw material nodes, go back to start of loop in time for the nodes to respawn. Donesies. You will pick up tons of material for six of the seven crafting skills (food ingredients come from different sources).</li>
<li>Good suggested places: Coldharbour main city for alchemy ingredients; Craglorn routes (harvesting in Craglorn gives you a small chance of looting a Potent Nirncrux, a very valuable trait item); Hew’s Bane (the Thieves’ Guild zone, very dense concentration of nodes). But honestly you can find good routes anywhere.</li>
<li><strong>Key addons: Harvest Map.</strong></li>
<li>Prerequisites: None – sort of. This activity is actually a bit difficult on Day One; material nodes are hard to see without putting skill points in the crafting passives that make the nodes glow from a distance. Get those perked out before you start trying to harvest in earnest.</li>
<li>Tips: <strong>Get a gear/race setup to sprint really fast without using your horse. </strong>Getting on and off your horse takes 3-4 seconds, which is wasted time, but luckily you can build a character that can run almost as fast as a leveled mount. One easy setup: Buy a 5-piece set of Darkstride and a 5-piece set of Coward’s Gear. You can boost this further with a bunch more money, but just those two sets will let you run extremely fast from node to node and never run out of stamina.</li>
<li>You can sell materials for good coin, but I would only do that early on if you have ZERO intention of crafting anything. This is wealth with utility, so in your first year it makes much more sense to just spend some time on this every day to slowly build up your crafting inventory. Someday when you have thousands of everything in your craft bag you will thank me!</li>
</ul>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://cdn-eso.mmoui.com/preview/pvw4637.png" alt="Image result for harvesting node eso" width="355" height="355" /></p>
<p><strong>3) DO YOUR DAILY WRITS! LEVEL YOUR HIRELINGS!</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>This was covered in my previous guide on crafting.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Do this.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Do this.</strong></li>
<li>Seriously, roll multiple characters and do writs on them every day. Doing writs for all seven crafting skills on one character earns you about 20-25k in pure gold, plus chances at master surveys which drop tons of raw materials, chances at gold upgrade mats, chances at master writs, etc. If you were to do writs on 8 or 9 every day you would easily clear 300-400K or more in overall wealth per week. You generally need to supplement this activity with occasional purchases of stacks of refined materials at guild traders, but that cost is dwarfed by the profit from doing the writs.</li>
<li>Additionally, perk all your hirelings. It’s free stuff every day (twice a day if you log in every twelve hours), and it REALLY adds up fast in building your craft bag.</li>
<li><strong>Key Addons: Dolgubon’s Lazy Writ Crafter.</strong></li>
</ul>
<p><em><strong><span style="font-size:12pt;">Things You Can Do with Some More Experience</span>:</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>1) Steal and kill! Shadows preserve us! Hail Sithis!</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>The "Justice" system in this game is SO MUCH FUN. You can pickpocket most NPCs in the game, you can assassinate people with the Blade of Woe and loot them for "stolen" treasures--and some of the items you pick up are worth good money. You need to level up your ledgerdemain skill and your TG and DB skills to really become a master thief/assassin, and the montary profit from the activity isn't great in terms of income/hour. But again - SO MUCH FUN if you haven't tried it yet.</li>
<li>Key Addons: FenceData. Not really essential but it puts a widget on your interface that tells you how many more items you can fence or launder that day (it's limited).</li>
</ul>
<p><img class="align-center" src="https://i.redd.it/md28l1lekzgy.png" alt="Image result for blade of woe eso" width="389" height="345" /></p>
<p><strong>2) Farm for valued style motifs in Veteran DLC Dungeons and Trials. </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>When the new dungeons start dropping their motifs, the pages can sell from 50k-250k each. This is because only a small percentage of players in the game are good enough to clear this content, at least at first, and the pages are rare drops upon completion. Scarcity breeds high prices.</li>
<li>Pretty simple. If/when you get really really good at PVE, grab your other top-tier pals and grind these dungeons for profit.</li>
<li>Key Addons: Various combat addons and interfaces so you can stabby stabby real good, and so you don't go squish in your dungeon.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>3) Earn tons of AP in Cyrodiil or Battlegrounds and convert it to gold. </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>You can read other guides on how to PVP. Generally, you can expect to make anywhere from 25k-75k per hour in Cyrodiil just heading over to keeps, outposts and resources that are being taken or defended by your faction. You can earn 6-7K AP from losing in Battlegrounds badly, and more if you play well and/or win.</li>
<li>Ways to turn AP into cash: Right now, buying Dawn Prisms from the War Researcher, or Akaviri motif pages, are likely the best AP-to-cash conversion options. Dawn Prisms are probably best, they move more consistently on guild traders. The War Researcher can be found at one of the two “home base” gate locations in Cyrodiil for your faction.</li>
<li>Side note: DO PVP. IT'S GREAT. DON'T LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO GRIPE ABOUT IT; NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN THEY ARE JUST MAD THAT THEY GOT STEAMROLLED BY BETTER PLAYERS. (Full disclosure I definitely do some steamrolling but I am also quite often the steamrolled.) </li>
<li>Key Addons: Various PVP addons that you like.</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}3843237129,original{{/staticFileLink}}"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}3843237129,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="3843237129?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="495" height="278" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><em><strong>Farming potatoes at Castle Roebeck: A compelling source of revenue.</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"> </p>
<p><strong>4) Earn tons of Tel Var in Imperial City and convert it to gold.</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Again, read other guides or watch vids on Youtube for advice on grinding Tel Var. You can get some from killing mobs and bosses in IC. You can get a lot killing other players. You will lose half of your carried Tel Var whenever you die in IC. Go for fun when you are new-ish in the game but don’t go in with expectations of earning and keeping tons of Tel Var.</li>
<li>Convert this to gold at the vendors inside your faction’s base in the Imperial Sewers (where you appear when you enter Imperial City). By far the best option is to buy Hakeijo runes for 5,000 Tel Var each. These used to sell for 10k, then 12k, then 14k, now well over 15-16k. (These enchanting runes are needed to make tristat glyphs for armor and Oblivion-damage glyphs for weapons. They are highly valued.)</li>
<li>Key Addons: Various PVP addons that you like.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>5) Sell Master Writs, or complete them and buy rare furnishing items. </strong></p>
<ul>
<li>It is not possible to consistently do all of these at first. All of them require mastering and perking out the relevant skill at a minimum, and most of them also require you to have collected a large number of style motifs or food/drink recipes.</li>
<li>Different master writs reward you with different amounts of writ vouchers, redeemable at a few vendors for various cool items that can be used or resold. <strong>VERY GOOD TIP: If you are doing crafting research on a character, you can buy timer-reduction scrolls from the furnishing vendor. They are super cheap, 3 vouchers to cut research time in a skill by a day, with a one-day cooldown between using a scroll of each crafting type. If you do master writs consistently, you can plow those vouchers into essentially cutting your research time in half. (You can also cut research time to nothing by spending an absurd amount of real money in the Crown Store, but please don’t do that. Say No to Monetization.) </strong></li>
<li>The value of the writs in based on how many vouchers they produce and how much it costs to craft the writ in terms of materials. Hence, their sale price, and/or the wisdom of completing the master writ, is based on the “cost per voucher” of completing. Lower cost per voucher means it’s smarter to complete it and its sale price per voucher will likely be higher. And vice versa.</li>
<li>You used to be able to instantly vendor these master writs for close to 1,000 gold per voucher, but those days are long gone. Today they are difficult to sell for 300-400 gold per voucher.</li>
<li>You can also buy things like Aetherial Dust or Attunable Crafting Stations and sell them on guild traders for big bucks. Generally, the conversion ratio isn't in your favor here (in other words, you'll spend more completing the master writs and collecting vouchers than you'll earn selling the things the vouchers can buy). However, say for example you are diving into the RNG boxes for high-end Summerset or Elsweyr furnishing recipes, because you want to collect them. If and when you get duplicate recipes that you already know, you can sell them to recoup some of your costs.</li>
<li>Unless you are really going to get into furnishing, or (as I mentioned) can get high value from the vouchers for yourself by speeding up crafting research, you may want to try and sell the larger vouchers, and just save the smaller ones (e.g., 2-voucher alchemy and enchanting master writs) for a while. It’s sort of a complex system at first, and you are better off focusing on mastering other methods of making money.</li>
<li><strong>One side note: </strong>completing any master writ, small or large, gives your character a giant amount of general XP. During a double AP event, with a 150% XP booster scroll, you can level a character from 1 to 50 by doing 100 (maybe 150?) of these writs. So you may find it worth taking a monetary loss on producing some of these writs, simply to speed-level a character.</li>
<li>Key Addons: WritWorthy--essential whether you're planning to complete master writs or sell them.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>I think that’s a good place to stop. Hopefully this information is helpful. The most important advice is to make sure you spend most of your time having fun—any repetitive action that offers monetary reward can be addictive, so don’t end up burning out on the game simply by getting tunnel vision and grinding money during all of your time in Tamriel. That being said, get out there and start building your empire!</p></div>Greetings from your Hosthttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/greetings-from-your-host2020-01-14T00:59:13.000Z2020-01-14T00:59:13.000ZAvihttps://TheSkyForge.ning.com/members/Avi<div><p>Greetings. Mission accomplished, everything else here is gravy.</p><p>My name is Avi, I will be hosting this tiny, and hopefully growing, group for the near future.</p><p><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}6267492,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}&width=192&height=192&crop=1%3A1" alt="6267492?profile=RESIZE_180x180&width=192&height=192&crop=1%3A1" /></p><p><span style="font-size:8pt;"><em>Here's a selfie of me. I had a rough night when this was taken</em></span>.</p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>ME</strong></span><br /><br />I am a long-time Skyrim fanatic, and the builds from this community and its predecessor have extended my enjoyment of Skyrim for many years beyond the game's reasonable shelf life. I have an active Skyrim playthrough going right now!</p><p>And when ESO hit its open beta in 2014, I signed up like many Bethesda RPG fans did, hoping for more of the things we all love--immersive roleplay, deep stories, wide open exploration, incredible flexibility to build a character and play as I wanted.</p><p>Well - I found that, to some extent. But I also found an entirely alien experience, because I had never played an MMO before. For the first six months I played by myself, like a Skyrim game, but eventually, inevitably, I met a person, then a few people. I joined a guild. Then I joined a better guild. Then I got over my fear and got in voice chat for the first time.</p><p>Before I knew it, I was a part of a vibrant, living world on two levels: at the level of my character and the actions he/she engaged in solo or with others, AND at the level of dozens of new friends in the real world with common interests (and very warped senses of humor). I am now a member of one of the top trading guilds in the game, and one of the top PVP guilds in the game, and both of those communities are incredibly strong with a great culture and tons of folks willing to help each other out constantly. </p><p><img src="https://esosslfiles-a.akamaihd.net/cms/2017/03/de7b36c540d70fdde671bd2dd29b1d75.jpg" alt="Image result for eso morrowind" width="573" height="284" /></p><p>Full disclosure: I have two accounts, one with the max number of 18 characters, the other with 9 characters. My accounts are filled with damage dealers, tanks and healers, of all classes and races, multiple master crafters, PVP warriors and PVE glass cannons. I've completed nearly all of the challenges the game throws at us, I've got more money than I know what to do with and an absolutely gorgeous home in Vvardenfell (if I do say so myself). I am DEFINITELY not the most-skilled player at anything in this game by a long shot, but I can probably answer any questions you have with more information than you might want. Or point you in the right direction to a better expert than me.</p><p><span style="font-size:12pt;"><strong>WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM ME</strong></span></p><p>If you have played MMOs before, my experience described above won't be news to you. But if you were like me-and MANY players in this game were new to MMOs like I was--then ESO might end up being a mind-blowing adventure if you embrace it as a community experience. It certainly was for me.</p><p>I bring all this stuff up to make a single point: <strong>most of the guidance and information I am going to provide, and the discussions I am going to kick off, will be centered on playing this game like an MMO.</strong> That means learning how to gather money and resources over time, how to get great gear for what you want to do, how to build your character for effectiveness, how to do DPS and healing rotations, how to start out in PVP, how to complete the mind-numbing Master Angler fishing achievement, and so forth.</p><p>As time goes on I'll be creating various mini-guides and posts designed to help people get started, and to direct people to more advanced advice from the game's best content creators on Youtube and elsewhere. The game is incredibly deep and complex in many different ways, and it does NOT do a great job of holding new players' hands. </p><p>I'll also try to kick off discussions aimed to get people sharing their experiences and their questions. Finally, I hope to be able to steer some of you towards guilds that fit your interest, whether those be PVP, end-game trials, or deep RP (there are REALLY great RP guilds in this game). All of this content will be oriented toward an MMO-style experience.</p><p><img src="https://alcasthq.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/spiders-before-3rd-boss-768x377.jpg" alt="Image result for eso halls of fabrication" width="458" height="225" /></p><p><strong>BUT HEY GUESS WHAT - YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME HOW YOU WANT</strong>. You can play it and have fun for years, just rolling new characters, creating stories for them, not worrying about gear or tough dungeons or using the "best" skills or builds--never talk to anyone in game--just use it as an RPG playground. You can become a trader that does nothing except buy and sell gold crafting materials, seeking to become the biggest tycoon in the game. You can just collect worms and fish all day. It's all available to you. So just because I am approaching the game in the traditional MMO manner, don't feel unwelcome if you want to do different things, and don't feel shy about posting your own ideas and discussions. My only rule is that we not get in arguments about the "right" way to play--there is no right way.</p><p>See you in Vvardenfell, or Summerset Isle, or Artaeum, or Black Marsh (oh yes - they're all in here) -</p><p>Avi</p></div>