Here you can discuss anything and everything pertaining to ESO in general.
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!
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.
THE JUBILEE EVENT
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.
So far, these reward boxes have NOT been parceled out via RNG—EVERY time you completed an activity, you got a reward box.
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!
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.
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.
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.
THE MOST IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY: 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.)
GENERAL PREPARATION NOTES:
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
ANNIVERSARY EVENT ACTIVITIES
CRAFTING WRITS
The Task: Complete a crafting writ. That’s it.
The Color Commentary: 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. On a prepped account with 9 characters doing writs, that’s 63 reward boxes per day. 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.)
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.
The Preparation: You get nine slots for free, use them.
- 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.
- For each character:
- Level them to level 6.
- Go to crafting writ boards in your faction’s starter town (Vulkhel Guard, Daggerfall or Davon’s Watch), accept quest.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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. :)
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.
For more on crafting and completing writs efficiently: https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/ESO-Crafting
DELVES AND WORLD BOSSES:
The Task: Complete daily quests to tackle Delves and World Bosses.
The Color Commentary: 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.
The Preparation: 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.
PVP/CYRODIIL:
The Task: Do daily quests in Cyrodiil, Imperial City, Battlegrounds.
The Color Commentary: 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.
The Preparation: Get to level 10 so you can enter Cyrodiil. To be better prepared for PVP, you can read my short guide here. https://theskyforge.ning.com/groups/elder-scrolls-online/eso-discussion/eso-guides-pvp-an-introduction
DUNGEONS/TRIALS:
The Task: Complete daily/weekly quests for these.
The Color Commentary: 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.
The Preparation: Level your characters, gear up, have fun.
So what are you waiting for? More hands make less work. Get after it!
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Replies
Awesome guide. It's worth noting that the Jester's Festival starts March 26th, and is likely to also have a double XP item. Great for grinding any alts at the last minute to get prepared for the Jubilee.
Also, for doing writs, not all cities are equal. I like to do mine in Vivec City. All the crafting stations are within a few meters of each other, with an outdoor bank in the middle. Not too far from the wayshrine or horse stables either, and the drop-off point for turining writs in is also right there. Alinor is another popular spot, but IIRC the bank is a bit out of the way, so if you don't have the banker summon, it may be less efficient. Rawl'kha and Rimmen are also pretty popular for writs.
One other note: We've discussed this on discord recently, but it bears repeating here. Writ rewards scale depending on certain factors. For instance, you get well over 2x as much gold from the quest turn-ins at level 50+ as at level 6. More importantly, the chance of gold materials goes *dramatically* up as you perk into the various upgrade skill lines (Metalworking, Tailoring, Woodworking, Engraver). So if you're already more or less set up with 9+ toons all certified for writs, you might want to try to grind a few of your toons to level 50 crafting in as many skills as possible, and take some of those upgrade perks. I mostly try to keep my toons either at 1/10 or 10/10 just to keep the material management as simple as possible, but grinding most crafting skills to level 50 pays for itself within a few days thanks to those gold materials.
Do you have any recommendations specifically for the *best* option each day once all writs are knocked out? e.g., say I only have an extra half hour each day once I've finished my writs. What do you think would be the best way to maximize my dailies in that time? World bosses and delves in DLC zones? Fighters Guild or Mages Guild quests? Cyrodiil dailies? TG/DB quests? (You didn't mention the TG quests, but in theory, these can actually be super quick, if you establish a stockpile of all the different treasure types. That takes a fair amount of time to do though.)
Sorry for late reply! I am pretty sure that TG/DB quests are not included in the Jubilee event--the only things that count are actual 1x/day quests. (If they did, then yes, you would just repeat the DB quest to kill someone--you go kill them, end of quest, takes 2 minutes!)
The trick to leverage is that daily quests are shareable. You can only pick up one of the let's say six delve quests in Elsewyr per day, but you can have the other five shared to you. Your guilds may end up running groups each day, where someone has picked up all of the different dailies on different characters, and just shares them one by one with the group. If not, hanging out in Orsinium, Vvardenfell, Summerset or Elswyer are good bets--tons of people will be doing the 12 daily quests in each of those zones, it won't be hard to get quests shared to you.
But if you are talking just a half-hour, the easiest would be to just do a Bolgrul daily quest on each of nine characters. Those are the simplest shortest quests, each one takes like 5 minutes, hop to the next toon, repeat.
Remember, if they break it up into sections like last year, some weeks are just not great weeks for certain people. Like if there is a Cyrodiil week and you aren't prepped for a PVP zone, you're not going to get a lot of reward boxes that week. It's fine. The gold is not real gold. :)
An urgent reminder to everyone to not sell valueble motifs gained from this event.