Elder Scrolls Online – Page 3

Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition

March 31, 2021 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I was realizing this morning just how completely out of date my blog side bar is when it comes to the games that I have been playing regularly. In theory I claim that this is my semi-monthly process of trueing up the sidebar so it represents the sorts of games that I am playing. What actually happens is that I go for large blocks of time without updating this and when that happens massive swings occur. For example the last one of these that I did was in October of 2020 and some stuff has changed. So here goes an attempt at maybe doing these regularly again for a bit. For those not already indoctrinated into the process I divide things up into a few categories:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

To Those Remaining

My sweet sweet Diablo 3, you are rarely ever gone from this list. There is even a new season starting this Friday and I am looking forward to going through the routine of the seasonal grind. This season has a bunch of changes to the game and as a result they sorta gave us a greatest hits collection of sets available through Haedrigs Gift. As a result I am looking at probably starting a Whirlrend Barbarian for this season because those are so stinking fun to play.

I am going to be honest, I am leaving this one on the list more as an aspirational placement than a game I am truly actively playing. I boot it up from time to time and play through a few encounters and then put it to bed for a longer period of time. I hope to get back in and play it more intently because also while we have been spilling truth… I feel a little guilty that I am not really doing much with my PlayStation 5.

This one retains its spot because it is still probably my go to “playing switch from bed” game. The pattern of play just fits spending a few minutes before falling asleep. I am not terribly good at it but I enjoy it mechanically and thematically. This is the only game I have played where I enjoy losing, because it means I am going to get some more story beats.

I am leaving this on the list for reasons of which I am contractually not at liberty to talk about. It comes out in August officially and I am looking forward to that release. I’ve never seen a game that has gone through quite so many changes during its late development cycle as this one. It is going to be interesting to see the state of this game at launch. I have quite a bit of faith in it.

Retro Games – Retro Freak Console, RG350, Retroid, Raspberry Pi 4

Still very much spending a chunk of my time playing games that I grew up with… that are now referred to as Retro games. Still feels really weird to be calling them Retro to be honest. Actually yesterday I literally just got an 8 gb Raspberry Pi 4 model in that I am going to be playing with. That is probably going to become my main emulation device for the short term for anything other than higher end stuff like Cemu that absolutely requires the power of my gaming PC.

To The New and Returning

Putting this one back on the list because I am technically playing it again. I am nowhere near as engaged with it as I would like to be and I am not exactly certain why that is the case. From all accounts this is a really good season but I find myself just unable to get stuck into it very deeply. Since we are trueing things up it is in somewhat regular rotation so it is going to get a spot on the list.

I am experiencing a massive renaissance of Elder Scrolls Online and it has rapidly become my primary game over the past month. While I am mostly leveling alts right now, I am going to return to the normal course of trying to quest my way through all of the content in the game and maybe just maybe be ready for the launch of the next expansion in June. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing because I have to make it through large blocks of content and I know I will become distracted by other games that spring up along the way.

Another thing that happened since my previous update is that I have returned to Minecraft in a huge way. I spent a lot of time playing solo and even recorded a semi-daily YouTube series on my adventures. Now however I spend my time either popping between my own private Realms world or a closed server run by my friend Zeli. Not playing near as much as I was but I am still popping in and wandering around. There is a stronghold in the nether that I am clearing and trying to set up a dual blaze farm right now so I still have projects that I am plugging away at. Right now I am likely going to wait to re-engage heavily until the new caves update comes out and create a brand new world.

Outriders is the new looter shooter hotness that is shipping tomorrow officially. I played the hell out of the demo and now am looking forward to consuming this game peacefully. I am not really planning on playing it as my primary game because I am super engaged with Elder Scrolls right now, but I am absolutely going to slow grind it. The launch time is just really bad because it overlaps with a bunch of other things going on like the launch of a new Diablo 3 season.

Valheim is freaking great. If you do not already own this game you should pick it up because it is dirt cheap and one hell of a lot of fun. I’ve reached a point of equilibrium with this game at least until new content ships. I had been playing regularly on a server but I have mostly been playing lately on my solo world. When the hearth and home update ships, I might start a new world depending on how deep the changes go. I will likely always keep Beltopia around given that it is set up nicely for crafting and such.

To Those Departing

I have no real idea why I bounced the way that I have from this game. I think partially it might just be that I don’t love “maintenance gaming” where all I am really doing is dailies. However in this game that isn’t even true because they have released a ton of story content since I last played and I never can quite bring myself to come back and play it. There are a lot of things about this game that work so well and then a lot of things that just frustrate me. For example the fact that I feel like I don’t have a reasonable manner in which to level new characters and catch them up to my core party… means that I largely feel like I am stuck always using my core party. Maybe at some point I will return when it ships on the Switch but for now it is a distant memory.

Shadowlands is a bad expansion filled with systems that I am not interested in engaging with. In fact I would probably say that Shadowlands is going to be up there with the worst expansions of all time. I talked about how frustrated I was with Battle for Azeroth, but at least that is an expansion that I actively enjoyed the leveling process. Shadowlands I barely made it to the level cap with one of my characters and couldn’t even manage to stomach a single zone on my alts. I am not exactly sure how things went off the rails in the manner that they did but for now at least I am done with the game. Like I have not talked about it a lot because in truth I am not even sure it is worth talking about it. I miss hanging out with my friends who play the game but I miss nothing about Shadowlands.

Ships Passing in the Night

Unlike most of the internet I have nothing but love for this game. I apparently had a sufficient system to play it and lucked out on not encountering many bugs during my play through. As such I am actively craving more content for it, but throwing it on the “ships” list because I have more or less put the game aside for the moment. When DLC releases I will either play through the DLC on my current play through or start a brand new campaign. I hope the issues surrounding this game do not kill this franchise because I loved it deeply on so many different levels.

Dragon Age Inquisition was one of those games that I had bounced off of so many times in the past and then suddenly was able to play happily. I have found with the hustle and bustle of the end of the year… I crave deep single player experiences. This is one of those games that I played during that period and had a blast. Looking forward to this story continuing.

When this game first released I tried playing it with a controller because it seemed like that was the proper way to play it. I bounced because the game is not terribly good at explaining when you should leave a planet. However over the holiday break I returned to the game and had a blast, this time playing with my more native control scheme of keyboard and mouse. Truly great game and great experience. If you have not played this game you really owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you like Star Wars even in the least bit.

Another game that I have bounced off numerous times is Knights of the Old Republic 2 and for some reason over this break I managed to make my way through it. Like the game is a mess… there is no getting around that but it is a mess that I am happy to have experienced. There is a lot of interesting things going on in this game and knowing now that this released before Fallout New Vegas I can see some of the things that they expanded upon later and made work better in that game. Would I recommend it to someone else? Probably not, but I am still very happy to have experienced it myself.

Summary

The funny thing about this is that I just realized upon writing out this post… that my sidebar was never actually updated from the October edition meaning it was even more out of date than I realized. Now I will hopefully remember to do the thing and actually make the updates once I finish with this post. Here is to also maybe doing this at least once a quarter going forward… if not monthly. The post Regularly Playing: March 2021 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Leveling Aftermath

March 29, 2021 by Belghast

Hey Friends! I did some nonsense this weekend. When we last spoke… and yes I am treating this blog like a two way conversation even though I am the one hogging this discussion… I was talking about leveling using the Jesters Festival buff and Dark Anchor grinding in Alik’r Desert. Since that post I have finished off my Two Hander Warden and decided to set a new target of my Destruction Necromancer. Since that previous goal that I didn’t talk about… I have finished off that character as well and dinged 50 last night during Walking Dead. As a result I am once again setting a new mission to work on Belghast Thornbite aka my Nightblade that will ultimately be bow/dual wield. So I feel like at this point some perspective is needed. I am doing this because my joy in Elder Scrolls Online is casually working my way through quest content. However I also suffer from this annoyance that as I am leveling alts… I am not also contributing to my account as a whole. Champion Points are an alternate advancement system much like Paragon Points from Diablo 3. The more you play the game the more you get access to additional perks and while leveling through content I would love to know that at least on some level I am advancing the overall ranking of my account. This is ultimately what lead me to power level my alts using this experience buff so that I can return to leveling them slowly but also be improving my account level as well. So you might be asking yourself… what amount of time did it actually take you to level your Necromancer since it started the lowest level. The problem with this notion is I have no clue how much play time I had actually spent prior to starting this. If I type /played in game it shows that I have 14 hours and 51 minutes on this character and I would say a maximum of 2 hours was spent prior to this grind. So that leaves you with an estimate of around 13 hours to level all the way up using Dark Anchors and overlapping the Jesters Festival buff and Experience Scrolls. Not exactly the fastest thing in the world with the core problem that things slow down significantly once you pass your 20s and again in your 30s and 40s.

It also greatly depends on how good the group is that you are with. If they are active and tagging every single mob then you are going to reap the benefit of a significant amount more experience than just from closing the Dark Anchor. So for example in the above group I can see that two people are now showing up as being in combat meaning that there are two people who are just soaking up experience while semi-afk. Ultimately that harms everyone in the group and I probably should have kicked them out given that I was leading this alphabet party. Another thing that I talked about in the last post was the AutoInvite addon. If you are looking to do large scale group content, then I would suggest going ahead and downloading this. Ultimately this is what allows folks to auto invite when a phase is typed in chat. There was no Z group and there were no openings in X or Y and as such I decided to fill that role. It is super easy to turn on and all I had to type was “/ai z” to assume the mantle of inviting people off the “z” trigger. To turn it off likewise was just typing “/ai” without an argument. It seems like there is always a struggle to find someone to take a group over when the previous leader needs to leave. When I was nearing 50 I started trying to find a replacement and ultimately did so that the group could continue on after I tagged out. For reference here is the addon and its requirement.

So you might be telling yourself that 13 hours is still a really long time to level in an MMORPG. This is very true but I ended up streaming my original leveling experience in Elder Scrolls Online and it was somewhere between 40 and 50 hours. For reference on my main character that I have spent the majority of my time playing over the years I have 21 days 9 hours and 42 minutes of play time, which sounds like a lot but is on par with the amount of time I have spent in Destiny 2 for example. Essentially for me personally that 13 hour investment per character will let me feel better about leveling them in the long fun given that I am just able to enjoy quest content while knowing my account is improving as a result. The post Leveling Aftermath appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Of Jesters and Dolmen

March 26, 2021 by Belghast

This mornings blog post is largely going to be common knowledge for anyone who has been around the game for awhile, but given that this is my very first Jesters Festival I thought I would share it with my readers who might be returning to the game. Right now there is an event going that has a bunch of sub components, but the big one is a “Pie” that goes into your tool inventory that when used gives you a 2 hour long buff that effectively doubles your experience gain. There are a number of other activities that happen during this event and you can find the official blog post here. Also if you are so inclined there are numerous video guides going over the various activities and events. Since this only lasts a week I thought I should probably make this my Friday post in case someone else wants to do the thing that I am doing.

When it comes to MMORPGs I tend to be on the digital hoarder spectrum and my bank vault is littered with items that I have acquired but never got around to using. As such I had a number of Grand Gold Coast Experience Scrolls and Crown Experience Scrolls sitting there wasting. I’ve been slowly working on my Warden, given that I want it to be my next max level character. However while questing on him there has been a part of me that wishes I could just leap straight to 50 so that I could start gaining Champion Levels for my account instead of traditional levels. With this event already giving me +100% experience gain I decided to take advantage of this and stack an experience scroll. Technically were I wanting to take this to the extreme… there are a number of other experience bonus sources that I could abuse. Far as I am aware the best of each is as follows:

Purple “Training” set gear 7 pieces plus weapon +80%
Event Buff +100%
ESO Plus Buff +10%
Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia +150%
Grand Gold Coast Experience Scroll +150%
Pledge of Mara +10%

So if my math is correct that leaves you with a possibility of +500% experience gain. The challenge however is that you are going to rapidly outgrow a training set as you move from level to level which gets a little spendy resource wise for my tastes. Similarly Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia is expensive to acquire and currently going for in the neighborhood of 200k to 300k. Since I have a stack of scrolls and already subscribe to ESO Plus, I decided to go with those options for +260% gain. So the question is where do we go to grind? The answer is the same as it always is… Dark Anchors in Alik’r Desert.

For the uninitiated, there are three Dolmen in Alik’r Desert that are extremely close to three Wayshrines. By the time you have done a circuit of Dark Anchors, the very first one is respawning. The important Wayshrines in zone are as follows:

Aswala Stables Wayshrine
Goat’s Head Oasis Wayshrine
Shrike’s Aerie Wayshrine

Folks doing the Dolmen/Dark Anchor grind tend to use an addon called AutoInvite that allows groups to be formed by typing some phrase in Zone chat. If you watch chat for a bit you are likely going to see the phase but so far in my experience it tends to be X, Y, Z, or G. If you are new to the zone, the easiest option is to find someone in guild chat that is also in Alik’r to get your first wayshrine. From there wait until the group ports and then teleport to a player in that group until you have collected all three shrines. From there just follow the pattern and reap a ton of blue jewelry, armor, weapons and a truly shocking amount of treasure maps all while watching the levels fly by. You might check the Fighters guild and see if there is a Dolmen quest for Alik’r because a side benefit is you are going to max out that skill line while doing this nonsense.

For reference I was level 22 around 6 pm and shut down for the evening around 9:30 pm gaining 19 levels. There was a break somewhere in there for food and a few to get up, stretch and hydrate but all in all it was a pretty nice ride. In theory this means I should be able to finish things up tonight and then comes the decision if I take this express elevator up on another character or not. The truth is I play this game differently than most and the enjoyable bit is randomly questing around the world, not rushing to the end game. However since I am already at level cap on one character… it benefits ALL of my characters to be at the level cap while doing that leisurely questing. So I am contemplating taking advantage of this express elevator while I have it. Side note the current event only lasts until reset next week, but from what I understand the Anniversary event is right around the corner and lasts two weeks granting the same buff. The post Of Jesters and Dolmen appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.