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.
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