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.
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.
Hey Friends! I am obsessing over a system in The Elder Scrolls Online called Antiquities, in part because I have a number of “Leads” that I have collected through doing content in the game that have expiration dates associated with them and I am afraid of missing out on something very cool. I had no real clue how this system worked, but watched several videos last night and as a result I am going to share that information with you. Nothing I am about to say is revolutionary if you already have a firm grasp on the system, but since I knew nothing I thought maybe also some of you could benefit from the knowledge. At a high level Antiquities is a system that allows you to find items out in the world, some of which will be worth money and others will be furnishings, mounts and in a few cases pieces of exceptionally high end gear. For those of you how have played World of Warcraft, this system is a lot like a more interactive version of Archeology.
Let’s start with the basics however. In order to interact with the Antiquities systems you are going to need to have access to the Greymoor expansion and more specifically you will need to travel to the City of Solitude in Western Skyrim. If you own the expansion the base Wayshrine just outside of town should be open to you. Rather than drag this out with three screenshots I created the triptych above to aid with this conversation. First you are looking for a building with an icon that looks like an Eye with Two Shovels crossed behind it. This is the Antiquities symbol and the door shown in the middle should be marked The Antiquarian Circle when you go to enter it. Specifically you are looking for Verita Numida who will give you the starting quest. This will walk you through a quick tutorial and give you your Antiquarian Eye.
Now you should have a tab in your quest log that is also marked with the Antiquities symbol where you store all of your “scryable” content. Every zone is going to have a green item that is immediately scryable and these generally sell for 250 gold when you eventually find them so not an awful source of pocket money. From there you will get additional “Leads” which should begin unlocking Blue and Purple variants in that same zone. Additionally while doing content in the world you have a chance of getting other leads as drops. For example if you look I have one called Ritemaster’s Slate that is purple in quality and flagged as advanced and requiring Antiquarian Insight rank 3 and states that it expires in 29 days and 19 hours. Essentially it is that last part that is leading me to dig into this system now, because up returning to the game I have been collecting leads…. some of which seemingly fairly rare and I don’t want them to go to waste.
Above I mentioned that the purple lead required Antiquarian’s Insight at rank 3, and that I did not have access to that yet. Like so many things in Elder Scrolls Online, this system is governed by a skill line or more specifically two different skill lines that appear under the World section. Much like opening lockboxes and chests increases your Legerdemain skill…. scrying and excavating leads levels your Scrying and Excavation skill lines. In order to unlock these fully with both skills at level 10, it would require a total of 31 skill points. However apparently once you reach rank 7 in both, you have access to attempt every lead in the game.
The first step is to scry the object using your Antiquarian’s Eye which is accessed by double clicking on a lead in your quest log. This brings up a grid like the one above… except mine shows an example of what it looks like when everything has been solved. Essentially there are different symbols on the board and you start at the needle protruding at the bottom and try and connect your dots until you touch all six stars. Later skills in the scrying line apparently allow you to swap symbols so that more connect allowing you to solve the puzzle in fewer picks. Ultimately you are given a fixed number of turns and you are attempting to connect as many stars as you can within that limit.
If you manage to connect all six stars within the move limit you get a single area highlighted on the map. If you only connect 4 or 5 then you will get multiple areas highlighted in blue. Each area will either be the final treasure or allow you to dig up another item that represents the “star”. You can apparently level from 1-7 in Artaeum pretty easily and that is effectively the defacto zone given how small it is and how relatively safe to run around freely. The next step involves going to the blue highlighted area and trying to find the dig pile. If you have ever done a treasure map, the dig pile is going to look very similar.
You can bind your Antiquarian’s Eye to a quick slot and when you are within the region outlined on your map in blue, it will render a blueish comet on screen. The “tail” of the comet will be pointing in the direction of the dig pile. Then when you find the pile it will have all manner of blue sparkles radiating from it. Especially in a small zone like Artaeum, the dig spots are going to tend to be the same handful over and over so once you get used to where they are located you can probably find them without using the quickslot item.
Once you open a dig it starts the excavation stage of the process. From here you have a handful of tools at your disposal. Initially it will be the scrying eye and your brush, but eventually you can unlock additional tools that will show up on the right hand side of the screen. The scrying eye pings the ground and gives you an impression of how close to the treasure you are. Orange if you are far away but going in the right direction, yellow if you are getting close and green if you are on top of the item. Once you find a green square you can begin brushing away the soil and revealing the treasure. You are given a “time” bar at the top of the screen and each action you take removes time from it. Your goal is to uncover the item as fast as possible so that you can spend the rest of your time digging for bonus treasure.
That friends is Antiquities in the shortest version I can supply. I am sure there are some finer points that I missed so feel free to include those in the comments. I am in the middle of leveling and right now my pattern seems to be to do a green lead which will unlock a blue lead… which allows me to gain a decent chunk of experience but then requires me to cycle back around to greens again alternating back and forth. From what I understand it is pretty reasonable to level from one to five quickly within Artaeum before needing to branch out into other zones. Each zone has a single purple lead that you can do once, and the idea being to hop around to all of the smaller zones knocking those out. At seven then you would need to focus mostly on legendary quality leads that you pick up from the world. At least that is my plan moving forward. Now time to run around a lot and dig a lot.
The post Elder Scrolls Antiquities System appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This mornings post is going to be a bit of an odd one but please bear with me. First off I feel like I need to start this with a disclaimer. Gatekeeping is awful full stop. Please don’t do it. Gatekeeping leads to toxicity in communities and it just isn’t cool to try and keep someone out because they don’t align to your lofty ideals for what being part of that community means. All of that said… as a fortysomething geek I understand all too well why it continues to persist in spite of all attempts to remove it. So I feel like I have to start with the inspiration behind this… well whatever it ends up being.
This friends is Emma Langevin a name I only know how to pronounce because she did a Q/A video where she started off pronouncing it. She is a 21 year old TikToker and YouTuber and also is funny as hell. In her videos she occasionally wears assorted Nirvana T-Shirts and has apparently caught shit for doing so. There are of course the ever so creative “were you even alive” comments and the answer to that is no. However fandom doesn’t exactly have an expiration date to it and I figure Emma has just as much right to put on Lithium on a bad day as I do. While I don’t condone this behavior, on some level I still get it because I probably would have been one of these assholes were it not for a series of friends who called me out on my shit.
So the positive is that we live in a time when it is much easier to be into weird shit than it used to be. While boomers were ultimately the first to step out of line against the 1950s Nuclear family, they nonetheless created their own social hierarchy of order and conformity. The 1980s were in many ways about figuring out which template you belonged to and then attempting to conform your desires to fit that mold. If you didn’t necessarily fit into one of those predetermined roles, it could be extremely lonely. Diversity was not a thing that was celebrated in any form and least of which was Diversity of thought.
So many of us desperately sought signs of being part of a larger community. So various pieces of apparel, mannerisms, or activities became a sort of social shorthand for finding someone that might be a kindred soul. You saw someone walking through the mall wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt and chances are as a Pen and Paper Dork you were going to find some common ground and maybe even strike up a conversation. In a land filled with polo shirts with popped collars… these folks stood out and were magnetically drawn to each other. The jean jacket often times became the cultural currency emblazoned arcane sigils that would let anyone else you encounter know that you were one of them. Mine changed a lot over the years but for at least one period of it I had a giant Powell Peralta Ripper on the back… which I got because I thought was cool even though never actually owned a single Powell Peralta skateboard. I had more from Santa Cruz than pretty much any other single brand.
Another common currency of “belonging” was the concert tee. Growing up we traded crappy recordings of all of these bands that were then underground. I first got clued into Nirvana because they were the backing soundtrack for a skate tape. Truthfully most of the musical was desperately lifted from the credits of a skate video. I’ve talked before about Santa Cruz Skateboards Streets on Fire movie and how important its soundtrack ultimately became to me. The thing is growing up in flyover country you sorta had to import your culture from somewhere else because it most certainly wasn’t happening natively. In truth we were all a bunch of posers… because we had to invent our way of life based on the clippings and footnotes found in smuggled media.
I cannot understate just how damned hard it was to get anything “good” in the small town I grew up in. We had been listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers for years and only knew of them because they played in the background of some movie we watched. Then we sorta went on a crusade to try and find as much of their music as we could. I cannot fully explain how excited I was when I saw this cassette single sitting near the electronics department check out at a Walmart. Something “WE” cared about actually getting noticed and becoming significantly more easily available. That excitement turned to frustration however as this thing that we felt ownership over… because we had to struggle so hard to get it in the first place… became something that the jocks were listening to.
So this rapid succession of being excited because the accessibility and then getting frustrated at the popularity was a cycle that I absolutely remember going through for several things. The thing is that I now recognize the sheer amount of nonsense that was involved in this reaction. That said I remember going through it all the same because RHCP had sorta been one of those arcane signals of belonging that helped us find more members of our tribe. Even though that “tribe” was contorted as fuck because none of us actually had the exact same ideals or believes or even hobbies. There was overlap obviously but everyone sorta had their own thing going on and we couldn’t really understand at the time that it wasn’t necessarily the shared experiences alone that bound us together.
This wanting to belong and trying to self sort yourself into a container that was easily recognizable was so strong that the very first thing I did when I got a laptop for college… is slap a NIN sticker on the back. Still to this day I have to resist the urge to go over and talk to anyone that has a Horde or N7 logo sticker on the back of their vehicle because that desire to find my people still exists somewhere buried deep inside. Where it turns sour and becomes toxic however is when belonging isn’t enough and you feel like you need to exclude others from finding the thing that you thought was special and unique. I am not exactly sure how to combat that instinct because I too understand it. I was annoyed at how easy folks had it when they found out RHCP existed with Blood Sugar Sex Magic or started listening to Nine Inch Nails after Downward Spiral. They didn’t have to find some seedy tape shop in a town 2 hours away to find the latest concert bootleg of the band. All they had to do was walk into Walmart and make a purchase.
I personally have learned the hard fought lesson that more access to good things is infinitely better for everyone involved. You get access to the things I love and in turn I get better access to the things that you love that I maybe also will love as well. So yeah Emma Langevin was born some six years after the death of Kurt Cobain, but that shouldn’t grant her any less access to being a Nirvana fan. I personally “discovered” Led Zeppelin some eight to ten years after the band broke up, and I didn’t feel like not being there when they were initially relevant was any hamper on my enjoyment of the music. I first listened to Rush in 1990 when a friend loaned me their Chronicles double CD set, and have been a diehard fan of the band ever since. Yet I am certain there is someone waiting in the wings to tell me I am a poser for not being able to conform to some artificial litmus test for fandom.
There used to be a part of me that was a little bummed that the age of instant friendship because of some shared ideal was gone. Then I realized that pretty much my entire twitter feed is populated by random strangers that I happened across because of some shared interest and then decided to strike up a friendship as a result. The act of Gatekeeping was not the social structure that allowed you to make life long friendships. In fact it probably limited your horizons to the point to where you could only see a handful of people. I wish I could spread that message to more people, that you don’t need to carefully guard these things that you love because once they spread they end up becoming far cooler as a result. To be honest one of the best experiences ever is watching someone experience something for the first time that you yourself love. I personally experience this almost contact high of reliving those same emotions that I went through when I discovered the thing in the first place.
Ultimately sharing something is how you keep it alive. Each time you can ignite the fire in someone else’s heart, it allows those really good things to transcend generations. I mean sure it is weird that going down the toy isle is a greatest hits collection of the toys that I grew up with… but it also means that things like the newest rendition of Duck Tales exist for a whole new generation. As a grizzled old man I get to experience being a kid once again as I view these favorite things in a new light.
The post Subculture and Gatekeeping appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
