I’m having a lot more fun now that I’ve sorted out the basics of the game. The flow on your first character is pretty miserable if you go in blind, between the lack of a real tutorial, and the whole debacle with it trying to have you skip the newbie area.
One of the biggest things that helped was realizing the game doesn’t give you shit in the way of gear, and that crafting is expected. Another thing that provided a nice boost was farming those public dungeon bosses a few times.
Spect
2016
What’s this you speak of? I’ve not seen any dungeons early on
Any other Qt3 guild members online able to invite me? Berzia. Edit: Wow, that was fast, Charmtrap! Thanks. :)
For example, in Daggerfall where the mage guild sends you to get 4 books (a level 8 quest), that dungeon has a mini-boss in it; he drops a soul stone and a bunch of loot. You’ll see people camping him.
Razgon
2019
That system annoys me a bit. Why its neccesary to stand and kill the same mobs over and over and over and over to get a decent supply of weapons to deconstruct, and soul gems, is tiring. I did it as well, because it WAS a good thing to do. It just shouldn’t be.
Razgon
2020
There’s a ton of caves, also ones marked with skull and bones which are public. Basically people just stand around, waiting for the unique spawn to appear, and kill it fast.
Good question. It’s certainly not fun for anything more than a few minutes. I killed a couple of the bosses about 5 times each and was ready to move on, but it was still a huge influx of loot. Those enemies shouldn’t be dropping so much for repeated kills, and normal enemies should be dropping a LOT more than they do now. Loot off normal enemies is stupidly rare.
I had a really rough time the first day I was playing, because I had basically no gear, and because I didn’t know there were lower level quests on the starter island. They need to do a better job onboarding new players. You’re fighting a lack of gear and overleveled quests at the same time you’re just trying to learn the basics. If you know how to get gear and that you can go to the newbie island it’s no problem, but nothing in the game really tells you that.
I don’t understand why you don’t start on the newbie island. Everything seems to point to that having been the original idea, and the game flows much better from there.
Grrr, I invested a lot of time and effort to reach Spindleclutch and the local NPCs just stand there, 50 feet from the spiders, despite claiming a desire to “press on”, while the spiders one-shot my level 5 Nightblade. I invested a lot of time and energy to get here and it seems I’ll have to abandon it for now.
Oghier
2024
That was the original idea. Many people pointed out that the newbie islands were not good content, relative to the rest of the game. ZOS’s solution was to allow people to skip it. You shouldn’t skip it :)
Yeah, just skipping people past it without replacing it in the leveling/tutorial process wasn’t really a solution, so much as an error based on a knee jerk reaction. It’s not like new getting thrown into the next zone unprepared is somehow a better experience for new players.
Haha, it’s like a throwback to the “good old days” of EQ1! For some reason the fact that a game in this day and age does this depresses me a little.
It’s because they were apparently so badly done and long enough that people were actually breaking the beta NDA to pan the game, and then every game reviewer given the beta started panning it. They obviously couldn’t let it go live as the forced introduction to the game, but probably invested too many resources in making the terrible start to simply replace it with something decent.
It’s weird though, because the ones I went through weren’t that bad. The Daggerfall Covenant ones didn’t blow my mind, but they’re not really any worse than most quest driven MMO intro zones. Glenumbra actually seemed crappier to me, with a less coherent story.
No. And the reason I say this is that I found a Mundus Stone right outside Davon’s Watch (Ebonheart Faction). But that’s the only one I’ve seen so far.
The dungeons are actually marked with a torch I believe. There’s one just to the east of Davon’s Watch, called Crow’s Wood (for levels 6 to 9 ish toons in a group). And dungeon may be a bad term for it, because Crow’s Wood is an outdoors instance. So it’s like a “public instanced dungeon.” Crow’s Wood is pretty cool, there are a couple of quests - one rewards you with a trophy that seems to indicate it does something (but sadly it doesn’t). There is a skyshard in there, there is an elite boss just haning out in one spot, and you can also spawn an optional boss who awards you a skill point when you kill him. It’s a group dungeon though; the mobs come in packs of 4 and 5.
There is probably a part of your achievement/journal that lists them, but I haven’t really looked.
I don’t believe the skull & bones are dungeons - I think they’re some sort of event or encounter - there’s one near Davon’s Watch that spawns about 10 bugs running at you when you trigger it. And I think the point of it is to just survive (not sure, really). I ran across a second one. I stood there a second at 3 of those floating jellyfish things spawned, including a named one.
Yeah, people complained so bitterly about the newbie island experience being bad, so they made it optional. But the first questgiver you meet (for Ebonheart, anyway) tells you about the island and gives you a way to take a ship back there. I don’t find the newbie island that terrible, and don’t forget, there are 3 skyshards there, so you probably want to do the quests anyway.
Teiman
2029
I am starting to feel the same. I replaced the pet for a magic light that give crit bonus. It seems that the pet lag behind, is not very agresive (is reactive) and don’t generate much agro. It does is usefull when it gets agro, but it normaly gets agro when the mob is already dead, or almost dead.
I like these things, its like small singleplayer experiences in my mmo.
The other day walked near a summoner wizard girl npc, … she accidentally summoned hostile creatures, I helped her. She thanked me and took a teleport going somewhere. No xp, no loot, just a random small vignete. I am starting to feel like they really tried to make a elders scroll game :D
Yeah, that’s the thing. I found the Ebonheart starting island a much more coherent entry into the world and overall much more rewarding than just being plonked down in Stonefalls and told to get on with it. As far as I can tell it would have been way easier and more sensible (absent a complete redesign) to just have an NPC on that island that can take you to the mainland on request the way there’s now an NPC on the mainland to take you to the island, and otherwise change nothing about gameflow. So people who’re inclined to bitch about the newbie island can go do their thing and the rest of us get a much less weirdly disjointed opening.
I somehow completely missed Crow’s Wood, wonder if I can solo it at level 14.
It’s a public dungeon so if you teleport to the instance you will most likely find other people there.
KevinC
2033
I just stumbled on Crow’s Wood last night and completed it solo at L10-11, so I think you should be fine. The boss/elite/whatever mobs I had to stay on my toes, but I never died.
KevinC
2034
It’s not necessary. People are free to do it, but I’ve never felt compelled to do so. Empty soul gems are fairly cheap to purchase and I find plenty of items to deconstruct just through normal play. For all the time people spend camping something like that, I’m out harvesting oodles of materials, lockpicking treasure chests for loot, and gaining a bunch of skill points through levels, skyshards, and quests.
