2717

Back to ESO voice acting, an actor I find particularly off-putting is one of the two nasal guys. Like the other voice actors, he does a variety of characters, many of which are fine (and some good) but some of which are ridiculous and jarring. Super burly warrior guy really sounds like that? This massive Brackenleaf Tree dude sounds like…that?? The ESO voice-to-character matching works well for me in most cases, but I just don’t understand how that particular actor got inappropriately matched with so many of the characters in the game.

On a more positive note, I really, really like American voice actor Wes Johnson’s Skyrim and ESO work. Apparently he has some notable film credits under his belt, too. His interpretation of Sheogorath in both Skyrim and ESO is a real pleasure (and an enormous improvement over whoever did the character’s voice in Oblivion) and I also appreciate coming across other minor ESO characters voiced by that actor, from time to time.

Wes Johnson’s Skyrim Sheogorath
His voice demo reel from over a year ago
ESO Sheogorath’s Circus of Cheerful Slaughter

“Don’t be presumptious, mortal, or I’ll banish ye to the Isle of the Lusty Bards!”

2718

While exploring areas well above my level, I’m noticing that I tend to get good experience finding locations and finishing quests (which are much easier when combat is less of a factor) but I don’t get much experience when I help kill enemies while piggybacking on other, higher-level players. In the latter case, my goal is often to simply benefit from their protection and not getting much experience seems to be an OK compromise, but I still wonder if I’m reading this right.

2719

Well I took the plunge on it, and I’m not regretting it so far. I love the slow pace, I’m still level 7 and I still feel like a schlub, which is good. I started in Daggerfall, and I’ve found the quest pacing to be just right - I don’t feel like I’ve got to pick up every damn quest, and I feel I can just roleplay as I’m rolling along, do things my character would do.

Mainly playing a Breton Storm Sorceress, Destruction Staff, with a side-line in Deadric Invocation, and Light Armor. Terribly squishy, but packs quite a wallop.

In an odd way, I actually prefer this representation of Tamriel to the Elder Scrolls games (much as I’ve enjoyed them). There’s always been something, I dunno, sort of un-fixed and un-solid about the way objects and quests are handled in the Elder Scrolls games - like everything’s constructed out of abstract, interchangeable pieces. It’s difficult to put my finger on it, but this version of Tamriel actually seems more real and alive to me than the “proper” one. Stuff is less crushed together, more spread out. I like the space, I like having to walk distances, etc.

2720

Glad you’re liking it, gurugeorge. The usual MMO constraints and issues are present, but I feel the same way.

Today I learned that while fighting a wasp, it may lay eggs in your back and a minute later, you’ll have a new loyal companion.

2721

I also did a quest that was a big departure from the usual quests. Basically (trying not to spoil anything) a storyteller took me back to various points in a young woman’s life and allowed me to become a new character who could influence events and choices to some extent, and the story ultimately was changed and culminated in something pretty darn beautiful and interesting. It was like walking into and taking part of a little novella inside an MMO. Never seen that happen before in an MMO.

2722

First, let me start by saying I do really love this game. Like, a lot. I’m VR7 at this point and it takes some doing. One of my closes friends is VR10 and we’ve been doing upper level dungeons and stuff waiting for Craglorn. Here’s the experience so far:

First, I’m a healer and he’s a tank.

We get into the dungeon queue finder for any of the veteran content and, on average, have to wait 20 minutes for a group. That’s the average - it gets much higher, but I didn’t figure it would be fair to average in “infinity.” During this time, maybe another member trickles in and then, right before another joins, they leave. Or, my favorite - they leave group and rejoin the queue just to be put back in the exact same group as us. This has happened upwards of 3 times with the same guy.

Then there’s what happens IF you get a dungeon group. In Wayrest Sewers, you can’t take the dungeon quest. If you do, it locks part of the map off and you can’t get to it. What part of the map? The part with the bosses. One of the bosses near the end, if you magically get the door open, might only give you one shot at beating them. It bugs like crazy.

Darkshade Caverns is somewhat worse. You can take the quest, but it’s not going to matter. Half of the bosses bug out in this dungeon, but that’s not the kicker. The final boss is this mechanical spider that goes through different phases and pretty much wrecks anyone that gets near it. However, if you interrupt it, it just sits there and does nothing. We tried to beat it fair and square for 3 straight nights to no avail. Then, we decided to try to keep it interrupted just to finish the freaking place. We melt it down. Then, as we go to turn in the quest, the entire instance crashes and resets the quest…

They’re supposed to be patching a lot in the next patch, so let’s hope it helps. I just hope it’s not too late. Wildstar is going to eat this games lunch if they don’t do something quick.

2723

I have done that quest yesterday.

It seems the encounter bugs if you revive with [E], you have to always press [R] or wait for teammate revive.

Is the only VR dungeon I have completed, I have no idea of pve stuff. I got the “Finish the dungeon in less than 30 minutes” achievement. Guildmates invited me to help them finish it.

About the encounter:

  • If the spider is green, some dude go to the center and press buttons. Everyone else dps the boss.
  • On the fire phase, avoid the fire pools.
  • Continue dpsing it from a big distance, until it dies.
  • On some phase 3 sphere adds are spawned. Kill them fast (they do a lot of damage).

Once you beat it, you have to do /stuck or similar, theres no way to escape the room.

I think you guys had too much dps, and where breaking the script.

2724

Right, and we even tried those things. The switches worked once. I have no idea what’s going on, but it sure sucks not being able to complete any of these things.

Now that the Wildstar beta is over, I’ll try to hit VR10 and do some Craglorning.

2725

So what about endgame PvP? Is that any good? Are there any brass rings to grab at?

2726

I must admit, I haven’t PvP’d that much. I was kind of waiting for them to up the VP totals before jumping in. I think I might do that some tonight.

2727

PvP (or as it’s called here, AvA) in paper is great. Cyrodiil is big (it can take a while to get from point A to point B, even with a teleportation network), beautiful (lots of gorgeous scenery), and full of stuff to do - not just AvA (each of the 3 sides has 15 skyshards in its’ territory, plus one on top of the center mountain, which makes 46 skyshards in Cyrodiil. There are small group dungeons for many of the skyshards - you probably aren’t completing those solo - there’s a mess of PvE quests, some of which are repeatable. There’s a daily “kill 20 players” AvA quest and an endless number of “capture this keep,” “capture this resource,” and “scout this area” AvA oriented quests. Each side has 2 Elder Scrolls, and one of the activities is grabbing the other guy’s Elder Scrolls and sticking them in your castles for buffs and bragging rights. So there’s plenty of reasons to go there.

The AvA structure is well-defined: you can pick a “home” campaign in which you live for the duration of the 90 day campaign. You can change this, but at the cost of alliance points, which is what you get for doing AvA activities. You can also “guest” in a campaign you pick, which means you can do stuff, but the alliance points you earn don’t count towards your standing - that only works for the home campaign. You can change your guest campaign every 24 hours.

If your side controls more… something … than the other side, the player for your faction with the highest AvA score is elected Emperor and gets an additional skill line that does all sorts of nifty things. When deposed, you keep the skill line, but it’s much less effective.

It ends up being a mixed bag though. It is awesome to be in a raid group (24 people max), to pull up to a keep, throw down Ballistas and Trebuchets, break down a wall, storm in, and then take a keep. That’s a ton of fun. Getting 40 people to enter sneak mode and then surprise attack a bunch of players is a blast! AvA can be a lot of fun.

On the other hand… I’m in a guild that has a lot of AvA enthusiasts, but we aren’t necessarily hardcore PvPers. I think most people picked AD for their faction, so in all the campaigns I’ve seen, AD is crushing everyone else. In Hopesfire we fight a bunch of people who are really good - they’re all VR10s, and most of them are Emperors/Former Emperors, which means they love playing us with our level 40s, our level 20s and our scattering of VR ranked guys. A number of those guys are also vampires, so until recently they were using the loophole where you could get your vampire ultimate down to almost 0 cost and could spam it for multiple applications. We are used to seeing Night Mistress, Hexspawn, Reese Withernospoon and the like no matter where we go, killing us wholesale. As with any MMO, balance is an issue. Last Saturday the current Emperor single handedly killed two or three raid groups of people by himself. He walked in and waltzed around AOEing everyone down while the rest of his force just stood outside and watched.

The campaigns are way too long - 90 days is an eternity for these things, and after a short period when the outcome seems decided, people tend to just quit when they’re the underdogs.

The 3 way factions was designed to make the battles more equal, but we still see 2 sides agreeing to trade back and forth to give their players Emperor skills.

And the home/guest campaign functionality is borked - you can actually attend ANY campaign, as long as you can travel to a player there. So one time my guild assembled and guested on a new campaign that we’d never been in before. After an hour of being there our adversaries from Hopesfire showed up… and we were like “wtf??? how is that possible?” As it turns out, their guild has 1 character based in each of the 10 or so campaigns. They peek into the campaigns to see where the action is - and when they find an active campaign, they travel to the player in that campaign, bypassing the home/guest campaign restrictions. So these 20 or so guys play in ALL the campaigns (which might explain why AD is kicking butt in so many of them).

One of the issues with Hopesfire is that I don’t think there is much activity for EP outside of our guild. So just like in any of these other games, once our events are over people just go back onto the field and take back the keeps we turned to our side. Of course when a lot more of the playerbase hits VR10 I suppose that will change.

There is room for small group AvA here but I don’t think the game or people have evolved that yet - it happened in DAoC and it’ll happen here, I’m sure, it’s just a matter of when. Tell the truth, Zenimax said that the resource camps were designed to be taken by a small group of VR10 players. So while AvA is somewhat zergy now, I’m sure it will evolve.

So … TLDR summary: it can be fun, it can be frustrating, still needs balancing!

2728

I PvP a fair bit, and I enjoy it quite a lot here. It needs more work to be great, however. Observations:

  • Distances are vast, and it can take a while to reach the fight in some cases. People who expect instant action get angry at this. The advantage is that dying has a consequence. Sieges become battles of attrition, as killing someone can put them out of the fight for 5 or 10 minutes. Note, you can rez other folks in-place, but that gets expensive (it requires a grand soul stone)

  • Sieges look and sound spectacular. It’s the most realistic, fantastic and grand imagining I have seen of this aspect of warfare. The siege engines are fantastic, there are multiple roles to fill, and taking a defended castle is appropriately difficult

  • The reward system needs significant fleshing out. There are 50 PvP ranks. Every one rewards a skill point, and every other one has a title. For 95% of players, these ranks will come quite slowly. There is also gear, but it’s hard to acquire and generally underwhelming

  • Small group combat is great. It’s absolutely action-based, but it also contains plenty of thought. Different foes require different tactics, and there is the back-and-forth of CC and counters. Until you learn how and when to block and dodge, you’re going to get wrecked

  • Balance issues are getting better, but there is still a long way to go here. Cyrodil is no longer completely dominated by Dragon Knight Vampires, but this will be a continuing struggle for ZOS. The highly flexible character building system has the expected downside of allowing surprisingly overpowered flavors-of-the-month

  • This is PvP in a progression MMO. If you hop in at level 10 and expect to be on an equal footing with high veteran ranks, you’ll find that you’re not. The next big patch will change this somewhat, as the scaling will increase. Currently, everyone sub-50 gets scaled to 50, which is still a long way from Veteran Rank 10. Soon, everyone will get scaled to Veteran Rank 5. That should make it more fair, but it still won’t be even. Combat here is never ‘fair’

  • It’s not nearly as zerg-based as in some games (e.g., GW2), but that aspect still exists. They added objectives to encourage small group play, but most of those objectives are too few in number and too close to the keeps to give you much of a buffer. I spend most of my time in a group of three to four, and we have a great time camping reinforcement lines when the enemy is sieging something. Eventually, though, we’ll get overrun by a huge group

  • Most campaigns are either dead (extremely low population) or utterly dominated by one of the three factions (and thus, there is no PvP activity). Right now, only two of the available 10+ campaigns will reliably provide large-scale action with some semblance of faction balance. Note, you can move to those campaigns. Nobody is trapped in a dead one. But people think they are, and ZOS needs to act here. Your first impression is likely to be terrible, unable to find anything PvP-oriented to do

  • Performance is generally very good – shockingly good, even. You will see often fights with 100+ players involved, and TESO doesn’t use any of the obvious shortcuts other games employed to reduce lag. There’s no culling, everyone doesn’t look identical. It just works. Usually :) There will be times when zoning into Cyrodil hangs your client. And if your party contains people not in Cyrodil, nasty lag will strike you

  • Stealth is interesting, as EVERYONE can stealth anywhere. Some are better at it (it eats stamina, which favors certain builds). This allows for interesting tactics. For small groups, it’s all about ambushes. It can be pretty interesting when two stealthed small groups are stalking each other around an objective. Large groups can also stealth. Last week, we had a large attack force (approx 40 to 50) riding through a bottleneck area towards a keep. At least 30 enemies unstealthed on us in the narrow bit. They also had siege weapons pre-targetted. It was a slaughter ;)

  • You can’t level to 50 in PvP. The experience gains are tiny. They’re doubling soon, but tiny times two is still fairly tiny. This changes when you hit veteran ranks. Killing players in a small group or solo is worth quite a lot of veteran points

  • ZOS avoided the common mistake of incenting “Player vs Door” fights. Taking an undefended keep is worth almost nothing. Taking a heavily defended keep is worth quite a lot. The rewards all incent killing players, not exchanging undefended objectives at a rapid pace while actively avoiding any fights

Many folks hate TESO’s PvP. It’s the exact opposite of the E-Sport approach WoW took (instant action, gamey, even numbers on each side). It’s sometimes slow, and it’s almost never ‘fair.’ It’s more an improved and larger-scale version of GW2’s RvR.

2729

Very well said, Charlatan.

My wife and I play AvA almost every day and have at least fulfilled the 20 kill players quest almost every day since we hit level 10 near release. She is a Rank 10? Veteran pvp level (we are still just level 46 pve levels) and I am Legionary 8 rank still. We started on Auriel’s Bow and it was very well balanced and good/high populations almost all the time, but lately it has become a ghost town for almost everyone but AD.

Now we are on Wabbajack (still just guesting there) and at least initially we (EP) were rolling there and outnumbered the others by a big margin. However, the past couple weeks AD has been migrating some of their better groups there it appears and things are very active and competitive lately when I have been on.

Personally, I believe the layout of the AvA zone with the mechanics in place and the terrain/scale the way it is has been very well done. There have been some balance issues as Charlatan has pointed out, but overall I believe there is a lot to like about the way it works and it has a lot of potential if they keep working at it.

2730

I am on Ariel Bow EU and things are balanced. So maybe the unbalance or 4th empire is more a usa thing.

2731

Yeah, I forgot there are two Ariel Bow’s. It is indeed the NA ones I am talking about.

2732

Endgame PVP needs player mass and the removal of ‘assisted aiming’

2733

Even with a L33 Nightblade, L24 Dragonknight, L4 Sorcerer and a L27 Templar, it took that long for me to do a group dungeon and I must say that, given some of the other issues I’ve experienced in the game, my first exposure to group dungeoning was really great and almost completely without problems. I’d grouped before, but only in quests and other little stuff.

The funny thing is, it started out with me playing my L27 Templar trying to find a group for Elden Hollow, which appeared to be my very last Grahtwood quest, and somehow I accidentally ended up in an Arx Cornium group with a bunch of Ebonheart players without realizing what was happening. It was my first experience with the Group Finder tool (well, first successful one) and I was/am a little unclear on how that tool works and how I was matched up and added to the group like that, because although I had put in my parameters and saw Arx Cornium groups listed, there were no options for me to initiate any kind of transactions or whatever, other than to hit the “R” key, after which I got a warning telling me that I had to be a group leader to do that.

So then I hit the “Your Group” button/tab, and suddenly I see that I’m actually already in a group with players I don’t recognize. So I right-click on one of their names, and after a bit of sparkly sparkly and a loading screen, voila, I’m standing with a group in a dungeon, somewhere. No fuss, no pain, just a little confusion and not the specific outcome I had expected. So I shrug my confusion off and act like everything’s natural.

I also don’t tell my fellow group members that this was my first group dungeon experience, and that I was surprised to be there, and that I wasn’t 100% sure if representing myself in the tool as a tank was accurate. My templar wears light armor and sure dishes out a lot of damage, and now that I’m thinking about her skills and armor I’m starting to think she’s probably a damage dealer instead. Oops.

Anyway for morale’s sake, I try to maintain appearances, and just start following cues. Turns out, group dungeons are pretty intuitive and straight-forward affairs (or at least, this one is), and group dynamics are the same provided you know your strengths and weaknesses and can follow cues and adapt well, and that there are no idiots in your party. And this group knew exactly what they were doing despite all being new to this dungeon, and everyone was respectful and polite to one another. Even loot was divided up fairly – guys kept checking to see if everyone else had gotten a locked chest before giving one a crack.

We progressed quickly and burned through enemies without a hitch, never got lost or lost a fight (for a while), got through the first two bosses, and then arrived at Sliklenia the Songstress where I was somehow killed in about ten seconds flat. Five minutes later while the other three were still fighting her, someone resurrected me and I took two steps and died again. But, five minutes later the two remaining members finally took her out, and we were able to proceed with only minimal (or moderate, I guess) embarassment.

We took out the next two bosses without a hitch, and then the Lamia Queen, the final boss, wiped all of us out at the same time within like five seconds. We revived, puzzled the situation over, and someone speculated that it was the water and her electrical thing. Ah. So this time we all stood on a couple of islands, and taking her out was pretty easy. All that remained was finding our way back to the exit, and ten minutes later we were all saying our thanks and goodbyes.

I think I was extremely lucky to be matched with three other experienced and well-behaved players, for my first outing. A+, would bid again.

2734

I should have mentioned a fascinating coincidence I encountered when I took the Spinners Tale quest on Sunday, because just before taking it I had nearly completed the second book in Matt Hughes To Hell and Back series that was recommended by malkav11, which also features a magical storyteller who selects and places regular joes into various character roles in a series of story drafts that affect reality in the world we all live in, in the hopes that the decisions the characters make will help educate and inform the storyteller in some unspecified way, and then when various decisions and actions occur and produce unpredicted results and end up changing the story/world in ways that the storyteller didn’t expect, ____. Nice idea, wonder if it’s a meme, or something.

2735

Based on guild chat,… its very hard to get people help you doing dungeons. I have seen people almost cryiing asking for people to fill the 4th player to kill the last boss of a dungeon.

These dungeons are mini-raids and are build around efficient groups with the sacred triad of tank, healer and dps. But the game is designed around freedom, to let you build a character that you will enjoy, but that may not fullfill any specific role.

On my current character, my sorcer can tank 8 mobs and survive (I did that yesterday, with a combination of multiple self-shields + devour swarm), but my character is not a tank… I can’t steal the agro from a healer or dps. So I am hesitant to join a dungeon, much less as tank.

2736

little things - I love the inbuilt harvesting tools, and that quest items take no inventory space (just need to check the inventory quest tab for some of them)

If I’d realised I’d have 3 chars (1 for each region) I would have split the crafts Alchemy/Enchanting/Provisioning across the three.
I’ve reallocated Provisioning. Enchanting is just too hard to restart (need jewellery crafting/destruction!), Alchemy may(not) be too late? I think each needs to do their own armour & weapons to take advantage of the wilderness crafting sites.