Questing does seem a bit wonky. My characters are lowbies, with the highest being 10, but already I’ve had things like quest markers pointing to nothing, missing people, and characters who upon log in have no quests at all for some reason. It’s been a while since I’ve played a game where you can get to position where you have no breadcrumbs at all. On the other hand, most everything else, beyond a handful of crashbugs, has worked out pretty nicely. I really am starting to like the combat/skill system, as it nicely splits class and weapon skills so you aren’t hobbled into specific combinations necessarily. It is very possible, though, to get in way over your head; I found myself on one character deep into an area and quests several levels above me, and with rewards I couldn’t even use yet, but without any clearly available on-level stuff to do.
If I can get to the high levels before really serious obstacles appear, I’ll probably get my money worth out of it. I am appreciating the world’s look and feel, and some of the stuff is fairly well written and designed. I still find it amusing though that there are many cases where your guys are fighting NPC soldiers of other alliances and it’s all in pockets of people standing around not paying any attention to their comrades getting jacked three feet away. But that’s a generic MMO thing I think.
I’m puzzled by the reports of quest bugs, because in leveling 2 different toons to VR1 (both Ebonheart) I have only run across maybe 2 instances of bugs related to quests. One was when I was in Coldharbor, and I did some clever jumping and falling to get into an area I wasn’t supposed to be in (for those who are familiar with the zone, I got into the central portion of the zone before starting the “Chapel of Light” quest). In that case, I had one of those phantom quest markers on top of an object. Walking through the quest area did nothing. I ignored it and eventually when I hit the area the “right way” I had no issues. My second quest bug was where I was supposed to free an NPC, and the NPC wasn’t there - someone else had just visited the area so I figured maybe the game was confused about it. I tried exiting and re-entering the area a couple of times and when I couldn’t get it to work, I just went somewhere else.
Maybe my memory is bad or I am just incredibly lucky, because I don’t recall any other quest related bugs in leveling either of those toons.
I will admit that there aren’t always breadcrumbs (or rather, it’s often easy to miss them), so that can be problematic. I’ve noticed that a lot of the time you stumble across an item when exiting in a solo dungeon that will serve as a breadcrumb to lead you to a new questing area (hey, here’s a book - go return it to its owner! Hey, here’s a sword - go find who made it, etc). If you don’t obsess on clearing everything on a map then or if you skip the dungeon then yeah, I can see how you’d miss that. Lack of breadcrumbs doesn’t bother me too much though; since I run the Undiscovered mod I just look at my map and head to a nearby area that has red X’s on it.
Could be that the bugs I mentioned were introduced recently and/or are limited to the Aldmeri Dominion.
I actually don’t mind the lack of breadcrumbs because a) it’s rare and b) I like wandering around until I find something interesting. The quest bugs have been rare too, but perhaps that’s why they’re notable. Today I finished up killing the supporters of the Veiled Queen, and was supposed to exit via a side door–but it wouldn’t let me. It had the door icon, but I had to backtrack through the entire ruin to the main entrance–outside of which was the NPC I needed to talk to anyhow, so no biggie. Just a little rough around the edges.
But man, bank and bag upgrades…gold, so much it is!
Yeah, bank/bag upgrades are still ridiculously expensive. Very, very strange design decision that I’ve never understood. Fortunately, it doesn’t take as long as I feared to accumulate enough gold to purchase those upgrades.
Breadcrumb issues are not a big problem for me, and extra wandering is usually fine. But indicators that point to nowhere and the non-working doors (both bringing the quest to a screeching halt) are not so cool.
Since I hit a wall with my region quests, I’ve been focusing on the main quests and completed about four of them tonight. Each time I complete one, invoking the next quest in the chain requires running about 50 feet away from the Harborage entrance, which seems to trigger an event, and The Prophet suddenly appears in front of me and says “Ah, there you are”, as though it’s been years.
I noticed that after each quest in the chain is completed, the NPC character levels go up by about 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 etc. each time. What’s more, if you invoke a quest, use The Prophet’s portal, and then travel back to the Harborage the NPC level of the Prophet (Varen Aquilarios) is now at the next level but any NPCs you might have taken with you into the portal are still at the “current” level. So right now, for example, my main toon is L45, The Prophet is L50 and the two NPCs I’m working with beyond his portal are still L35 and will become L50 after, I assume, this quest is completed. Kinda interesting, I guess.
Aeek
2844
Once you reach L10 you can use Cyrodil for free shrine travel (and to a Bank) , but you need to remember what province you were in.
Its worth visiting since you may get bonuses if your faction is doing well. No penalties if not.
I’m finding with 3 chars I have no gold issue upgrading bank/bags. Mind you, I have no horses to feed. It does, occasionally, get tight.
Oghier
2845
There’s an easier way to travel for free. Join one of the big trade guilds. When you need to go anyplace, open up the guild roster, find someone in a place you want to be (or anyplace), r-click their name and “travel to player.” You’ll be transported to the Wayshrine nearest them. It does not matter if you have never been there. The only restriction is zones to which you do not have access at all (e.g., other factions, or veteran zones when you’re not a vet yet).
I like the way The Prophet splash screens mostly look like bad 70s album cover art from some progrock group like Yes, only not as classy.
Having come pretty close to running out of PVE content at L46, I ventured into Cyrodiil for the first time on Saturday. For most of Saturday evening/night, I only did scouting quests and NPC quests and never once saw PVP action. Then on Sunday, I discovered that the Aldmeri Domain had lost a lot of territory. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to locate where the action was. I’d grabbed quests, but their markers were all very far away and deep inside enemy territory, and so were useless. I may be wrong on this, but the game doesn’t really seem to give you much help in getting started on PVP.
So I ended up wandering around our borders and finally, I came across a dozen or so comrades. No one was chatting as far as I could tell, but it looked like they were up to something. So I stood around and waited and after a little while everyone started climbing onto horses and heading off in the same direction, so I followed. We traveled awhile and arrived at what I think might have been a fort or something. We took it with relative ease, and erected our banner, or whatever, and in the process I took my first two players since buying the game.
We moved on and did the same thing two or three more times and eventually, we arrived at and took a fort near Castle Faregyl, and a few minutes later people began deploying siege weapons. It was very challenging and desperate (many casualties), but eventually we managed to break down a segment of wall and breach the castle. We poured into the place and took over what I think must have been the parapet(s), and even managed to deploy a couple more siege weapons, but after another twenty minutes or so we were totally licked by the defenders. After I died I traveled back and forth, but saw no further evidence of Aldmeri advancement on Castle Feregyl, and assumed that our side had given up for the time being.
My main takeaway from this experience is, it seems that a concentric siege effort should require communication, because throughout this campaign or whatever, beyond making guesses, I never once had a clear impression of who the leadership was or what the objectives or strategy/tactics were supposed to be. Secondly, if you aren’t a member of a guild or a group of players who embark on PVP activities, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to hook up with people who are planning such activities. Having access to a PVE campaign tool similar to the Group Finder tool would be very helpful.
Oghier
2848
A couple points:
-
Most campaigns have little action. There are currently too many. The next series will have fewer, so they’re more crowded. If you want one with lots of action, join us in Wabbajack
-
PvP is how I have met most of my friends list. Many groups recruit in zone (on the busier campaigns), and all the good groups require some form of voice comms. So go in with TS, Mumble, Raidcall and Vent ready ;)
Cyrodil is frustrating because it’s a fantastic experience on an active server, but most of them are not. People get a terrible first impression.
Teiman
2849
Zone Chat
- Pay attention to zone chat. Pretty often somebody is tryiing to form a zerg, and he will ask for people writting something like “+”. Thats how you get in a zerg, if thats your thing.
The Map
- The areas of conflict will have a icon of two crossed blades.
- Castles under-siege will have a orange glow sign, but are not available to travel… but you can travel to the nearest castle and travel to it with horse (something that may get you ganked, so try to get in a group)
Ambusing
- Go somewhere in conflict, and study the map. Think logically where the reinforcements will come from. Sneak in the shadows between the zone in conflict and where people will come from. Combat awaresness can help you predict where the battles will be soon. (like… if a farm and a mine are taken by the enemy, most probably the castle will be next.)
High-population server
- If you have choose a underpopulate server, you can “visit” a high population one. The only problem with this is that you are not elegible for emperor, but I think you have to abandon your family, job and hobbies to work for that purpose, so maybe not a problem at all. In a high pop server all of the above will be plentifull… more if is high populated and balanced (a onesided server may get less action).
Personally I have not problem finding action, the next thing is finding the good action, and is not always the hugest of zergs, but small scale conflicts, even 1vs1 gankings.
Cyrodil reminds me a lot of DAOC RvR areas. Lots of wandering around, vague instructions, problematic communications. In DAOC you generally joined a battlegroup, eventually, but much of the day to day fighting was in eight-man groups zipping around on Bard/Skald speed and assist training people. I have only been into Cyrodil once, as I only have low-level characters, and I explored a bit until being one-shotted by a guard–also reminiscent of DAOC!
Yeah, AvA is great when it’s busy, and sort of sucky when it’s not.
However, if you go to a non-busy campaign, you can spend your time doing the Cyrodiil quests (which I understand give pretty good experience) and/or getting the skyshards there. I believe there are 15 skyshards per faction’s area, and 1 skyshard up top the big mountain which is sort of near the center of the map. I’d estimate that half of those skyshards are in dungeons, which you probably won’t be able to solo (or at least solo easily) since they bumped the mob levels up in Cyrodiil - but if you bring a friend or two it should be pretty easy to get 75% of those skyshards.
The guild I’m in runs either in Volendrang (Tuesday 6 PM Pacific and Friday 11 PM Pacific) or Wabbajack (Saturdays 3 PM Pacific). All of those events are open to anyone who wants to join in - there are announcements in zone chat and you typically say something either in zone or in say chat to get an invite to a group. We use Raidcall and Teamspeak for voice comms. If you’re looking for a big event feel free to try one of those, as they can be fun.
@barstein, I am somewat surprised you are running out of content. Have you done any dungeons? They can be a good source of xp, and at the worst case, the main questline of the dungeon awards a skill point. I know they are tougher to get going these days but it’s worth it. Also, do you have the Undiscovered addon? It will show you what areas in each zone you have not completed by putting big red Xs on the map for all your unknown POIs. That can be good for ferreting out areas you have missed. Plus the center quest chain in Coldharbor can be 1.5 levels or more, if you haven’t done that (and if you’ve done it at 46 I would be really impressed).
Thanks for all the tips. I’ll check out alternative campaigns next time I visit Cyrodiil, and maybe I’ll end up having to join a PVP guild or something.
Yeah, I did several Cyrodiil quests despite the level gap, but probably hit a limit of sorts and got tired of hoofing across the map each time I died. Will probably have to close the gap to fifty before returning.
@Charlatan, I have five quests near my level in Reaper’s March but the only one that doesn’t involve a broken quest marker is a stupid racing quest. I also have a high-level quest in Cold Harbor, and that’ll probably be next on my list. In lower-level areas I have about four total and just haven’t felt as motivated to finish those, but probably will follow up soon. Could be that I’ve overlooked another new area beyond Reaper’s March aside from Cyrodiil but I’m fairly certain I’ve covered everything.
Oghier
2853
I don’t know anyone in my guild who had a similar experience from 1 - V12. We were all overleveled for every zone well before completing it, from Auridon through Reaper’s March. We did the main quests for each hub, all the dungeons (public and solo), hit each instanced dungeon once for the achievement and did all the Mage/ Fighter/ Harborage stuff as it became available.
This was in Aldmeri Dominion. I have only played the other zones as Veteran Content.
That (bolded) may explain it. I’ve only completed one public dungeon, and it wasn’t in Aldmeri. I may also be a little behind on the Undaunted stuff. Edit: Ah, Coldharbour has a bunch of stuff beyond a mission I’d recently acquired there. Didn’t realize that it was a true region like the others that would offer a bunch of new quests. So that and, if necessary, the public dungeons should suffice to raise me to L50. Edit #2: Darnit, I gained half a level and found that even Coldharbor has enough broken quest markers / endless quest loops to stop me cold (pun unintended).
Aeek
2855
I did heaps of Cyrodil PVE quests and scouting missions when my Night Blade was L15. We get “scaled” to Vet5 (was L50) so I can kill most things 1 on 1, a few 2 at once.
Not an Alliance Guard, and I have my doubts about a Mammoth. Now back at L21.
NB is good for travel, I stealth long and fast, that helps. Not having the high end skills AND all my passives hurts but I do have some extras from the Cyrodil shards.
Cyrodil is also good for Alchemy and not bad for Enchanting runes. Its also great for enjoying my new monitor.
At level 10 or 11 I am finding that I often am fighting mobs two or three levels higher than I am; I have almost never been on-level with quests, they’re all yellow or orange most of the time. Maybe I need to explore more!
