Dark Brotherhood hit the pts yesterday and will be released on 31 May 16.
http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-gb/news/post/2016/04/22/dark-brotherhood-launch-details
I gave in and resubscribed. Addicts are going to addict.
The patch notes for 2.4 look pretty good and they are making some honest balancing attempts. If they can improve prime time lag in Cyrodiil then that would be wonderful. Having had a 2 month break from PvP, I’m finding it somewhat refreshing to be stomping around all my old haunts again. I am worried that my family might stage another one of those “interventions” again. Hopefully not before I add another alliance rank or two. :)
Heh, you should be happy this patch! Magicka nightblades look pretty strong with new annulment. Me, when I pvp (pretty rare) I do so with my sorc, so I’m not a happy camper. Hopefully they’ll cave in a bit and not reduce the duration of ward too much.
KevinC
3525
I saw via the link that they’re removing Veteran Ranks?! Can anyone shed some light on this change?
stusser
3526
I plan to start playing ESO again when the dark brotherhood patch hits. Not for the DB content specifically, but because they’re finally adding NAMEPLATES. My biggest annoyance is being fixed, finally.
@Kevin: All the stats you got from VR1-16 are now given as you level to 50. Every VR translates to 10 Champion’s Points. So you’ll have items that used to require VR14 to equip now require 140 CP to equip, you’ll find monsters that used to be VR15 listed as 150 CP, and so on. Pretty simple in principle, although there are a number of implications, as CPs cap at 500, VRs only went up to 16, and CPs don’t translate into baseline performance directly the way “leveling” a VR did.
The crazy thing is that Thieves Guild ended up being a huge boost for magicka nb’s if you wanted to go proxy det + soul tether + vicious death. I could buy some VD pieces from a guild trader and try it out but it just seems too gimmicky. I prefer to skulk around the outside of the fighting and find soft targets that I can surprise or pick off the wounded that get isolated outside the scrum.
Proxy Det is getting a well deserved nerf though. It hurts people like me who were using it for single target but I really won’t miss it. I used it because I had to for burst since I have been trying to play my mag blade more like a stam blade with in your face melee attacks + cloak. I’m just going to go back to using fear more on my main bar. I’m also going to craft up a set of Clever Alchemist and use that to replace the burst lost by no longer having the proxy det as a finisher.
And yes, I’m switching my harness magicka over to annulment and it will be on my back bar now I can live with 6 seconds because it will be part of my oh shit combo Healing Ward + Annulment. :)
I doubt if it will stay 6 seconds though. I’ve got a feeling it will be like mage light and they will bump it up to 10 seconds after showing you just how bad it could be and you will be grateful :)
IC is getting capturable flags for districts so that should breathe some new life into it.
There is also a new crafted set that might make hybrids viable. If I had the gold and mats I would toy around with it but sadly I always seem to just have enough gold to finance my potion chugging habits.
So the Dark Brotherhood DLC launches tomorrow.
The new zone is pretty cool and the quest line looks fun. The new passives are all about enhancing your ability to assassinate NPC’s and there are no PvP benefits. This will not be Assassin’s Creed (PvP) but that is probably for the best. :)
Poison’s are being introduced. I really like the concept and what they are trying to do. It oddly enough doesn’t suit my playstyle since I have to hit hard and get out quickly and the poisons proc on light, heavy and weapon skill line attacks. I rely on magicka melee so no poisons for me. Luckily they are buffing weapon enchants so all is not lost.
Meanwhile with 1 day left before release! Drama explosion on the ESO message boards.
DRAMA DRAMA. You don’t wan’t no drama. The type of drama that probably chills the blood in devs veins.
Apparently a 3rd party app called cheat engine can be used to change parameters on the client to increase character speed (movement and action cool downs), ultimate generation and resource regen…plus a bunch of other stuff like levitation lol
A player or group of players started spamming meteors, others soon followed and unholy hell broke loose. Claims are being made that the game has been vulnerable to this since beta but cheaters were more controlled in their cheating ways. The player who started the flagrant stuff did tell everybody who he was and why he was doing e.g. To draw attention to it since he believed ZOS was unwilling or unable to address this.
All this of course is nothing new. I feel for ZOS and hope they can come up with some good solutions. They have been making some honest efforts to improve the game and as I have said before when the ping is sweet so is the PvP.
Razgon
3530
This launches tomorrow? There is a bunch of QoL improvements with this expansion that I have been waiting for , so this will probably be when I dive back in.
Thanks for reminding me!
Yep, the crafting bags alone will make my subscription worth it! They are also removing the Vet ranks and converting to a Champion Point leveling system. VR16 is now equal to Champion Point 160. The CP cap is still 501. All in all some pretty good changes.
Razgon
3532
Aye - The crafting bags sound wonderful. I haven’t touched any of the expansions, and Im a subscriber, so lots of PVE content waiting for me! Now, just give me my housing as well, and Im happy!
Yes, I plan to start back up with Dark Brohood too. Not for the content, but for the nameplates. Oh my god I’ve been waiting for nameplates for soooo long!
Drama Update: so they banned a bunch of people with hopefully more to come.
The “whistleblower” got banned as well apparently. On one hand, this does seem to be an ongoing issue ZOS has ignored for some time, and he was able to force them to actually do something. On the other hand, there’s probably a better way to do it (90 day ultimatum?) and to expose it during a holiday weekend is pretty inconsiderate.
Dark Brotherhood looks pretty good, not a fan of their sorcerer changes but with VR gone I have some new, viable alts now.
The cheating stuff has been very rampant, esp. in PvE and farming and after the expansion before this it got more bold. I saw it less often in PvP, in part because that side of the house would go on its own witchhunts w/o ZOS. I’m really not sure how much of the player base probably needs a ban. And with the extent that ZOS ignored early reports, I’m not sure how fair it is to blame the ones who decided they couldn’t progress via farms w/o doing the same (ladder drops, even farming gold via public dungeon drops) and saw no penalties. I saw quite a bit when I decided to get the complete all public dungeon cheevos, mostly solo. No cheating, just my majicka NB. =P But it left me jaded.
I think allowing it as long as they did that hurt community in a ripple effect. But I also think the community manages to hurt itself with little help too. I stopped playing this just recently. Part was craft/alt/daily burnout as well as realizing I had to compete head to head with bots for farms outside my dailies. I was so looking forward to those craft bags too. But mostly I stopped because of was people. So many entitled people. No one was mean to me personally, I’m boring. Drama. Entitlement. I just got sick of listening to them, I don’t know if I’ve changed, or gamers have changed (or both?). Like, look at the No Man’s Sky threat stuff. Really? I generally enjoy co-op games, used to love pugs, but am ironically deciding to bail on online games lately … due to people.
That said. A note on crafting for those picking it up for this expansion. It isn’t the character’s level that determines what drops you get in craft tier. It is having the points spent in that crafting. So, if my character is L10, but I spent the points to be able to craft the max tier BS items, and I manage to walk into a zone and mine, I get max metal tier. Using deconstruction to feed a craft alt to level it from a leveled main, is still fairly viable too. The thing that gets you in the end is the research system.
The game is so improved with nameplates! I really found it annoying without them before. I kept missing monsters.
If you haven’t played ESO since release, or never tried it, I very much suggest picking it up. It doesn’t feel like any other MMO. It’s kind of a single-player Elder Scrolls game with some MMO-like mechanics. And there’s so much content, most of it very high quality, and unlike at release it all works.
Very few quests involve killing 12 bears and collecting their asses.
For example, one quest I just did:
- Started by a husband crying about a daedra that seduced him into sacrificing his wife as a host
- I went into an open-world area filled with spiders with the wife’s sister to destroy 4 elvish wards locking a tomb
- Entering the tomb, the sister told me I had to destroy the daedra’s sacrifices with her sacred amulet before the daedra could awaken. Seems fishy, but OK. I murdered 'em.
- Then in the rear of the tomb we found the wife surrounded by a pentagram, and both sisters said the other was the daedra. I had to figure out which one was lying. (OK, it was the one that had me kill all the sacrifices, not a head-scratcher, but still.) I could have killed either one.
- Even though I picked properly and killed the sister, as they shared the same blood this awoke the Mephala spider-demon. Nice bit of exposition here. OK, no real consequence to my choice, but how many MMOs offer any choice whatso-frickin-ever?
- Killed the spider demon, then Mephala herself appeared and called me a dick. Had a little conversation with her, spoke to the wife, then we ran out. All the spiders were non-aggro then, both in the tomb and outside.
- Took the wife back to her husband, where she screamed at him about his cowardice, sending in her sister and then a stranger (me) rather than helping her himself, after sacrificing her to a daedra in the first place. She’s getting a divorce!
- Unclear what would have happened if I killed the wife-- I guess the spider demon would have come, I would have killed it, and I would have missed a bunch of story with the wife.
This is an example of one quest area, taking around 20 minutes to complete. Each zone has maybe 25-30 of 'em.
Give ESO a shot. It’s pretty awesome.
I need to play more of it, I’ve REALLY enjoyed my time with it so far.
Can I play it without joining a party or grinding? Those are the big hang ups I have with MMOs. I actually have this but only played to level dunno. 12ish or something? The looming cliff of “mats” or wtf scare me away.
OH yeah, I’ve never been in a party. I’ve got maybe 8-10 hours in it entirely solo.
Oghier
3540
TESO makes quite a good solo Elder Scrolls experience. You’ll miss a lot of group-only content, but that’s in the context of an enormous game with plenty to do. There are hundreds of hours of quality solo gameplay, questing over a huge map.
You can play the game entirely solo up to max level. And even at max level, there’s tons more solo content as you do the other two faction’s areas, then orsinium, the thieves’ guild zone, and the dark bros zone while you get champion points (which are essentially diablo 3 paragon points).
Like I said, it you last played at release, it’s incredible how much ESO has improved. Everything works, and there have been a ton of quality of life improvements. There’s a little addon scene too, I customized my UI quite a lot, something I found quite addictive in my WoW days.
And of course once you bought it, there is no need to pay them anything ever again. Each DLC costs some money, and they are well-worth it, but completely optional. ESO is not pay2win; the cash shop has tons of cosmetic stuff. XP scrolls and other consumables are available, but not a big deal.
OH yeah, I’ve never been in a party. I’ve got maybe 8-10 hours in it entirely solo.
