habibi
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I’m onto another random quest, or so I thought - and this one is about accompanying this one guy into his ancestral tomb to talk to his Living God. There’s just too many names floating around and I’m already lost at who’s who. I have a feeling this “random” quest is actually the main quest as there’s a prophecy about an Outlander (me) who’s here to save the world. Unfortunately I’m just at Level 5 and the vampires in the ancestral tomb is too powerful for me. I’ll have to LFG and do it together. But I’m indeed impressed that there’s so much spoken dialogue. No wonder this game is eating my HDD!
You should be able to solo pretty much everything except the public dungeons and the world bosses (skull and crossbones icon on the map), but yeah, you need a few levels under your belt to get some skills unlocked and rotations going. You’ll also have to avoid pulling too many mobs at once until you are pretty confident you can take the damage.
It’s important to choose a main stat. Your toon will be either magika or stamina based and use magika and stamina skills, respectively and your damage is scaled off that. A magika toon using magika skills scales damage based on magika stat. You can put a few points into health as you see fit, but dump into your primary.
Watch a quick yt on weaving and basic combat mechanics, particularly dodging, blocking and interrupts. Weaving is the art of alternating light attacks with skills. Basically due to animation cancelling, the optimum way to dps is to weave light attacks between skills. Skill1, light attack , skill2, light attack, skill3, light attack, repeat, etc. Throw in a heavy attack to restore stamina/magika as required until you have some sustain.
There is a main story line, zone story lines and guild story lines. They can be differentiated from normal quests as they will have a different quest giver icon and map markers. If you check your quest log you’ll probably notice the icon differences.
Did you start with the Cold Harbour main quest? I started playing with the Elsweyr expansion and that just dumped me in Elsweyr at level one with no background or direction to the original content. If you have the base game, not sure how it starts. You probably started in your faction zone/city with some rough direction that should have kicked off the Cold Harbour main quest, which then provides touch points into the guild story lines.
Not that it matters that much, you can just wander off and go nuts, but the main/guild stories do introduce you to a bunch of recurring characters and lore as well as reward skill points. It’s kind of a known failing that ESO does not do a good job of helping new players discover the original content.
If you are having problems surviving in fights in PvE you should consider going Magicka and getting a restoration staff for your back bar. Most classes have skills with a heal, some much better than others but if you have the staff you can get yourself out of trouble with a healing ward or a heal over time. You can try to get the stam skill vigor but you will have to do some PvP. They really lowered the requirements for AP but it still takes some effort. I haven’t played in like 8 months so things might have changed.
No, not yet.
For those looking for all the cinematic trailers in one place, enjoy:
Cormac
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Thanks for that explanation! That probably crystallizes why I hate the skill bar & fighting mechanic so much. Its bloody fiddly homework! Like I said, I’ve been playing for a while and approaching it like Skyrim: take a weapon and hit something and randomly use funky skills to spice the action up to have some variety. This weaving stuff and front and back skill bar switcheroos are all just frustrating complications!
Reckon this discussion is just proving to me I need to quit this game. Whats really frustrating, is that its the only game a mate of mine wants to play.
None of that stuff matters unless you’re doing group content.
Here’s what I do to win literally every fight while questing:
Fire off an arrow storm, pop my “heal on crits and get a bonus 20% to all damage” skill, turn into a hurricane and mash the key for whirlwind attack until everything is dead.
If it’s a big single target I do the single target attack instead, but it’s otherwise the same.
It still matters if you care about speed and efficiency. You can get by just fine without optimizing your build and gameplay, but many of us enjoy that sort of thing.
It should be said that despite issues like lag and some really bad design choices like cast times on ultimates (which is why I decided to take a big long break) PvP is the best around for a MMO in my opinion. Nothing has ever come close and still doesn’t. The skill system and fluid combat really shines in that environment. If they remove cast times on soul harvest/incap strike I would be downloading and playing in heartbeat. It’s that addictive.
Damn you all. Now I want to reinstall this.
I kill everything in seconds. If you really care that much about killing them in 6 seconds instead of 7 or whatever, more power to you, I guess. But my point was to reassure someone turned off by all the optimization talk that you can do anything you might want to do in solo play without needing to get that deep into the weeds, which you are distinctly not helping with.
Neither approach is wrong and ESO lets you play either way. There is enough twitch and customizability to try to wring out every last drop of performance or play more laid back and focus on fewer tools.
Additionally there are various options for play - overland PvE questing, dungeons, veteran dungeons, pvp, etc. All seem to be well done and you can find whatever floats your boat. That is part of the beauty of the game.
Lol. I just did. And the Elsmyr or whatever expansion was on sale for only $8 I think and so I’m starting a new dude in a whole new region.
My road to hell is paved with the gigabytes of MMOs I’ve downloaded “just in case I get back to it.”
Bored here. Anyone have a guild that I can join in this? Installing now.
habibi
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So far I haven’t joined any Guild myself but I am enjoying taking my time doing all the quests. They have good story telling in these quests! I love that they don’t fall into the WoW’s tired formula of killing X things or collecting Y stuff.
Started playing ESO again, it’s excellent these days. Playing through Summerset. They really stepped up the quest quality, and you’ve got to hand it to them-- they truly put a ton of effort into this game. Cities are huge, you can enter every building, they’re all fully populated and stocked with various placeables, and you see NPCs everywhere fully voiced, even when they aren’t involved in any quests. It’s worth another shot.
I skipped Eslweyr last year because I was just occasionally pvping. I took a long break starting last October or so. Came back because this new DLC has “Mythic” items. Not much has really changed. It’s a great game on a lot of levels but some of the decisions that have affected my particular class are still there and really aggravating. The cast time on ultimates (soul harvest) is something I am still struggling to get over.
Maybe they will have a pvp DLC this year. One can dream.
I’ve been logging in a bunch of level 1 characters daily for the daily rewards and horse training, so I started my new sorcerer with a fully specced-out horse and tons of normally microtransaction-paid XP scrolls and food.
Horse speed alone makes a huge difference. I really hate how it isn’t account-wide. One of my two biggest complaints with ESO, the other being the stupid weapon switches required to play at a high level. Just let players hotkey 10 skills, Zenimax!
Anyway, I prefer the sorcerer over my old DK. Much faster kill speeds and effective AE make a huge difference.
The quests, even the side quests, are great. Fully voiced, multi stages, full conversations with the NPCs. One sidequest I did, easily missable, was at a local school where a dude read the wrong book and converted all the teachers and students into characters from stories. You had to figure out which character they were by reading books, then cure them, and it capped off with a mini-dungeon where each level had a theme, you figured out the theme then reshelved the book. And of course the book itself was the boss.
Another side quest had two retired detectives brought back to take on one last case, because a copycat murderer from their most famous case was terrorizing a local plantation. There was tons of backstory, one of their wives slept with the other’s husband, tracking down the murderer, finding the killer was just a patsy, etc, don’t want to spoil it but this was a side quest.
No other MMO does this stuff. Well maybe The Secret World, I never got into that one.
Secret World has some pretty cool quests, but they definitely don’t have the density of either quests or NPCs you can interact with.
Secret World beats out ESO in that many of the quests required close examination of the game world to solve them - noting the time on a clock, deciphering desriptions of areas to find a specific location, etc - drawing you into the world.
SW and ESO have the best quest writing of any MMO’s I have played, heck better than most single player games. In fact I play ESO primarily as a single player adventure RPG.
