Some modern games still do it - case in point the Xenoblade Chronicles/X/2 games have been accused of being almost like a single player MMO, but they do have these great insta-kill difficulty spikes wandering around an otherwise lower-level enemy zone. I really love that kind of thing.
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What is Blackwood? Is this an full expansion? I thought it was DLC at first, that would be included with ESO Plus, but now I see a $40 price tag. Looks like a full on expansion. Anyone playing this?
Yes, it’s a full expansion. Same as every year, a big zone, lots of content, which will be followed up by a smaller DLC zone in the fall. Banner feature is companions.
Is there a way to chase down sets in ESO? For instance, if my character has two items from a five-item set, is there some in-game way to hunt for them? Do I just have to wait patiently for the other three items to drop? Am I supposed to buy them from an auction house or something?
-Tom
All sets either drop from a specific zone or are crafted at special locations. But really, just buy them from guild traders.
Wearing a full 5+5+2 (or 5+5+1+1) makes a huge difference. Be sure to wear full sets as soon as you hit CP160. Green is fine, you want those set bonuses.
Get the ring of the pale order too. 20% lifesteal is downright sick.
Three types of sets:
- Crafted. Make them yourself, or find a crafter to help. Each set is made at its own special crafting station, somewhere out in the world.
- Overland. These drop in specific outdoor areas, delves and public dungeons. Each area has three sets. They also drop from chests in those areas. They are all bind-on-equip, so you can get them from other players/ guild traders.
- Dungeon/ Trials sets. These drop from specific dungeons (or trials, which are basically raids). Dungeons generally have three sets. They bind when you loot them, except you can trade them to other people who were there for the kill for a short time afterwards.
Here is the site everyone uses to find items placed on guild traders somewhere, and also to help price things:
https://tamrieltradecentre.com/
How is the companion part of Blackwood? Can they take on different roles? Are they actually useful?
I mean, define useful. There’s basically no content you would ever need a companion for (or wasn’t before Blackwood, at least) other than content the game expects you to bring a full party or raid for, and I doubt an average player is ever going to get enough from an AI companion to substitute for a full player group.
(To be clear, I haven’t gotten a companion yet, but there’s no world content up to and including public dungeons that I haven’t been able to solo with fairly little trouble and I don’t even have that ring that stusser’s so hot on.)
As the developers have stated that the companions are meant to make it possible to two-man dungeons, with each person using a companion, or even solo them, I would assume the companions to be fairly strong?
From here
Lambert says the idea behind Companions is to allow solo players and small groups to take on dungeons without worrying about becoming overwhelmed. As a solo player myself, I bluntly asked Lambert what took so long for something like that to be added.
“I think we’ve learned a lot over the years. And one of the main, recurring themes that we’ve heard from players, especially our more hardcore Elder Scrolls people, is people are scary. And there’s some content that they aren’t necessarily comfortable within a large group, but they would do with a couple of close, trusted friends. And so the beauty of this system and one of my hopes is, you know, you and a buddy could go and do four-player dungeons because you have two companions to help you out.”
Another benefit to the upcoming Companion system, Lambert hopes, is that it’ll give folks the confidence to take on tougher dungeons, thereby getting the chance to mingle and engage more with the ESO community.
“It will help players, A: develop stronger social ties in-game with their companions, but also, B: help them kind-of edge a little bit more into some of the group content and meeting other players potentially, which is really exciting to me, because that’s where the magic of MMO happens, you know, meeting other people and talking with them and developing those really close social ties.”
Hmm. I’m skeptical, but if that’s the idea maybe they’ll be powerful enough to overcome the inherent lack of complying with mechanics you can expect from an AI-controlled character.
Are you sceptical that that is the idea, or that they will be that strong?
But it will certainly be interesting to see - and personally, I’ve missed a Lydia to go with me on adventures!
Also, Playing Barbie- Dressup is half the reason I play these kind of games!
That they’ll be able to pull it off. AI bots in coop games almost never meaningfully contribute in my experience - they can attack and heal, but that only takes you so far in more complicated contexts - e.g., I found the bots really frustrating in L4D2, because I had to do all the actual carrying gas cans and turning cranks and whatever and it just doesn’t work very well like that. And MMO boss fight mechanics get a lot more involved than that.
I have little experience with them in MMO’s, unfortunately. Only from SWTOR, and before they were downgraded damagewise into oblivion, they were VERY good there, and could carry you through pretty much all content, even Heroic (Small group content).
But there they worked well - the confines of the swtor are different of course from ESO, but it IS possible to make companions that actually work pretty well.
Hell, Skyrim with mods is a proof of that as well.
Vermintide 2 is doing pretty good as well, as far as I understand.
Anyways - I hope to get to see it myself this upcoming weekend.
Skyrim fights are swinging sword until thing die. That’s not hard for AI to do. And SWTOR specifically designed soloable versions of (at least some of) their dungeons. That said, SWTOR’s revamped companion healing made it nearly impossible to die when I was still playing. And that certainly helps with a lot. They may have nerfed that, I dunno.
If they end up being anything like the customisable AI Heroes introduced way back in late 2006 to Guild Wars with the Nightfall stand-alone expansion then ESO’s AI companions could prove to be very useful. You can practically do all the content in the first Guild Wars solo with Heroes with the appropriate AI team composition (builds) for whatever it is you are doing. Which is no easy feat with how challenging some of the ‘Hard Mode’ late game content is tuned to be, such as the Winds of Change stuff in Cantha.
So, it will be interesting to see how ESO’s implementation of AI companions stacks up to the AI Heroes of the first Guild Wars.
Lots of people (like me) play ESO essentially as a single-player game and companions are pretty useful there.
The companions can be specced and geared as pretty good healers, right up there with the ring of the pale order. Of course if you have the ring you do not want them heal specced as you can’t be healed!
They’re pretty bad tanks and melee DPS, because they stand in the fire all the time.
And finally they’re decent ranged DPS, where standing in the fire is less of a concern. They don’t do a ton of damage but hey-- it’s free.
I’m dipping my toe back into the ESO pool and wanted to pick up where I left off, or perhaps start a new character. I just wanted to ask, if you or anyone else knows, what was the “story” progression again? I’m going to try and do a little flowchart here and need help filling in the end pieces.
- Your character starts in their little beginner province depending on their choice of alliance (Uh, the red guys, the yellow guys and the blue guys. I was a blue guy).
- Your character completes main quests, region by region, until they’ve been thru the entire alliance, then they go to…that blue hell place. Molag Bal is like main baddie.
- You then do this for each of the other alliances (if you want), minus the Molag Bal stuff.
That was all pre-Morrowind. Then things started getting confusing for me and also around the time I started doing other stuff.
Now, Morrowind is the first chapter of their new storyline, right? I’m going to use it as my starting point either way.
- Your character helps Vivec and company out solving Morrowinds crisis. Probably not killing Dagoth Ur, since thats Elder Scrolls 3.
- Your character then heads to…Clockwork City? Does stuff there?
- Then Summerset? Land of the, umm, elves?
- Then Elswyer, land of the cat people. I imagine it will involve smuggling skooma.
- Then…looks online…Greymoor? I guess this is the other half of Skyrim that wasn’t in ESO already?
- Blackwood is the latest hotness and I don’t think it has launched yet (at least on the Playstation)
The other DLC, like Orsinium and whatnot, are all standalone storylines, right? The Brotherhood and Thieves Guild have like their own lands/cities where their stuff takes place if I remember correctly.
Originally you started in Coldharbour (Molag Bal’s corner of Oblivion) and escaped into the beginner province but that’s pretty much correct otherwise. No skooma smuggling though.
Ahh you’re right! I forgot about that brief prison breakout thing you do at the beginning. If I make a new character, will they still start out there or do they start in Morrowind or something? I remember I made a mule character when Morrowind came out and I believe they started there (although maybe that was an option I chose).
I believe there are at least 2 new classes that came out - the Necromancer and the Warden. I was going to try one of them out.
