ESO – Pledges and Dungeons

Well I’ve been slacking with blogging. Part of that is selfishness – I don’t have unlimited time so I can either play, or write a blog entry about playing. Actually… that’s all of it; it comes down to balancing these two demands on time.

I’m not sure how the other bloggers like Syp or Wilhelm do it – they write a very consistent ~5 entries a week! Meanwhile, my play vs. write decision only comes up once a week.

Anyway, before the holiday weekend I have a bit of extra time and I’m in the mood the jot some notes down.

My friend and I are still having a lot of fun playing. We’ve got a nice pattern going: warm up with either a delve or two, or more recently a public dungeon or two. When we do a public dungeon, we grab the quests and finish them, look for and defeat all the bosses, do the group event for a skill point, and find the skyshard. This dovetails nicely with Mage Guild daily quests because all of those are to find and retrieve one of Sheogorath’s Artifacts inside a public dungeon.

After that, we’ll do an Undaunted Pledge or two. We’re comfortable doing, or at least trying, the ones from Maj and Glirion. We’ve found a few we never did, generally Part 2 of something, but there are some we had never stepped into, such as Selene’s Web, Blessed Crucible, etc. So we’re going through and being sure to grab the Undaunted Daily when it appears, saving it for the weekend.

We’ve also gotten stronger. Incrementally better gear/weapons, plus a few more CP into offense/defense. Before we had trouble with High Kinlord Rilis in Banished Cells 2? Well we dispatched him and danced on his corpse. Ok not really but it was a rush to win that fight.

Our new roadblock is the Engine Guardian at the end of Darkshade Caverns 2:

He looks pretty cool – a robot spider! – but has a really tough Poison attack we can’t deal with too well. Basically he has three attack phases, and two of them are fine.

However, the poison attack requires the group to pull levers in the middle of the room to stop the AoE damage, which is tough since we are only 2 players so we need to get 2 levers each and there is barely enough time to do it. Any delay in running from a fight to pull a lever ends up being fatal (and sometimes adds that follow you and keep attacking mess up pulling the lever).

General advice online is to skip doing the lever pulls and heal through the poison AoE instead. Especially in a PUG – it is essentially impossible to get randoms to pull one lever each in time.

We tried that and I could heal us just fine but… he summons adds too. Basically, dealing with the poison takes us both out of the fight long enough to end up with +1 or +2 enemies to fight when we return. Getting two poison phases in a row is really bad; besides there is a thin margin of error for the grouping-to-heal timing so this fight just a bit too tough for us right now.

We can come back when we are a bit stronger again (more CP into reducing damage, improved gear and glpyhs, etc.) and hopefully take him down.

It does feel good to finally down a boss after failing a few times!

I cashed in more Undaunted keys and finally got the armor piece in the correct weight I was looking for: Sentinel of Rkugamz light shoulders. Someday “The Golden” will have the helmet for sale (it drops in Veteran Mode, and I don’t think we’re strong enough to duo a vet mode dungeon) and I’ll buy it up, which will be a very nice healing buff for me.

EDIT: It is there this weekend! Woot!! I’m 100K poorer now but that is money very well spent. My longer term goal is to get monster sets for healing, offense, and defense to give myself more options for mixing and matching gear; now I can check the healing box off that list. (Sentinel of Rkugamz for healing; Stormfist for offense; Iceheart for defense).

I’ve been eyeing zone achievements and want to start working on world bosses. Most are roughly the same health as dungeon bosses, and we can duo many of them, so the world bosses should also be doable by us. Plus, some random folks might jump in as well. We’d get some loot, make progress on zone achievements, and have a chance at antiquity leads. My friend is very interested in some of the mythic items that you can find via antiquities.

ESO – Antiquities

There are so many things to do in Elder Scrolls Online…

I received a lead for the ultimate difficulty Stained Glass of Lunar Phases by fighting dragons in Elsweyr with my guild. The timer was ticking down so I worked on scrying and excavating as much as possible to dig up this antiquity. My method was to choose a zone, scry the green leads and followup anything else (prioritizing the zone based on the lead expiring the soonest).

This worked very well – I reached 10 in scrying and excavation without “grinding” Artaeum like some guides would have you do. I was able to dig up my Stain Glass of Lunar Phases, as well as another ultimate difficulty lead I had: Blessed Dias of Almalexia.

Here they are side by side in my courtyard:

My new problem is my house is too meager to properly show off these relics. 😉

But there is a great solution for this – the free manor you can get by doing the Elsweyr zone questline – the Hall of the Lunar Champion!

As soon as I’m done with my faction storyline (I’m 80% done with The Rift, and I’ve already completed Soul Shriven in Coldharbour) I’m zipping over the Elsweyr to get the manor.

I’ve also spent some points into crafting. Until recently I did my daily writs for crafting inspiration, thus leveling my crafting but not spending skill points. Since I’m 50 crafting in everything except jewelry and enchanting, which are not far away at 48 and 49 respectively, it is time to go from crafting entry level stuff to crafting CP 160 stuff. Which also grants better leveled rewards such as repair kits… and master writs.

I maxed out Clothing and Provisioning and so far have received 1 master clothing writ, that I unfortunately can’t do, I’m missing the style. So I didn’t start the quest and am saving it for later when I might be able to do it.

One skill point I did spend was for a passive in Excavation: Keen-Eye: Treasure Chests. This skill makes chests burn with a blue/green flame and helps me spot stuff in dungeons, delves, the overland, heck anywhere there is a chest I can pick. But it is very nice in dark dungeons, or any place where something obscures the chests. For example I did a public dungeon in Grahtwood where every chest was wrapped up in foliage or tree roots… I would have missed half the chests if it weren’t for the flames.

A screenshot doesn’t do the skill justice because the blue/green flames move like the item is on fire. So it definitely catches my eye. In this screenshot I was showing my friend the range of the skill – I was at the edge of the range where the chest lit up for me (20m with 1 skill point invested).