ESO – Armory

Well it’s been a while. I’ve been playing ESO and FF14 of course, more ESO than FF14, but I’ve mostly been taking a break from blogging.

ESO

Things are going well in ESO.

My two friends and I decided to try our first Veteran Dungeon – Fungal Grotto 1. There’s a symmetry there; one friend and I tried when we were newbies – as I recall I was level 40 and she was just over 45 (high enough to get the Undaunted Pledge which is why we picked Fungal Grotto 1 in the first place) – and it was rough. We were attempting to duo and while we did finish we died a lot. Still it was extremely satisfying to beat the dungeon.

We thought it would be fitting to make our first Veteran Dungeon Fungal Grotto 1 as well. So we convinced our mutual friend and dove in. It went pretty well minus a few deaths at the boss – in Vet mode the boss AoE attack does a huge amount of damage, and my friends didn’t always dodge roll. I was a tank and had twice their health, but also moved out of the way. We did finish up and it went reasonably smooth overall.

We also tried a few DLC dungeons – Moongrave Fane and Lair of Maarselok. I picked those because I wanted the 3rd wing to my Hall of the Lunar Champion. 🙂 One thing nice about tanking is I survived essentially everything and that meant the group did too. Even if I was the only at various times and had to combat res if I could get ~6 seconds away from fighting.

This could also mean I need to practice tanking more, haha.

Armory

ESO introduced a quality-of-life item, the Armory. This lets you save and reload a build, which is really handy. While you could always change up your char by a respec of attributes, skills/morphs, and champion points, the Armory lets you save the results and quickly switch back and forth… without spending in game gold.

It saves your current attributes, skills/morphs, champion points, gear, “disease” (i.e. vampire or werewolf), quick slots… but oddly enough not the mundus stone.

Still, the Armory is fantastic. Loading an empty build clears everything out, which let me more efficiently spend my skill points. And the save/load function makes it easy to add a second build to characters, so my main can now heal and tank (OK I bought a 3rd slot), my tank can have a dps build and quest a bit faster, etc.

FF14

So what about FF14? Well I’m still pursuing that ideal balance of (attempting to) play multiple MMOs. I have not bought Endwalker, mostly because I’m not there in the main story yet! But I will.

In the meantime while I sort that playtime balance issue, I’m considering transferring to Cactuar, to be able to join the Super Dungeon Friends (advertised here again).

I know that cross-DC play is coming to FF14, but the timeline seems murky/vague. So I’ll see what it takes (how much it costs) and if it is even possible given crowds and queues due to Endwalker.

Hey, it’s a good problem for a game to have!