A few weeks/months ago, I was shopping around for 3rd, 4th, and 5th guilds to join. ESO let’s you join 5, no reason to not do it!
Lots of players join a trading guild, one that is dedicated to obtaining/maintaining a public trader – the kind that sells stuff to other players not in your guild. (Every guild lets you sell stuff to other guild members. This system works differently than every other MMO, except EVE Online come to think of it, so it isn’t intuitive).
I however, was after more chances to do vet content.
So I joined more guilds, and ironically, my own guild reorganized a bit, and now I’m in 3 “core” groups there. The original guild divided into a training guild, a hardcore trials guild, 3 social guilds, and a trading guild.
As it happens I’m in the training guild and one of the social guilds, and was generally keeping an eye on the schedule and signing up for “open” runs. Those are runs of trials which take anybody that qualifies (discretion of raid leader to set the requirements, typically requesting supports that can use certain set combos, dps that can parse certain minimums, or sometimes dps that can bring support sets like elemental catalyst, zenkosh, brittle, etc.)
Open runs are fine and all, but occur ad hoc so it is tricky to plan around doing them. Core runs are ones with a fixed roster and schedule – much better. If you can get into one.
The guild leader has been bugging people to offer more trials and more cores and it has paid off, enough players (knowledgeable, experienced at the trial they are running) have stepped up to offer core runs at various levels, and I joined 3 of them.
One is called “minions” and we are warming up with the Craglorn hard modes (Sanctum Ophidia, Aetherian Archive, Hel Ra Citadel) and then moving to progging vet Rockgrove.
One is called “sload-slotters” and we are warming up with Cloudrest +1 before moving to +2/+3 and then veteran Cloudrest.
One is called “scoundrels of tamriel” and that one picks a different trial every week, from Maw of Lorkhaj on (skipping the Craglorn ones since those were the original end-game and to get into Scoundrels one qualifier is having completed the Craglorn hardmodes).
I’m a fill in a 4th core, on a discord server that isn’t a guild, the ERR server. That one started with a small group that was running vet Sunspire, and I joined in to heal once or twice, and stayed around. That was months ago, now the server has exploded and runs a core vet Cloudrest, vet Sunspire, and usually one other trial a week. Membership is now about 300 players, discord admins are very active filling in all sorts of great info channels, organized events, and so on.
Anyway, the nice part of all of this is that I can actually play less – being in a few cores with a regular schedule (ok, for the next few weeks things are off due to holidays) means I don’t have to search every day for trials, I know I can do 2 to 4 a week. So on the off-days, or even before/after core days, I can jump on and pick something to do for an hour or so: writs/crafting and survey reports, dungeons achievements with my friends, storyline stuff (zone quests), overland exploration (delves, area quests), antiquities and lead farming, etc.
I’d like to get back to working through the overland content with my main, do a random dungeon or two on some alts (for the transmute crystals), and then play some other games so I don’t burn out. 🙂
MMO Juggler 