Big grab bag of ESO stuff from the weekend

9 Oct 2019

Bank is at 1.1M gold. I have another 1.2 to 2.4M gold on my 12 alts, who carry 100-200K gold each. I bank 100K when a toon goes over 200K. Almost all of my gold now comes from selling writs and doing crafting dailies. Toon 10 is at lvl 46; toon 11 is at 29; toon 12 is at 32, and I have no skill binds in site. Toons 1-9 are lvl 50.

Banked levelling sets for magicka and stamina every 10 levels works great, until I screw up and research a piece on the character which stores those pieces. Looks like when I transfer them from inventory to bank and back to bank again that the lock goes off, and I have to remember to re-lock them so they will not show up for deconstruction or research.

Research is going fine on all toons now. Big problem with researching random drops is there is no rhyme or reason to what you find. You may say have 6 traits researched on cloth gloves, and maybe 2 traits researched on cloth chest pieces. I try to pick traits high in the list (from top to bottom, sturdy/powered is top) with low research times.

There was a problem with having too many pieces of the same slot and trait. The way I figured this out was to load up each toon, grab researchable pieces without repeats from the bank. As you go down a roster of 12 toons, all of the training gear gets gobbled up in their inventories, and you are left with the duplicates to deconstruct.

I am thinking it might be sane at this point to craft and finish out entire trait lines so that I can deconstruct anything from that completed line.

I got 2 writs from my 12 toons doing crafting dailies today, and those sell from 1-6K or so for purple, and the yellow writs go for 25K+. Every day is a day at the lottery for this. Pulling down 5K ish per toon per day. Champion level with 9 lvl 50s is now 493.

Much of the chest stuff I get as I do my surveys is no longer worth more than 1000g, and I have seen prices drop on that stuff since summer. Not sure whether it is a market glut, or lack of demand (kids back in school). I think the way to make money there is look for what overland end game sets Alcast calls for, then go run chests in that zone to get a good stock of that for sale.

There was a dragon event this week, but I am so wrapped up in my own projects I did not do much with that. Also there seems to be a whole world of housing that people spend lots of time in.

I am starting to get into some materials binds for the level 50 stuff. I suppose this is due to many toons hitting 50 and wanting 160 gear. The good news is the raw bulk mats are cheap.

I am thinking about how far down the research tree I want to take my toons on jewelry crafting. I do arcane, healthy, robust, protective, and infused. Beyond that it gets expensive. Not sure if it is worth it. Still working on my 9th trait for jewelry crafting on my main, and am still wrapping up the 9th trait in blacksmithing/clothing. It is bizarre when my main crafter has something complete, as typically these are on a 20-30 day cycle now.

I finally completed the recipe for psyjic ambrosia? which gives you XP, but needs some rare fish stuff. Looks like a 30min buff for 10% xp or so…probably a good gold sink. I seem to have a few XP scrolls in the bank yet, and all boosting Xp does is mean I complete less of a zone before I ding 50, and likely I still need those skill points. Maybe I should try fishing. Not sure. Depends on if I can watch a movie on Netflix or something while doing it. Not sure if the time spent fishing is saved by faster levelling. Probably not. If I had a 2yr old kid, I could set them up fishing, but it will be a while before grandkids come off the line.

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15 Oct 2019

11/12 characters are 50 now. My last toon to level up is at 34, magicka Dragonknight. Just one more toon to 50 and I can then pick someone and do them up right. Champion level is 501 now.

Doing the daily craft missions today, and I got 6 writs. This is about double the yield of what I had before I started all of the researching on all of the alts.

I read the guild MOTD asking for gold help on buying a good trade server. I felt bad because I have been a bit of a gaming hermit recently, and I had missed that MOTD for so long. Dumped 100K gold into the guild bank to make up for it. I do think the guild gets a cut from sales, which is why some of the bigger trading guilds either have a weekly fee or minimum sales. For this reason I tend to put all of the writs I am selling on the OTG trading server, as those move fast and move for a lot of money, and I figured that would also help out.

Researching is a bit squirrely. Without craftstore I would be lost. What a great addon. I try to research items in the top 5 list if I can, with the hope that at some point I can grind up entire lines of drops. My present method is to go down my alt list and grab one research item per armor/weapon slot until everyone is filled with everything they can research. I then grind up the rest.

I moved to dumping most of the permanent stuff I was leaving in the bank like recipies, siege, crown items onto an alt to maximize bank slots. During the week everything comes off the alts and into a common bank, and I really only have time to log on once per day per toon and do the dailies and set up research.

All 12 of my toons now have 50 in clothing, blacksmithing, and woodworking, and provisioning. 6 of them have 50 enchanting and jewelry crafting. Alchemy is also around 6 toons at 50. They all have maxed out research bonus too, and typical research times are 1-10days now. I will scroll through the entire profession line to find the shortest research time.

12 Nov 2019

I now have 14 level 50s. I can do 4 more and I will be capped.

The extended Halloween event really helped a great deal. That witches cauldron with the 100% xp boost for 2hrs certainly helped a lot. With the Champion point rest bonus and that buff, I was getting around 1.5 Champion levels per day across all of my toons just doing crafting dailies. This took me to level 557 this weekend. My army of alts now on its own is able to deplete the entire rest bonus for Champion points just doing dailies.

I think I have a better logistical system for dealing with research across so many alts. I have been pecking away at this problem for quite a while now. My character loading screen is in order of oldest character is at the top of the list. Thus the older characters need less research, and the bottom of the list newer characters need far more.

So what I do now is run in either weekend mode or weekday mode. On weekdays I only have time to do the crafting dailies. On weekends I have time to go out and level up a character or do PvP or run instances etc.

I ‘pack up’ for the weekends by taking all of the research items out of the bank and putting them into alts. I have an inventory mod that puts a magnifying glass icon next to items that alt can research, which is extremely helpful. I just start at the top of the list, and pull out all items that each character can research, without regard for duplicates (that takes too long). Then I log out, and repeat on a younger toon lower in the list. Thus all of the research items get banked by characters that actually need to research it, and I can empty out the bank and clear up the inventory of the youngest character I am running up. Any time I research with a character, I will check to see if those magnifying glasses go away on items in that character’s inventory, and dump the duplicates back into the bank. Items then flow from the top of the list to the bottom of the list.

To unpack for weekdays I just empty out all research items to the bank, starting at the top of the order alt, and working down until I have around 400/480 items in the bank. All characters can then research off of that common pot in the bank, and typically there are lots of duplicates there that get winnowed down by the week. Depending on timers, I can knock that 400 item bank down to around 200 by the time the weekend hits, and I can then replenish that 200.

Now as I pack up and I get to the last alt in the list, I will see some items which I do not need to research. Those items have been picked through by the entire roster, and they are good to grind up for advancement in clothing, woodworking, blacksmithing. If that toon is maxed out, I just bank them on my main crafter who has almost every trait known and is down to just researching nirnhorned stuff for blacksmithing and clothing. On weekends this crafter main holds those items to free up the space for the low level I am running. On weekdays I unpack that to the bank so the low level alt can research them and knock the number down. I never bank more than 100 or so of those.

Occasionally I will hit spots where a character can not research anything, and I have unpacked fully. At this point I hop onto my crafting main and use the Craft Store mod. I can check that for the character in question and craft one of each of the items that toon needs up to around 20 or so. I dump them into the bank, and I know they will at least be used by that one toon, and probably hit up by everyone else in the roster.

For a while I was researching things from the top of the trait list down. I have abandoned that, and just scroll across a profession for the shortest research time item, regardless of where it is in the list. This depletes stock and uses up the stuff I find, rather than force me to craft specific items. There are so many toons and so many traits that I sustain it best by trying to use what I find to the biggest extent possible.

All the CP160 stuff I find I check first with my guild store toon to see if they are valuable. At this point Master Merchant needs to list it around 2K gold or higher with multiple instances listed for me to bother trying to sell it. Gear moves slowly, and I have so many crafting writs up there that I have maxed out 4 guilds worth of guild store on the writs. Writs move much faster, and are worth selling even at 1K gold since they turn over fast. If those items are not worth much, I will then mainly use them to level up crafting skills on my lowest alt. The alt as it runs around finds stuff below CP160 which offers little crafting experience, and is better to grind up on research.

I am at the 5-10day research time now for most of my alts, so I am getting to the point where I should just load up each character with exactly the items they need, and just do the usual live off the land stuff for the newer alts who have many items to research.

Gold wise I am now around 2.5M in the bank, and 1.4-2.8M gold on my alts. And this is after I just splurged big time on jewelry for research, buying jewelry for traits like harmony that were running under 10K gold per item. Each toon is loaded up with a few jewelry items so that I do not have to buy anything during the week and can immediately research the next one.

It takes me a little over 1hr in the morning to cycle through all 14 toons. I do the dailies, post research, dump stuff to the bank, get out recipes from the bank, keep my guild stores full, and do riding training. I do this in the morning, then spend the nights with my wife watching TV, hitting the gym, walking the dogs, that sort of thing.

Upgrade materials are flowing off of this army. During the week I bank on my Nightblade all of the surveys and treasure maps. On Fridays (which I have off), I take that massive pile of surveys and go do them. I will pop treasure chests I find along the way with force locks. And this keeps pace with the material outflow from crafting. Problems arise when I set up toons in level 50 gear, which tends to knock holes in my leather and cloth supplies, and I buy in bulk from the guild store. Note that some unethical tricky people will post 100 stacks of Ancestor silk, and if you are rapidly buying, the price may look competitive with a 200 stack, but it really is double. Vivec City vendors seem to have the most supplies on hand, but I can when I run the surveys just pop into guild stores in other places on my nightblade and stock up for those sets.

Gear level sets for me are every 10 levels and work like this

Magicka Set (magicka traits, increase magic damage jewelry, flame enchant, weapon damage ench)
-Shacklebreaker chest, legs, belt, gloves, boots (Vvardenfall)
-Innate Axiom head and shoulders (Clockwork City)
-Julianos weapons and jewelry (Wroth) inferno staff and resto staff

Stamina set (stamina traits, increase weapon dmg jewelry, poison main, wpn dmg offhand)
-Shacklebreaker chest, legs, belt, gloves, boots
-Mechanical Acuity head and shoulders (clockwork city)
-Hundings weapons and jewelery (Reapers) Typically use 2h axe and bow

These sets work great and seem to give a nice mix of DPS stats for levelling up. I will do a yellow set of such at 50 except jewelry for a fresh 50. Doing a CP160 piece is around 100-200 resources, and this will knock down my piles of stock.

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Some math on champions levels. Basic data

559 34%, 20, 6
560 92, 79, 65, 51, 37, 24, 10, 6, 2
561 99, 95, 93

I started this morning with Champion Points (CP) = 559, and needed 34% to level. I ran 9 characters through, all of which had Witches Cauldron buff, which gives +100% xp. Also those 9 had the rest bonus experience. They did 7 daily quests each, and netted 13.78% xp per character. I then had a clear 3 that had no rest bonus, but still had the cauldron buff, getting 3% xp per character for the same 7 daily crafting quests.

Math goes like this

x * (2+y) = 13.78
x*(2) = 3

Where x is the base XP for 7 daily crafting quests (in percent) without the cauldron buff running. From the second equation, I was getting 1.5% per character with no rest bonus.

If I then solve for y, I get y = 7.2

So think of it like this

XP = Base XP * (100% + bonus percent)

The scroll was 100%, and by comparison, that rest bonus was over 700%.

From this comes the optimal strategy of advancing champion points and levelling alts- run out your rest bonus on the champions, then level up your alt. That daily rest bonus is enormous, and your gains really fall off past that.

Now comes the fun part. From the data I get around 125% of a level in rest bonus. Maybe this is reduced with level, but I will assume not for the following. How many alts with no buffs would it take to kill the daily rest bonus?

The XP per toon rested then is XP = x *(1+7.19) = 12.3%
And it would take 125/12.3 = 10.2 toons, call it 11 alts to burn it per day.

So if you push alts to 50 until you have around 11, those then should be able to burn the rest bonus down even without buffs. Note that having something like the Witch’s Cauldron buff only burns down the bonus in fewer alts. And once you have 11 alts you can go full time into levelling the next alt and be reassured your rest bonus will be burnt down daily by your 11 maxed out toons. Before you get to 11, you probably would want to run one of those maxed out guys a little to run down the bonus. I am not sure how much bonus gets banked either. If it all rolls over with no cap, then there is no rush to do anything.

I got 141% of a level today (1.4 levels). How many CP levels would I get with a maxed out alt army of 18 with no buffs?

Roughly 10 of them burn down the 125%. The other 8 would then yield 8*1.5 = 12% = 137% of a level. I am beating that now because I have the Cauldron buff, and it only took 9 to burn down the rest bonus, and I had 5 doing 3% each for another 15% to get me to 140%.

Now here is the cool thing. If you have Witch’s Cauldron running, that was a 2 hour 100% xp buff. It takes me around 5 minutes per toon to log on, get the daily crafting writs, do them, train riding, muck around in skills and inventory, then switch to the next. So that 2hr buff on these characters that only log in to do dailies is worth around 24 days of dailies, and this is super high yield of xp for that buff. If there is any kind of event that grants you an xp bonus buff that persists after log off, it is worth it to make sure your whole alt army gets it.

Here is the other fun thing I have learned about leveling up via crafting dailies- I can load up the bar with absolute junk skills, the kind of stuff which would be useless for XP grinding. So for instance on a magicka character, I typically cap destruction staff early. I can then load up the bar with untrained stuff on each of the 3 main class lines until those cap. As they cap, I can then fill that bar with resto staff skills, and those then cap. Right now I have a toon with all 5 resto skills leveling up on the bar via crafting dailies, and resto is advancing fast to the cap. Once resto is done, all the lines that can advance via xp are done, and I can do stuff like put on world, armor, guild skills, or alliance skills. So instead of having to go out with a partial bar with maybe 2 decent skills and 3 useless ones just carried for advancement, I can park this toon in town and have the crafting dailies advance that stuff.

My very first character, a magicka Templar, I spent quite a long time doing the full quest line all the way through the AD, and most of the way through the rest of the alliances. Skill lines capped and I have almost all of what I could advance completed except for new DLC content. These newer toons are hitting 50 in an intensive weekend of play or so, and over a month or so with just daily log ins of 5 min, I will cap out most of the lines that would have been painful to do by questing. Also all of that low riding skill annoyance is not a factor since all I have to do is ride around Vivec city, and if I just passively level them I can eventually roll out a top end riding skill character with all lines maxed. My Necromancer which I began in August has around 30 days left to cap riding

Summary

  • rest bonus for champion points is around 700%, capped around 125% of a level per day
  • make a point of grinding that off. 11 alts doing all 7 dailies will accomplish that.
  • you can by daily crafting advance skill lines and riding in a painless fashion

More bloggy. 15 now are at 50. The latest is “Hellpigg” the stamina Orc Necromancer.

Hellpigg was a fun trip up. This time I went with 2H, which paired nicely with Necromancer. Charge with Stampede, and heavy weave Ruinous Scythe. Change position to maneuver them into the DoT field from Stampede, and charge the stand off ranged casters/archers, dragging the melee to them. Ruinous Scythe heals you based on the number hit, and this replaces the usual Brawler (AOE, damage shield per hit) as your level up skill. Hellpigg also had the sprint passives, and champ bonuses. I used the stat recovery crown drink with this alt, and was able to sprint huge sections of delves with no real stamina drop. So sprint between fights, charge to close, then mow them down. That left 3 slots and an ultimate to skill up the rest.

Soul magic levels up on main story completion, and you get rank 5 around the time you down the big bad guy, which then lets you have passives to generate soul shards. I had around 10 stacks of 200 soul shards to charge up, so this with an AOE build was good.

My training gear is solid, and I was bumping up the weapons to gold quality since I am swimming in resources now. This then let me do all the public dungeons in the 3 alliances solo, which together with the main story completion gave Hellpigg quite a bit of skill points by the time he was 50. I got to Psijic order rank 2 by the time he dinged, and I went through 4 crown xp scrolls- 3 from the daily reward we had a few days ago, and the one you get at 49.

Alcast has a bunch of stamina Necromancer guides, all which like Orc for the role:

  1. PvE DW/Bow ‘Reaper’
  2. PvE 2H/Bow ‘Cleave’
  3. PvE Bow/Bow ‘Blight’
  4. PvP 2H/1+S ‘Bloodrush’
  5. PvP 1+S/2H ‘Bonecrusher’

The ‘Reaper’ build is the PvE meta, and there are a couple of brawler type PvP variants, so this character looks like a good all around melee type to play with. Also Necromancer has a lot of stamina friendly skills that make it play different than other stamina builds.

With the scrolls and training gear, I was able to hit around 30 before Ruinous Scythe and Stampede capped on their morphs, and at that point I switched to bow. I ran all the way up to 30 with Arrow Barrage on slot 5, which got me high enough so that I could move to Acid Spray and level up a whole slew of other skills. I only bothered with one bar the whole trip up…it is that strong. Heavy weaving with the crown stat recovery potion worked fine, with only a couple of abilities left to deal with. I have become a much better bowman doing this sort fo thing, opening with a heavy pull, and slightly moving back while heavy weaving the next shot. This slight kite means all of the stuff on the ground lies before you, the melee stuff never quite reaches you, and when they wind up for stunning abilities they never land because you are out of range, and the ranged characters have to get out from behind their spread position into a line to close the distance. It all drops fast.

Bosses involve hitting some of the other abilities on your bar other than Acid Spray, and dodge rolling through their heavy incoming attacks to resume the assault from the back. Or you can circle strafe with heavy weaving. Necromancer has a few abilities that help with survival. I could handle bosses with the bow, although 2H was way safer. I could clear public dungeons, but I could not solo world bosses with my single skill and kiting technique, but I could make short work of delves and solo them. I am using more healing pots now and pop one when stam is low without a thought. This guy killed stuff so fast that I just bowed down everything in the dungeon as I went.

Alt army logistics is the usual with maybe a few refinements. I no longer bother trying to sell equipment- I have inventory with writs and can not move them all on the 4 trade guilds I am in. My 14th toon was not yet capped on Blacksmithing, so I use that character to filter out the research materials. Since that toon is young, most of what it needs to research is still wide open. So I switch to that toon, deconstruct everything that it does not need to research, then store that on another character. I also before the weekend run go from alt 1 to alt 14 in order pulling stuff from the bank each needs to research, and dump the last alts stuff for research in the main bank. I am around CP=565 now.

The world was rather empty since everyone was doing the Undaunted weekend bonus, which meant I could clear the public dungeons with ease and no waits on most of the boss respawn that you face on a regular weekend.

Overall I like ‘Hellpigg’ and will let him bake in the daily writ grind for a month or two and come back to him later when he has his skill lines maxed and put him in a meta build. I also went with the tubby model and he looks like he just hit a buffet table. Great fun!

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25Nov2019

Alt number 16 arrived. Breton, Magicka, Nighblade.

I was impressed by Alcast’s Leech build for PvP, in particular the video in the guide. Because it is magicka based in a sustain race like Breton, you can endlessly spam shadowy cloak and set the terms of your engagement. The gear for the build seems easy to get, with an overland set and a crafted set.

Seems like most of the Alcast recommendations involve Orcs for stamina, Bretons for magicka.

I tried to be clever naming this one. I D Claire was taken. ID Claire was taken. I gave up and went with I Declare. Should have done I Dee Claire. Bet that was taken. Ugh. Naming is so painful.

Early on the combination of Lotus Fan and Unstable Wall of the Elements works great for most pack grinding. Both apply AOE dots, and I was filling with lightweaving on swallow soul. Maybe I should have gone with Elemental Blockade because the other wall always blows up after they are all dead. I would fan to the target, drop the unstable wall, then lightweave swallow soul to retain life, and dodge roll to make sure they stayed in the wall. Big packs I would dodge roll then hit a potion and whittle them down.

I decided to go vampire for the no armor penalty in stealth ability and the recovery. I had no problem getting bit. I ran to Bangkorai, and as I ran up to the altar, some guy saw me and bit me free of charge. I was going to pay 5K gold for it, and he wouldn’t take it. He bit me after I did a zone request. Some other dude said he would bite me for free if I could correctly tell him the origin of vampires. I went to Vlad the impaler, and the original Dracula, and he corrected me telling me it was some football players mother.

It took me to my mid 30s to get Vampire to 10. I use the Accelerating Drain morph, Elusive Mist morph, and Devouring Swarm Morph. These are mostly useless for pack grinding, except the ultimate is good for bosses, and mist helps you get out of dodge when you get dismounted.

When I capped out Unstable Wall and Lotus fan, I switched to Impulse/Pulsar, Shadowy Disguise, and Concealed Weapon. I could sneak at speed to a pack and pulsar grind it down, but it was pretty risky in public dungeons. I could barely stay alive if I added a back bar with single target DoTs and Rapid Regeneration from resto. This class is way more fragile than the usual stamina 2H or bow build, and I put off running public dungeons until later.

I like shadowy disguise and concealed weapon for delves, since you can sneak at hyperspeed, and spam cloak to get past most enemies, and open on singles for a big hit with concealed. For packs I would open with concealed on the problem one.

Here are my takes on the build. For PvE grinding, and for PvP. I will need around 240 skill points to pull this off, so there is a bunch of PvE grinding to go. I think Fan, Sap Essence, and lightweave Pulsar would do it for the grind, with tossing in Degeneration and Crippling grasp for bosses. Harness Magicka before switching to the main bar for the open should let me survive packs.

For PvP I dump Lotus Fan because that puts me in melee, and instead add Crippling Grasp as a strong single target DoT. That, Swallow Soul, and Degeneration on an enemy debuffed by Elemental Drain and with Merciless Resolve as a Finisher, I think I can get a lot of pressure. Backbar is Hysteria/Shooting Star from stealth/invis, with some heal and perhaps shield. Not sure whether or not Harness Magicka is better on back bar here.

I was running crown restoring drinks, and between that, vampire, and Breton I could light weave all day long with no issues. Stamina is just there for dodging and sprinting and the occasional block. It is nice to be able to dodge roll and sprint as much as I want without worry about resources for the fight. I am only carrying the vampire passives of supernatural recovery, undeath, unnatural resistance, and dark stalker.

Right now at 41, Pulsar, Shadowy Disguise, and Concealed weapon is making short work of delves and the usual skill grind. I have been popping chests to up Legerdemain, and am around 5 right now there. I probably will do Dark Brotherhood to 7 to get Shadow Rider, and steal everything on those missions I can to up Legerdemain. With this character, I ran the main story until I got Soul Magic 5, then did the unlock the world, and am now doing the Psyjic Order/Delves, Skyshards/lore books with occasional world boss run as well as dolmens if they are up when I run by. I am in Bankorai on the staff quest at the moment with Mages guild around 8.

I have started to really get better as a player with blocking, and dodging and bar swapping. I really do not think about dodge rolling anymore…if I want to go there, I just roll there. I am getting better at spotting the incoming heavies and either blocking them or rolling them. Champion Points are at 575, and gold is around 2.5M in the bank. Most toons are in the 21 day research range on woodworking, with around 5-10days on other stuff, and I am not going to go nuts on Jewelry with these alts, or even bother with nirnhorned. I am around 4 guilds worth of writs for sale on the market now, and this alt should stabilize that set of sales. I only spot check for expensive CP160 point gear now, and grind the rest up. Son comes home for Thanksgiving Tues night, so we might play some, but I doubt it since he is only bringing his laptop home.

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2 Dec 2019

I completed alt 17, and started my final alt (18) this weekend.

My 17th alt is “I Declare” a female stamina Orc Warden. I tried “I D Claire” and it was taken. “ID Claire” was also taken. Maybe had I done “Eyed D Claire” it would have been a play on it, but I just gave up and went with the regular boring name.

Warden is great for solo, as it has a number of healing skills and defensive skills. The bear is also a nice distraction. I ran this character to unlocking the Cold Harbor zone, then did the public dungeons before starting the Psyjic order grind. She could blast packs in those dungeons with ease.

I tried leveling up bow for this toon. Subterranean assault + Acid Spray is a lethal combo. Open with sub, then heavy weave an acid spray and you blast the pack. You can go Arrow Barrage + Soul Splitting Trap (from soul magic) until you unlock Acid Spray and take down packs, but I just opted to load up the bar with bow skills until I unlocked Acid Spray. Cutting dive as your anytime skill against singles is strong, but probably not worth carrying once you get Acid Spray. Bull Netch is amazing, helping with stam return and giving buffs, and I used drinks for stamina recovery while levelling. Green Lotus and Bull Netch gives you double buffs and health return from light/heavy. Soothing Spores is a nice general stamina based heal from your class line, useable on any bar. Ice Fortress is a strong defensive buff giving Major Resolve and Minor Protection. Shimmering Shield is projectile defense from Magicka cost, and situationally useful. You do not need Momentum and its morphs in this build as you have Bull Netch and other sources of healing. I would instead pick up Shuffle from Medium armor for the snare removal and 25% reduction of AOE.

One really good tactic is a simple back step with another Subterranean Assault, or opening with Acid Spray and casting Sub as you backpeddle. The Acid Spray aggros the pack, which then narrows into a line which your Sub can destroy easily. Sub does not go that wide so retreating strings them out. A dodge roll back will also work to buy your space and lower damage.

By level 45 I had bow capped at 50, and swapped to 2H. Stampede + Brawler is fantastic as ever, with all other skills being gravy. It is a fun combo, and I found myself engaging packs I could skip just because I could close so quickly and destroy them so quickly that it was better doing full clears. There is a lot less finesse than the Sub + Acid combo, too.

Alt 18 is a female Wood Elf stamina Nightblade, going for the classic PvP bow build for non snipe engagements. She is at 7, which sort of stinks. I did get to 5 in Summerset and could not do the certification (you must be 6 to certify for Jewelry Crafting and you can do writs then). I leveled her up some and parked her in Vivec City for the week to do crafting dailies.

Logistics of crafting is harder than ever, particularly with the research. I finally discovered the sorting filters for the inventory addon I use. You can sort by weapon, weapon sub type, and then click the trait arrow at the top to list the researchable items. So if I dump all the researcables in the bank, then withdraw just 1 of each that I need, I have no redundant items and can load up the toon with what they need. Sure beats scrolling through hundreds of items and going back and forth between deposit and withdraw to figure out what I have. As some of these people get advanced in things like woodworking, I need to craft specific items for them to continue the research.

I have 120 writs for sale on the 4 trading guild stores, and they are moving slower now. I have around 10 left in inventory, so it seems like I am now generating them faster than I sell them. Some of the lower quality ones do not move fast at all, and I do not bother posting less than 1000g items. As more of this alt army complete research, I suppose I will see more yellow quality stuff and I will be able to post higher value items in those 120 slots of guild store. Perhaps I will actually do the lower quality writs myself on my crafting main.

I will need to do another jewelry bulk buy for toons 12-18 of the higher traits like harmony. I do not bother with triune, that stuff is too expensive. Maybe there will be deals. Protective is not too bad. Infused I naturally get by popping Psyjic chests and dailies. So I get 4 traits pretty much off the land (arcane, health, robust, and infused) and the other 5 cost me gold.

Some of my higher toons now have 8 slots in woodworking, blacksmithing, and clothing. I am not sure whether or not it is worth it to go for nirnhorned on the alts. Sure is expensive. My main toon completed Jewelry and Woodworking, and has around 5 items left of the Nirnhorned trait to complete clothing and blacksmithing. That is looking like maybe a Jan-Feb timetable.

Bank balance is around 2.8M gold with 18 alts running around with 100-200K gold each. The bank dips when I create a new alt because I blow 300K on it for bag slots straight away.

I have to streamline my morning routine of horse training, crafting and research. That 1hr has gone to around 1hr20min, so I need to not putter around as much and just get the research loaded, and get the crafts done with the horse training, and not fuss around in inventory or skills menus so much. I might have to really load up a lot of researchable materials on each toon so that there is no delay. Loading time is the biggest annoyance, and it stinks having to log over to my main crafter to make a researchable. Buying stuff from guild stores is slow…seems to never arrive via mail until I log to another toon, forcing a second log. So I need to have research lined up to knock down the time to cycle through people.

I banked surveys/treasure maps all weekend and ran them on Sunday. Took me around 2hrs to do those surveys on Sunday. The tough part is the double survey in the same spot. You have to run off the radar map so the marked survey is off screen then come back. Or you can log out and back. Typically I run because that is faster, and I usually try to grab a treasure chest in the process.

Since I am really not crafting much now, with only 3 toons left to put in lvl 50 gear, the upgradeable materials are starting to rise. Alt army equals surveys equals huge mass amounts of raw mats to process and equals upgrade mats. This was the real long game move with the alt army, trying to have enough raw mats and gold coming in to handle end game upgrades of dungeon drop gear.

I dinged 585 Champion level today, which means I can have a 120 line and a 75 line in the same color. I have been able to do 75/75/30 for inspiration since 540CP. 630CP I can have a 30pt, 75pt and 120 in the same color. At 720CP I can have two 120 point skills in the same color.

The grand scheme after I get this last one up, is to then put each in a PvP spec and take them to Cyrodiil. I am not going to fuss over gear so much while I do this as long as they can function somewhat in the crafted sets I supply. Typically for stamina I do 5pc Shacklebreaker, 5pc Hunding, and 2pc Mechanical Acuity. For magicka I do 5pc Shacklebreaker, 5pc Julianos, and 2pc Innate Axiom. These give raw stats which fuel power, and are not really gimmick sets that can unbalance things. The goal will be to get people in decent specs, go out, find the Zerg, and have some fun in strategic PvP. If I can get contribution to the 30day campaign, this will equal mats to transmute traits on ideal gear. The first part of having raw upgrade mats is coming to a close, but I need transmute mats now.

CPs are coming in at 1-2 per day of dailies. This is all automatic with hardly any grinding. That adds up over a week.

Son comes back for Christmas Break in a few weeks and I hope to be in PvP mode for then. Should be fun. I think he might want to do Path of Exile though, since we have been away for a couple seasons now.

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9Dec2019

I did it. 18 level 50s. What a journey that was.

I made a spreadsheet of who is where. So for instance I have a column for number of jewelry crafting traits researched. And who is storing the lvl 50 drops. And who is storing the crafted gear. And who is presently grinding jewelry, enchanting, woodworking, blacksmithing, and clothing. It is useful. It gives me something to look at on loading screens.

The last character was Wood Elf (Bosmer) female stamina Nightblade “Limping Bird”. I think for a stam character, it is better to go with 2H first until you ding 50 in that, then switch to bow as bow is a late bloomer and requires more skillpoints. Brawler and stampede are simple and highly effective for the early levels. Once acid spray is maximum rank, you can easily go through most delves and dolmen, although the latter can be tricky. Rather than craft level 50 gear, I just swapped the 30 gear with the other stamina character in 40 gear. It is all training gear, so as they do crafting dailies, the bonuses work just fine. In fact, had I been thinking, I would have just worn the training sets for completed characters rather than storing it.

So the question became “What do I do now”? And the answer is Cyrodiil. I have a Nightblade sniper that works great, and I have a werewolf Templar that is fine for Imperial city. So what was next?

What I chose was my female Argonian magicka Templar “Eggsplain”. The idea here is I would make a healer type so I could learn dungeons, and learn Cyrodiil, and Templar is the meta for healer, and Argonian is solid for that meta. So this is a good solid toon to invest some time and work in.

I went to Alcast and pulled up all of the magicka Templar guides- Beamplar, Reliever, Blazeplar, Ritualist, Guardplar, and Lightbringer which is the healing Cyrodiil build. Phase 1 is to rack up the skill points to pull off the build. Now I had completed much of the world before DLC with this character, one of my originals, who went through both a name and race change to its present incarnation. So I put every single skill and morph used in all those guides, then visited the respecification stone in Grahtwood. I went through each morph to see what I had learned and what I needed to learn, and I made a list. I then put those morphs into the skill set, some of them requiring 2 morphs. And with that, constructed this ESO build of all of what I needed. All you really need is puncturing sweep to do most content, so I could level up all the other morphs as I went.

I also needed to get Psijic Order to 10, so I picked up from there. I was Psijic Order 5, and most of the world is explored. I was able to knock the whole line out on the weekend.

So here were some of the weird morphs I ran with, and my impressions.

  • Vampires Bane, a single target DoT with major prophecy buff on activation. This is a little extra pressure on a single target, and the prophecy buff makes jabs hit harder.

  • Living Dark, a yellow black bubble that heals you when you are attacked. This worked great with jabs, since jabs and bubble heal. It is good to run into packs with.

  • Wall of Elements, I needed both morphs, ran up blockade first. It is just a little more AOE pressure, I would only bother on boss packs.

  • Elemental Drain, 0 magicka to cast, gives you magicka steal and lowers spell resistance, with long range and does not agro. I would do this on approach, and it helped with the magicka burn of jabs.

  • Radiant Magelight, reveals stealthers on activation (for PvP) and gives you major prophecy (crit rating) while slotted. Sort of like perma buff of vampire’s bane.

  • Degeneration, single target chaos DoT with major sorcery (spell damage 20%) buff on activation- really powered up jabs like crazy, definitely a second move after Elemental Drain.

  • Elemental Weapon, that weird spammer from Psijic, buffs next light attack. I suppose this is a ranged attack spammer, not really used that much in a jabs build.

And it is smell-the-roses time. I feel no burning hurry to grind out one toon and move manically to the next. I would herb. Sometimes I would move from A to B by sprinting, gathering as I go. I am not running XP scrolls, so I can fart around waiting on Dolmen to respawn. It is just fun.

I went up to the public dungeon ‘Karnwasten’ in Summerset as my last play on Sunday. I got all the way to the first boss, and it was dead. Another player was there, and we were waiting on the timer. He has the light blue tag indicating he is in one of my guilds, and he asked me if I wanted to run bosses. Sure! I give him an invite, the boss spawns, and he goes werewolf. Oh what a ride that was. He was running top speed between packs of enemies. I know this well, since I played werewolf before. And I was just biting jab spamming it. It all died in droves super fast, we did a full clear in about 15 minutes including the quests, and we complimented each other afterwards on the nice run.

For the week of dailies, I just loaded the back bar (resto staff) up with the one morph I had yet to do and the ultimate, and put on 4 of 1H+shield skills. Rather than use these to level, let the dailies grind up this stuff during the week.

I figure I will grind out the morphs I need and lines, then move towards getting the the overland gear for the PvP build, then just go out and either hit Cyrodiil or run instances as a healer to build gear. Once the morph grind is done, I can load up with optimum skills and do tough content. Running around in gimp builds sure builds up basics like weaving, blocking, interrupting and dodge rolling. Those core skills make anything you do play much stronger, and I have been doing these gimp builds for so long now I am getting better at basics.

I need overland Elsewhere Crafty Alfiq, which I can either chest run with my NB or just buy. And I need to run some veteran Cloudrest for the other stuff (Olorime), and I can use up some unused chest keys for the monster set. I might bother doing Dark Brotherhood and do thieving at the same time, so I can force chests. I am near Legerdemain 10 on this character.

Alt army and other notes-

Over 3M gold in bank now. Most toons have 7 JC traits done, and around the same for armor stuff. About half the toons are max on enchanting and JC level. Note you get inspiration from research too, so do not neglect research. Blacksmithing/Woodworking/Clothing grind is on alts 16 and 17. I get so much stuff from doing the dailies, both writs and surveys. 5 characters are done with riding research. 7 have maximum storage. The latter helps because I can then dump on them things to expand my bank to my alt army inventory.

I figure for sales, I will keep it writs only until the level grind on blacksmithing/woodworking/clothing is done. Then at that point I may price threshold sales higher. For instance I have a lot of writs that are only worth maybe 500g each, and I could perhaps deeply discount pieces of CP160 drops for a lot more than that. It is too much trying to sort out what to grind up and what to keep with research now.

I did a load up and grind move this weekend. All researchable traits were in the bank. Then I would log in on alt 1, and pick up one of each of the items I needed to research. As I went down to alt 18, everyone had one of each of the things available, and I could grind up duplicate items for inspiration on the big 3 crafts. This took a while, and the item filters for inventory helped quite a bit. But now on each parked character there is a number of items they need for a good month of research. Once the grind is done, I can load up my guild store character and scan a whole bank of stuff for the valuable items, then maybe cancel auctions and load up the high end stuff.

I am not getting any hate mail from the guilds for trader fees, so I think maybe my sales are good enough that I can live off the land and not pay fees, since guilds get a cut of sales. I will continue to dump gold to OTG if they need it.

2 Likes

So when do you send your ESO spreadsheet to ALL us ESO addicts, er, I mean players

1 Like

Hah! I can maybe upload or at least screen shot it. Ill try to remember :slight_smile:

Here is a snip of the spreadsheet I am using.

Number is the order in the load list. I can sort by this and change the order. As is right now they are in chronological order of creation (roughly). I am going to put Noto as my seller since I am running Eggsplain now for XP.

The k/b column- r means riding completely done on this character and above; b means maximum storage this character and above; k means this character is the one I am trying to get to 200 storage kits next.

JT is the number of jewelry traits researched on this toon

Race, Class, Sex, Level are all straightforward. Since it is a spreadsheet I can sort by any of these to see what I have.

SK is the free skill points left to spend. Sort of a gauge when I need to visit the shrine and free up more. I tend to open up a morph, put it onto the bar for dailies, and when it is capped open another. This process burns skillpoints but over time fills out the tree.

Ty is the type, magicka or stamina

Gr is the level of the gear this toon is wearing

Prov is the level of provisioning this character has. I tried to have several alts at each level to generate recipes at all levels for everyone. I dump the ones I know into the bank, and another toon learns them.

Notes are on the roles they do. Eggs is my sales toon, with the full addon package for guild stores right now. Toddie has the crafted levelling gear. Rotsmell is holding all the misellaneous stuff like siege equipment, soul gems, pieces of collectables. Dunewisp has level 50 bound items that I got in dungeons like monster gear that I might want to use on other toons. Slippery is presently grinding enchanting and jewelery to 50, and everyone above him is 50 in both. I Declare is grinding blacksmithing to 50, Kleengon is grinding clothing and woodworking to 50. Limping bird holds all of the recipes everyone else has learned.

Even though I am at a max 18 toons, I think if they add another class, they will increase the number of slots, so I am hanging onto all of the gear for levelling as I have space.

Just dinged Champion level 600. It took me 7 dailies on 15 alts to move from 600 to 601, so it is slower, but still at least one level a day (enlightened bonus running). I might take my extra crown XP scrolls and use one for each of the low rotation characters (a character that is not doing a major function in the note field, who just logs on to do dailies). That 2hrs or more of XP bonus means I will see that bonus apply to many many days of crafting dailies.

3.4M gold in the bank with 120 writs listed for sale at the moment, and a good 20 or so extra in my inventory.

I am getting ready to go out on Abutuyata, my Kajit NB and do the 49 surveys/treasure maps I accumulated from 3 days of crafting dailies on my 18 toons.

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16Dec2019

That enlightened bonus is huge. When it is off, I got maybe 30% of a champion level post 600 with all 18 of my toons doing 7 crafting dailies each. So it is something like 3-4x. Since everyone is 50 now and any time I do anything, I get CP xp, I am going up faster. I am CP=613 as of the end of this last weekend. While I do get it faster by playing a 50, the alt army still is useful for burning down the mid week enlightenment bonus.

I took out Eggsplain and started doing the main story on zones she has yet to complete. TO do this open the map, and see if you have done it (there are icons to the upper left which shows progress). If there is no progress in that same map window for the zone, you can open zone guide. Completing the zone story gives you skill points and cosmetics as well as titles/achievements. Since I typically want skillpoints, it is worth doing the zone story, and skipping all the little side quests on the quest hubs.

I repeated the Summerset story, and did the Vvardenfell story which was quite good. It really gives you a feel for who the players are in the zone, has some conflict in which you are an active agent, and there is a tale of divinity involved in that zone that is cool.

I ground out the Dark Brotherhood to 7 to get Shadow Rider, the skill that reduces your aggro radius by 50% while mounted. This is useful for getting around a zone quickly, and if you aggro stuff it seems like it drops off easier. Speaking of which if you are stuck in combat, try launching a light attack at nothing…this tends to take me out of combat. Dark Brotherhood also offers Shadowy Supplier, free equipment once per 20hrs at the vendor in the thieves guild. This effort took about 5hrs, and would have taken a lot less had I abandoned the ‘Litany of Blood’ achievement. I thought I would get guild XP for it. I did not get it, and only got a cosmetic I do not like and a title I do not use. A good trick is to portal from the zone (not wayshrine) at gold cost to the Vvardenfell point, go towards he water and mount up for a clear shot to the thieves guild with no aggro. You can cleanse the bounty there for cheap and sell stolen goods at the same time, as well as dump stuff in the bank on the way out. Every level of Dark Brotherhood opens a new story quest for a while, and zone story completion tracks that. So I suppose going back and doing a few more tiers might be worth it, even though I will likely not bother stealthing with this alt at all.

What seems to help in the Dark Brotherhood grind is to have roguish escape potions and pardons. You get the escape potions from doing the bounties. Pardons I mainly get from Thieve’s guild chests, and I had a stack of over 90 of them. Usually you think you have your lines right, and someone spots you and calls the guards. Hitting the escape potion and moving will drop that aggro and let you re-stealth. The pardon will let you drop your bounty so you can move about freely, which is important if your stealth is horrible. I typically ride in, find the target, walk behind it, then stealth just before the kill. The worst part of this grind is all of the zoning, so I load up on bounties and the new tier quests before going out. When NPCs are dead, loot the room, and vendor that in a thieves guild for legerdemain XP. I got from lvl 9 to lvl 11 in Legerdemain doing the Dark Brotherhood grind.

I ran across what I call the Coldharbor waypoint bug. Works like this. You call up the Cold Harbor map from another zone, and place a waypoint on the map where you would like to go once you zone in, then use the wayshrine to go there. If you mindlessly go towards the waypoint, often you go in the exact wrong direction since the waypoint displayed on the compass is not where you placed it. So zone in first, then put the waypoints down for Cold Harbor. I only have problems with that zone and waypoints.

My alts are now in the upper tiers of research for Woodworking, Blacksmithing, Clothing, taking around 10 days, around 7 traits researched. At this point sorting or holding big piles of random stuff that I find , then loading up each alt with what it needs is not very effective. Most of what is there is not useful. So what I do is pick an alt that can not research, and I go to my main who knows most all traits (except Nirnhoned) and craft one piece of each that specific character needs and does not have. In the Craftstore addon, a yellow X shows an empty slot for that toon (you can load up the one of interest by clicking the name and scrolling down the list of your characters). When you craft that item, it goes from yellow X to pink plus symbol. THen you dump it in the bank.

I have multiple people grinding up Woodworking, Blacksmithing, and Clothing to 50, so I dump all their research items in the bank. Then I have the character I am levelling, and I dump its items in the bank. And I have a storage character who has items, and those go in. That storage character for research items dumps all it has into the bank and people do research, then I pull it all out again before I run whoever it is I am working on. Any item they find right now is going into the grind for Woodworking, Blacksmithing, etc.

I like this better because I was able to buy from guild stores one of every Nirnhoned items. THese are not cheap. I looked into crafting them, and the base materials to craft them are more expensive then the items put up on the store. People who craft Nirhoned stuf take a loss posting it, typically posting it for less than the raw materials cost. So I bought one of everything and dumped it into the bank, then store it on the alts so it does not get mixed up in the general bag of junk that flows in from questing. So I can load it up periodically with all of the lesser stuff, and I really save on all of the inventory sorting business.

With jewelry, I just lock it (right click the item, select lock) and that way when my person grinding stuff for jewelry crafting 50 just mindlessly grinds what is in the bank, all of the locked stuff does not show up. Then if I need to research a new trait, I go to the bank, unlock the piece I want to do, and research that. There are no mistakes that way. I will be able to start researching Triune stuff on all of my other older characters in about a week or so, so I have been shopping for deals there.

My crafting main is now my merchant, and this works great. That character needs no research other than Nirnhoned stuff every 20 days or so, and thus I can keep his inventory clear. This works great because I use him to make all the stuff to fill the research voids of others, and he has room to hold all of the extra writs that I have yet to sell. I did not like PVPing with him that much as a werewolf, so I was able to refund many skillpoints and max out all of the crafting stuff on him. He can make the armor, weapons, enchant them, knows how much things cost if he is shopping (in terms of deals) and do whatever in just one stop. It is well worth it to have one such character.

Eggsplain, my Argonian Magicka Templar, got all of the morphs she needed for all of the builds at Alcast to level 4 this weekend. That grind part is up. Now she has a decent non-gimped build that can do hard content. Her main solo bar has 5 skills that work well-

  1. Degeneration (Mage)- strong Chaos Dot and buffs your damage by 20%…do this every fight. Also empowers, granting your next light attack more damage
  2. Puncturing Sweep (Spear)- AOE kill cone + self heal, great for big trash packs
  3. Elemental Weapon (Psijic)- great for ranged lightweaving on any weapon, good single target damage
  4. Purifying Light (Dawn)- DoT + bonus damage. Bonus is a copy of the damage you did to it in the last 6s, so put this on and light or heavy weave sweep, and you will get a pile of damage. Also leave a heal puddle.
  5. Channeled Focus(Restoring Light)- around 5K physical and spell resist, another 50% resistance if you stand on the rune, and restores magicka if you stand on it. Helps a lot in a boss fight.

So for a tough boss, keep both DoTs up, try to stand on your rune and weave sweep, typically circle strafing to avoid positionals and stuff on the ground. If it goes into point blank AOE, go off and lightweave with elemental weapon until it quits that. I am able to do most public dungeons in this build, only having issues with some mechanics.

I have a garbage skill bar 2. For example this Templar is magicka based, so I probably will never bother with dual wield, but I loaded up this bar with dual wield skills, bow skills, and 2h skills so all those lines level when I turn in quests with that bar active. I did get Eggsplain’s shield skill to 50 on the garbage bar last weekend. I can either use this for weekdays and crafting. For weekends I can keep the garbage skill bar, I just need to use pots more for healing as I solo stuff. For really tough content I will put healing stuff on bar2. I suppose one day I may want to switch this character from magicka to stamina or something, and having all the morphs unlocked helps. Note that for the Dark Brotherhood grind, I just ran around with the garbage skill bar as blade of woe really requires no skills to use.

It is satisfying see this alt army complete different objectives. I almost have my 6th toon done with riding. I almost have 9 or 10 toons with maximum storage. Woodworking/Blacksmithing/Clothing grinds to 50 are pretty much on alt 18, and that will end soon enough. Research is slow, but I am making progress. For instance since I posted the spreadsheet last time, most of my Jewelry Trait researcheds incremented by 1. Gold is around 3.4M, and I probably will dump another gift to OTG soon.

Eggsplain needs to run a few more skill rich zones and story lines. She is my completionist toon, with everything done in the non DLC world as far as maps go, and a good half of the maps done in the DLC world. I am having a lot of fun smelling the roses, listening to story with her, and am in no hurry to get her geared out for PvP quite yet.

1 Like

You are a ROCK STAR :sunglasses:

1 Like

31Dec2019

I will have a proper bloggy update when vacation ends. But I wanted to put out a note here on the addon ‘Craftstore’. I had to figure out how this works as there is not a lot of user guide, or maybe I just fail at finding it. When you open it up you will see a list of your character’s traits that have been researched. Here is the key

Green check, you have researched this. Done.

Purple +, something you need to research, either in your inventory or in the bank.

Yellow +, something you need to research, this is on another alt. If you hover over it, it will tell you which alt it is on.

Orange x, something you need to research, that is not on any character you have.

Also you can click on the name in the Craftstore window and pull up another character you have.

This is all very useful if you have one crafting main who knows traits crafting stuff for alts to research. So say your alt “FreddyM” needs stuff to research. Open up craftstore on your main, pull up the page for FreddyM.

Anything with a green check you do not need to make. You can see if you want to move around the stuff on the yellow pluses, but typically the character that has that item needs to research that item, so I just make another. If there is a purple plus, it is in the bank or that character’s inventory and you do not need to craft it. If there is a pink plus, it is in your crafting main’s inventory, and you should put it in the bank.

Go through the various crafting stations making this stuff for that toon, then log to that toon (FreddyM) and pull out one of everything you need. This is more easily done with the inventory management addon (Advanced Filters). With advanced filters on the bank I can on the withdraw tab, say pick weapon, pick 1 handed, and pick axe by the filters in the addon and it will list just those. I then pick up one of each trait which I have not researched (indidcated by the magnifying glass). Once you load up each guy with everything they need to research, you are good to go for daily crafting .

Early on my alts needed so many traits researched that there was not enough inventory space per character to hold it all. So I would just craft yellow X material, one of each and dump it in the bank. This meant I put items in the bank for which I was missing one, and someone needed to research it. I might have needed 2 or 3 of them to cover all the people who needed it, but if I made just 1, I would not over produce. I would also load up the alts with what they needed to find out what duplicate items that were in the bank that nobody needed researched, and grind those up.

As research has gone on across my 18 alts, I am now at the point where I can hold every item they need to research in each character’s inventory. And so I am loading them up. Any found items now are either sold on guild stores or ground up for spare parts or vendored for gold.

General loop is this

  1. Get on crafting main
  2. Open craftstore and pull up character I am outfitting
  3. Craft any yellow +, orange x material. As I do this they turn to pink +'s in the craftstore addon
  4. Deposit all those items in the bank
  5. Swap to the alt that I am outfittng
  6. Use filtered pick up to only remove one of each item needed
  7. Go to next alt

There are very expensive items (Triune, Nirnhoned). I hold off on researching these until dead last. At that point the research time is around 27 days, and the gold drain of buying those items is much less by doing these last. I can search guild stores outside of town for good deals on these, and buy them as those good deals happen. Pretty much the rest of the stuff I craft, except jewelry traits. I simply do not have enough mats to craft jewelry stuff for research, and I save it for crafted sets.

Edit

Just spend 5hrs doing 200 surveys/treasure maps. It is faster letting them pile up, but man that was rough. Let them pile up from around 18Dec to 31Dec. Got around 4K platinum dust, 5K rough ruby ash, 3K raw ancestor silk, 2K rubedo hide scraps, and 4K rubedite ore.

6Jan2020

Happy New Year!

I did not play as much ESO as I expected over the holiday since my son wanted to play Path of Exile instead. I did manage to get on most days and do daily crafting stuff.

I am playing again, and I do have some progress to report.

As you have gathered I have been struggling with the logistics of researching traits on 18 alts. I finally hit the point yesterday where my 18th alt completed blacksmithing, clothing, and woodworkding and I could begin to manage stocking up everyone with what they need for research.

I thought the Craftstore addon would be the way to go as per previous posts, but when I crafted what the addon said I needed, it missed items, and made some items I did not need. I suppose the addon needs an update.

So I did it the old fashioned way. Log onto an alt, go to the crafting station. Pull up research. Scroll through the items that are grayed out, indicating I did not have one of those to research. Write that down on a notepad. Repeat at all stations until done. Then switch to my crafting main, make those items, dump them in the bank and pick them up on the alt. Took me about 3hrs to do this on all 18 alts.

Some advice- if you have 3 or more remaining traits to research on most items, the shopping list for your crafting main is huge, and you tend to make mistakes. I would check by going back to the crafting station to see that I could indeed make everything if the timers were off. Frequently I had to go back for a second round. Also if you have more than 3 traits to go, odds are your alt will not have enough inventory to hold everything. So this is very much a late research strategy. Before then it is better to use Craftstore to find out what items have a yellow x next to them, and make one of each of those and dump them in a common bank from which everyone researches.

Now comes the problem of how to do with adventuring once you are loaded up. If there are not many items, you can lock the items you need to research and just keep them in your inventory as you run around questing or whatever. Using the lock feature also lets you dump them in the bank, and no other character will mistakenly research that item of that alt’s.

I also find that things like nirnhoned items, which is the most expensive one to buy and I typically hold off until last, should be dumped in the common bank. At that point you are looking at research times around 27days or so, so no alt needs a bunch of it, and it makes sense not to load up each character with those items. So I pool the nirnhoned. I did load up each alt with Triune jewelry though (that is the last jewelry line for me to do, also expensive, around 20K gold each). There are not that many jewelry items to carry for research.

The other big tedious thing I did with my alt army was put them in “skinny spec”. Realizing that most of them are not going to adventure and will just be on daily for crafting, I refunded all combat skills and passives, and carry mainly crafting skills. On crafting I skip out on keen eye and deconstruction (unless they are still deconstructing). I take all the rest of it at max rank. This frees up 30-60 skill points per alt that I then use to research skill lines. My bars are useless from a fighting perspective, loaded up with things like say 4 1h+shield skills on a bow bar, just to advance that line. They never leave Vivec until I am going to run them, so it makes sense to just use the daily crafting XP to move along those other lines. In this way I can once completing 50 in everything for my character, I can then say research stamina skills on a magicka character just in case I ever need that. The tour on the crafting bench thus elevates to 50 every kind of skill I would likely need, so once I do roll them out, they will be ready to go.

The daily take of items when I survey or adventure go into the main bank now. The main bank is pretty much empty except for the nirnhoned stuff and recipes. Anything I find goes there. My crafting main who now is also my guild store merchant character will then use the addon Master Merchant and Tamriel Trade to see if anything in there is worth anything, and post it. Usually they are not worth much, but I did find some staff that was averaging around 75K, and I posted and sold it quickly at 60K gold. I am posting around 80% of market average to move items fast as things stick around way to long otherwise. The rest of the stuff I just grind up for components.

I am starting to get a significant backlog of low value writs, and I am thinking about crafting those. I will look into that process and see if the time spent equals the gold return. Otherwise I might just dump them somewhere or to a guildy who wants them.

I am back on my Kajit Nightblade for experience. The sniper build is good for Cyrodiil, and I get plenty of kills with my 2 shot routine from stealth. I also do surveys on it. The problem is I have all of skills from many lines, and not enough skill points to carry it all at once. So I am going back and doing the main story on him. It is a nice change from all of the grindy stuff I have been doing. I am skipping the side quests as they do not yield skill points. So far I have done all of AD, and am working through the next faction. I have an addon (Wykids? outfitter) that lets me load up different specs, and I want to have enough skill points to switch between PVP, PVE and solo and still carry all of the crafting skills and thieving skills.

I am around Champion level 645 now. That holiday with the bonus xp was good across all my 50s on the dailies. My crafting main is researching the last couple nirnhoned traits. I have many with 8 jewelry traits now (around 6), and most of the other professions have only a couple traits left to go per item with typical 10-21day research times. 6 of the 18 have completed riding, and around 12 have maximum storage (205 items each thanks to that crown store mount).

I have around 4.5M gold in the bank, and if it can be believed, and around 20K gold in sales per week supplementing the main direct gold gain via daily crafting.

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12Jan2020

As you know, I have been selling writs in the guild store for gold, not really bothering to do them for profit. I would sell of the most valuable writs first, and my inventory was slowly filling up with writs maybe worth 300-400g each, hardly worth a slot in the guild store. So I decided to give it a go and see what it was all about.

Now months ago a wonderful guildy took me aside and explained all of the wonders of writs, and had me get several addons like Writworthy and LazyWritCrafter. I had forgotten all of that. I wish I had not.

THe first thing was to clear a Daggerfall covenant weapon master writ quest which I still had active. It required a funky crafting station that was not obvious on how to get to, and I remembered that guildy saying I should go to the guild tab, search the roster for Tess, and visit her residence as she had a lot of stations there. So I did. There were lots. So many, I made a map of them by row. There is a cluster of 3, then the main cluster. And to complete the writ I needed a trait component, so I went back to the guild store and bought it, and the other trait components I lacked. I completed the writ, and turned it in to the guy outside of Elden Root.

Then it was on to my inventory issue. I quickly realized that all of the cheap writs I had were for Jewelry Crafting. And I went through getting rid of them by doing quests. Thing is these required upgrade mats which were extremely expensive, and about halfway through the process I thought it might make sense to see if it was a net gold loss doing them.

So I looked at the store for the turn in guy near Elden Root, and saw that the currency you get from writs (writ vouchers) bought stuff, and Master Merchant was telling me what the market value of those items were. And one of those addons I had would list the gold per writ voucher for doing a writ. So I wrote down the market value of the stuff in the store, and the writ cost, then divided the market value by the writ cost and put it in a spreadsheet and sorted in descending order. Looks like most of the stuff you can sell nets you around 600 gold per writ voucher. And I looked at the writs I had for Jewelry Crafting, and many were 600+ gold per writ voucher in material cost. So yeah, you lose money doing those unless you have a lot of resources you want to turn into vouchers. Since I could not really sell them, I just deleted all of the low return ones, and did the rest under 600g per writ voucher.

In that market study I found a couple of items that were netting 700-800g per writ voucher, and I bought them, and put them up to see if they would sell. One was a cheaper item around 20K gold, and the other was a whale of an item worth 360K gold (around 450 writ vouchers). They have not sold yet, so I will see. I also bought off that vendor styles I was lacking.

So I ran dailies today and got more writs. Since my stores were mostly full, I decided to do them. I tossed out the junk JC ones, and gave the others a try. The first one I did required a style I did not have, so I went out and used Tamriel Trade to find the cheapest one for sale (9K) and did the writ. Not worth it. Then I noticed on the writ worthy that it would tell me if I knew the style. I had 5 to do, 2 which I did not know. I checked the cost of the styles, and they were crazy, so I just sold those writs.

And then I did the others. This time they were not JC, and I found a weird thing. As I clicked on the crafting station, it would not let me craft. Then the lag went away, and I noticed the quest was complete. Oh yeah, lazy writ had auto crafted it and upgraded it to the quality for my active quest. Nice. Apparently that addon does not work for JC though, so that is another reason why nobody wants to do them. Where the typical JC writs were at best 500g/writ voucher in mat cost or higher, these clothing, woodworking, enchanting, blacksmithing ones were much cheaper, around 200-400g/writ voucher. Much more profit doing those, and better yet the addon auto crafts it for you.

So in my drunken stumble through this process I learned a few things

  1. Don’t bother with JC writs unless they are under 600g/wv in resources
  2. Sell the writs for which you do not know the style, unless that style is for sale cheap
  3. The non JC writs are a snap to do if you have the right addons
  4. You get pretty decent XP turning in these writ quests, so load up a bar with skills you want to level before you turn in

I think I squandered around 1M gold doing this, with a chance to get 400K of it back if I make some sales, but I think I am better positioned to make money from the process and intelligently sell of the ones that would cost me money. If anyone wants the lower return JC writs, let me know and maybe I can mail them to you instead of just deleting them.

It boggles my mind how much money Tess spent on those stations. Most of the tough ones are on her island. There are some that are missing and I have to look them up on the web to know where to go, but it is pretty fast using Tess’s place. She also has some cool stuff there. I was very appreciative and dumped 200K gold into the guild bank in gratitude.

I am playing Eggsplain, my Argonian Templar now. She ran out of skill points, and she is my completionist alt. I am going through the clockwork city story and having a blast.

Completed crafting on my crafting main today after over a year of slogging it out.

Congratulations!

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Update 20Jan2020

Happy MLK day!

Servers are down for maintenance, so I will take this opportunity to post.

First off I have a pretty decent single bar magicka Templar solo build. I use

  1. Degeneration (Mage guild, DoT and major sorcery)
  2. Puncturing Sweep (Aedric Spear, 8x6 cone AoE and self heal)
  3. Purifying Light (Dawn’s Wrath, damage copy single target)
  4. Channeled Focus (Restoring Light, Major Resolve, 240 magicka/s buff, 50% phys/spell res)
  5. Radiant Magelight (Mage Guild, stun immunity from sneak, Major Prophecy)
    U. Temporal Guard or Shooting Star

I was able to solo group delves and world bosses with this setup in Craglorn. I was able to do this on one other character, my werewolf.

Pre pull I do Channel Focus, then pull with Degeneration followed by Purifying Light. I then start Puncturing Sweep. I did have Soul Splitting Trap, but I was getting closer to dying using that. Degeneration is more there for the buff, and Purifying Light ends in a heal that helps. Mainly I sweep, then refresh, and lightweave.

For big groups I will do the the above, then typically dodge roll through the melee guys and re-establish a Channeled Focus spot near the ranged guys. The heal and the toughness of the focus, as well as the magicka flow from Channeled Focus make it hard to lose.

Where I get in trouble is against stuns. For a few of these world bosses, I had to back off and re-apply Degeneration and Purifying Light, as to hang in melee range during some phases is really risky, and the ground is cluttered with all sorts of stuff you should not stand in. The main heal comes from sweep, so if you have to go range, use a potion. You have to pay attention to telegraphs and ground stuff and dodge roll many times. The one thing that bugs me is sometimes a stun lands and I sit there mashing break free for several seconds before it finally permits me to break free, and during that time I can die. Standing on the rune from Channeled Focus can make or break a life situation here.

Right now I am using Temporal Guard because I am levelling it up, and it gives the Psijic Order block shield , and gives a flat minor protection. Shooting Star is more DPS, and you can blast packs down and get ultimate back fast with it. If I go with Shooting Star, I would swap in Elemental Weapon for Radiant Magelight. Elemental Weapon lets you DPS at range by lightweaving with this attack, and that can be really handy to have. Overall it is better to get in their face and sweep though.

Inner Light would be more DPS, and Radiant Magelight is there mainly for PvP. However I think the stun immunity helps for large packs because stun tends to kill me more than anything else.

I am using a training set, CP160 yellow quality gear, magicka enchanted, damage enchanted. I carry an inferno staff and a resto staff. On the resto staff I can load up a pretty competent healing bar if necessary, else I just put a bunch of skills to level up when I turn in quests.

Those world bosses are a learning curve. I die, then try again, and work on movement or techniques. Some are much harder than others, and in general I will likely punt on soloing them for future OTG outings. I managed to catch a coffee run iwth the guild and knocked out bosses in one zone on Sunday. This is nice because we tend to have the quests active for each boss, and I can de-load my bar with useful stills and re-load with skills that require training. Really for most content all I need on this alt is Puncturing Sweep. I am working out maxing bow, then after that I will do dual wield, then I will likely go and deal with odd things and morphs.

I have been doing a lot of story. I did screw up in Craglorn by running the delves, then later going back and doing main story which sent me right back into those delves. Run main story first if you can then fill in. Loved the constellation storyline for Craglorn, and I have a better understanding of what is going on zone wide. I think I have a few more group delves to knock off, then some quest hubs to quasi complete this zone. I have done all of the zones for the 3 alliances, and am doing the all-alliance content. Have a good 5+ zones left to do story on and complete.

Summerset quest hubs are nice for leveling up legerdemain. I have completed the Dark Brotherhood zone (up to rank 9), and as I quest I get sent into noblepeople’s palaces, and I can rob them blind for decent gains in legerdemain. Right now at legerdemain 13. My aim is to get high enough to force lock at 70%. Being able to blade of woe innocents in these private residences makes looting them easier.

Snydelee

First off, thanks for helping everybody. I cant believe we have not played together. Have we? I have been playing 2.5 months and I still know zero about writs. I was giving them away.

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