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 nothingâŚthis 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 âLitany of Bloodâ 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 Thieveâs 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-
- Degeneration (Mage)- strong Chaos Dot and buffs your damage by 20%âŚdo this every fight. Also empowers, granting your next light attack more damage
- Puncturing Sweep (Spear)- AOE kill cone + self heal, great for big trash packs
- Elemental Weapon (Psijic)- great for ranged lightweaving on any weapon, good single target damage
- 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.
- 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 Eggsplainâs 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.