Big grab bag of ESO stuff from the weekend

[Snydelee]

23 Jan 2020

Colwyn,

Here is what I know about writs.

There are daily crafting quests called ‘writs’ that you pick up from two boards near the crafting stations. I like doing them in Vivec City in Vvardenfell because all the stations are outdoors and you can mount up and get around faster. It is also easy to train riding there, and the thieves guild is easy to get to from the waypoint, just go towards the water, mount up, and you can ride there even with bounty and have no issues with guards. Just come in the water side.

The quest boards have one for (jewelry crafting, enchanting, provisioning, and alchemy) and another for (woodworking, blacksmithing, and clothing). You only get offered these quests if you are a certified crafter. With a new character I get 6 certifications in Vulkhel Guard/Auridon, and the jewelry crafting certification in Summerset/Alinor. Note that Summerset and Vvardenfell are DLC zones, and you will not have access to them unless you are ESO+ or you buy that DLC for crowns.

The quests typically have you craft something appropriate for your skill level in that craft, and you turn them in. In Vivec City, turn in is at the docks. Be careful on turn in, you can mistakenly steal from a crate and the guards will kill you. The lazy writ crafting addon will prevent you from doing that. The rewards for turning in a writ are varied- gold, crafting materials, master writs, surveys, intricate items (which deconstruct for extra inspiration, crafting experience), sometimes rare jewelry, occasional recipes etc. When you are 50 in a profession you get the most rewards for doing the daily writs.

Woodworking, Blacksmithing, Clothing, and Jewelry Crafting all have research options. You go to a crafting station, click the research tab, and it will look in your bank and inventory for items with a trait you lack, and give you an option to research it. If you research it, you will learn that trait, be able to craft items with that trait, be able to switch items to that trait in the late game. Also the more traits you have, the better the quality of the master writ you might get as reward from daily writs. Research starts off with short times to complete, but goes up to around 27days per item at the high end. Putting points into the research skill for crafting will shorten research times, and allow you to research multiple items (3 max) at a time. Master writs of yellow quality are worth quite a bit of gold, so it is worth researching all traits if you are doing daily writs. Also as you complete research, you get inspiration, which can advance your skill in that crafting profession.

For alchemy the quality of master writs tracks the number of potion types you have discovered. There is an addon which helps you with discovery for alchemy which is quite useful. For enchanting, I think the number of runes you unlock drives quality of the master writs. Again there are addons which can help you here. For provisioning the number of recipes you know on that character drives the quality of master writs. For this reason I pass around recipes I find to whoever needs them on my army of alts. There is a nice addon which will tell you which of your alts knows that recipe, which I use to pull out of the bank the recipies all of my alts know. If you see me in game, send a tell and I can trade you a huge starting set of recipes that all my characters already know. I am @snydelee in the game if you track people by user name.

Doing daily writs skills up your crafting professions. Also deconstructing items skills up your crafting professions. All of the intricate items you get from daily writs can be handed down to a character who can deconstruct them for inspiration. Research skills up crafting professions. I typically try to max out my oldest characters first, and move on down the line of alts.

The more alts you have, the more gold you make by doing daily writs. Not only do you get gold, but your character gets experience. I find it really useful to log onto an alt once a day who has as the active bar a bunch of useless skills I wish to skill up to max out a skill line. Because I am not fighting, I can level them up over days of daily writs.

Master writs are interesting. You can directly sell most of them. If you use them to start the master writ quest, you will get a reward of writ vouchers which is a currency you can then spend on the vendors for the turn in to buy items of use to your character or tradeable/ sellable on guild stores for profit. There are several addons which are helpful doing these, one which automatically speeds the completion of them, another which tells you if you know the styles required to complete the master writ, and also the gold cost in materials per writ voucher. I find the latter very useful, and from my market survey I think if it costs more than 600g/writ voucher, you should just sell the master writ or destroy it because you will lose gold doing it. I would only bother with those if I was desperate to get crafting stations for my house, but Tess has a super-awesome house with all of the stations, so I just use hers (pull up guild list, search for tess, even if she is offline you can right click her name and visit her residence).

I have not had much luck selling stuff I buy with writ vouchers, so I prefer to directly sell the most profitable master writs on guild stores, and do the other slow movers myself. Jewelry master writs are a real problem because the lazy writ addon does not work for jewelry crafting, and typically the upgrade materials for jewelry crafting are hard to get and very expensive, and thus most of these are not worth it. I use the Master Merchant addon to see what the value of things are in the guild store, and sell the most expensive master writs first, and do not bother selling the ones worth 1000g or so. At that level they typically do not move on the guild store, and you just waste a store slot on something that will not sell.

I have been pecking away at my alt army for a while now. I have 11 characters who are done with everything but alchemy. I do not power skill alchemy because the material cost is high, and I just let it organically happen via daily writs. I have 8 alts done with everything. I usually couple riding training with daily writs once a day for each alt. Researching traits is a long hard grind, and I am at the point where all of my toons have at least 6 traits researched in woodworking, blacksmithing, clothing, and jewelry crafting. I am noticing the master writ quality improve. I mainly get purple quality now, with a good shot at a yellow one every day.

Even if you do not bother with selling via the guild store things like master writs, the direct gold you earn by doing these daily writs is a huge boon, handling all money problems I have in this game on that alone.

Surveys are another thing you get from daily writs. If you have a survey in your inventory, you can go to the zone where it is and find 6 enhanced resource nodes of that survey type. There is an addon that puts a nice red x on the map where your surveys for the zone are. Also it adds a + symbol to indicate if you have multiple surveys at that spot. Also it will show you wehre your treasure maps are. I load up my sneaky nightblade with all of my surveys and do them twice a week…on Fri, and on Sun. That alt is great since he has dark rider (lower agro radius while mounted) and he has the Steed mundus complete with penalty free steath from vampire, and the skill that enhances movement speed while stealthed. He is near mount speed while stealthed, and has all of the radius bonuses of Kajit and medium armor and legerdemain. I can thus ride at a high gallop to these survey sites and avoid agro, or dump it with shadowy disguise and easily gather. Better yet, I have force locks at 70%, so I can pop every single chest I run across while I am doing surveys for extra loot and goodies.

You get so many more raw crafting materials from surveys than you do with regular gathering. For instance a regular rubedite node can yield 4, or 8 if you get the double. The ones at the survey site can yield 20, or 40 if you get the double. So a single rubedite survey will give you 120-240 rubedite over the 6 nodes, or around what it would take you hitting 30 nodes in the open world to gather. I typically can do around 40 surveys per hour, and I will spend 2-3hrs doing all of the surveys I have on a Friday. This is a huge amount of raw materials.

Raw materials matter more than processed materials. If you go to a guild store and compare the price of Ancestor Silk verses Raw Ancestor Silk, you will see the prices is something like 4 times or more higher for the raw stuff. One creates Ancestor Silk by refining at a crafting station Raw Ancestor Silk, or by deconstructing cloth items of the tier of Ancestor Silk. The thing is the only way to get upgrade materials is by refining raw materials. Upgrade materials let you at a crafting station upgrade an item from say purple quality to yellow quality. This is very useful for end game dungeon drops that may not be of top yellow quality. Thus there is a huge bind for upgrade materials, and I find that daily writs and surveys give me a huge amount of raw materials from which I derive upgrade mats. Note that you want to make sure the person refining has maximum refine skill, as that gives you the best chance to receive upgrade mats via refinement. Since people will grind up via deconstruction a lot of items, they can easily get a lot of processed materials which they dump at realatively cheap prices in big stacks on the guild store.

This epic journey I am on with my 18 alts then is to see what happens if I max them all out on traits and run dailies. How much gold will I get? How many master yellow quality writs will I get a day? Will that army of alts yield so many upgrade materials that I will have no worries about upgrading any end game gear? I think the answer I am getting now is YES.

I have not been so social recently in ESO. Sometimes I game with talk radio or podcasts or audio books running. I am usually dealing with this 18 alt project of mine. But I will on occasion pop into Discord and join the coffee runs.

Typically when I complete the daily grind, I will roll out the character I am working on and run story, PVP, do dungeons, whatever. To this point most of the characters I have are in huge skill binds owing to the huge number of skill points it takes to maintain crafting at maximum levels for daily writs. As I wind down research, many of those points will free up. Also as any individual character gets done with skill points, I then pivot to dungeons and pvp where I am game to interact. Presently my Argonian Magicka Templar “Eggsplain” is completing all zones in the DLC (I have not done this on any character, so I want to do it now.) My aim then is to go nuts healing dungeons and in Cyrodiil and see how she pans out. I think achievements unlock styles for the outfitter station, and this is per account, so having one completionist run the game will let me be all fashionable like the rest of the players out there.

[Snydelee]

3 Feb 2020 update

Well I did not do the midyear mayhem event, even though much of the guild was running it. I get caught up in my completionist stuff and doggedly pursue the end.

This time I was working on getting legerdemain to 19 for my magicka Templar, Eggsplain. This is a serious grind, and it is very tempting to use crowns to shortcut the process. The main reason for legerdemain 19 is you get force locks at 70% chance. This means every door and chest wherever you are can be forced at a cost of lockpicks which you can buy in bulk from the vendor, and that means more loot as you run all over the place.

Since Eggsplain is the toon that I am completing the full game on, I had to do both the zones for Gold Coast and Hews, and story completion means progressing those skill lines to unlock the story quests at each and every tier. For Dark Brotherhood, I had to go to 8 to complete the zone. That is nice because the grind to 12 takes forever. For Thieves Guild, going to 10 completes the story line.

But I was thinking this. If I keep both Dark Brotherhood and Thieves guild skills while I am grinding out Legerdemain 19, the process will go faster, and I can just re-spec out of them all later for a nice return, likely only keeping the riding buff from Dark Brotherhood. Eggsplain is a Templar, not a nightblade, so routine thieving is more difficult and does not make a lot of sense.

I think you get the same 10 points of Thieves Guild per board quest, whether or not you go for optional rewards. I went for optional rewards because most of the time you get sent out to pick pockets, and that seems to be the fastest way to level up legerdemain. Each successful pick pocket advances the skill, and you can go up to 3x per target, and you can find a lot of targets in a city. When you vendor the stuff you get from it, you will get points as well. The board quests send you out for safeboxes, and they also send you out to sell ‘clean’ stuff. The former I tend to force locks even at the 50% level, since the risk of getting spotted is high unless you time the pathing right. The latter is simply a travel to the target, turn in the item, and head back to Hew’s for your 10 points.

Now I was looting houses as I went, but that rapidly ate up my item sell limit at the fence and the return from it was not high. I know some people look at the loot and do not loot all unless there is something worth it, but that seems time consuming and not very considerate leaving a wake of worthless trash for the next person. If you loot all and then item by item delete out the cheap stuff, that takes quite a while. The safeboxes next to vendors have nice yield, but you only get legerdemain for picking the chest, and for selling the contents.

Anyway I would hit my daily cap on sales, and I would go further filling up the inventory. I would then at the end of the night park Eggsplain near the fence, and sell out the whole inventory the next day. The big problem with carrying an inventory of stolen goods is if you get nabbed by a guard, it all goes.

So to counter this, I was using the stealth potions (green ones) that you occasionally get as reward from thieving. I suppose I could craft these, but I had a 100 stack or so of them banked, and I just used those. When you get caught, how you react matters. I typically have the stealth potion on the hotkey for immediate use.

On one level, your target notices you, says unpleasant stuff, and you can just wander off and re-stealth with no issue. The target will be suspicious, and you may not have the pick pocket option. Typically I either blade of woe them, or move to another target, then come back.

On another level, your target goes red and wants to attack you. You can usually hit the stealth potion and escape on these. You will have bounty and heat, but there are ways of dealing with that.

On the worst level you get an invincible guard. The worst of the worst is if you get one of these in an indoor area that is small. I got one of these in a burglary operation yesterday in an inn. I think they toss a debuff on you which prevents you from stealthing, and I have seen it negate the stealth potion. At that point it is dodge roll and run all over the place until you can string together about 8-10s of time without it hitting you and a gap where you can open the door and zone out without him tagging you in the lag. On the one yesterday I had around 100 stolen items on me, and he nixed my first pot, so I went into fight mode far from the door until the timer came back, then dodge rolled, hammered the pot, and managed to zone out. You literally can not kill these guys. If you are outdoors, sprint and dodge roll when you think they are going to go for you with a root or something. Here distance is your friend, and at some point the guard will leash back and quit. You do have to be careful of not having a ton of guards agro you though.

So I got Eggsplain up to Legerdemain 18 yesterday with an inventory of stolen stuff. I had Thieves guild 12, and Dark Brotherhood 8. Once I got Thieves 12, I quit doing those missions. Having to zone into the guild, zone out of the guild, zone to the target area, and return with the zones was asking for a disconnect. Seems like the character server was overloaded and I was timing out on zone ins, having to go back to log in with a long wait to fix the problem. It was better to hang in Stormhaven and just rob houses and people. This morning I sold my inventory and am a few points shy of 19.

My crafting main is around legerdemain 16, and I am thinking about just loading him up a few days in a row with stolen stuff and run the Thieve’s guild. Doing Thieve’s Guild is a good way to level garbage skills. You can have a whole bar of stuff that is useless and still advance it with every turn in for quests, and most of the quests do not involve any fighting at all. The big problem I have with him is he is a werewolf, while Eggsplain is a vampire. That means Eggs has no armor penalty and can do stealth stuff pretty easy. However Noto (my crafting main) is slow and wears heavy armor. I had been going to a small town and looting safeboxes, then vendoring those goods. I may go back to that, or dust off a crafted armor set that negates the speed penalty and use it and do Thieve’s guild.

As far as heat goes, I find teleporting to Hew’s or Vardenfall, then riding wide of the guards to the guild is pretty reliable. You tend to as you thieve generate enough gold to eat the teleport cost. But you can not do it every time. So I try to see how bad it is trying to get to the nearest waypoint on foot, and if it is a real bother, I will port. The leniency objects which clear bounty and heat are helpful to use when it is a bother to stealth back to the waypoint, and you are in the expensive region for teleporting. If you run a lot of Thieve’s guild quests, you can rack up quite a few of these to hand down to the next toon.

The alt army is moving along. A good half have 9 traits in Jewelry Crafting and Woodworking. Blacksmithing/Clothing ranges from 5-7 traits researched. I have been buying nirncrux to craft woodworking weapons to progress the alts. I imagine it will be quite expensive when I am doing blacksmithing weapons. The armor crafting ingredient for nirnhoned is not that expensive, and you can typically buy those items for a lot. But weapons are expensive, with listings around 40K each, and you can get the nirncrux for around 30K, so each one of those makes someone 10K gold.

Net gold is around 5.4M in the bank, with me selling 1K or higher writs and 3K or higher armor/weapons. I am listing around 80% of average of TTC, and things tend to sell. If I get too many writs, I concentrate on selling the ones I lack the trait knowledge of, and complete the rest. Mostly I just destroy jewelcrafting master writs, although the purple quality ones (getting some of those now) do sell for a bit. 8 alts are done with riding, and my 18th is about done with maxing speed. I have around 10-12 with maximum storage now. Around 13 toons are done with JC/enchanting, and around the same are done with alchemy. Writ quality is improving, with better drops from all. Champion points are 693, and not coming as fast with all of this progression of thieve’s guild.

I am getting sort of bored playing Templars, but I do want to finish the world. I have around 5 more zones to run story on to complete, all of them in the ‘all alliance’ category.

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Just a side note. Apparently filling up my inventory resulted in at least 3 days worth of fenced stuff to sell. Dinged 19 legerdemain this morning on the backlog of stuff. This speaks to a good weekday strategy of loading up with fenced stuff on the weekend, and letting weekday log ins clear it across the week.

[Snydelee]

Update 10Feb2020

I put in this chart today which is sheet two of my open office spreadsheet that I use to track characters. I use this for doing master writs. Rows 1-8 and columns A-F is a crude map of the crafting stations in Tess’s private residence. To go there, open up the guild menu, go to roster, search for ‘Tess’, right click her name even if she is offline, and click visit primary residence. You come out at a canoe. Turn around from the water. To the left are the crafting stations in the spreadsheet. Row 1 is furthest away from the water, and 8 is closest to the water. Column A is the first station you encounter in that row as you walk from the canoe. Tess also has 3 special stations to the right from the canoe (Armor Master, Redistributor, and Noble Conquest).

Tess does not have all crafting stations. Column G and H are my alphabetic listing of her stations. So if the master writ calls for Eternal Hunt, you look it up in the list, and in column G it says 5,2 meaning it is on row 5, 2nd one in from the canoe. When you want to leave Tess’s residence, go to the canoe and it puts you at the Torug’s Pact crafting station in Grahtwood (southeast section of the zone on the ocean).

If it is not in Tess’s hideout, you can find it on the wiki which I went to the Julianos set. If you scroll to the bottom there is a box with all of the names of the crafted sets, and you can click on that to go quickly to the page for that set, and check the map to see where it is.

In the middle part of the sheet I chunked in a calculator (rows 10-12, columns D-F). Column D I enter in a price, and ticket list of the item on the vendor, and it calculates the price per ticket. Master Merchant gives me a tooltip when I look at the items on the vendor to see how much they are worth. Column F I put in a tickets and desired price per ticket and it tells me the price. From the lower half of the sheet I find I can pretty much sell stuff at 600g/ticket or higher, since most of the master writs are less than that. I forget what addon I use, but it has a tooltip for writs that says how much the material cost is, how many tickets that writ will yield if you do it, and gives you a material cost per ticket. If it is 600g/ticket on the writ or higher, I usually do not bother doing it. All the JC writs are very expensive to make, and so too any nirnhoned weapon. I will sell those master writs in the guild store or destroy them. The JC writs I typically destroy.

So my characters are starting to generate more writs than I can sell with 4 guild stores. I have 120 slots full of items and I still have more writs. So my new strategy is to post only the master writs that I lack the trait knowledge to do (red script on the writ), and do the rest.

The lower half was an initial survey of stuff that sells. Note this stuff changes, so I added the calculator. A lot of those recipies seem to yield 600+g/writ, and I bought one, and put it on the store, but it did not move. I do not know what sold last night, but I logged on this morning and had 600,000g in sales in my mailbox, so I will track down what I listed. I suspect the research timer shorteners are a good solid 600g/writ thing to sell, and you can stack them and sell a whole stack. I also think the stations that you can use to mimic other crafting stations in the world and then add to your private residence as Tess did sell. I tried some of the recipes for armor and weapon styles too. The really big ticket furniture stuff I do not think sells that well. Anyway you will have to determine what is in demand now, buy it, and list it.

So we come back to it. Selling the writs directly via the store can yield you steady cash. Typically most of the ones I sell are around 1000g each, but I have seen them go up to around 20,000g for yellow quality ones. Since crafting dailies at lvl 50 yield around 4,500g per character, you can add a bit more gold by selling writs.

However if you can tap into the market of selling stuff that you buy with the ticket currency you get upon completion of a master writ, you can get orders of magnitude higher cash. I think I spent about an hour or two doing these writs on Sunday with my crafting main, clearing out every writ I could complete. I got around 2500 tickets doing this, and put up around 1500 tickets worth of merchandise on the guild store, and I suspect most of it sold that same Sunday. I kept around 1000 tickets and will restock with the things that moved fast.

So I thought this table is sort of useful from the standpoint of streamlining writs. Accept the quest for the master writ if you know the style, look up if it is in Tess’s place, if so go there, else find out where it is and travel to that spot and do it there. Then return to Grahtwood and turn in and repeat.

My alt army-

Most everyone has 6-9 traits researched on the 4 main professions, with Jewelcrafting and Woodworking close to done on a good 9 of my alts. I am seeing a lot more writs in those categories too. Blacksmithing and Clothing take longer. I am tempted to just invest a bunch of tickets into accelerating trait research just to see more alts with 9 traits on everything done, but the Nirnhoned items to research are expensive and perhaps it is best to just let it organically happen to minimize the gold drain in producing nirnhoned items. Rows 14-18, columns A-C are my notes on upgrade mats for JC, and the materials for traits, and that kind of stuff gets expensive. I think the weapon version of nirnhoned is around 30K per single item, so I am in no hurry to have a lot of characters maturing on that as is. Woodworking is draining me out a bit as is.

I spent the weekend doing story on Eggsplain, my magicka Templar. Smithfire did Craglorn bosses in the Coffee Run on Sunday, so that completed that zone except for the group quest areas (not group delves, I did those already). I was able to respect out of much of thieving, and I use force locks on random chests. I did wind up putting points back in though, since if I am in a house I will do one pick pocket, then blade of woe them and get double loot from them. Then I force locks on any chest in the house. Eggsplain basically has the quest hubs in Vvardenfall left to do, then the story and quest hubs and delves for Wrothgar, and I am pretty much done outside of the PVP zones for the game.

She has completed all of the other zones. I did manage to finally train to level 4 all of the skills she has and now am loaded up with a decent set of 2 bars. Bar 1 is dps, and bar 2 is healing, and she can take on most content without issue now.

Because it is so very useful to have 70% force locks on a character that you run all over the place, I have bothered to get Dark Brotherhood to 8 and legerdemain to 19 on my crafting main. So far I am at 4 in Dark Brotherhood, and 16 on legerdemain. I loot every assassination mission I get and get the bulk of my progress from vendoring stolen goods at the fence. My aim next weekend is to have an inventory full of stolen stuff that I can fence over the next workweek and move legerdemain to 19.

I bothered to look into alchemy for invisibility potions. Yes I made a nice 80-stack of potions that grant around 15s of invisiblity, around 6s or more of immunity to crowd control, and I think a heal. These work much better than the stealth pots you get as rewards from missions since it combines the invis and immunity. If they can not stun you or root you, you can get away faster. I looked and I had enough mats to make around 1500 of those pots, which gets multiplied by 4 since I have the advanced alchemy perks. I will likely have to make a Night’s Silence set for my crafting main (he is a werewolf, so no vampire bonus on armor in stealth). Since my crafter now is doing writs, and that involves a bit of routine overland travel, I am going to bother getting force locks so I can pop those chests as I run all over the place. Once I get him set, I will likely go back to Eggsplain and do a bunch of dungeons and PVP with her to see how that works out. I need to figure out a few gear/spec addons to make switching specs faster. My aim is to just get a flavor for how she plays rather than optimize her for raiding. She will be then my healer/magical DPS Templar. The other toon I want to do pretty quickly is my Dragonknight tank/stamina DPS guy. If I get those 3 toons, that is a basis set (the third is my Nighblade sniper) to fill in group roles as needed.

The rest of the alt army is proceeding nicely on skilling up to morph level all of the skills. The 7 crafting dailies per toon adds up to a lot of progress on skill ups, and most of them have their main weapons and class skills done, and are in the process of doing the other weapons and rounding out all of the guild skills. It is very satisfying seeing their riding and crafting and skill training progress daily with so very little effort. It will be nice to be able to roll them out for a tour later.

[Snydelee]

18Feb2020

I had a nice run of days and was able to accomplish a few things.

First I dinged CP720. That means I can have 2 lines at 120pts, sort of a big breakpoint. The last 90points will allow a 30pt investment in a 3rd line.

What really seemed to crank that hard was taking out an alt who needed skill points, and running the main story (involving the Harborage) all the way up through Cold Harbor. I think I moved a good 3-4 CPs on that. This is also fantastic xp for skill lines as well, btw. I had all 3 class skill lines in the 47-48 range, and was able to cap them to 50 just doing that.

Eggsplain my magicka Templar who is completing the game finished out the quest hubs in Vvardenfall, and is about halfway through the last major zone for me, Wrothgar. The Vvardenfall stories are good with a few costumes/toys that unlock by doing them. Seems like both Vvardenfall and Wrothgar have “sneaky” quests involving infiltrating areas unseen as part of the objective. Eggsplain is a stage 4 vampire, and she has all of the stealth stuff from legerdemain and armor. But she is completely reliant upon invis pots. There was one horrible quest that involved a jumping puzzle while stealthed with roaming guards that I had to invis pot my way past. If you are going for completion on a character, make sure they have a stealth option.

My massive sales from the writs proceeds put me into high ranks on several guilds I am in for sales. I think I broke the 7M gold barrier, only to dump a good 1M on nirncrux and raw mats to make bringing my alts up easier. Jewelry and Enchanting is starting tow wind up now, I am on my 14th toon doing those. This speeds up the daily writ routine, since I can skip checking research for JC and Woodworking on many toons now. Same with riding training…as more people finish up that, the time to cycle through my toons on the daily writs has gone down. If this performance upgrade reduces load times, then I will be a very happy ESO person.

[Snydelee]

24Feb2020

Was sick this weekend with a cold. Ugh. Had to sleep in the recliner one night from drainage. Still got into the game and accomplished a few things.

1. Eggsplain is done with the story.

Eggsplain has completed the game. Well sort of. I think I have some bosses in Vvardenfell to do, and a few things to tick off in instances that pertain to zones. But I finished the storyline in Wrothgar, which is a nice rundown on the Orcs. I like how ESO does this, gives you background on a people via the stories. I was going to run her through PvP and Dungeons, but I am a little tired of her at the moment, so it was time to Alt-hop.

2. My new love, Vulcae

And so it was on to Vulcae, my Nord stamina Dragonknight. I think this was the very first character I did, and he originally was magicka, and originally was High Elf, but years went by and I got free rename/race respect tokens. I kind of like him, he has a lion’s mane of curly red hair, and his garish purple/orange/red armor really completes the entire look. He has been on crafting dailies for a good part of the year, coming off the assembly line at the end of the grind. His horse is done. He is 50 in everything. Has 9 traits in woodworking and jewelry crafting, 7 in blacksmithing and clothing. Enchanting, Provisioning, Alchemy are maxed.

But this guy was from way back in which I did not focus upon leveling up skill lines as I leveled. No, instead I just used the skills I liked. So there was some remedial training to do.

To make this fun, I crafted up weapon sets and played them each as a set. I had completed 2h, 1h+S. Dual wield has a really odd feel now. I thought that dagger gap closer skill you get last would be like charge. No it is a double button mash that is not very swift or useful. The whirlwind morph with execute is fantastic though. Stuff dies fast. I went with increased damage on the pulsing damage buff, and life return on the single target abilities. I definitely like the 2H set better, with gap closer, brutality buff, knockback move, and execute.

I started doing pure bow. I did not have enough points to fill up a bar, so I used the fighter’s guild silver arrows as my spammer for lightweaving. That poison version of snipe hits hard and is a strong open. Poison arrow backing it up makes it even more nice. And then you have acid spray to round out the triple dots, and more if you want to barrage.

I had neglected main story on Vulcae, so I was in Cold Harbor with most of the zone uncompleted. It is amazing how fast your weapon lines go up on those quests. On one quest turn ins, my bow went from 24 to 28. The Fighter’s guild silver arrow really chews through this zone nicely too.

The nice benefit now is I feel like I have done my time listening to story, and now I can just spam the answers as fast as possible and get on with the progression.

3. I go fishing in ESO

I tried out fishing on my crafting main Noto. I saw this fishing guide at Alcast and the build I was going to use with Vulcae called for food that you could only get via fishing. So it was off to explore the wonderful world of fishing.

I loaded up 4 mods- two from Wykyd related to fishing, 1 for fish tracking, and another that has a graphic. Not sure what does it, but when it is time to reel it in a giant white fish icon flashes across the screen. This let me watch the Arsenal/Everton game on the other monitor and fish.

Fishing seems more about getting to the next pool you need, then grinding out 15 fish. People are not really pissy about you fishing in their fishing holes since you get increased rewards with more people fishing the same hole. The fish tracker thing keeps track of the green and blue quality special fish you need to catch for each zone to get Master Angler.

I wound up turning off map tracking for fishing schools, as with my harvest mod it puts this giant white column everywhere. You look for the fish splashing on the surface, and really if you get to a nice spot, you just spin around as a quick check. I did turn on find clams, since those yield some of the rare resources needed to do the recipes.

I very quickly got the pickled fish recipe, that ups your yield of drops. Basically you drop more rare stuff, and you do not get extra items. I bought up clam gall to make it (expensive, around 10K a pop). I did one craft yielding 4. I read up on it, seems like it takes 30% less time if you run that buff while fishing to complete master angler.

I completed the achievement for Artaeum (easy since there are only ocean fish there), and got the Takaway Broth recipe. I then went on to Summerset. I got ocean and river fish done, lake fish is only the blue fish away, and foul fish is zippo. This is the thing that killed my desire to do Master Angler. There are only 4 fishing holes for foul in all of Summerset, and I went to them, and they all were empty. Talk about time sink. Not doing that.

I did get a bunch of containers fishing (you open them, they have rare stuff). I got 8 for my time in Summerset, which was around 2hrs. I got a couple Clam Gall in one, and a few powdered mother of pearl in the other. The latter is the rare component for the provisioning recipe of Takaway.

I did not keep track of perfect roe. One of the mods I have lets me right click a stack of fish, select ‘filet stack’, and I can walk away and come back later with the stack done. I did see it flash 3x, so I got at least 3.

Overall, I would rather make gold and buy from the market this stuff than spend time fishing. But it can be fun to do this if you are watching some TV program on the other monitor.

4. Alchemy

I decided to research traits on all my toons in alchemy. Alchemy is a really simple master writ. You just go to any crafting station and BAM you are done. Thing is I was not getting many master writs in Alchemy.

SO I used the addon Potion Maker for Alchemy. This is a neat addon, since you can pick a solvent, then click search, and it will give you list of unknown potions you can make. There is also a padlock symbol next to those potions that have traits you do not yet know. So what I did was go to making poisons, since I do not use that many potions and can stand to burn through those solvents.

And I would start out on the first recipe with a lock symbol, make 1 of it, and then go to the next. Typically around 30 pages or so and there were no more traits left to research. The experience you get from this is quite a bit, and I should have done this first for all of my alts. Alts 1-3 all are 50 alchemy now with all traits known. Alts 14-18 are in the mid 40s or higher in alchemy with all traits known.

And my alchemy writs went way up. So yeah, worth it. I did not grind out the last 5 lvls or so because dailies give me 20-30K xp in alchemy per day, and I do not want to squander mats grinding.

[Snydelee]

2 Mar 2020

1. Guild bank and provisioning and motifs- noticed this weekend that OTG trading had recipes and motifs. I took all of the recipes I had and dumped them in the bank, then cycled through all 18 alts to get motifs and recipes. There were 100-stacks of this stuff. In case it rubbed anyone the wrong way, I dumped in $1M gold too.

This puts me further along on the provisioning curve, but I am nowhere close to Expresso. The motifs did alleviate the materials bind…some of my alts only knew a couple styles, and all of the crafting components were running out on those common styles. I still get no real master writs for provisioning though, and I think I am so far behind on recipes there that it will be quite some time.

2. Alchemy- I went ahead and force the last 45-50 transition to cap all 18 alts at 50 alchemy with all known traits. I am seeing a steady supply of alchemy master writs, and I like these since I can bang them out quickly.

3. Enchanting- I discovered how to complete trait research for enchanting. I have Craftstore, so I just open up the enchanting station and about 4 icons to the right is a rune research icon. You will have white for ones you know, red for the ones you don’t. You pick one from the left 2 columns, and 1 from the right column. This brings up a recipe in the top window, which you left click to make and learn up to 2 runes a go. For a while I was just doing single traits, then I discovered I could double up. Took all 18 through this process, although the last 4 alts are not enchanting 50 so can not fully discover everything yet. Generated a lot of runes doing this which advanced my character grinding enchanting quite a bit. I am seeing more enchanting writs now, with a good 14 alts with maxed enchanting.

4. Writ worthy and what is worth doing- If you open up the addon writworthy with the slash command followed by writworthy, it brings up the menu. I wound up binding this to f12. You can then queue all writs for which you have a master writ in your inventory. Then you go to each station, and it will complete those writs, and then you go turn in. You still have to do it one at a time. I find that the tooltip as you hover over the master writ shows in green lettering the writs which you have completed via writworthy. You click one that master writ, accept the quest, then turn in. Expresso says do this with an XP scroll for massive experience on turn in.

This sure sped up the process of master writs. I used to activate one in a quest, travel to the station, travel back, turn in, repeat. Now I take a look at the writs and decide what I am going to do, what I am going to sell, and what I am going to destroy. And I just go out and do all the ones I am going to do.

This brings up the question of which ones to bother with. Doing clothing, blacksmithing, woodworking, and jewelry crafting (not supported by writworthy) means you have to go to a specific station. Tess has most, but a lot of the rest are not there. Sassy says the Tamriel Trade Guild has all of them in alphabetical order in the guild leader’s hideout. Might be a good trading guild to join…For me I will do all alchemy, provisioning, and enchanting unless it is using some ridiculous expensive component. I still use the material cost per writ voucher that writworthy displays and I usually do not bother with stuff over 500 mat cost per writ voucher.

But this then leads a whole slew of 5 writ voucher quests that require those special stations, and I just do not bother with that. If it is big (30-60 writ vouchers) and I have the style and I have the trait material and the crafting station is in the game right now (got some drops from the future content this weekend), then I will bother. Thus most everything is going to the guild store except for the easy stuff. Suits me fine as it reduces the chore time of doing writs.

5. OMG what a crap ton of XP- A completionist bug got me with Vulcae, and I started running main story on him in the zones I had previously done the usual sweep for skyshards, delves, and other POIs. I went from around 735CP to 750CP doing this, and I had burnt off my rest bonus too, and I was not running any XP scrolls. If you have a lot of alts, this might be a fun way to grind up CP to the 810 cap. I also did the main story all the way through to the end an unlocking soul magic 6.

[Snydelee]

6 Mar 2020

I took some stats on my surveys I just ran. As I survey I look for chests, psyjic order loot, and thieves guild troves. I force locks on chests. I do not really harvest except at the survey site, and generally I mount up at full gallop ride from point to point.

• began with 79 surveys obtained from 6days of 7 daily crafting quests on 18 alts
• generated 11 treasure maps during the run
• took me 2hr15min, or 40 surveys per hour, or 1.5min per survey
• got about 80K gold worth of merchandise from looting stuff
• 1200 silk, 1000 rubedo, 1800 rubedite, 1300 platinum (did not write down wood)

[Snydelee]

9 Mar 2020

Some anonymous donor gifted me 14x Psyjic Ambrosia. I say anonymous because they showed up in my mailbox with no message, and the mail addon I use auto deleted the message after looting. I get around 100 mails a day from hirelings and sales, so I use that addon. Thanks whoever sent it! I applied it to any alt I had that lacked an xp buff. I turn in 7 daily crafts 6 times a week at around 3-4min of time, and there is hardly a better way to maximize that buff. I am down to 3 today, and CP = 772.

Since I joined Total Domination, I now have only 3 trading guilds really. The main OTG guild I have been posting stuff like Cyrodiil treasure maps and JC master writs at 3x vendor for whoever wants them. Total Dominion must not care about their vendor at all as I had a lot of good stuff listed there that did not move at all.

So I have pulled down writs from sales. I am storing on an alt the writs I can not do, and I will put up on OTG at 3x vendor the ones which are a loss doing (someone may want to take that loss to get writ vouchers). And I will do the rest. This means I have 90 slots of gear up for sale. Had a green staff sell for 100K this weekend (I probably listed that too low).

I am in this zen-mode with Vulcae, doing main story for each Psyjic portal zone map, along with the usual delves, public dungeons, skyshards and other POIs. He is a huge black hole for skill points. My aim is to carry enough skill points to have all of the skills in the morphs needed trained, and just use my spec addon to flip between roles. As I have been doing this, I have been training all of the stamina off morphs on weapon lines and skills.

For bow, arrow barrage and acid spray is the way to go (or the other morphs). You ground target lay down the arrow barrage, then heavy weave an acid spray. I was training the morph of bombard, and that roots them in the arrow barrage. You can melt packs with this pretty easy. Using a stamina recovery drink food can really help with the stamina drain here.

For 2H, I like stampede and the slice version of execution. Another AOE of some kind (even soul magic soul splitting) makes it go much faster. As I train off morphs, brawler is a good substitute. 2H is very fast since you charge to reduce time closing on packs.

For DW, that tornado is amazing, and super fun. Adding giant stomp? speeds it up a lot. DW has no decent closer, but the AOE range of tornado is great.

For 1H+S, I just back bar train it. I put the skills on the back bar and swap to it on quest turn in.

So with Vulcae, I got all morphs of bow done, and am tidying up the 2H morphs, and will have fun next with DW. I have been carrying a full set of tank skills on my shield back bar, and this is useful when I run into a boss that is annoying. I am working on Psijic order 8 now. Craglorn is next. When I am done with Psijic order, I should have enough skill points to back fill legerdemain and then do the Dark Brotherhood grind (for the rider secondary) and Thieves guild grind (until legerdemain 19 for force locks). Just opening chests that I run across and opportunity looting stuff as I quest took me from legerdemain 10 to almost 13 this weekend.

For the alt army , the last 3 characters are working on JC/enchanting. I have been letting my crafting main learn first any new provisioning recipe found with the aim of getting that character able to complete any provisioning master writ found. I have 10 who have completed riding training, and the last 3 are still working on optimizing storage capacity from the mount.

This weekend is Path of Exile’s new season launch. My son is home for spring break, cooking up builds for that game, and we will go nuts with it on opening day (Friday). This means I may go through a stretch where I just log in daily for crafting in ESO while I spend time in POE.

[Snydelee]

3Apr2020

Still playing Path of Exile, but I am doing dailies in ESO. Took some data on progress.

On 14Mar20, I was 783 CL with 7.4M gold. Today on 3Apr20 I am 811CL with 9M gold. The 4th anniversary event really pushed me over today, and I did a lot of writs. Been spending writs on the vendor and not using htem for gold. Still have full vendors of stuff, although I have moved the JC writs over to TD guild since their vendor really has low turnover.