When I did it this morning they turned red when the target cross was on them, that was the change and meant I could hit them prior. All previous times they did not turn red. Very odd and annoying
they sent me a mail with the activation code etc for the forums so that it is linked to my account i guess.
i completed it at lvl 10 on my nightblade .. my wife on level 10 on her heal spec templar.oh i'll admit to spending hours on that quest hehe ! First tried at L8, failed badly...and every subsequent level. Unfortunately at L12 i didn't even go below 75% health killin it, my dps doubled from 10 to L12 though
massively.com said:Massively's Elder Scrolls launch diary: Day three - Questing, story, and more
by Jef Reahard http://data:image/png;base64,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 on Apr 2nd 2014 10:00AMFantasy, Game Mechanics, Launches, MMO Industry, New Titles, PvE, Opinion, Hands-On, First Impressions, The Elder Scrolls Online, Subscription0
I'm just about to level 10 as the sun sets on day three of my Elder Scrolls Online pre-launch experience. After plenty of decisional paralysis on Sunday, I settled on a Redguard Nightblade and spent Monday and Tuesday leveling him through Stros M'kai, Betnikh, and the city of Daggerfall.
Now I'm working my way northeast through the wilds of Glenumbra, stopping occasionally to assist the citizens of Deleyn's Mill and clean up the Vale of the Guardians.
MMO story
There's a lot of solo quest content in ESO's early Daggerfall Covenant levels, and I haven't even bothered with the main story quest as of yet. Well, technically I have, but the level 3 quest in that line is buried underneath all the other errands on my Glenumbra to-do list, so whenever I can stop gawking at the sights, sounds, and resource nodes of Tamriel at some point, I'll polish it off.
The story's not half bad if you're into that sort of thing. I'm not, really, since I'm more of a sandbox fan, and in ESO's case, a fan of wanderlust and random exploration. But the story looks to be competently handled. It's fully voiced, of course, and there are some interesting wrinkles in terms of decisions that may affect my access to NPCs down the road.
For example, I chose to side with Betnikh's Orc clan and destroy a troublesome artifact rather than turn it over to the Daggerfall Covenant, and while the tribe and its chieftain greatly appreciated it, the Covenant-sympathizing pirate captain who transported me to the island and farmed out her crew to serve as my quest-giving NPCs was none too happy with my decision.
She made noises about refusing to do business with me again, but thus far the moral choice hasn't had any discernible gameplay consequences since the Orc chieftain forced her to sail with me again, anyway.
It's a nice idea, though, branching story quests with gameplay consequences. BioWare shied away from meaningful choice in Star Wars: The Old Republic, so I'll be interested to see if ZeniMax follows the same path with ESO's narrative or if the devs had the time, resources, and inclination to actually implement consequential arcs in an MMORPG.
Random fun stuff
Apart from questing and Glenumbra's terrific production design (seriously, high fives and raises all around to the art team and whoever is responsible for those gorgeous god-rays-through-the-forest-canopy effects), a few other positives stood out on my third day. I love, love, looooove all the emotes in the game. The fact that ZeniMax included six different sitting animations, not counting /sitchair, is indicative of a game that at least acknowledges fringe groups like roleplayers and immersion junkies, even if it doesn't build itself around them.
Public dungeon instances are a treat too, and the dev team has absolutely managed to capture that oh-cool feeling from the Elder Scrolls single-player series where you happen upon an unmarked labyrinth in the open world and discover a vast network of tunnels and crypts, all beautifully rendered, beautifully lit, and stocked with plenty of those addictive trunks, baskets, and bone piles that basically serve as a sort of kleptomaniac's harvesting node.
Some negatives
Though I'm still having quite a good time with the game, I do have a couple of bones to pick, as it wouldn't be much of a launch week diary if I spent it all telling you how The Elder Scrolls Online is a big fat fangasm from start to finish.
Let me start with ZeniMax's decision to reveal player account handles to everyone on said player's friend list. I wish I were joking here, but unfortunately the devs did fail IT Security 101, so if you've got a login handle that you'd just as soon keep private, well, don't join a guild and don't make friends!
I can't for the life of me understand the logic behind this decision unless ZeniMax is hoping for a rash of account hackings so it can start selling you USB security keys in a few weeks. Gold spam is already prevalent in ESO's zone chat, and making one half of a player's login pair public is simply asinine with a capital-A.
To say nothing of the fact that now I have to buy a second account if I want some quality alone time with an alt apart from my guildies!
Quest bugs
Past Elder Scrolls games have been fairly notorious for their launch bugs, and while I'm still willing to call ESO the smoothest pre-launch I've experienced in a number of years, it's certainly not perfect. [Ed. note: OK, maybe it's not all that smooth anymore due to the NA megaserver being offline for hours on April 2nd!] I've experienced no lag to speak of, but I've encountered a handful of iffy quests throughout my Tamrielian vacation.
I say iffy because I'm not sure whether they're all bugged or just poorly designed. I found myself waiting around for what seems like an eternity for those infernal Bloodthorn Necromancers to spawn and deliver their motes. After that, I found myself waiting around for another eternity as the Seamount hunters I was supposed to duel stubbornly refused to regenerate their health bars after their encounter with the previous player.
And who could forget those Bloodthorn Assassins who have been refusing to spawn on that damn ship at the Daggerfall docks for several days now? Yesterday afternoon's impromptu one-hour maintenance session fixed two of those quests, at least for me, but stuff like that does unfortunately have to go in the negatives column of a fair launch summary. Finally, come on guys, it's 2014. Shouldn't we be able to claim pre-order account rewards across our entire account without having to claim them on one character and then spend half an hour moving them around at the bank?
These are small nitpicks, to be sure, but I feel the need to point them out since, contrary to occasional commenter opinion, I am not on ZeniMax's payroll and I can get away with saying, hey, fix this stuff!
Until next time. And don't forget days one and two of our launch series:
Massively's not big on scored reviews -- what use are those to ever-changing MMOs? That's why we bring you first impressions, previews, hands-on experiences, and even follow-up impressions for nearly every game we stumble across. First impressions count for a lot, but games evolve, so why shouldn't our opinions?
Tags: bethesda, bethesda-softworks, bethsoft, bugs, daggerfall, daggerfall-covenant, elder-scrolls, elder-scrolls-online, eso, eso-bugs, eso-launch, eso-launch-diary, factions, launch, launch-day, launch-diary, launches, mmo-travelogue, morrowind, nightblade, oblivion, pvp, redguard, rvr, sandbox, skyrim, tamriel, tes, teso, the-elder-scrolls, the-elder-scrolls-online, three-faction-pvp, three-way-pvp, zenimax, zenimax-media, zenimax-online, zenimax-online-studios
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massively.com said:Massively's Elder Scrolls Online launch diary: Day four - PvP
by Jef Reahard http://data:image/png;base64,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 on Apr 3rd 2014 10:00AMFantasy, Game Mechanics, Launches, MMO Industry, New Titles, PvP, Opinion, Hands-On, First Impressions, The Elder Scrolls Online, Subscription0
My fourth day In The Elder Scrolls Online didn't start until well after 3:00 p.m. thanks to the North American megaserver going down in the wee watches of Wednesday morning and remaining down for several hours.
When it came back up, the first thing I did was load into Doshia's Lair outside Daggerfall with a pickup group that intended to finish a Fighter's Guild quest called Anchors From the Harbour. Unfortunately none of us could see the others' avatars inside the instance, so after several attempts at reloading and relogging, we abandoned ship [Ed. note: Yes it's a solo quest, which wasn't in any way made clear to the group trying to enter it!].
While additional data like this has caused me to reassess my earlier observations about ESO's smooth (pre-)launch, it hasn't affected my overall enjoyment of the game. In fact, ESO would need quite a few more bugs and several more days of downtime to qualify as a "bad" launch. If you disagree, well, I question how many MMO launches you've actually experienced.
Anyway, let's move on to the actual gameplay. Shortly after my failed PUG experiment, I dinged level 10 and set about preparing myself to sample ESO's much-touted three-faction PvP.
When I say preparing myself, what I mean is pressing L to bring up the Alliance War menu, clicking the rightmost campaign button, and selecting a home campaign, which as I understand it is basically an instance of the gigantic Cyrodiil PvP battlefield. Right-clicking my home campaign and selecting Enter then whisked me away from Daggerfall to a training camp well inside friendly faction lines.
From there I picked up a tutorial quest line and made use of the Transitus Shrine (i.e., the fast travel network between keeps, outposts, and gates). Fortunately for me, the Daggerfall Covenant was currently dominating Cyrodiil, so I could teleport to most areas of the map unmolested. It's telling that Cyrodiil has its own fast travel system, too, because the zone is absolutely ginormous. I ventured outside the safety of my faction stronghold a few times just to explore, and I was blown away by the enormity of the place.
I guess it has to be big given the fact that ZeniMax says it can support 2,000 simultaneous users with 200 of them onscreen at any given moment. But I still wasn't prepared for exactly how big it is until I looked at the zone map and spent some time traversing it on horseback.
First things first, though. Back at the Northern High Rock Gate camp, I turned in the first of my PvP newb quests and was rewarded with Alliance Points that are used on everything from new gear to repair kits to siege weapons and camps. Said siege weapons are a lot of fun, and they may even end up overcoming my PvP indifference if maintaining a steady supply of them doesn't turn out to be a hellacious grind.
As you'll discover when you arrive at the firing range portion of the newb quest, there are four types of siege weapons: trebuchets, catapults, ballistae, and battering rams. Each has its own unique abilities and situational usefulness. Catapults are great for taking out enemy troops, and they can even hurl boiling oil or nasty looking disease balls. Trebuchets, on the other hand, are ideal for pummeling keep walls. ZeniMax deserves quite a few kudos here, as watching the siege machinery in action is fun all by itself, even when you're just firing it on the practice range.
The catapults clank noisily through their motions, and the impact effects of boiling oil are pretty spectacular. You can also dump said oil off of ledges and into the path of onrushing enemy players. And of course all of these siege engines take damage, so you'll need to use repair kits that can be quick-slotted and key-pressed in the thick of battle.
So what's the point of all this destructive machinery? In a nutshell you want to help your faction capture keeps, farms, lumber mills, mines, and even Elder Scrolls themselves, which buff your faction's players after they're yoinked and controlled. ZeniMax has also placed a variety of repeatable quests in Cyrodiil that range from scouting sorties to kill-20-players to resource-capturing battle missions and keep-capturing warfront missions.
I won't pretend to have the full measure of ESO's PvP at this point, as so far I've simply engaged in a few cat-and-mouse games with enemy players who've ventured close to the borders of DC-controlled territory.
I traveled to Cyrodiil as soon as I hit level 10, and while every low-level PvP participant receives the buffs required to make them useful throughout the zone, I'm still at a disadvantage compared to higher level combatants who have access to more class, race, weapon, guild, and other assorted skills.
I can tell you that I'm very much looking forward to delving into Alliance Wars as I continue to play ESO over the next few weeks. And given my history of PvP apathy, that's definitely a feather in this game's cap.
- Massively's ESO launch week diary, Day One
- Massively's ESO launch week diary, Day Two
- Massively's ESO launch week diary, Day Three
Massively's not big on scored reviews -- what use are those to ever-changing MMOs? That's why we bring you first impressions, previews, hands-on experiences, and even follow-up impressions for nearly every game we stumble across. First impressions count for a lot, but games evolve, so why shouldn't our opinions?
Tags: bethesda, bethesda-softworks, bethsoft, cyrodiil, daggerfall, elder-scrolls, elder-scrolls-online, elder-scrolls-pvp, eso, eso-launch, eso-launch-diary, eso-pvp, factions, mmo-travelogue, morrowind, oblivion, pvp, rvr, skill-based, skyrim, tamriel, tes, teso, the-elder-scrolls, the-elder-scrolls-online, three-faction-pvp, three-way-pvp, zenimax, zenimax-media, zenimax-online, zenimax-online-studios
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Funnily enough i'm playing a resto staff healin' templar
