The Floodgates Are Open: ESO

Friday February 14, 2014 marks the day Zenimax lifted the NDA pertaining to content available in the Beta weekends (any additional tests for any other content still have additional NDAs associated with them). And I have to say, even within my own guilds, tons of content has flooded in from beta testers, myself included. In this article, I'm going to quickly cover some aspects about ESO, with as many screenshots as possible.

The armor in the above screenshot is merely a costume (replaces the textures of your equipped gear). Such costumes are obtained primarily through quests. The costume above was optional in a quest, where my character could choose to use to sneak past enemies without having to fight them. All costumes are bind on pickup (soul bound, account bound, etc), and unfortunately cannot be traded.

Any Gold Goblin (or any goblin for that matter) loves chests. I am no different. Like most MMOs, there are chests or similar containers that spawn in certain locations with loot in them. In ESO, these chests feature a lock picking system, similar to what was implemented in TES IV: Oblivion. The contents contain gold and items ranging from a plain white item (lowest rarity) to multiple items of varying rarity.

The difficulty of the chest doesn't seem to determine the contents. I've unlocked master chests in higher leveled zones and received less impressive loot. This chest only had a simple lock (simple being easiest, master being hardest). At present, chests spawn in set locations on any given map. The same is true for gathering nodes for clothing, enchanting, blacksmithing, and woodworking. This could change at any time. Such is the case with alchemy ingredients.

In my quest to unlock all the alchemy effects, I can tell you that chests and plants to not follow the same re-spawn rules. From what I've seen, chests always re-spawn in the same place. This is not (entirely) true for plants. Alchemy nodes re-spawn when another node has been harvested nearby. The type of ingredient that spawns seems to be random, as long as it meets certain conditions. Nirnroot for example only grows alongside water, and some areas only spawn certain types of plants (mushrooms or flowers for example). As for location, there are more possible locations than there are "spawned" nodes. Again with examples, say there are 10 alchemy nodes spawned at any given time, but there are 20 possible locations they could spawn to. This ensures that multiple people can farm these resources at once, but no one person can abuse this mechanic.

While (loosely) on the subject of crafting, lets talk Racial Styles.

There are a total of 14 motif books in total. Books 1 through 9 are the alliance races. These motif books are the most common, but still fetch a pretty penny. Average market price for these have been around 2k in the beta. Book 10 is Imperial, allegedly the rarest. Considering that I found one, I doubt that. Books 11 through 14 are for the non-playable races of Ancient Elf, Barbaric, Primal, and Daedric. The (beta) average market price for these are somewhat harder to determine. I've seen one person constantly trying to buy them for 10k, but people tend to start a bidding war for them. They've gone for 15k, probably higher. That is almost the price of a horse.

So in short, if you can find a way to farm those books, you really, REALLY should farm them.

In the last article I wrote, we took a look at how crafting actually works. What wasn't mentioned, is that you can craft set items. Yup, set items that are typically the pride of dungeon raiders are also craftable.

There are specific locations (some hidden) where set items can be crafted. The ones that aren't hidden are marked with a flame icon with a hammer underneath. Normal crafting stations are marked with a flame with an anvil underneath. Set items (shockingly) have additional requirements in order to craft them. Set items have tiers, and these tiers are dictated by how many traits must be researched to unlock the item. Ashen Grip for example, needs two traits researched (per item) for that item to be unlocked for crafting. When dealing with set items, whether looted or crafted, keep in mind that the set bonus takes up the enchantment slots of that item. So if the set bonus proves to be useless, then the item is worthless.

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