In Which Gyllerah Resumes the Hunt for Time Breaches

Multi-session post covering the last stretch of my holidays, before needing to return to work tomorrow! Which will impact my play patterns again.

Main action in these sessions: final activity for the New Life Festival; trying and failing to finish the Bloody Reunion quest; trying and failing to proceed through Tower Full of Trouble; and doing some Psijic Order time breach sealing.

Play by play

• Play dates: 12/28/2022-1/1/2023
• Session numbers in this run: 79-83

Wednesday’s play

• Ran writs
• Ran an Old Life Festival thing this time because Breda kept wanting me to do the plunge again and I did that one already
• Had to find a shrine on Auridon this time, a part of the island I hadn’t been to before
• Found the shrine, wrote and burned the messages; got the event box and tickets
• Then boinged off to see if I could kill the Pale Worm this time; answer: no, ending of quest still fucked
• Boinged back to Alinor for a bit of inventory management and to spend some of my event tickets

Thursday’s play

• Ran writs
• Got Old Life Festival quest for Bangkorai
• Boinged over there to hit the shrine, and also hit a jewelry and a woodworking survey while there
• Both of those were down near Old Tower Wayshrine
• Hostiles fought: 
  • Spriggans
  • Wolves
  • Asssassin beetles
  • Lions
  • Wasps
  • One very surprised Imperial sentry
• Boinged back to Alinor for redemption of event tickets and inventory managing
• At some point during this session, spent a skill point earned from skyshards, which took my Woodworking up to 7

Friday’s play

• Ran writs
• Got repeat of mudball festival on Auridon
• Then boinged to Vvardenfell and ran repeat of jewelry survey near Gnisis Wayshrine
• Ran woodworking survey down near Seyda Neen
• Then a woodworking survey in northern Blackwood
• Returned to Alinor to finish writs
• Got the Barbaric style page out of the Guild bank to see what the Barbaric armor looks like, now that I can actually make it (not terribly impressed)

Saturday’s play

• Ran writs
• Didn’t bother to do the New Life Festival
• Instead tried to boing back to High Isle to do that quest with Ember–only to discover it’s frigging broken, could not disenchant the enchanted livestock
• Boinged off from there for a while to Glenumbra to track down time breaches; did three of them
• Got another skyshard and a skill point, so dropped that on Woodworking to take it to 8
• Boinged back to High Isle to try to finish the quest; no joy, even tried abandoning it and restarting, but it failed the same place
• Finally canceled out of the quest again (as well as the Bloody Reunion one since i couldn’t finish that one either)
• Boinged back to Alinor to try to run a second round of writs, but did not finish them
• Also picked up Ancient Elf style book from Guild bank

Sunday’s play

• Ran writs from previous day
• Had to buy several items from Guild traders to finish them off, then worked on second round of writs
• Went out to finish off time breeches in Iliac Bay, which meant I had to go to Stormhaven
• Found and fought assorted hostiles and got in and out as fast as possible
• Had another NPC come up to me demanding attention situation, but wasn’t in the mood to run a full quest right then
• Leveled up to 44 by finding locations; dropped skill point on leveling up another thing in the Skills Advisor
• Boinged to Artaeum without bothering to hit a wayshrine just so I wouldn’t have to fight my way back through hostiles
• Found Josajeh and reported in
• Got an armor piece for quest reward, and next round of breaches to go seal in Morrowind and Skyrim; got another point in the Psijic Order skill line
• Boinged back to Alinor and made set of level 44 armor to try out the Ancient Elf style

Commentary

I feel like, in general, the New Life Festival kind of fizzled out for me. I’ve been thinking about why, and I think it kind of hit me in the same mental space where festivals in Animal Crossing did–i.e., too much “run around and do this errand quest” without any really meaningful reward. Paul says he likes the mount he got off his festival run, but I couldn’t summon quite enough motivation to get more tickets than I did, once the various festival options started repeating themselves.

I find ESO more interesting when I can actually do serious questing and/or RP. So with that in mind I tried to finish up some of the pending quests I had in my quests journal, only to have this fizzle out on me twice.

I could not for the life of me get the boss to spawn for the Bloody Reunion quest. Nor could I find any info on whether this was caused by my trying to finish it outside the context of the Dark Heart of Skyrim event. But apparently I wasn’t the only one who ran into this issue? When I searched for info on it, I found other players reporting issues getting the Pale Worm to spawn, too. But all of those reports were within the time span of the Dark Heart of Skyrim event happening; I could not find any more recent reports. So still an open question there about WTF caused the problem.

So this may just be on me, trying to finish the quest late. I’ll see what happens if/when another Dark Heart event rolls around. It would be nice to finish up the quest properly.

Likewise, I was stymied by running the Tower Full of Trouble quest, which is supposed to result in you getting Ember as a companion. I was more disappointed by this one failing, just because Ember seemed like a fun character and I was sad I couldn’t finish her quest. 🙁 Point of failure here was partway through, when Ember asks the player to use her enchanted spoon to disenchant farm animals who’d been transformed to human form (but which were still acting like animals).

I could not get the animals to spawn correctly. First time through, I found only the one sheep, but could not get any additional animals.

I canceled out of the quest, found Ember not far off, and tried a second time. Same point of failure, but this time I had three “enchanted sheep” spawn in the same spot, none of whom I could interact with. Augh.

And again, I tried searching for solutions. I saw other players reporting issues with this quest, from back in June when the High Isle content dropped. I even found a support article. But none of the solutions suggested worked for me:

1. Canceling the quest and restarting
2. Using /reloadui command in the text chat window
3. Logging out and logging back in

I even tried logging out on the Deck and logging back in via the ESO client on my Mac, but that didn’t work either.

At least I did get in some constructive progress on the Psijic Order time breaches plot. And I advanced my Woodworking skill enough that I was able to unlock a couple of the style pages we had banked up in the Guild bank. So now Gyllerah has level 44 Ancient Elf armor. So there’s that!

Next time

Definitely time to make some progress on the Main Quest. I’m into 80 sessions with this character and starting to get a little bored with her, too much writ running and not enough adventuring. More adventuring is required!

Screenshots

Notes

1. Updated post on 1/3/2023 to add missing screenshots, and missing items in the post summary at the top.
2. 11/25/2023: Restored missing gallery.