In Which Gyllerah Lends Further Aid to Northern Elsweyr

This is another post that covers a wider span of time than I’m actually noting here with the sessions–but as per earlier warning, I’m only counting “sessions” as days where I do something with Gyllerah besides just running writs and antiquities.

Play by play

Play dates: 12/2-12/15/2023
Session numbers in this run (counting days where I did something besides writs and antiquities): 309-313

Saturday the 2nd

Joined the Guild for vet trial action; we ran Asylum Sanctorium and then Hel-Ra Citadel
Came in as a backup healer since we were a little short on DPS, but was not primary healer, since this was vet trials and the primary healers needed to be familiar with the mechanics
But I came in for practice, so that was fun <3
There were stretches of five whole minutes in places where I didn’t actually die ;D
Picked up three new dye colors for running these trials, neato

Saturday the 9th

Installed the Go Home mod which will let me set keybindings to go to various homes, I wanted one to set up going to Kelesan’ruhn, and maybe to set a different “home” for Marwyth even though Cliffshade is considered my account-wide primary home right now
Ran Grahtwood to get the Ancestral Elf Maces motif Marwyth found a lead for
Ran a dolmen while in Grahtwood so that was fun 🙂
And after playing Marwyth for a while, logged back into Gyllerah so I could start working on a level 46 gear set for Marwyth

Sunday the 10th

Went to Riverhold to move the Northern Elsweyr plot further along
Reported to Abnur Tharn about what I’d discovered at the Desert Wind Scriptorium
Checked in with Khamira about how to help out while Rverhold prepared to fight off Euraxia Tharn’s incoming troops (because clearly Euraxia wasn’t content with just holding Rimmen)
Khamira sent me off to a nearby farm, Greenleaf Farm, to try to get its people inside Riverhold’s walls
Zamarak the adept came with me to help
We found Euraxia’s forces already there and searching the place (for more parts of Cadwell’s body, apparently)
Found a survivor inside the farmhouse and got a tip from her to go find her mate and her brother
Found the brother but the mate was dead
Killed assorted Euraxian hostiles while doing all of this, and finally got the two survivors heading safely into Riverhold
Then went off to fuck up some nearby supply camps; had to startle their horses and burn some supplies
Next objective: checking with Cadwell and helping him set traps
But that also led to Cadwell getting a vision off of his own floating head; he could see Zumog Phoom heading for Riverhold with undead forces
Hurried back into the city to warn them of the imminent danger, but oh shit it was already there! OHNOEZ! Because dead bodies kept coming back to life
Which put Zamarak up to bat, he asked me to help defend him while he went to consecrate some nearby pillars
Finally got all three consecrations done and the dead stopped rising
Khamira announced herself as the rightful heir to the Rimmen throne to rally the remaining troops, just as three dragons came in to attack the city: Kaalgrontiid, Mulaamnir, and Bahlokdaan
Kaalgrontiid, the leader, ordered Bahlokdaan to finish us off, then flew off with Mulaamnir
I took down Bahlokdaan with a ballista, and then we took him out, fuck yeah \0/
I reported back to Abnur Tharn and Gharesh-ri about what to do next
But held off on that for now and returned to Cliffshade for final inventory managing

Tuesday the 12th

Boinged to Auridon and ran a delve there, Entila’s Folly, so I could harvest spider eggs
Got the skyshard there and took out the delve boss who was apparently a bonkers Khajiit who thought the spiders were his pets
Looted a few Thieves Troves while running antiquities, LOL, Marwyth is a bad influence on Gyllerah at least in this 😉

Thursday the 14th

Ran antiquities on Galen since I hadn’t done any there yet, and while doing that, ran two different volcanic vents
Holy shitballs, those are hard! Died at the second one!
But got good loot! Notably, a Firesong stylesheet for shields
Got eight thousand gold off of running all that, and also a piece of Syrabane’s Ward

Beginning of December login rewards

The daily rewards for logging in, as of the beginning of December, had some fun stuff. I got the following notable things:

A pig pet
Another guar pet
A “Black is Slimming” dye stamp which I wound up using on Marwyth’s Thieves Guild leathers costume
A Solitude banner emote

I have quite the sizable array of pets to choose from, by now. Which is kind of hilarious just because I usually just wind up defaulting to a dog if I feel like having a pet follow me around! But lately I’ve been more of a mood for not having any pet following me at all.

Writ action over the last couple weeks

I did a lot of writ action over the last couple of weeks, not only the regular ones, but some master writ action as well. I have a sizable backlog of those things, and have been trying to make a hard push through knocking them down.

And needing to run the master writs meant I finally got an opportunity to see the fancy new Grand Master crafting stations on our guild island! I’d missed those coming in, during my taking a hiatus from the game. They are cool and I really like how they reduce the need to have a zillion different crafting stations for the various sets around. This is something for me to actually eventually spend more writ vouchers on, maybe? But it’ll clearly take a while.

And I also have some level of question about how many of the craftable sets I’m actually interested in, anyway. I almost always use Adept Rider when I’m running Gyllerah solo, but if I kick over to her build with the Scrying and Excavation points on it, I’ve got Winter’s Respite in there as well. And the build I usually run for trials now has a mix of Pillager’s and Spell Power Cure. And none of the latter three sets are craftable.

On Marwyth I’ve been running a mix of Night’s Silence and Night Mother’s Gaze, but once she hits champion status there’s a strong likelihood I’ll be pulling in non-craftable sets for her, too. I’ve been building a stock of Night Mother’s Embrace pieces for her, and I’ll be eying Vesture of Darloc Brae as well. Both of these do fun things for aiding Sneak and that is highly relevant to Marwyth’s interests.

So we’ll see. As of this writing, I have about 650 writ vouchers. And I need to unlock appropriate achievements before I can get those fancy Grand Master crafting stations, anyway. I could always buy more storage chests, first! And if I go through with the plan of getting a larger primary house, I will have more space for storage chests anyway.

Last thing I want to note here is that I had two different Master Writs in Jewelry, both of which required me to get Dawn-Prisms. And experienced ESO players will know that those are expensive. I dropped gold to get the first one, but actually wound up going into Cyrodiil to buy the second one with Alliance Points. I continue to have zero fucks to give about PVP, but I had banked up a fair amount of Alliance Points just off of daily login rewards. So I had enough of those to get a Dawn-Prism from the appropriate Dominion vendor.

Antiquities action over the last couple of weeks

By extension, running my master writs this has also led me to a bunch more antiquities action, just because that’s one of my fastest ways of making enough gold to actually run those master writs.

And I do enjoy finding the antiquities! I learned that antiquity leads are also account-wide, not limited to specific characters. So leads found as Marwyth can be scried and excavated by Gyllerah, or vice versa. Though so far, Gyllerah’s build with the Scrying and Excavating points spent is the one I use for doing all this action anyway. Just because she can get to the tastiest stuff.

I wound up having to ask the Guild for a few tips, though, just because the master-level antiquity leads were giving me problems. But Guild folks are super helpful and I got a couple of pointers to make things work a lot better. 😀

Running antiquities in Craglorn (another place I really need to run properly) was a challenge. One particular antiquity site took me forever to reach because I couldn’t figure out the proper angle to approach it. And Craglorn, particularly in the center of its map, is geographically complex. Lots of physical barriers I have to find ways around.

I’ve even done some antiquity hunting in Coldharbour, which seems like the very last place Gyllerah would want to go antiquities hunting? But there’s also a sizable “fuck you, Molag Bal, I’m coming onto your turf and I’m taking anything cool I find” factor to consider here, too. And Gyllerah is definitely down with the “fuck you, Molag Bal” factor.

And I am pleased to report that I have now gotten Gyllerah’s Scrying and Excavation up to 10 each. Which unlocked a bunch of achievements, and gave me both of the Antiquarian costumes. I’ve started putting her in the field garb one every time I go out on an antiquities run!

Installing the Go Home mod

It vexes me that ESO does not let you set a primary home for specific characters. So I went looking for what add-ons are available that try to address this problem. I installed one called Go Home, which seems helpful. It lets you set keybindings to teleport to specified homes, with various settings to tweak for them as well.

The challenge I have here is, how many characters on the keyboard are still available to use. ESO’s command set is large, and most of the characters on my keyboard already have in-game functions! So I need to figure out how many keys are actually available to map to something.

For now though, I have a binding set to send me straight to Kelesan’ruhn, which helps a lot with…

Decorating Kelesan’ruhn

Since I got the large house for free on the Telvanni Peninsula during the Necrom event (which I didn’t participate in, but I still got the house anyway), I’ve started trying to decorate it. It has several large walls that turned out to be suitable for some art pieces I’d acquired. And I left the Dutiful Guar statue I got in there, along with several trophies from trials that I couldn’t put up in Cliffshade.

Antiquities runs have also given me a few more nice items to put there. I got a nice Ebony Fox Totem, a Carved Whale Totem, and a Khenarthi tapestry!

I really ought to start running the Necrom content some time soon, though. 😉 Just so I can actually properly explore the Telvanni Peninsula, and get a reason for why either Gyllerah or Marwyth might choose to move there. Marwyth currently seems like the more likely option, though. Gyllerah is an Eye of the Queen, so I can’t see her wanting to move all the way to Morrowind.

But I’ll hold on whether I want to commit to Kelesan’ruhn being my new main digs, because the Hall of the Lunar Champion is about to enter the chat. Which brings me to…

Further action in Northern Elsweyr

I finally moved the Northern Elsweyr plot a little farther along, and that was fun. Khamira revealing herself as the rightful heir to the throne of Rimmen was not actually a surprise! I’m pretty sure I didn’t see that as a spoiler while reading the wiki, but even aside from that, she has too much of a part in the beginning of the plot, and way too much bickering with Tharn, to not have a super critical role in the overall story.

And I did like the drama of how she revealed herself.

Also, I really liked the creepy side touch of Cadwell getting visions off his own floating head. Learning more about what’s going on with him has been great! The conversation I had with him did a splendid job at underscoring how Cadwell the Soul-Shriven is clearly no longer the same entity as Cadwell the Betrayer.

But a question I don’t have answered yet in this narrative is, if Cadwell the Soul-Shriven is a soulless vestige of his original self, and Cadwell the Betrayer is still operating with his original intellect, is Cadwell’s soul still out there somewhere? Is it possible for him to get it back? It’s intriguing to me that Cadwell the Soul-Shriven, even if he’s totes off his rocker, is now clearly a better person than the version of him that’s apparently fine with being a necromancer’s familiar.

If Cadwell the Soul-Shriven is now serving Meridia, I hope she’ll at least do him a solid and hook him back up with his soul like she did for Gyllerah.

Also, I’d like to note for the record that zombie Khajiit are definitely creepier than regular zombies.

Also, I think this marks the first time I’ve killed a dragon as part of a plot in ESO, as opposed to the world event encounters in Northern Elsweyr. So this was a lot more of a one-on-one thing, more akin to how I’m used to taking down dragons in Skyrim. But that said: this was still a good hard fight and that dragon did smack me around hard a bit before I finally killed him.

I have one more leg of this plot to run before I’m awarded the Hall of the Lunar Champion! And that is potentially going to alter my housing plans considerably. I know the Hall has extra parts you can unlock by running other content, but at least two of those parts are things involving DLCs I don’t actually have. So much is going to depend on what I can do with what parts of the Hall I will have access to.

Running volcanic vents on Galen

And here’s yet another place in the game I have yet to actually run properly. But I have a better impression now of what Galen is like, and I’m more interested in playing there now.

One big thing that stood out for me is that I really like the ambient music for that locale. I’ll need to see if that’s an available soundtrack to purchase!

And the other big thing that stood out for me is that holy shitballs, the volcanic vents are hard. I’d already tried one of these with Marwyth on High Isle, but I ran a couple more of them on Galen with Gyllerah. It seemed like a damn good opportunity to practice throwing heals on a group while also dodging severe environmental hazards!

Also, Galen really isn’t very large at all, so it was super easy to find two of those vents and run them in rapid succession.

Got really nice loot off of that, too. I was surprised at how valuable the bits of volcanic rock are! And I got a Firesong style motif for shields, as well as a couple of hunks of the relevant style material, Firesong Skarn.

Last but not least, there are bits of Galen that have lava flows and a jungle environment right around them. Which seems geologically odd to me to say the least? But okay sure why not, LOL.

Next time

Next post I drop for Gyllerah, whenever that’s going to be, will include further Northern Elsweyr action. But for now, I’m having a bunch of fun charging through antiquities and master writs! And working on level 46 gear for Marwyth.