In Which Gyllerah Seeks Bosses, Dragons, and Antiquities

Catchup post from the middle of January, when ESO ran its Guilds and Glory event. A big exciting thing involved with that was that they also ran a free trial week for ESO+, so I got in on that action and therefore got access to everything on the map. So I did a mad dash around to hit a lot of places I hadn’t been in before, including Murkmire, Fargrave, the Deadlands, Orsinium, and Southern Elsweyr.

And I did a whole bunch of farming for leads for antiquities, specifically the Ring of the Pale Order, the Ring of the Wild Hunt, and the Oakensoul Ring!

Play by play

Play dates: 1/18-1/21/2024
Session numbers in this run: 338-341

January 18th

Big play here because the Guilds and Glory event started
And a free trial week for ESO+, so I activated that, which gave me access to all the content in the game, so started hitting a bunch of areas I hadn’t been able to get to before
Did a lot so organizing this by area rather than in strict play order

Murkmire

Boinged into Murkmire to see if I could trigger a drop of the lead for the bit of the Ring of the Wild Hunt
Ran both delves available in this zone, and both of them had some nice crunchy local plots
Was amused that one of the nisswo (priests of Sithis) I had to rescue was in fact a Bosmer
Also took on a world boss but fuck that was a hard fight, the damn thing kept regenerating health, and even after several other players showed up, it took us all a while to take it down
Ran a whole bunch of antiquities, but didn’t get the lead for the ring yet
Also picked up a fragment of a Saxheel tablet

Fargrave and the Deadlands

Kicked off this plot even though I haven’t run Blackwood properly yet
Progressed that far enough along to get me into the Deadlands so I could run some antiquities there, though I may hold the rest of the plot until later, after I run Blackwood
Ran one of the two delves here, False Martyr’s Folly, and ran several antiquities as well

Wrothgar

Kicked off the local plot here, again mostly to get into the zone and activate some wayshrines, so I could have somewhere to port to to aid exploration and antiquities
Killed a bunch of hostiles who were harassing orc peasants
Got a local chieftain (who was not pleased at an outsider showing up and sticking her nose into things) to draft me to help out and figure out how to stop the attacks
Went far enough along to find Orsinium

Gold Coast

Boinged into here too to explore the place, and yet again, run antiquities
And harvest stuff since this was one of the areas covered by the event
Ran both of the delves available for delve rewards
The first one featured Mel Adrys, the Dark Elf vampire hunter I’d met in Western Skyrim
And the second one, Garlas Agea, gave me a delightful surprise: the local quest giver was Razum-dar! <3 RAZ, YOU SCOUNDREL! it’s good to see you!
Very happily helped him kick the ass of a bunch of mercenaries in there

Azandar

While running all this stuff, I got enough rapport off of Azandar to get the quest prompt for the next round of his personal quest; he really likes me scrying for antiquities!
So I took that prompt off of him just to clear the quest marker but did not yet pursue it
Used event tickets to buy Az Fighters and Mages Guild commendations

Infinite Archive

Ran one round of the Infinite Archive but nope, still not making it through the first cycle yet
More leveling to do!

ESO+ stuff

Experimented with dyeing costumes since I could do that during the trial
Got the Antiquarian’s Garb to a dye set I liked and wore that while doing all my running around with Az 😀

January 19th

Ran a daily in the Gold Coast, which sent me back to the first of the two delves I’d run before
Ran a daily in Orsinium, which sent me off to a delve to free some spirits from being undead, and to take out a necromancer
On the way, stopped at a world boss site and participated in taking down the boss, but didn’t get any loot of note off of it
Daily reward got me a Trinimac Shoulders style sheet, yay!
Resolved to try that boss again (Corintthac the Abomination) because he can drop a lead for the Ring of the Pale Order
Went to Murkmire for another crack at getting the lead for the Charm of the Shapeless, for the Ring of the Wild Hunt
Result: SUCCESSFUL! Got in on taking out the other world boss in Murkmire, who dropped the lead 😀
Then scryed for that in Murkmire and found it! \0/
Took a couple of tries at the Infinite Archive
Discovered Briarheart items were showing up on the Guild traders, so bought almost all of the ones I needed for Gyllerah’s DPS build
Briarheart pieces did seem to let me get farther along past certain Archive bosses, but still wasn’t able to crack out of the first cycle yet

January 20th

Ran a daily in Orsinium, which required me to go hunt down the other world boss I hadn’t killed before
The quest for it was to talk to a drunken Khajiit in the hostel near the city, who’d lost assorted friends to Dwemer mechanisms
So I had to go investigate the sites of earth tremors and then take out a big nasty centurion
Didn’t do enough damage to it to get loot, but I did get achievements
Wrothgar being one of the areas covered by the event, the world boss sites there were swarmed, so harder to hit the damage threshold–and a lot of players killing everything so fast meant I barely had any chance to get a hit in, especially if I was mostly throwing heals
But still, got the lead for a piece of the Ring of the Pale Order \0/
Hunted down that antiquity lead oh my yes gimme
Meanwhile, ran first trial with St. Blackwood and their sister Guilds St. Elsweyr and St. Greymoor
We did a triple header, Sanity’s Edge, Maw of Lorkhaj, and a failed attempt at Cloudrest
Cloudrest at this point was still very crunchy for me to try to keep track of, and I fell down and died a lot in that one >_<
But did better in the other two, and got event rewards off of the Maw of Lorkhaj drops too!
Got appreciation for coming in with group repair kits, used a few of those in lulls to help repair everybody’s armor
Hit the gold coast to pick up a delve quest there for event rewards
Hit achievements for killing all delve bosses in the Gold Coast, fuck yeah
Then ran some guild dailies, with Azandar as continued backup, which got him another level up
- Fighters Guild: Dolmen in Auridon
- Mages Guild: Public dungeon in Rivenspire
- Undaunted: Delve in Rivenspire, Orc’s Finger Ruins
This required me to explore through some bits of Rivenspire i’d seen before but not actually run quests in
And my favorite bit of this was definitely the public dungeon, Obsidian Scar
Triggered a local quest there with a female Orc who begged me to help her find her husband, a Redguard
She and her husband were fleeing her stronghold because the prince of that stronghold was pissed off she dared to marry an outsider
Turned out they actually pursued and captured the couple, and killed the husband
That royally pissed off the Orc who asked me to help her swear a blood oath with Malacath
This required us to behead two brothers of the prince and offer those to Malacath, who accepted her oath and transported the prince to us
At which point we killed his ass and fulfilled Lashgikh’s oath
Moral of this story: do not piss off an Orc by murdering her husband
And oh yeah I had to recover a button off the Mad God’s doublet, LOL
Also, had a teeny side quest involving an Argonian bandit who was trying to bail on being a bandit, and I found her tied up in Orc’s Finger Ruins
Let her loose and she asked me to find a colleague of hers to tell her what was going on
Found the colleague in Fell’s Run and Brigibeth admired Teeba-Ja’s decision
Found Teeba-Ja in Shornhelm to get her reward

January 21st

Did some initial exploration of Southern Elsweyr, because I had a treasure map pointing to there and I wanted to use it while I could
Found Sai Sahan as soon as I got there, which let me kick off the Southern Elsweyr quest
Had to help him do a little light thievery and forging in order to get an appointment with the local Imperial official, to see if we could commandeer a ship to get to an island where a dragon had been hanging out recently
And Sai, as one of the last Dragonguard (possibly the last, as far as he knew), felt it was his duty to take out that dragon before it razed the city
The Imperial official told us to fuck off though
His daughter, on the other hand, came running out after us and wanted to help us; she pointed me at a friend of hers with a ship
Went to find that friend, a Dagi-raht Khajiit, and his first mate, who was a Senche-raht
But someone had in fact taken his ship so got an objective to help him to try to get the ship back
While doing all of this, did in fact find the treasure map spot and got the chest
Also spotted a nearby dragon battle site, but did not try to engage the dragon as I was the only player in range
Later, went to the Alik’r Desert to run the Coldrock Diggings delve
Found a local quest there in the form of a promissory note, and also cleared the delve by taking out the boss–SEVERAL TIMES, because that boss drops a lead for the Ring of the Pale Order
And it took me half a dozen tries to kill her before she finally dropped the lead
Several other players camped out by her for the very same reason
Then went to Stormhaven to camp out at the Titanclaw boss site, to try to farm a lead for the Oakensoul Ring
Took several tries, but finally got the lead for that, and then successfully made the ring!
Went to Kozanset in the Alik’r Desert to find the guy whose promissory note I’d found, and tell him that the guy he owed money to was dead; he was very relieved and gave me a small sum of gold for that
Did a lot of running around Bangkorai trying to hit chests to farm the lead for the Ring of the Pale Order, and a whole lot of NOPE resulted from that
Tan two different delves as well to try to get chests in those, Torog’s Spite and Troll’s Toothpick
Did not do the local quest in Torog’s Spite and I’m pretty sure I didn’t technically clear it, either? Wiki says it requires killing three bosses
Did find a local quest in Troll’s Toothpick though, which required me to free a captured Bosmer
Later met up with that Bosmer in Evermore, and she gave me a quest reward

Initial impressions of ESO+

I’ve written before about how I was side-eying the whole idea of ESO+ very hard. A lot of that commentary still stands. But since I have continued to play the hell out of this game and have continued to get entertainment out of it, I’d just like to note for the record that I had swung over to being willing to subscribe to ESO+.

And then I got laid off, which scuttled that idea real fucking quick.

But at least I got an opportunity to sample what ESO+ is like. And here are the main draws for it, for me at least:

It gives you access to the entire ESO map
It gives you an infinite Craft Bag to contain all your crafting supplies, including food and drink ingredients, and fishing bait
It doubles your bank space

Now, I still side-eye the notion of losing access to certain parts of the map if your subscription lapses. Though to give Zenimax fair due, they do save any progress you have in any areas you lose access to. And if you happen to have a house in an otherwise locked off area, you still get access to that. And I can personally confirm the bit with their saving your progress in such areas, since that definitely happened with me.

That said, I’m still working on getting access to as much of the map as possible independent of an ESO+ subscription. A year’s worth of unemployment has reminded me that if you’re on a budget, subscriptions to entertainment sources are not necessarily feasible for everybody. And dammit, I want access to those parts of the map. Hence a lot of farming and selling of things I’ve been doing all this year so far, while building up such a huge backlog of posts I still need to do.

So, access to the whole map isn’t going to call me back to ESO+ later by itself, assuming I get a job again and will be able to budget for that. At this point I have access to all the existing overland content except for dungeons, and I’m working on getting those.

But what will pull me back to ESO+ is that Craft Bag. Not gonna lie. That was fucking amazing. Not only the infinite storage space for ingredients, but also having the game automatically stash any ingredients I harvested, which took the pressure off of me for having to manage that stuff. It freed up more of my mental space to do the important stuff: i.e., adventuring!

Not to mention, the doubling of storage space was beautiful. As I’ve written many times in my Skyrim posts, I’m always chronically overloaded in that game. Overloading is impossible in ESO+, since it doesn’t restrict the player by item weight–but it does restrict you by number of distinct types of items you’re carrying. So ESO’s version of my carry woes is, I’m always running out of storage space! Especially given that I only have the bank storage and eight chests’ worth of space to stash stuff in, period. So doubled bank space and an infinite Craft Bag pretty much solved all my storage problems.

I’m very, very much looking forward to having access to that again. (Sooooo, if anybody out there wants to hire an SDET, drop me a line!)

And oh yes, I also really liked playing around with dyeing my various costumes. This is a feature I legit don’t mind being an ESO+ perk, just because in general the costumes in ESO are fun enough on their own that I usually don’t miss being able to customize them without the subscription. But the custom dye ability strikes me as a good nice-to-have perk to make ESO+ worth it.

So yeah, I’ll look forward to having that back when I’m finally able to subscribe properly.

Initial impressions of Murkmire

I’d gotten at least a little taste of Murkmire back when I ran its prologue plot. But this time, I got to see that zone in depth. It was about what I was expecting: swampy as fuck and full of gigantic wasps.

But I do like the background music. And now that I’ve had more of a taste of the Argonian cultures by running Ebonheart Pact plot, my appetite for at least exploring Murkmire in more depth has been whetted. Plus, I did like the prologue plot for the zone, so I’ll be interested in following up on that. I know there’s a quest hook for it right in Lilmoth!

Initial impressions of Fargrave and the Deadlands

I really like the idea of Fargrave, i.e., an independent realm in Oblivion not under the control of any specific Daedric Prince. And I was particularly interested in visiting there after having run the prologue quests for Blackwood and the Deadlands, with Marwyth.

And I was impressed by both Fargrave and the Deadlands, once I made it into both realms. The Deadlands in particular certainly felt familiar, after the times I’ve played Anniversary Edition content in Skyrim, and the brief glimpse I’ve had of that place so far in Oblivion.

But I definitely need to swing back around to do the plot for this in proper order, if I want to run it as Gyllerah in particular. As of right now Gyllerah has gotten more access to those realms, so it’ll make sense to follow up on the plots with her, but I’ll need to backtrack first.

I didn’t get far enough in on the plot to know who the Anchorite is, other than “the Anchorite”; it’ll be interesting to see what if anything gets revealed about that person’s true identity. And I was also deeply amused by meeting Madam Whim!

Initial impressions of Orsinium

Wrothgar in general and Orsinium in particular were also highly interesting to me to visit during the event. Not only because Wrothgar was getting featured in the Guilds and Glory event in general, but also because I was very interested in running the zone plot for it.

But at least in these sessions, I had only enough time for an opening sampling of the zone plot there, and of Orsinium. And I rather liked Orsinium, honestly!

It reminds me of Windhelm as implemented in Skyrim, in terms of a bunch of the architecture being very blocky. But unlike Windhelm, Orsinium isn’t flat. There are a lot of hills of varying heights inside the city, so the layout is more interesting. And at one point, I spotted a water wheel that was very blocky and Orcish in design, so that lent more overall visual interest to the place.

And heh, the overall snowy design of the place certainly helped lend it an ambiance that felt real familiar, after all the time I’ve spent in Skyrim. 😀 And by familiar, I mean, looking really frigging cold. The NPCs seemed to agree with that, or at least one Argonian I passed did, since I heard her bitching very loudly about how cold it was there.

Initial impressions of the Gold Coast

The Gold Coast zone isn’t terribly large, from what I saw in my explorations of it. It seems comparable in size to the starter zones of Betnikh or Bal Foyen or Khenarthi’s Roost. So it was pretty easy for me to explore just about all of it, minus the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary there, just because I didn’t want to try to start that plot yet. And also minus Kvatch, which I did find but did not explore in any real depth either.

And yep, that terrain certainly looked like Cyrodiil! Though a bit more hilly and plains-like than the parts of Cyrodiil that are actually contained in the “Cyrodiil” portion of the ESO map.

There were only two delves, but one of them, Garlas Agea, handed me the delightful surprise of the quest giver being Razum-dar. <3 That pleased me immensely! And made me very happy to help him kick the asses of a bunch of mercenaries in there.

Initial impressions of Southern Elsweyr

It should not surprise me very much that Southern Elsweyr is a more tropical-type climate than Northern Elsweyr, really. And this makes for a nice change of terrain! As of this writing I still haven’t explored the area in depth, even though I have since actually acquired the DLC outside of ESO+ and have permanent access to it now. I definitely need to fully run its plot. 😀

But at least during the course of the Guilds and Glory event, what little I did there was some initial steps of the local plot. Which kicked off with meeting a familiar face: none other than Sai Sahan.

After having a heaping helping of Lyris Titanborn in the Western Skyrim stuff, and a whole lot of Abnur Tharn in the Northern Elsweyr stuff, it was a great pleasure to see Sai Sahan here. I do quite like the character, and I’m glad that the third remaining one of the Five Companions gets a share of action in post-Main-Quest story.

(Though I do have questions about how the Southern Elsweyr plot handles it if you happen to choose to kill Sai as part of the Main Quest! According to the wiki, even if you did sacrifice him, he somehow manages to come back to life? OKAY THEN!)

I didn’t get too far in on this plot yet, but did like the initial set of NPCs I met, including the daughter of the Imperial official we talked to, and her Khajiit friends. It was especially cool to meet an NPC Senche-raht, since I haven’t actually run into too many of those yet in the game (aside from the one that hangs out in the middle of Rimmen).

Farming for Mythic antiquity leads

This span in January saw my first real efforts to start gathering the Mythics, the special class of Antiquities that are super useful in combat builds and give you a whole bunch of special perks and bonuses (countered, in some cases, by debuffs as well). A bunch of the Mythics have leads that are impossible to get unless you specifically have access to certain DLCs–so this was a thing I took advantage of a lot during the ESO+ trial week.

And it did finally result in my acquiring the Oakensoul Ring! As of this writing I have given it to my alt Veghra for use in a one-bar sorcerer build; more to come on that later.

But I also worked on farming the leads for the Ring of the Pale Order, and the Ring of the Wild Hunt, both of which I have also since acquired. So I’ll have more to say about those rings, too, in future posts.

Main thing I want to note about lead farming here is, holy hell farming the chests in Bangkorai for that Ring of the Pale Order lead is fucking tedious. So if you go after that one, be prepared for it to take a while, y’all.

Next time

Gyllerah’s next post will feature my taking more advantage of my temporary ESO+ access by running Falkreath Hold; running Bad Man’s Hallows in Glenumbra; and continuing Azandar’s quest line!