In Which Marwyth Closes Breaches and Learns How to Parse

In the first week of March of this year, I arguably only had one session for Marwyth that counted as a proper session… but I’m documenting three here anyway, because one of them was parsing, and another let me find an amusing NPC in the Alinor Outlaw Refuge! The post is super short anyway, so I don’t mind a bit of non-adventure detail here.

Play by play

• Play dates: 3/1-3/7/2024
• Session numbers in this run: 111-113
• A lot of writs and harvesting

March 3rd

• Ran around with Ember to close breaches for the Psijic Order, since I was in the mood to do something fairly low key
• And also get a skyshard or two, so I could drop a skill point on unlocking Grim Focus again for my current build
• So ran around Glenumbra, Stormhaven, and the Alik’r Desert to hit all the breaches I needed for this round
• Then boinged back to Artaeum to turn in the quest
• While talking to Josajeh, also saw another guy nearby had a quest marker on him
• So talked to him, and got a pointer to go talk to the Orc at the delve on Artaeum–so that gave Marwyth the quest to run that delve, awesome
• Did more practicing with the iron atronach dummy, and Marwyth’s numbers were slightly better than Gyllerah’s
• Had to do a bit of rearranging of gear, did a transmute on a ring to change it to Bloodthirsty
• Also, finally got Marwyth’s rapport with Ember high enough that I triggered her personal quest

March 4th

• Did some practice on the iron atronach dummy on Swamp Haven Guild island
• Still holding fairly steady at 21K and about 16 minutes killing the thing, even after rearranging gear a bit

March 7th

• Took stolen stuff to the Outlaw Refuge in Alinor for once–and was amused by the Nord fence in there bitching about the fragility of High Elven jewelry 😀

Commentary

Closing breaches for the Psijic Order is something I’ve gone into already with Gyllerah’s posts, so I won’t do so here. Mostly I charged through it as a means to get Marwyth access to more skyshards. (And it does get easier running the plot on later alts! Especially if you have the appropriate addons.)

Main thing I want to talk about here though is getting into doing parsing. I started doing this in early March as a means to practice being a DPS, since there are a lot of aspects to it in ESO. The game gives you a lot more things to keep track of than I’m used to dealing with in Skyrim, that’s for sure!

I already knew about the concept of a rotation from running Gyllerah as a healer in trials, but I learned fairly quickly that that was even more important a concept for DPS players. ESO gives you two bars of skills you can use for your character in combat, with five skills each on them. You can choose to use only one bar… but even if you do, that’s still five skills to cycle through in combat. And that’s still more complex than Skyrim!

So I needed to get used to the concept of utilizing DPS skills in a certain order, i.e., a “rotation”. And the game provides an easy way to do this with the various types of training dummies available for player homes. If you want to run DPS for a trial, though, you need to target the kind of dummy that Swamp Haven makes available on its Guild island: the Target Iron Atronach, Trial.

Attacking this thing until it falls apart is considered a standard way to gauge your damage output, which is useful information if you want to be in a trial group. And while the game does have built-in logging capability that you can use to actually look at what damage you do, it’s a lot easier if you have an addon called Combat Metrics, which I also took the time to learn about and install.

And I did some reading on a guide about parsing, in general.

All of this laid out for me some initial estimates of the kinds of damage I could do with Marwyth (as well as Gyllerah, since I did some initial parses with her too). And it gave me some goals to shoot for in how to improve. Since this was in the early stages of my gearing up Marwyth for proper DPS work, that involved getting skill points for her as well as improving her gear. I resolved to nab her a Briarheart dagger, and either the Kra’gh shoulders or a better monster set.

At this stage of the game, though, I got a ballpark parse for Marwyth of 21K across about 15 and a half minutes of fight with the dummy.

Which is not an impressive number. For comparison, current parses I’m doing with Marwyth put her north of 85K, across about four minutes! And that’s after months of practice and getting my mitts on some much better gear for her.

But more to come on these things in future posts!

For now, I’ll note that I just also enjoy parsing! It’s fun to practice the damage skills, particularly if I want to vary them up a bit and experiment, and learn which skills perform better and which ones don’t.

Mind you, this has absolutely no in-character bearing on Marwyth’s action in the game whatsoever. I decided it was best to not worry about working trials and dungeons into the regular narratives for my characters–in no small part because you can visit trials and dungeons repeatedly. The quests for dungeons don’t repeat per character, but the ones for trials do.

And I see no smooth way to explain how any of my characters, not just Marwyth, would visit the same place over and over, LOL.

But I’m okay with all of that! Trials and dungeons are their own thing, separate from running quests and stories, and I fortunately enjoy both aspects of ESO.

So look for a lot more commentary about my exploration of being a DPS to come, not only with Marwyth, but also with Veghra and Ashoshah as I get caught up on their posts.

Next time

Marwyth’s next post will feature more parsing exploration, but also running Ember’s quest to find her missing friends, running the delve on Artaeum, and running some Guild dailies.

Screenshots