In Which Gyllerah Gives Aid at Graystone Quarry

Opening post for March of this year in Gyllerah’s playthrough on ESO. This is a short one, with action featured in Wrothgar: recovering a relic for the House of Orsimer Glories, running the Nikolvara’s Kennel delve; and moving the main Wrothgar plot further along at Graystone Quarry.

Play by play

• Play dates: 3/1-3/7/2024
• Session numbers in this run: 360-362
• Lots of writs, both regular and master
• Lots of fishing and farming resources, on Artaeum, and in Craglorn and Northern Elsweyr
• Lots of selling stuff
• Lots of leveling up Bastian
• Bought a bunch of Nirnhoned items to use for research for master writs (and being able to make weapons for Marwyth)

March 1st

• Went back to Orsinium to follow up on a thing or two
• Turned on Bastian for backup
• Went after the helm that the curator at the House of Orsimer Glories wanted, Uzdabikh’s Helm
• Getting this was easy enough; just had to go to the mountain called Sorrow in the northeastern bit of the map
• Passed a camp that apparently contained Stibbons, LOL, but did not engage
• Got the list of the rest of the relics the curator wanted
• Ran the quest to get the Dunmer guy the durzog whistle he wanted, which turned out to require me to run a delve, Nikolvara’s Kennel
• The delve boss was a woman who had a gift for training durzogs, and the so-called enchanted whistle wasn’t magical at all, it was all her
• So I had to go back to the guy and tell him either the whistle was bullshit, or lie to him
• Opted for truth, as Gyllerah is not a liar, and unsurprisingly the guy was very disappointed

March 3rd

• Did some practicing with the iron atronach dummy on the Swamp Haven Guild island, which was actually my first time trying this at all, and which did not get me terribly impressive numbers

March 7th

• Ran a bit more RP in Wrothgar
• Ran more of the main plot of the zone, to recruit the first of the chiefs for King Kurog
• The stronghold of Clan Tumnosh was very near one of the wayshrines, so I hit that one first
• While trying to find a way in, found a permit of trade lying around on a rock
• Read that and saw that it mentioned three merchants that were supposed to be given legal access to build a bookshop in Orsinium and do business there
• Got objective to find the merchants, but for now focused on the Tumnosh plot
• Talked to the forge-wife, Kharza, on the way in and learned that there had been an incident at the nearby stone quarry that caused the injury of the chief and at least a few deaths
• Questioned her further about the situation and volunteered to help
• Went in to talk to the wounded chieftain, who was not terribly thrilled to see me and at least at first wanted me to fuck off, since he’s no friend of Kurog
• I asked him about what he remembered about his attack and stressed I was there to help; made a point of not bugging him about talking to Kurog yet
• Then went over to check out the quarry
• Spotted a skyshard and went for that first, which took me a bit because I needed to figure out how to jump to get to the platform it was on, then went down into the quarry proper
• Talked to a wounded worker, Ghorn, who told me that the hunt-wife Bolgar was still down in the quarry, along with her daughter
• Found Bolgar and agreed to help her by finding her daughter Shabon
• Finally found the High Elf I was looking for and OH HEY it was Neramo, the Altmer I’d met on Stros M’Kai
• Learned he was trying to get the situation in the quarry under control by taking over the loose automatons
• Helped him out with a puzzle to solve that would let him do this
• Neramo successfully took over the machines, and I went back out to report to the forge-wife what I’d discovered
• She was not happy about Neramo still being alive, and actively insulted by the idea of Neramo offering the machines he’d commandeered to make up for the lost productivity in the quarry
• She was ready to take out a blood price on his ass right there and then
• But I hit the “Persuade” option and pointed out to her that the machines could be useful while the Orcs regained their strength to get back to the point where they themselves could do the work, if that’s what they wanted to do to please Malacath
• She accepted this and this resolved the quarry plot
• Went back in to speak to the chieftain to update him on what had happened, and then asked if he’d be wiling to talk to Kurog
• He agreed to this, which knocked his objective off the list of chiefs I had to convince
• Held at that point for now

Stibbons sighting in Wrothgar

At some point I probably need to engage with more of the appearances of recurring characters in this game, LOL. Like, say, Stibbons! Who so far I’ve only actually interacted with in Coldharbour… but in the sessions I’m writing about here, I also spotted him in Wrothgar while going after that helm for the House of Orsimer Glories.

I’ll need to go find him again when I’m more in the mood for side questing. I haven’t been, for a while, unless it’s specifically when I’m logged in as Veghra. Maybe Vegs will find him!

But yeah, Stibbons certainly seems to get around. I’ll definitely have to follow up on that sighting later, whether as Gyllerah or any of the other characters. I think I will keep that in reserve for when Veghra finally runs Wrothgar–because oh my yes, she will.

Learning how to parse

I already mentioned learning how to parse in Marwyth’s last post, but I actually tried to parse for the first time with Gyllerah before I did it with Marwyth. In general, I wanted to play with parsing because I hadn’t done it before, and I was curious about how much damage I could do with my then-current available gear.

“But Anna,” you might be saying, “aren’t you playing Gyllerah as a healer?” Yes! I am! But that’s what I do with Gyllerah in trials and dungeons. When I’m running her solo, I’m almost always on a damage build I set up for her.

As of this writing, I actually have six different build variations I have set up for her, controlled by the game’s Armory station, and also by the Wizard’s Wardrobe plugin I’m using.

On the Armory station, I have two builds: “Stamplar” and “Magplar”. These are short for “Stamina Templar” and “Magicka Templar”, which reflect the primary attribute each build is centered around.

And on Wizard’s Wardrobe, I have two different gear configs for “Stamplar”, and four for “Magplar”. The Magplar builds are the ones I use most often in trials or dungeons, when I explicitly need to be functioning as a healer, and I keep different builds for that because of having different healer gear available.

But on both Stamplar and Magplar, I also have configs available that let me do damage. And I usually want to have some at least some damage capabilities when I go out for overland adventuring!

So out of general curiosity, I wanted to measure how much damage Gyllerah could actually do. I mentioned doing a parse test back in this post, and on 3/3 was when I actually did that.

I tried first with the gear I chose for the Archive. This got me about 14K of DPS across 24 minutes of combat, and that was just not very good. I knew even at that point that really hardcore DPS players can clear 100K of DPS!

I tried a second time with Briarheart and Pillar of Nirn gear (gear which I later handed off to Marwyth), and that was slightly better: 20K across 17 minutes.

All of my parsing efforts since then have been oriented around my DPS characters, just because I’ve set them up better to do a lot more damage. Gyllerah is adequate for overland adventuring levels of damage… but not serious business DPS.

I’m slowly poking at improving that, though. I certainly don’t need Gyllerah to be able to do DPS. But I just like the idea of her being versatile enough to do either damage or heals, if I need her to. And I want to learn more about the damage capabilities of the Templar class in general.

So we’ll see what happens with that.

Action in Wrothgar

The biggest fun in this set of sessions though was definitely continuing the plot in Orsinium, and in particular this time, the Quarry Conundrum plot at Graystone Quarry.

I had to snerk at the forge-wife who gave me the quest, Kharza. While I was talking to her, she asked if I’d seen an Elf around, and made a crack about him looking “a little like you”. Altmer clearly all look alike to the good forge-wife? Though I rather think Gyllerah at this stage of her adventures is doubtless aware that the Altmer kinda have that coming. 😉

On the way down into the quarry, I was also a trifle bemused by the hunt-wife Bolgar and her daughter Shabon–just because, despite the overall danger of the situation and how anxious Bolgar was for me to find her daughter, neither of them seemed terribly interested in actually moving out of the spots they were standing in after I talked to them. I do hope they eventually moved once I finished the plot

The pleasant surprise about this plot was that the High Elf I was asked to look for turned out to be a familiar one: Neramo, the guy I’d met on Stros M’Kai! If I’d read prior to meeting him there that he’d be there, I’d forgotten! So it was nice to see him there, and to also know for sure that I wasn’t going to be dealing with someone hostile.

What I did need to deal with, though, was a large and complex puzzle to solve that would let Neramo take control of the automatons in the quarry. It was, however, complex enough that it was past my level of patience to fully solve on my own. So I looked up the solution on the wiki.

And I was pleased as well that I was able to resolve the situation without conflict, by which I mean, without the forge-wife getting all violent on Neramo. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t passed that Persuade check! Pretty sure Neramo would still have survived it, though, since he does show up in other content elsewhere in the game. Notably, Clockwork City.

Next time

Gyllerah’s next post will feature my first crack at a veteran trial, a bunch of sales and farming and such, and another round of plot in Wrothgar!

Screenshots