In Which Marwyth Unmasks a Culprit in the Fighters Guild

ESO catchup post for my run with Marwyth, from the first half of March of this year. Main action here is making a hard push through the rest of the Fighters Guild plotline, but with a heaping side helping of parses, helping Ember rescue a missing friend, running the delve on Artaeum, and running some dailies.

Play by play

Play dates: 3/8-3/14/2024
Session numbers in this run: 114-117

March 11th

Did some parse practice with the iron atronach on Swamp Haven’s Guild island
Also attempted a practice with the atronach while logged into the computer
Meanwhile, noted with a bit of concern that the new patch released seemed to be quite problematic on the Mac client
Kept having crashes when trying to get to Swamp Haven’s Guild island
Crashed to desktop, and when I tried to come back in, I had to go through UI making me select my country and everything
(Resolved later of course, but still!)

March 12th

Got enough Tempering Alloys that I was able to improve Marwyth’s Pillar of Nirn dagger
Swapped out the Darloc Brae one I was using for one of the Night’s Silence daggers instead, since that was an easy way to get a second Legendary quality dagger in her attack rotation
Played with the color scheme of the Pillar/Briarheart armor combo, settling into an overall theme of black + red + blue + gold for Marwyth’s armor colors
Did another round with the atronach but did not beat last night’s rough numbers of 27K DPS, 12 minutes
So had more gear work to do, as well as practice of technique and refinement of DPS bars
Did some actual adventuring today!
Took Ember to do the first part of her quest to find her missing friends
This played pretty much the same as when I did it with Gyllerah–with a notable exception: dialogue I had during this session did account for my being a Dunmer!
Got the skyshard in Pulk where we rescued Jhaka, but didn’t bother with the boss
Then boinged to Artaeum to run Traitor’s Vault
Still a very fun delve, and I do like the glimpses into Mannimarco’s past
Also saw the denouement where a senior Psijic showed up to reprimand Ulliceta!
Did not initially get the skyshard, had to look up help for how to reach the damn thing because the layout of the delve is quite complex
But did go back for a second round and got to the skyshard quickly
Ember leveled up again while running Traitor’s Vault, yay!

March 13th

Did a respec on Marwyth since I got Skill Respecification Scrolls as a daily reward
Rearranged a bunch of her skills, downgrading crafting skills since her having crafting is less of a priority now
But didn’t blow away her crafting points entirely, wanted to keep her on par with Veghra
Woke up a bunch of additional Dual Wield, Bow, and Fighters Guild abilities
Also rearranged her Champion Points, and the Briarheart/Pillar of Nirn gear set a bit
Result: tried three test parses on the atronach, each test came in over 30K 😀
Best test so far: 32K 10m
Also made a point of using some of the Speed/Weapon power potions I made as Gyllerah
Later, made a hard push through running the rest of the Fighters Guild plot to get that cleared off of Marwyth’s plate
This time through when I had the opportunity to choose the form of the Prismatic weapon, I chose the bow of course
And once again was merciful to Sees-All-Colors; Marwyth knows a thing or two about needing to redeem oneself from having committed a murder ;P
Then ran two of the three available dallies
Did Westmark Moor Dolmen in Rivenspire; had to wait for that one to spawn, so did circuits around it five or six times, killing random critters
Took out Nedras the Sly who I’d faced before as Gyllerah, and looted several chests
Finally ran the dolmen solo, fuck yeah \0/
Then hit the Shael Ruins delve in Malabal Tor, again one I’d hit before as Gyllerah
But started seeing some odd behavior with lag hits; Ember or I would do an attack, and it’d be a couple of seconds before I actually heard a sound for it
So that was kind of unplayable
Held off on running Bangkorai’s public dungeon quest until the next day

March 14th

Ran the public dungeon Razak’s Wheel in Bangkorai to finishes dailies from the day before
I’d already run this place as Gyllerah but it was still fun to run, and also profitable 😀
Got a couple of leads, a style page for Dwemer maces, and a few pricy Dwemer machine bits and a bunch of dwarven gears
Ran a few extra bosses this time and got the achievement for clearing the dungeon
Ran the same internal quests Gyllerah had done, helping the Covenant scout and finding out what the Imperials were doing
Plowed through a bunch of the mobs with Marwyth’s Innate Axiom/Hunding’s Rage set, fuck yeah
Once I got the dagger from Gyllerah’s run in Orsinium, rearranged my practice gear a bit to try to accommodate it
Wound up with 5 Pillar + 5 Briarheart + 2 Oblivion’s Foe pieces
But this got me slightly worse results than the parses the night before, so still had optimizing of armor work to do

More on parsing and improving Marwyth’s gear

This stretch of sessions saw me doing more work on trying to learn the technique of light attack weaving, a.k.a. animation cancellation. The idea here being, you fire off a light attack with your wielded weapon, then before the animation on that is actually done playing, fire off a skill attack. This is supposed to let you attack faster and bring your damage numbers up.

I’m writing this post many months after this session, and am here to tell you that it’s taken me a while to get the hang of this properly. But current, November Marwyth is regularly able to clear 90K when I parse with her.

March Marwyth, however, had some work to do. ;D But it did seem promising to me at the time!

I started using the same Lava Foot Soup-And-Saltrice bufffood Gyllerah uses for Stamina runs, and suited her up in a combo of Briarheart and Pillar of Nirn. Which has since served me very well as an an armor set!

I also rearranged Marwyth’s skillbars a little, and put Grim Focus on the front bar since that thing shoots a bow when I launch it. Which didn’t seem intuitive to me to have on my dagger bar. And I swapped out Drain Power for Surprise Attack. This left me with needing something to replace Grim Focus on the back bar.

And after doing this work, March Marwyth was averaging about 27K on her parses, over the course of 12 minutes. (That November Marwyth is now clearing the 90K mark should be an indicator to y’all of how much work I’ve been putting in on this over the course of the year!)

In these sessions, though, I also needed quite a bit of Marwyth’s Briarheart and Pillar pieces transmuted, and was chronically short on transmute stones.

The answer to this, of course, was needing to run more group dungeons!

Later, after doing work on this on the 13th, I had these things still to do:

Transmuting more pieces to Divines to take best advantage of my Mundus Stone
Run more Fighters Guild dailies to unlock Barbed Trap and a couple more passives to up damage
Run Undaunted dungeons and trials to get enough transmute stones and do the necessary tweaking of this gear
Practice practice practice, since I needed to clear 75K to be considered a reasonable DPS! MORE STABBING IS REQUIRED

Parsing on Deck vs. parsing on computer

Just because I was curious like that, I also tried parsing while playing ESO on computer instead of on the Deck. And I noted with surprise that i was actually less comfortable doing that practice with the PS4 controller I use! I kept having to alter how I was holding the controller, and this was slowing me down making my attacks.

(And my latency numbers for the connection weren’t doing me any favors either.)

Over the course of this year I’ve done enough parsing on computer vs. Deck that I can say that most of the time, I don’t get a significant difference in numbers. I’m pretty sure that ESO’s performance on the computer isn’t significantly different than performance on the Deck, so this tracks. I almost always get similar FPS and latency numbers on the two platforms.

Overall though I do significantly prefer doing this practice on the Deck.

Running Ember’s quest to rescue Jhaka as a Dunmer

I played this out with Marwyth pretty much the same way I did with Gyllerah, with one notable exception: the dialogue choices I had did account for Marwyth being a Dunmer, which was nice.

I got a chance to doublecheck with Ember about whether she was actually okay with traveling with Marwyth–i.e., a Dunmer. And Ember was mature enough to acknowledge that she’s capable of seeing that not all Dark Elves are slaving bastards. Marwyth was, I feel, very relieved by that!

Because yeah, Marwyth is definitely on team Fuck Those Slaving Bastards.

Also, while I did get the skyshard in Pulk when we rescued Jhaka, I didn’t bother to kill the boss. Gyllerah had already done so, and I had the achievement for it! So I didn’t actually have to kill Bralsa.

Running Traitor’s Vault on Artaeum

Then I ran the Traitor’s Vault delve on Artaeum, since Marwyth had a pending quest for that. Still a lot of fun, and I like the glimpses of Mannimarco’s ast. Though this raises the amusing question of whether this guy magically records everything he does, because he’s still doing it for the Main Plot!

And leaving the damn speaking stones all over the place, too, LOL. New pet theory: Mannimarco became the world’s most powerful necromancer because he started off a huge fucking diva, and was basically pissed that NOBODY IS PAYING ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEE.

Bonus fun, this time I hung around long enough to see the denouement where a senior Psijic showed up and reprimanded Ulliceta the Orc. I looked her up on the wiki, and saw that she eventually tells the Psijics to fuck off, joins the Mages Guild, and shows up in Orsinium. Awesome. Good for her!