I had a great time last night with the UESP guild in ESO. They ran a “Kill Your Friends” event, which was designed to get everyone the achievement for killing 100 players in the Imperial Arena.
First of all, I’d never even been to Cyrodiil (the game’s PvP area), let alone the Imperial City (which was added as DLC back in August). I did not realize how FREAKING HUGE Cyrodiil is. I mean, I guess it makes sense for it to be sized relative to the rest of Tamriel? — it’s an entire province, after all — but I’m also comparing it to battlegrounds in other MMOs I’ve played, which are generally not that large.
(And can I say how creepy it is to see that giant Dark Anchor hanging over the city? Almost as creepy as that echo of White Gold Tower that is forever out of reach in Coldharbour…)
Because I didn’t quite understand how the Transitus shrines work, I rode from the North Morrowind Gate to the entrance to the Imperial Sewers, and met the rest of the Ebonheart Pact folks there. (Our group was about 7 EP folks at its height, five AD, and 1 or 2 DC). Our guide, Sedrethi, took us to a bunch of sites within the Imperial Sewers and the EP base, like the two dueling scholars, Lady Cinnabar and Phrastus of Elinhir. (Who I regrettably did not recognize. So much lore!)
(Much was made of the fact that the Imperial City in ESO is rotated 30 degrees from what it was in TES IV, driving lore nerds crazy).
We eventually made our way to the Arena, and then had to defeat the Arena bosses. But then… it got more difficult.
There were three major obstacles to folks getting this achievement — one, other players (it is a PvP zone, after all); two, the fact that the arena bosses do keep respawning; and three: apparently it only counts for the achievement if you score the killing blow.
This happened… so few times for me. I think I ended up with 5 kills, maybe. And that was only because EP was the largest faction, so I had a lot of people backing me up.
But it was fun, and it was my first experience PvPing in the game. I came out of it with the Alliance War skill lines unlocked, a bunch of Tel Var stones (the currency for Imperial City), and several of the beginner Alliance War achievements, so I can’t complain.
Later on that night, Matt and I were brave enough to ask in guild chat if anyone wanted to do pledges with us. (Pledges are the daily dungeons of this game). Brave, because neither of us had done much in the way of group dungeons before; I think the last one we did was Fungal Grotto with Holly back when she was playing regularly. (For reference, that’s the first dungeon EP-side). We made sure people knew we were inexperienced; I hope we didn’t fuck things up too badly.
Our first battle was trying to form a cross-alliance group, as our other intended group members were DC and AD. Currently you can only do this through the LFG tool, however! Our method was to pick an unpopular dungeon (i.e. not the pledge dungeon), hope the group finder stuck us together, go there, kill a few mobs, and then go to the dungeon we actually wanted. It worked… moderately well? In that eventually we all ended up in the same group and where we wanted to be. But we all agreed this couldn’t possibly be working as intended.
(I hear they’re going to fix this Real Soon Now ™).
We did this first with the normal pledge (which was Tempest Island in Malabal Tor) and the vet pledge (Wayrest Sewers in Stormhaven) — which meant first going to normal Blessed Crucible, and vet Fungal Grotto. The latter turned out to be funny; we didn’t kill any mobs before trying to leave, and the group finder tool kept trying to port us back to FG when we were riding to the wayshrine, or while we were in the middle of zoning into Wayrest Sewers. Once we killed some mobs it seemed to work fine, though.
We finished both dungeons fairly easily, and got our silver and gold pledge keys. (I didn’t get much from it except the motif for Mercenary shields). I was definitely struggling with “no, seriously, you have to ONLY HEAL” and had a couple of deaths on my watch. Thankfully the penalty for it in this game isn’t too bad. Also, the fact that we had two well-equipped V16s probably helped — yes, the dungeons are scaled, but scaling only does so much.
One of the complaints I’ve had about ESO in the past is that the content doesn’t seem very challenging. This changed somewhat last night. While we could pretty much blow through normal Tempest Island, vet Wayrest Sewers was trickier, and actually required some coordination. That made me happy 🙂 (There was a lot of “don’t stand in the bad,” and my skills at that are… somewhat improved by my move to playing in third-person view?)
Overall, this is probably the most fun I’ve had in ESO in months. I’m weird — most of what I like in MMOs is the opposite of what everyone else does. I think leveling is just about the most tedious thing ever, even if I enjoy aspects of the individual quests, but I love PvP and dungeons and anything that requires group coordination. This is why I only have a V8 and a V1 character even though I’ve been playing since release. I’m just gratified to see there’s content to scratch that itch, after months and years of avoiding it due to inexperience.
If this sounds like fun to you, please do come join us! The game is B2P these days, and we have our own tiny guild of two, along with the UESP guild, which is one of the friendliest guilds I’ve ever been part of. (And it’s connected to the best ES wiki!)
