Second attempt

Harold_Hedd

and still frustrating as fork

So it's been a few years since I gave up on my Mac experience with the game, and now I am on the Xbox series X team.

The whole experience is so much better on Xbox, although there are new chellenges, but I guess it is as good as it gets without a Windows computer.

I am again finding myself with lots of handwritten notes on my crafting experience and on online searches for strategy, levelling and gear and builds.

I have chosen a High Elf magical sorcerer this time, and it is a breeze playing this caracter compared to my former Breton templar. I aim towards dd with enough sustain to keep me alive playing solo.
I have crafted my own gear, Order's Wrath and Diamond's Victory, and are currently level 122. I am somehow enlightened and gain experience quickly, which means that my level 30 gear is already outdated

I began on Stros M'kai and continued to Auridon and completed the main Quest, then travelled to Summerset and did the zone quest and began the Psijic Order's quest. That brought me to level 50, with a lot of skill points and around 100.000 gold.
I am in the middle of the Mages Guild Quest and I am closing time breaches, with the occuring side quests. This opens up experiencing other zones without the zone quest, and a lot of crafting marerials and chests, psijic portals and thieves throves and dolmens. I am also colecting skill points from skyshards I come across in delves and open land.

I really like this form of playing, although a bit boring sometimes, I can enjoy my coffee while travelling the different zones - and when I need extra money and gear to decunstruct, High Isle vulcanic vents are alwys very rewarding, although they require a soul gem or two from time to time.

So, all is good and I am actually looking forward to be playing this second time - but it has also been a new learning curve and still some frustrating outbursts from me.

The game is what it is, and it doesn't take long reading the forum to realize, that there are many frustrated players around. I am unfortunately also one of them, but I have also learned to live with it and brush it off. It is obvious that the game is getting old and that it will not be improved in many ways.

I am still finding it childish in some of the quests and the dialogs, but what irritates me the most, is when I am in Coldharbour and being approached by the former emperor and told to hurry to the harborage and I am to run to the nearest wayshrine and travel to Auridon and run to the harborage to be met with the " Vestige, we must hurry to Coldharbour" dialog.......
I simply can not comprehend the thought behind that gameplay, and it ocuurs many times in the different quests - and I guess that either the game isn't written to recognize where in the world I am, or someone just thought that it is the absolute best way to fill in hours in the game.

I am also having problems with the animations. I happily followed some of the online suggestions to my build, but both the Twilight Matriach and Crystal Weapon gives me problems. Sometimes I can easily take out a delve boss and sometimes I have to flee to avoid dying when facing 3 Senche-tigers. I suspect that it is also connected to the Xbox concept with a wireless controller and playing through the Xbox server.
I have a cable connection from my Xbox to my router and are testing a ltlle more than 300 mbps up/down on the Xbox, but it seems the servers can't handle all the visual effects.

The solution for me is to change the Twilight Matriach to the Clanfear. It frees up the whole screen and I can actually see whom I am fighting.
Crystal Weapon is switched to Crystal Fragments, which has awesome animation and repsonds super quickly.
I have also toned the enemy colour brightness down all the way from blindingly glow to just a colour.
I am using a LG Oled 42" screen and I have prioritized framerate over visuals, and 120 hz.

I know I am still a newbie among all the players around, but it can be great fun playing this game, I still have to do the quests, but now I can at least walk away when it gets too stupid and I also know that my combat is working every time and I can take on challenges in dungeons and world bosses.

So mixing the good with the bad is the way, or more precisely..................... "this is the way" - "I have spoken"

moo_2021

Why don't you just use Boot Camp?

Had a mac mini once, got huge performance boost after switching to windows on the same computer, because apple didn't have proper video drivers for their own system - and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the hardware.

Harold_Hedd

Well, mostly because Apple ARM processors can't run BootCamp.

I could of course have tried Parallels Desktop or WMWare Fusion, but my search results did not convince me.

So I choose the Xbox with it's array of supported games, and native controller support. And it actually runs good after I figured out the animation problems and put a few points in my non-combat-speed tree to get a little pep in my step