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ESO for the long term WoW player - an introduction
jackub17_ESO23
Soul Shriven
Elder Scrolls Online for the long term World of Warcraft player.
By Freshmeatha (many other chars) - Skywall CHAOS.
I wrote this for our guild forums to give long term WoW players a basic framework when evaluating if they want to try or switch to ESO. Some players like myself have played WoW since original content and after that many years, transitioning to a different MMO brings its own set of challenges and confusions. Some may have retired from WoW (like myself) and wondering if ESO is worth the time to look at.
If you are an Elder Scrolls franchise player – this guide is not for you. It is targeted specifically to the long term WoW player that has not played the ES franchise games before. I use WoW terms instead of ESO terms due to the target audience.
Servers
There are no servers. ESO is a mega server technology so you have only three choices – American, East, and Europe. Choose the one closest to you and where your friends are. Internally they are mapping to a server farm using instancing and other techniques but the general appearance is there is just a single server for your region.
Character Creation
When you first start up ESO, you have to create the character. Sounds simple but if you are thinking about characters in terms of WoW character – you will find the ESO system a bit puzzling.
First you have to throw most of what you think about a character away. WoW terms like Tank, DPS, and Heals still apply but in ESO every character is able to do all three of these depending on how you spec and what gear you wear.
Here are the ESO characters (with simplified WoW equivalents)
So four characters. But take the above as just an initial guideline. Every class can tank, heal, and dps. Every class can do melee or spells. Every class can wear light (like cloth), medium (like leather), and heavy (like plate) armor. Every class can put on a 1H and shield and heavy armor and with the correct talent points you are a tank. Every class can put on a restoration staff and light armor with correct talents points and you are a healer. Want to throw fireballs and do AOE spells? Every class can do it.
Want to be a rogue type of character that throws AOE fire like a mage and steals life like a warlock? No problem – get a destruction staff and spec correctly and you are a rogue warlock.
So how do you choose? Choose the char based on what looks cool to you. If you are still unsure, start with this WoW list and try them out:
You also have to choose a race – there are 10 to choose from. Any race can be any class. Each class has some slightly bonuses compared to the others but it really does not make that much of a difference. Yes, the combinations possible are huge so just pick what sounds good. Here are some super simplified mappings just to help you get going but the reality is – it does not really matter.
You also have to choose what Alliance you want. You have the choice of three:
Choose whatever your friends are – it makes no difference. If you enjoy the Alliance style – pick Aldmeri. If you enjoy Horde style – pick Draggerfall. If you enjoy being a rebel – pick Ebonheart.
You can customize the look of your character in a huge number of ways. Have fun playing. Unlike games like Aion, a small character size is not an advantage in PvP, so make it whatever you want. Old, young, boobs, male, female, short, tall, tattoos, piercing, scars, bald, hair – go for it. The choices are endless.
Gameplay
So there are a couple of BIG differences between WoW and ESO.
There is no such thing as auto attack. If you want to attack, left button attacks once. So it is not possible to auto attack something – you have to click left button.
Special attacks are from the hot keys and you can only have up to 6 buttons at any one time. That’s it – no more rows and rows of buttons – you have six and only six – five when you first start out until you can learn the sixth. (At level 15 you can weapon swap and have another set of 6)
There is mostly no such thing as automatic block or dodge. You have to do it yourself. Every character can block, dodge, and interrupt. (Exceptions exist later on - don’t worry about it now)
Right mouse button will block most special attacks. Does not matter what gear or weapon you have, right mouse button and you will see your char go into a block stance. So if you see that big old monster doing a huge 2d swing at you – right click to block it and usually stun the monster. When you are blocking (right button down), you can also interrupt by then holding down the left button. See that caster start to throw that big fireball in your face? Press both buttons at the same time (or right followed by left – does not matter) and you will interrupt that caster and usually stunning them.
To dodge, double tap the movement keys. W is forward, S is backwards, A is left, D is right. Tap them twice really quick and your char will do a cool roll to that direction. Thus it makes it super easy to get out of the fire – just double tap and you are out. So you are being attacked by that big 2 hander, double tap forward and roll right to their backside and stab them in the back or do whatever. Seriously – the days of having to turn and run out of AOE crap are gone, you can double tap multiple times and move quite a distance very fast.
Every char is able to sprint like a rogue – press and hold SHIFT and you will sprint for a short time until you run out of stamina.
Every char is able to stealth - this is so cool. Tap your CTRL key and your char will squat down and become slightly transparent. Yes every char is a rogue! You can move (slowly), jump, and do some abilities while in stealth. Your first attack brings you out of stealth and some chars can get bonus on that first attack and other rogue type of things. So moving as a group in stealth is a strategy in PvP. Tap your CTRL key to go back to normal or press SHIFT to start running and it brings you out. This simply rocks!
ESO uses the E key for just about “do something with this object or person”. Why? I guess it is legacy with the older games. Whatever – it seems stupid but get used to it. If you can’t figure out why you can’t talk to the NPC – press E.
You will have a minimal UI. This was hard at first for me – I was so used to a busy WoW UI. The ESO UI is very minimal and lets you see the world. ESO does have an API and macro language and add-ons are starting to appear so we will see how that progresses. Later on healing is a bit of a pain but since most heals are AOE it’s no big deal – except if you are tank healing – then it is just like AION where you have to target the tank. Sorry – no Healbot add-on (so far). But you do not need to worry about that now.
If you can’t figure out how to click something on your UI, press the period “.” Key. Press it again to go back into targeting mode. Mainly useful for clicking your mail.
Mail – there is no mail box. On the left side of your UI is the chat/mail options. You can get/send mail at any time.
Guilds – When you join a guild, your account is joined to the guild – not the character. Thus all of your characters are in that guild. Your account may belong to up to five guilds at the same time.
Mounts – no flying mounts. Everything is ground. They are expensive unless you buy the special edition then you can get a mount at the beginning for one gold. A mount by default is 15% faster than running but can be improved every day. HINT: For 250g every day you can feed your mount. Turns out that you can make your mount increase your personal bag space! I did not know that at first and worked on speed, but now want more personal bag space.
Gearing
Your character has three stats. Magic, Stamina, and health. Magic is like mana, Stamina is like energy, and health is naturally your health. Every character has abilities that use Stamina and Magic – so you have to figure out how to balance them.
There are three types of gear – light (cloth), medium (leather), and heavy armor (plate). Generally light will help your magic, medium will help your stamina, and heavy will help your armor and health but it depends on that properties of that piece. You level your knowledge of gear as you get XP, so it is important to wear some of all three while you are leveling. You get bonus for having 3 or 5 pieces of one type of gear but you only have seven slots available. Many are using the 5-1-1 approach while leveling. Wear 5 pieces of what helps your class the most, then one each of the other two. Some are using 3-2-2 to have all gear level near the same speed.
Like old school WoW – greens are quest rewards and sometimes drop from mobs. Sometimes for harder/longer quests will you get a blue reward. Whites drop all the time. Blues and higher are rare.
There is no PvP specific gear. However gear can have attributes and enchants that may help PvP play such as crit resistance, hp regen, increase HP, etc. This is very nice since not having specific type of gear just for PvP (but I suspect that for those that want to focus mostly on PvP will make gear with attributes better for that than raiding).
There is no AH. Thus you either have to trade/buy in trade or craft it or find it. This will encourage using a guild bank for leveling gear. Now that I have been playing a bit more, every guild that has enough members is able to run a guild store (it is managed by the game bank). There you can buy/sell stuff but only for your guild. Thus just about everyone joins one or more trading guilds just to have access to AH type of operations. The UI and searching is poor making it hard for those to farm the AH (it is called the Guild Store). If possible – add-ons would really help here.
There is no such thing as kill stealing or even having to make a group in normal content. Every player has their own loot table for every kill, so if you touch the mob and it dies, you have your own loot. If you heal someone and the mob dies, that counts also. Thus no such thing as need/greed/roll etc. This applies to 4 man dungeons also (tank/heal/2xdps is normal). I don't know about raids - I am a long way from there.
Thus in the general area and the public dungeons, everyone is helping to kill everything. When running around the world, most stop and help someone if they are having problem - there is no down side to helping someone kill something.
You can only get loot for mobs within 5 levels below you. Thus you will never have high level chars farming low level stuff - they can't get any loot. But there is nothing stopping a higher level helping a lower level - the lower levels get loot and the high level gets super small xp. A negative side effect of this is now you see bots farming the same mob endlessly making it hard sometimes to complete a quest if you can’t get some sort of hit in. Hopefully they will fix this getting those bots out of those quest mobs.
PvP
When you hit level 10 you can enter the battleground. ESO did a good job compared to WoW in terms of character balancing. When you enter a battleground – your character is given equivalent stats as other level 50 characters – for the most part everyone is the same. Every ability you use is balanced in pvp – tools tips don’t change and your char still looks like that level 10 char but their effect is like you were level 50. It really works well and ESO is able to change abilities for PvP without affecting the PvE experience.
The battle grounds are HUGE. I mean really HUGE. If you remember old school AV, take that and make it at least 10x larger – we are talking a solid 100x area increase – easily – most likely a lot more.
Now that I have been playing PvP more, I'm loving it. Here I am a low level char and I am viable in a mass PvP and able to kill higher level chars - everyone is sort of balanced and even. Yes, higher level chars have more abilities and they can be more powerful. Their armor may have better enchants but it does not make that much of a difference - they give everyone similar stats while in the battle ground.
Naturally you have the idiots that just run in and die instantly because 20 are on them - so in that way it is very similar to the AV Bridge. But we are talking 100 vs 100 here - these battles are huge, with massive siege weps and castles. And the battle ground is simply massive. For those that are sick of that - there are entire quest lines in the BG so some just peel off and go do those quests but look out for small gank teams waiting for the solo quest guy (helps to stay in stealth a lot especially if you are solo). There is a ton of information out there about ESO PvP so go research if that is important to you.
Quest Lines
The quest lines are long - detailed - and they are interesting. Most of them are building the lore, so you have very few of the go out and kill x mobs type of quests. It’s more like you have to talk to these people, ask them questions, listen to their stories, and then go do what they need done to help save a town type of thing. Go into this solo (public) dungeon and find this missing guy - in there he gives you quests to help him finish his research/whatever and sometimes escort him out.
Some of these will give you an assistant to help fight the mobs for you.
Old school WoW players will remember the chicken quests where you escorted - like that but so much better. A better example would be the boom-a-rang quest line in old school WoW – long and very interesting – or even the old school 0.5 dungeon quest line. As a player that did the entire Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest line before it was removed – this really mattered to me – quests have to be interesting and even humorous at times to keep me interested. The developers really did a good job here.
The format is very open and free form - generally you have a quest hub area (town/city/outpost) and from there you spread out. Nothing stopping you from bouncing around the areas - if you hit an area that is too hard - back off and level up a bit and try it again. Generally for every small area there is an overall theme you are working toward with sub quests to achieve that theme. At the same time there are major quest lines that span entire regions and ones that so far have spanned my leveling experience. They mixed it up really well with only a very few have been grinding. Some quests even branch off depending on your choice, and there are abilities to force or pressure a NPC to take a particular direction in the chain. Nice touch.
One thing that confused me at first was that there are groups of NPC' you can join and be a member of. There is no downside to doing this - you should join them - and then you get their quest lines (and rewards). They call them guilds but they are not player guilds. Think of them as just more quest lines you want to do.
Oh, if you die - every character has the ability to use soul stones so put a point in Soul Magic and rez yourself without being sent back to a portal (graveyard). Yes, we all have that warlock ability and it works the same way. Buy the empty stone - kill something while siphoning its soul - and it is charged. I'm glad they did not change this - makes it easy to understand. You use the same soul stones to recharge your weapon enchants.
Leveling
I went into an area and found mobs a solid 20 levels over me - and I found a solo one and was able to kite kill him. So you don't have this massive power/level difference. Things like chance to hit and stuff like that that are level based don't exist - high level mobs simply hit harder and have more hp. Thus most areas are available for exploration – if you are willing to stealth even lower level chars can see a lot of the world before they are really ready to be in that area.
Everything works off of attribute points and skill points. Attribute points are like stats in WoW - you get one every level. Those can only be put into three areas - mana, stamina, or health. Stamina is like energy for those that have played rogues before. The best recommendation at this point is just put all your points into health (initially) so you won't die as much - and use gear/enchants to give more mana or stam. Every char has abilities that use either mana or use stam - so you will need both (exceptions exist but this is an entry level guide). As you get higher level you may want to reassign your attribute points - for a fee you can do that.
Skill points are given in a number of way - completing major quest lines, collecting shards, and leveling. These are how you build your char. Want to heal? - get a healing staff and put some points into those abilities. Want to cast stuff - get a destruction staff and put points into those abilities. Same for tanking and dps. Basically every char is expected to do some dps even healers (exceptions at higher levels). Want to be the best enchanter - put points into enchanting. The entire character building process is all about allocation of skill points.
So let me give you an example. I started with a nightblade (rogue/hunter) and started him with dual weps. It was fun but I was sort of bored even early on 7ish - so I switched to a bow. I wanted some points for the bow so I went shard hunting (these are around your area, and every 3 you find give you a skill point). By level 9 I had most of the abilities I needed for that level. At 10 I jumped into the BG's and had a blast being a sniper - hanging back in stealth at max range and picked off stragglers - kiting them around if they had no idea how to play or getting owned by those that know that a low level nightblade is not hard to kill.
By level 15 or so I wanted to try casting. So I went shard hunting again - finding all of them in the current zone. Starting using a staff to level its skill up (in ESO leveling a weapon does not make you better at it, it opens up more abilities and some abilities become stronger - so it’s very different than the old WoW weapon skill leveling). Around level 20 I found that I was using my staff most of the time now as I had more points to get some abilities to allow my mana to last longer. So now I'm mid 20's and dynamically switching from a bow that most uses stamina abilities to a warlock that mostly uses mana and life drain and having a blast kiting crap around or using AOE to take down a larger pack. Simply way to cool – a warlock hunter/rogue! Will this char be viable at higher levels? I don’t know. If not, pay some gold (a lot) and respec. My key point here - so far I'm having fun while leveling.
Crafting
Everyone can learn every crafting skill - technically. But I'm giving up on that - I simply cannot manage that much bank space. Bank expansions get crazy expensive, same for bags, and you have so many mats. Thus I have not figured out how to level all the crafts at this point given that I am always low on gold. I was able to make all my own gear until L20 but now I need all new mats and skill points to use them and I'm tired of only having 10 open spots in my bags and always running back to town. I moved all my mats to a couple of chars for enchanting and cooking and will look at that later when I have more gold. I'm only making a limited attempt at blacksmith (plate and most weps), tailor (cloth/leather armor), and woodsmith (bow, staffs, shields). There are tons of guides online on the fastest way to level each one - I'll do that later. Sounds like something to keep yourself busy when you level cap.
The main problem is all of your chars shared a single bank - you don't have a bank per char. And only way to move stuff between chars is via the bank - you can't email yourself (this game is account based - not character based). Right now, I just want to enjoy the game. So all the crap you don't want, you can just disenchant it into mats and put them in the bank and later log into a storage char per mat type and stash it away to leave some room in the bank.
One more problem is that all of the mats to make anything are found in the world. You can't buy any of them from a vendor. So stuff like water to make potions has to be found. Thus a high percentage of just about every piece of junk white stuff is usable for something. Cooking is the worst – I have no idea how many mats there are for cooking – tons of recipes that have to be found.
So what I am doing is this - start with mostly empty bags. Go out and loot everything doing the quests. When the bags are full - head back to town and sell the few really junk things - cook whatever I have found - and junk the rest of the cooking mats. Break down any gear/weps into mats, put them in to the bank. Later log into different chars and pull that crap out saving on those chars until I can find the time to really craft stuff. Many of these mats are found in barrels, crates, baskets, chests, etc. Loot everything!
I tried to make my own guild to use as my personal storage - this is common in WoW - but you have to have a number of members in your guild to have access to the guild bank. Not characters - accounts. No one wants to be in a guild just so I can store my own crap. I miss this from WoW but I think they are doing it to keep the gold farmers down. Not that it is working – dang bots are common but not any more than you currently see in WoW. So leveling any of the 6 types of crafting will be a challenge in managing your free space. This is not that much different than WoW but there you are limited to only two types and bag/bank space was an issue. Now take that to 6 crafts in ESO and the problem is simply bigger.
Overall
I'm impressed. New game has deep content - graphics are amazing - sound is excellent. Very rich lore. They reward you for actually going and looking for books (sometimes a random book will level some random skill for you so everyone reads every book). Very good achievement system but no real way to show off your achievements. A few crashes - not too bad. A few broken quests – but so far they are getting fixed. Content is deep - really deep. World is massive. Play style is different from WoW but not enough different so after a few evenings it become comfortable. PvP so far is a blast - just exploring that battle ground is a huge undertaking. Virtually no UI so I find myself really immersed in what is around.
I'll keep playing - I'm enjoying just dimming the lights - putting on the headset - and listening with the sound up to hear environment based sounds. I give it two thumbs up so far.
- Fresh
By Freshmeatha (many other chars) - Skywall CHAOS.
I wrote this for our guild forums to give long term WoW players a basic framework when evaluating if they want to try or switch to ESO. Some players like myself have played WoW since original content and after that many years, transitioning to a different MMO brings its own set of challenges and confusions. Some may have retired from WoW (like myself) and wondering if ESO is worth the time to look at.
If you are an Elder Scrolls franchise player – this guide is not for you. It is targeted specifically to the long term WoW player that has not played the ES franchise games before. I use WoW terms instead of ESO terms due to the target audience.
Servers
There are no servers. ESO is a mega server technology so you have only three choices – American, East, and Europe. Choose the one closest to you and where your friends are. Internally they are mapping to a server farm using instancing and other techniques but the general appearance is there is just a single server for your region.
Character Creation
When you first start up ESO, you have to create the character. Sounds simple but if you are thinking about characters in terms of WoW character – you will find the ESO system a bit puzzling.
First you have to throw most of what you think about a character away. WoW terms like Tank, DPS, and Heals still apply but in ESO every character is able to do all three of these depending on how you spec and what gear you wear.
Here are the ESO characters (with simplified WoW equivalents)
- Templar: Sort of a combination of a warrior and paladin. The WoW player that wants to be a traditional tank, arms warrior, or healer would consider this char.
- Dragonknight: Sort of like a death knight but much better.
- Nightblade: Sort of a combination of a rogue, hunter, and feral druid.
- Sorcerer: Sort of a combination of a mage and a warlock.
So four characters. But take the above as just an initial guideline. Every class can tank, heal, and dps. Every class can do melee or spells. Every class can wear light (like cloth), medium (like leather), and heavy (like plate) armor. Every class can put on a 1H and shield and heavy armor and with the correct talent points you are a tank. Every class can put on a restoration staff and light armor with correct talents points and you are a healer. Want to throw fireballs and do AOE spells? Every class can do it.
Want to be a rogue type of character that throws AOE fire like a mage and steals life like a warlock? No problem – get a destruction staff and spec correctly and you are a rogue warlock.
So how do you choose? Choose the char based on what looks cool to you. If you are still unsure, start with this WoW list and try them out:
- Death Knight: Dragonknight
- Druid: Any.
- Hunter: Nightblade
- Mage: Sorcerer
- Monk: Templar
- Paladin: Templar
- Priest: Templar
- Rogue: Nightblade
- Shaman: Any
- Warlock: Sorcerer
- Warrior: Templar
You also have to choose a race – there are 10 to choose from. Any race can be any class. Each class has some slightly bonuses compared to the others but it really does not make that much of a difference. Yes, the combinations possible are huge so just pick what sounds good. Here are some super simplified mappings just to help you get going but the reality is – it does not really matter.
- Rogue type: Wood elf, Dark elf, Khajiit.
- Tank type: Redguard, Imperial, Orc.
- Healing type: High elf, Breton, Argonian.
- Mele type: Orc, Khajiit, Nord, Imperial.
- Caster type: Dark elf, Argonian, High elf, Breton
You also have to choose what Alliance you want. You have the choice of three:
- Draggerfall Covenant: Like the Horde
- Aldmeri Dominion: Like the Alliance
- Ebonheart Pact: Mixture of the above two (sort of).
Choose whatever your friends are – it makes no difference. If you enjoy the Alliance style – pick Aldmeri. If you enjoy Horde style – pick Draggerfall. If you enjoy being a rebel – pick Ebonheart.
You can customize the look of your character in a huge number of ways. Have fun playing. Unlike games like Aion, a small character size is not an advantage in PvP, so make it whatever you want. Old, young, boobs, male, female, short, tall, tattoos, piercing, scars, bald, hair – go for it. The choices are endless.
Gameplay
So there are a couple of BIG differences between WoW and ESO.
There is no such thing as auto attack. If you want to attack, left button attacks once. So it is not possible to auto attack something – you have to click left button.
Special attacks are from the hot keys and you can only have up to 6 buttons at any one time. That’s it – no more rows and rows of buttons – you have six and only six – five when you first start out until you can learn the sixth. (At level 15 you can weapon swap and have another set of 6)
There is mostly no such thing as automatic block or dodge. You have to do it yourself. Every character can block, dodge, and interrupt. (Exceptions exist later on - don’t worry about it now)
Right mouse button will block most special attacks. Does not matter what gear or weapon you have, right mouse button and you will see your char go into a block stance. So if you see that big old monster doing a huge 2d swing at you – right click to block it and usually stun the monster. When you are blocking (right button down), you can also interrupt by then holding down the left button. See that caster start to throw that big fireball in your face? Press both buttons at the same time (or right followed by left – does not matter) and you will interrupt that caster and usually stunning them.
To dodge, double tap the movement keys. W is forward, S is backwards, A is left, D is right. Tap them twice really quick and your char will do a cool roll to that direction. Thus it makes it super easy to get out of the fire – just double tap and you are out. So you are being attacked by that big 2 hander, double tap forward and roll right to their backside and stab them in the back or do whatever. Seriously – the days of having to turn and run out of AOE crap are gone, you can double tap multiple times and move quite a distance very fast.
Every char is able to sprint like a rogue – press and hold SHIFT and you will sprint for a short time until you run out of stamina.
Every char is able to stealth - this is so cool. Tap your CTRL key and your char will squat down and become slightly transparent. Yes every char is a rogue! You can move (slowly), jump, and do some abilities while in stealth. Your first attack brings you out of stealth and some chars can get bonus on that first attack and other rogue type of things. So moving as a group in stealth is a strategy in PvP. Tap your CTRL key to go back to normal or press SHIFT to start running and it brings you out. This simply rocks!
ESO uses the E key for just about “do something with this object or person”. Why? I guess it is legacy with the older games. Whatever – it seems stupid but get used to it. If you can’t figure out why you can’t talk to the NPC – press E.
You will have a minimal UI. This was hard at first for me – I was so used to a busy WoW UI. The ESO UI is very minimal and lets you see the world. ESO does have an API and macro language and add-ons are starting to appear so we will see how that progresses. Later on healing is a bit of a pain but since most heals are AOE it’s no big deal – except if you are tank healing – then it is just like AION where you have to target the tank. Sorry – no Healbot add-on (so far). But you do not need to worry about that now.
If you can’t figure out how to click something on your UI, press the period “.” Key. Press it again to go back into targeting mode. Mainly useful for clicking your mail.
Mail – there is no mail box. On the left side of your UI is the chat/mail options. You can get/send mail at any time.
Guilds – When you join a guild, your account is joined to the guild – not the character. Thus all of your characters are in that guild. Your account may belong to up to five guilds at the same time.
Mounts – no flying mounts. Everything is ground. They are expensive unless you buy the special edition then you can get a mount at the beginning for one gold. A mount by default is 15% faster than running but can be improved every day. HINT: For 250g every day you can feed your mount. Turns out that you can make your mount increase your personal bag space! I did not know that at first and worked on speed, but now want more personal bag space.
Gearing
Your character has three stats. Magic, Stamina, and health. Magic is like mana, Stamina is like energy, and health is naturally your health. Every character has abilities that use Stamina and Magic – so you have to figure out how to balance them.
There are three types of gear – light (cloth), medium (leather), and heavy armor (plate). Generally light will help your magic, medium will help your stamina, and heavy will help your armor and health but it depends on that properties of that piece. You level your knowledge of gear as you get XP, so it is important to wear some of all three while you are leveling. You get bonus for having 3 or 5 pieces of one type of gear but you only have seven slots available. Many are using the 5-1-1 approach while leveling. Wear 5 pieces of what helps your class the most, then one each of the other two. Some are using 3-2-2 to have all gear level near the same speed.
Like old school WoW – greens are quest rewards and sometimes drop from mobs. Sometimes for harder/longer quests will you get a blue reward. Whites drop all the time. Blues and higher are rare.
There is no PvP specific gear. However gear can have attributes and enchants that may help PvP play such as crit resistance, hp regen, increase HP, etc. This is very nice since not having specific type of gear just for PvP (but I suspect that for those that want to focus mostly on PvP will make gear with attributes better for that than raiding).
There is no AH. Thus you either have to trade/buy in trade or craft it or find it. This will encourage using a guild bank for leveling gear. Now that I have been playing a bit more, every guild that has enough members is able to run a guild store (it is managed by the game bank). There you can buy/sell stuff but only for your guild. Thus just about everyone joins one or more trading guilds just to have access to AH type of operations. The UI and searching is poor making it hard for those to farm the AH (it is called the Guild Store). If possible – add-ons would really help here.
There is no such thing as kill stealing or even having to make a group in normal content. Every player has their own loot table for every kill, so if you touch the mob and it dies, you have your own loot. If you heal someone and the mob dies, that counts also. Thus no such thing as need/greed/roll etc. This applies to 4 man dungeons also (tank/heal/2xdps is normal). I don't know about raids - I am a long way from there.
Thus in the general area and the public dungeons, everyone is helping to kill everything. When running around the world, most stop and help someone if they are having problem - there is no down side to helping someone kill something.
You can only get loot for mobs within 5 levels below you. Thus you will never have high level chars farming low level stuff - they can't get any loot. But there is nothing stopping a higher level helping a lower level - the lower levels get loot and the high level gets super small xp. A negative side effect of this is now you see bots farming the same mob endlessly making it hard sometimes to complete a quest if you can’t get some sort of hit in. Hopefully they will fix this getting those bots out of those quest mobs.
PvP
When you hit level 10 you can enter the battleground. ESO did a good job compared to WoW in terms of character balancing. When you enter a battleground – your character is given equivalent stats as other level 50 characters – for the most part everyone is the same. Every ability you use is balanced in pvp – tools tips don’t change and your char still looks like that level 10 char but their effect is like you were level 50. It really works well and ESO is able to change abilities for PvP without affecting the PvE experience.
The battle grounds are HUGE. I mean really HUGE. If you remember old school AV, take that and make it at least 10x larger – we are talking a solid 100x area increase – easily – most likely a lot more.
Now that I have been playing PvP more, I'm loving it. Here I am a low level char and I am viable in a mass PvP and able to kill higher level chars - everyone is sort of balanced and even. Yes, higher level chars have more abilities and they can be more powerful. Their armor may have better enchants but it does not make that much of a difference - they give everyone similar stats while in the battle ground.
Naturally you have the idiots that just run in and die instantly because 20 are on them - so in that way it is very similar to the AV Bridge. But we are talking 100 vs 100 here - these battles are huge, with massive siege weps and castles. And the battle ground is simply massive. For those that are sick of that - there are entire quest lines in the BG so some just peel off and go do those quests but look out for small gank teams waiting for the solo quest guy (helps to stay in stealth a lot especially if you are solo). There is a ton of information out there about ESO PvP so go research if that is important to you.
Quest Lines
The quest lines are long - detailed - and they are interesting. Most of them are building the lore, so you have very few of the go out and kill x mobs type of quests. It’s more like you have to talk to these people, ask them questions, listen to their stories, and then go do what they need done to help save a town type of thing. Go into this solo (public) dungeon and find this missing guy - in there he gives you quests to help him finish his research/whatever and sometimes escort him out.
Some of these will give you an assistant to help fight the mobs for you.
Old school WoW players will remember the chicken quests where you escorted - like that but so much better. A better example would be the boom-a-rang quest line in old school WoW – long and very interesting – or even the old school 0.5 dungeon quest line. As a player that did the entire Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest line before it was removed – this really mattered to me – quests have to be interesting and even humorous at times to keep me interested. The developers really did a good job here.
The format is very open and free form - generally you have a quest hub area (town/city/outpost) and from there you spread out. Nothing stopping you from bouncing around the areas - if you hit an area that is too hard - back off and level up a bit and try it again. Generally for every small area there is an overall theme you are working toward with sub quests to achieve that theme. At the same time there are major quest lines that span entire regions and ones that so far have spanned my leveling experience. They mixed it up really well with only a very few have been grinding. Some quests even branch off depending on your choice, and there are abilities to force or pressure a NPC to take a particular direction in the chain. Nice touch.
One thing that confused me at first was that there are groups of NPC' you can join and be a member of. There is no downside to doing this - you should join them - and then you get their quest lines (and rewards). They call them guilds but they are not player guilds. Think of them as just more quest lines you want to do.
Oh, if you die - every character has the ability to use soul stones so put a point in Soul Magic and rez yourself without being sent back to a portal (graveyard). Yes, we all have that warlock ability and it works the same way. Buy the empty stone - kill something while siphoning its soul - and it is charged. I'm glad they did not change this - makes it easy to understand. You use the same soul stones to recharge your weapon enchants.
Leveling
I went into an area and found mobs a solid 20 levels over me - and I found a solo one and was able to kite kill him. So you don't have this massive power/level difference. Things like chance to hit and stuff like that that are level based don't exist - high level mobs simply hit harder and have more hp. Thus most areas are available for exploration – if you are willing to stealth even lower level chars can see a lot of the world before they are really ready to be in that area.
Everything works off of attribute points and skill points. Attribute points are like stats in WoW - you get one every level. Those can only be put into three areas - mana, stamina, or health. Stamina is like energy for those that have played rogues before. The best recommendation at this point is just put all your points into health (initially) so you won't die as much - and use gear/enchants to give more mana or stam. Every char has abilities that use either mana or use stam - so you will need both (exceptions exist but this is an entry level guide). As you get higher level you may want to reassign your attribute points - for a fee you can do that.
Skill points are given in a number of way - completing major quest lines, collecting shards, and leveling. These are how you build your char. Want to heal? - get a healing staff and put some points into those abilities. Want to cast stuff - get a destruction staff and put points into those abilities. Same for tanking and dps. Basically every char is expected to do some dps even healers (exceptions at higher levels). Want to be the best enchanter - put points into enchanting. The entire character building process is all about allocation of skill points.
So let me give you an example. I started with a nightblade (rogue/hunter) and started him with dual weps. It was fun but I was sort of bored even early on 7ish - so I switched to a bow. I wanted some points for the bow so I went shard hunting (these are around your area, and every 3 you find give you a skill point). By level 9 I had most of the abilities I needed for that level. At 10 I jumped into the BG's and had a blast being a sniper - hanging back in stealth at max range and picked off stragglers - kiting them around if they had no idea how to play or getting owned by those that know that a low level nightblade is not hard to kill.
By level 15 or so I wanted to try casting. So I went shard hunting again - finding all of them in the current zone. Starting using a staff to level its skill up (in ESO leveling a weapon does not make you better at it, it opens up more abilities and some abilities become stronger - so it’s very different than the old WoW weapon skill leveling). Around level 20 I found that I was using my staff most of the time now as I had more points to get some abilities to allow my mana to last longer. So now I'm mid 20's and dynamically switching from a bow that most uses stamina abilities to a warlock that mostly uses mana and life drain and having a blast kiting crap around or using AOE to take down a larger pack. Simply way to cool – a warlock hunter/rogue! Will this char be viable at higher levels? I don’t know. If not, pay some gold (a lot) and respec. My key point here - so far I'm having fun while leveling.
Crafting
Everyone can learn every crafting skill - technically. But I'm giving up on that - I simply cannot manage that much bank space. Bank expansions get crazy expensive, same for bags, and you have so many mats. Thus I have not figured out how to level all the crafts at this point given that I am always low on gold. I was able to make all my own gear until L20 but now I need all new mats and skill points to use them and I'm tired of only having 10 open spots in my bags and always running back to town. I moved all my mats to a couple of chars for enchanting and cooking and will look at that later when I have more gold. I'm only making a limited attempt at blacksmith (plate and most weps), tailor (cloth/leather armor), and woodsmith (bow, staffs, shields). There are tons of guides online on the fastest way to level each one - I'll do that later. Sounds like something to keep yourself busy when you level cap.
The main problem is all of your chars shared a single bank - you don't have a bank per char. And only way to move stuff between chars is via the bank - you can't email yourself (this game is account based - not character based). Right now, I just want to enjoy the game. So all the crap you don't want, you can just disenchant it into mats and put them in the bank and later log into a storage char per mat type and stash it away to leave some room in the bank.
One more problem is that all of the mats to make anything are found in the world. You can't buy any of them from a vendor. So stuff like water to make potions has to be found. Thus a high percentage of just about every piece of junk white stuff is usable for something. Cooking is the worst – I have no idea how many mats there are for cooking – tons of recipes that have to be found.
So what I am doing is this - start with mostly empty bags. Go out and loot everything doing the quests. When the bags are full - head back to town and sell the few really junk things - cook whatever I have found - and junk the rest of the cooking mats. Break down any gear/weps into mats, put them in to the bank. Later log into different chars and pull that crap out saving on those chars until I can find the time to really craft stuff. Many of these mats are found in barrels, crates, baskets, chests, etc. Loot everything!
I tried to make my own guild to use as my personal storage - this is common in WoW - but you have to have a number of members in your guild to have access to the guild bank. Not characters - accounts. No one wants to be in a guild just so I can store my own crap. I miss this from WoW but I think they are doing it to keep the gold farmers down. Not that it is working – dang bots are common but not any more than you currently see in WoW. So leveling any of the 6 types of crafting will be a challenge in managing your free space. This is not that much different than WoW but there you are limited to only two types and bag/bank space was an issue. Now take that to 6 crafts in ESO and the problem is simply bigger.
Overall
I'm impressed. New game has deep content - graphics are amazing - sound is excellent. Very rich lore. They reward you for actually going and looking for books (sometimes a random book will level some random skill for you so everyone reads every book). Very good achievement system but no real way to show off your achievements. A few crashes - not too bad. A few broken quests – but so far they are getting fixed. Content is deep - really deep. World is massive. Play style is different from WoW but not enough different so after a few evenings it become comfortable. PvP so far is a blast - just exploring that battle ground is a huge undertaking. Virtually no UI so I find myself really immersed in what is around.
I'll keep playing - I'm enjoying just dimming the lights - putting on the headset - and listening with the sound up to hear environment based sounds. I give it two thumbs up so far.
- Fresh
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