DBG is pretty lame yea. Thieves guild too.

I just went on rampages and didn't worry about any objectives just to grind out the skill to advance the quest. Saved myself the grief of worrying about the objective sillyiess. Never going back hehe.

I got to max DB only doing one Sacrament. That was enough for me to go "Nope" and never try one again.

As a stealth player, I am highly annoyed that there is any sort of timer on stealth quests, including both Sacraments and Heists. For me, stealth is about patience, planning, and timing... about waiting until the guards are in perfect position for you to ghost through unseen. In the Sacrament, I even tried to ease the ending timer by clearing the path to the exit ahead of time, only to have all the enemies friggin respawn. It was insulting how few choices I had to decide how to approach it.

Yes, you still get rewards for not hitting the timer, but when there's a timer on a quest, the point is to meet the timer, and that makes you feel rushed in a way I hate feeling when I'm being stealthy.

So, to level DB, I did the Elam Drals quests instead, and those are much more fun. They're quick and easy, as long as you have the location unlocked. Plus, they're not dailies... you can chain them one after another. Not sure why Damianos recommends not doing the single-target ones... those are most fun for me, because you have to watch and wait for your target to get in position away from others. Maybe clear out a few other NPCs before going in for the kill.... I find that sort of stealth play much more rewarding than the Sacraments.

So yeah. Don't do the Sacraments. Go check the book in the front room, and return for a small reward and, even better, one of Elam's wonderful quips.

Whew. Glad I am not the only one. Like BlackSparrow, timing and patience is how I've gone about these, but it ends up not mattering in the long run. I was hoping to get some of the motif pages, but yeah, I might just stop doing sacraments.

So disappointed to hear TG is the same! I've not done any heists yet so I had no idea.

Huyen wrote: »

To the OP: the situations you are describing here are the Thieves Guild, not the Dark Brotherhood. As far as I can tell you are saying you cant complete the Heists within the time-limits.

Dark Brotherhood doesnt got a timer on its instanced killing-spree daily quest. Just saying.

Yes it does. Once the target is dead you have 2 minutes to get out, and that can be impossible if the guards are in a bad place.

OP, I started out with the same experience as you. What I did to make them a lot easier is this: crafted a cheap 5pc Night's Silence cp150 set (only requires 2 traits, I believe) and bought some cheap Night Mothers Embrace pieces (for the decrease stealth detection).

Night's Silence removes the speed penalty when in stealth, so that you are actually jogging while in stealth. This is so important for beating the timers in both the Sacraments and Heists. The decreased detection allows for you to sneak (jog) by everyone but the lantern holders.

Since getting those 2 sets, I haven't failed the time limit in a single Heist and have been able to run almost every Sacrament perfectly. The only time I trip up on Sacraments is when I get too cocky or impatient, letting multiple NPCs spot me.

I also suggest making sure you learn the secret passages and secret areas for each map. There aren't many maps, so these should be rather easy to learn. There should be some maps out there if you Google it.

ETA: I only put on that gear for doing my thieves guild and DB quests, which I try to knock out all at once.

Personally, I rather like the Black Sacrament daily's.

I've done enough of them to get the full slate of DB titles (Executioner, Bane of the Gold Coast, Silencer, etc.) and the Box of Forbidden Tools.

It's not that hard once you get used to it, and when looked at objectively, is no more tedious than any of the other Daily's, but I understand that they aren't going to be popular with everyone. Everyone has their own tastes, and the Sacrament quests are not going to appeal to everybody.

That said, I do have one issue: The Dark Brotherhood Motif Page drop rate. It's abysmal.

I routinely finish the Sacrament Quests perfectly; spotted zero times, main objective and all secondary objectives completed, and the RNG chance to get a page has had the bottom drop out of it. The Sacraments used to be pretty reliable for delivering pages. I do the Sacraments across three characters, and out of those three, at least 1-2 of them would get a page every day.

Over the last two months though, that chance has dropped significantly, and I'm lucky to pull a page every three (3) days on just one character.

The Sithis equipment I always get won't even sell at Trading Guilds. Even when priced at 2k or less, nobody wants this Set, as there are much better Sets out there that drop.

So while I love the Black Sacraments, I have to wonder: Pages have dropped off in frequency, and I've got a flood of Sithis Set items that I can't even give away, what incentive is there for me to keep doing the Sacrament Quests?

I love them, I really do. But there needs to be an incentive put back into them, because the meager item rewards I get just aren't cutting it any more.

Please, ZOS. Put some love back into the Black Sacrament Quests!

You will see a night and day difference in the difficulty of those quests when you use that gear.

Other options also include Shadow Dancer (instead of Night's Silence) for magicka characters, Night Terror 3 pc for stealth detection reduction, and being a stage 4 Vamp for movement speed in stealth.

heaven13 wrote: »

Why do NPCs even respawn in a solo instance? What's the point? I get it otherwise, but in sacraments, I should be able to clear my path so I can escape easily.

If you've gone in, cleared the way and NOT been spotted there is no reason at all for mobs to respawn.

OK, if you've been spotted have a couple respawn - near where you were spotted - to represent more people being called in to look for you.

But if you have not been spotted there is no logical reason for the mobs to respawn.
There are plenty of lazy game design reasons for them to do so though.

All The Best

Sacraments are completely, 100% about planning and preparation.

The first part of that is making sure you have good stealth gear. As others have mentioned the real key to this is making sure you can sneak with no speed penalty. If you're a stage 4 vampire you already have this (but you need to be careful not to accidentally feed instead of using blade of woe, because then you'll drop to stage 3). Otherwise the easiest way to get it is with a set of Night's Silence crafted gear, which only requires 2 traits to craft, so it's very very accessible.

Ideally you also want to be able to sneak closer to people without being detected. Wearing 7 pieces of medium gear with the passives helps with this, and in addition to that my typical stealth gear setup (I've got a set of stealth gear for each of 12 characters) includes 3-piece Night Terror. It's a dropped set that drops in Stormhaven - farm dolmens to get the jewelry. Remember: for the purposes of these stealth quests the quality of your gear doesn't matter much, as you shouldn't really be fighting. Green jewelry is fine.

So with the gear out of the way, the next thing to think about is what skills to slot. For the most part this doesn't make much difference, but I always think it's a good idea to have Rapid Maneuvers (or a morph) on at least one bar. You shouldn't need it often, but if you're in a bit of a bind it can sometimes be handy to have that extra burst of speed. If you're using a bow, I would also recommend Snipe (or a morph), for reasons I'll get into later. Otherwise slot whatever you think will be handy to have on your bars in the event you do screw up and have to fight things (or run away from them, depending on what you want to do).

Next, as soon as you port into the sacrament location make sure that the sacrament is your active quest, and check to see the general locations of your secondary target and your primary target. The important thing here of course is to make sure that you're going after the secondary target first. It's also important to remember that all of the sacrament locations include multiple hidden rooms that don't show up on your map!

Now that you know roughly where your secondary target is, you carefully go after the secondary target, using the Blade of Woe (turn off the Blade of Woe kill cam in your settings - it looks cool, but it can get you trapped in an animation at the wrong time and cause you to be spotted!) to eliminate potential witnesses along the way if you feel it's safer to do that than to try to sneak past them.

While you're doing this, stay alert for lantern guards and try to learn their patrol patterns. You'll also want to keep an eye out for places where you can safely hide if needed. These might be baskets that you climb inside, or they might simply be bits of terrain that can be used to block line of sight. And, of course, keep looking for hidden rooms. Some are hidden behind vines, some have secret doors activated by turning torch sconces, etc. Chances are good you won't need to go in a hidden room on any given sacrament, but your target could be hiding in one, so it's a good idea to try to find their locations even if it's just for future reference.

If you're having trouble finding your target, watch the walls and ceilings to see if you can faintly see the hand through them - if you can this is generally an indication that there's a hidden room where your target is located, and you just have to find a way in.

So now you've found your way to your secondary target. Obviously take your time to make sure you can take out the secondary target without being spotted. It's also important to remember that while you don't want to be spotted at all, you can get spotted a few times and still get the maximum reward - keep an eye on the alert level in the quest display to know if you can afford to get spotted.

The secondary target is out of the way, so it's time to find your primary target. If you already know where your primary target is, great. If not, scour the area, while keeping a special eye out to decide what your escape route will be. Once you know where your primary target is, you need to decide whether based on what you've observed of guard patrol patterns etc you can easily escape after killing the target. If it seems like it will be iffy, now is the time to try to clear your escape route. Doing it earlier is unwise because the enemies you cleared out can respawn, but if you do it just before you go after your primary target they won't have time to respawn before you're running past their still-cooling corpses to the exit.

At this point, if you use a bow, it's worth taking out any guards who patrol your escape route. If you wait for a lantern guard to be facing the other way and you hit him with 2 snipe shots from stealth (you want to start firing the 2nd one before the 1st lands) you'll kill him without raising the alert level. There may be other ways to kill the lantern guards without raising the alert level, but this is the one I've used successfully with basically no risk.

Now your escape route is either clear or too easy for you to have bothered clearing it, you can just kill your primary target and waltz on out of there with ease and time to spare on your timer.

Planning and preparation.

you can get motifs from completing them as well, and its a way to level dark brotherhood and thieves guild to get more quests for skill points

heaven13 wrote: »

Thank you for all the tips. I went ahead and crafted a set of Night's Silence and got managed to scrap together 3 low level Night Terror as well. Did better. In fact, I completed all the objectives.

What did I receive? A pair of blue Sithis boots. That's it.

Pretty sure I'm done with Sacraments. If the "good" reward is still stuff I get elsewhere, I'm just not going to take time out of my day to do them.

Unlike the Thieves Guild Heists, completing all of the optional objectives in a Dark Brotherhood Sacrament doesn't guarantee that you'll get a motif page. It's still the way to get motif pages, it's just not a guaranteed drop. Back when I was farming Sacraments on 12 characters, I seem to remember it being roughly a 50% chance for a motif page, but I could be wrong on that, and that was a while ago anyway, so the drop rate could have changed since then.