Everstorm wrote: »

Sorry, skipped through the replies too fast then. But now it looks just as hopeless as when you started to the point you even bring it up on the forums.
And shared CP is not the only thing, lately they have been bombarding us with exp scrolls. Coupled with training gear it really doesn't take that long to get to 50.
If you dislike questing then yeah, it's gonna be a chore. But you can start wherever you want, mix it up a bit.
Undaunted and mage/fighter skill lines take quite long but you don't need them to make a character viable.

It’s not the grind to 50 that’s painful; it’s the guild lines. And yeah, you do need them (Undaunted especially) if you want to be viable in PVP. I only play this game for PVP these days, and it sucks losing to someone in a close fight just because I couldn’t face leveling Undaunted for the umpteenth time.

ATomiX96 wrote: »

I wish I could have more characters tbh, to be more flexible when PvPing with friends on different factions, for example I only got 1 AD and well if they wanna go pvp im kinda bound to a stamblade, bad distribution on my side but still wish more than 15 were possible, but cant be asked to delete characters with undaunted and mage guild maxed out.

Also Mage Guild, Undaunted and Psijic dont take that long imo, if you do undaunted with a stable group you can get it done in an afternoon. Even though finding a group of 4 people willing to do all these dungeons might take longer than getting undaunted 9 itself.
Mage Guild books take like 3 hours.
Fighters Guilds just passively from farming all the undead.
Psijic around 2 hours.
And leveling 1-50 during event with 150% ambrosia and training gear is like 3 hours?
And then invest another 2-3 hours to level weapon skill lines, morph ablities etc.

I think the current time it takes to level and ready a character for any kind of content is fair compared to other games.

That’s a big “if.” I’ve tried to get groups together for Undaunted in the past, asking in guilds and in /zone. People rarely have the time/patience to knock it all out in a day or two. 99% of the time, you have to level Undaunted by completing daily pledges and queuing up for specific vet dungeons for the achievements. It takes a while, to put it mildly, especially if you’re not specced for tanking...

TheShadowScout wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

Can’t bear levelling more than one of each class

...then don't.

It may get worse when you also level magica DPS, stamina DPS and heavy armor tanky characters of each class.

It does help if you focus on levelling -characters- instead of builds!

Then you don't level "another sorceror", you level your dunmer goth librarian, or your daedric cultist executioner, or your clockwork kitty... and you don't level "another templar" but you level your orsimer paladin-wannabe, or your altmer priestess, or your imperial deserter ex-pirate... well, I did anyhow.

Characters don’t win Battlegrounds — builds do.

I have 1 of most, but I like wardens so I do have 3. One for tanking, one for Stam dps, and one for healing (or magicka DPS I guess). Just makes it easier for me since I don’t need to respec of anything, etc. There have been so many double xp events that it wasn’t tooo tedious.

I've maxed out 8 characters over 4 years. I like it. But I don't do it all at once. It's 1 or 2 every year at most. And since it is spaced over time, I always have a nice feeling or "new to the game" when I see the prophet and the companiosn again, as well as the empty undiscovered maps.
Also, I use a different strategy every time, to get a different feeling : do all quests in story order, or, inversely, do it all upside down as it comes, or do all skyshards first without touching a quest, or whatever other "system"...
But if you do them all at once, with the same strategy, then no wonder you're bored. Anyone would be imho.

Nowadays if I level a character (I have 9 at the moment so no hurry for more) I try to do something different like under 50's battlegrounds and undaunteds. Or go exploring and world boss hunting. I find if I grind the new character I just get bored or feel unattached. I also like to get a feel of the class/race as they level up and see if I like it or if they measure up. And from an RP standpoint it gives me time to develop a story and get to 'know' the character.

Aurielle wrote: »

Anyone else feel the same way? I’ve been playing this game for several years now, and I simply cannot seem to bear levelling up stamina and magicka versions of each class. It is just so mind numbingly boring. I made five new alts recently to FINALLY try to have one of each class (especially since I’ve been thinking of making a BG build site), but I just couldn’t bear to level any of them beyond 36 and deleted all but two of them. I’ll probably delete the last two as soon as I can.

How do you keep alt levelling fresh for yourself? How do you slog through Undaunted/Fighter’s Guild/Mage’s Guild/Skyshards for the umpteenth time? How do you afford to keep all your alts kitted out in decent gear? I regularly see people here saying that they have 14+ characters and I’m all... HOW?

Well, the leveling is pretty freaking easy, wont take more than 4 hrs seriusly, As for having them with gear, it's a slow process and you want to have them with several "ok" gear, the BIS is for your most used toons. So for magicka having them with Julianos or Stam with Hundings (I Used to have them with NMG until ZOS decided to make it useless).

And I always pick gear from people that don't want it xD

Whether people find leveling up multiple characters enjoyable or tedious depends no doubt on the motivation behind it.

If you only roll multiple characters because you feel a need to have "one of this and one of that" solely for some future endgame purpose be it PvP or competitive PvE, then it's highly likely that you find it a tedious grind and will complain that the game isn't alt-friendly, especially if you also feel that you need all the skyshards and guild skills etc which you may argue should be account-wide so as to reduce your sense of tedium.

If, however, you roll multiple characters because you enjoy the whole process of character development as well as repeating content that you enjoyed previously then it's highly likely that you won't find it a tedious grind, and will consider the game alt-friendly so long as things like lorebooks, skyshards and achievements remain character-specific so as to maximise the enjoyment of playing all your characters fully and yet in different ways.

Whenever I have played a game solidly with a single character I have found it impossible to keep it fresh, sooner or later logging in the same character every session became a chore. My preference is always to play multiple characters and spread my time between them in different areas of the gameworld so that even if I'm repeating content I've done before it's probably a couple of years since I last did it. By playing that way for a couple of hours a day, most but not always all days a week, the game remains totally fresh. I only do content that I want to do, and never feel a need to do it.

But then I'm not a competitive player, and that distinction is what essentially lies at the heart of the OP's question. Competitive players need to do certain things, non-competitive players want to do certain things, and whether you find something enjoyable in any walk of life including gaming tends to be determined primarily by whether you need to do it or want to do it.

The other way of looking at the issue of "competitive or non-competitive" is to distinguish between those who play a game solely for the destination i.e. endgame, and those who play a game solely for the journey i.e. character progression. The former do find a lot of tedium, grind, and ultimately lack of content while the latter never suffer those problems.

I only have two characters and I played the first one for almost two years before creating the second. But yes, it is repetitive. Sometimes it is nice to revisit long forgotten quests but doing things that have already been "done" breaks immersion for me. I think the game would be much more conducive to have multiple characters if the quest lines were segregated. It always seemed weird to me that you could be a hero of the crown and join the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood. If certain stories were locked out by your choices it would be more incentive to create more characters to do them. Cadwell's silver and gold is a nice idea--for one character. But when you've experienced all alliances, why create a new character in a different one?

I realize of course that game development has gone in the exact opposite direction...but these are my thoughts.

I'm going to have to level one soon. The way Sorc is going I'm going to have to switch to Nightblade. I worry about the racial passive update. I know Redguard will get nerfed and it's going to wreck sustain.

I should probably level it up now during the exp event...

Aurielle wrote: »

Precisely. Levelling to 50 is the easy part. It’s the stuff that comes after that I dread. That and mount levelling.

Meanwhile, my eyes bleed at the thought of "leveling to 50" by running in a circle for hours.

I'd much rather take my time and enjoy the scenery.

I recently got a stam warden to 50, and now I'm leveling skills and other things. I also have a stamplar that is 27 and should be 50 by the end of the New Life festival. That will put me at a Stam/Mag version of each class, plus the Iron Vestige.

Before One Tamriel I had a number of sub-50 characters in different alliances, but after I got all of them to 50, I made a Warden when the class came out and then the stam Warden just before Summerset and most recently the Stamplar.

My main source of leveling/skill points for all these characters is guild events. My guild runs two PvE events a week where you can bring whatever character you want and we are pretty open ended about what we are doing. If we go to a zone, we grab skyshards/world bosses/dolmens/lore books along the way. If we do Public Dungeons, we make sure to grab the Skyshard and Group Challenge.

I also log on to the character every day to do mount training, but I don't necessarily feel the need to play them. I have other things to do on different characters as well.

I think if my goal was to get a character "battle ready", I would probably start by looking for skyshards till level 10, then going to Cyrodiil and getting the skyshards there with a side of PvP levelling, while running a daily dungeon here and there to get the skill points from those and level Undaunted. Then, when I got to 50, I would see what's lacking and work on that in little bits.

However, I don't feel like my character is incomplete if I don't have all the skills and passives. I improvise and work towards it. Like my DK who is on the cusp of getting Caltrops, who is still able to tank dungeons without it. But doing too much of one thing would get boring fast. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

Edit: Really messed up that quote