Sadly, you can't go home again. I have played RPG games for almost 40 years and I've learned that you can never re-capture that feeling of discovery and amazement you get when playing a great game for the first time. My advice is to find a new game entirely.

Are you burnt out on dungeons? If not, maybe you could do those for a while. The Undaunted have an ethos of doing things for the pure challenge of it, which creates pretty good alignment between character and player mindsets.

Just don't do random dungeons; queueing for specific ones is less stressful. And queueing as a healer usually leaves you in a short queue (5-10 minutes is typical for me on PC/NA, and it's often faster). I almost always queue for the pledge(s) I have active, whether I picked them up that day or earlier. And of course never queue for a vet dungeon until you find it straightforward in normal mode.

Sorcerer healing, by the way, is pretty simple. Run one restoration staff and one destruction staff (lightning and fire are both OK). Skills include:

• Twilight Matriarch x 2
• Elemental Drain or (my preference) Siphon Spirit
• Combat Prayer if your group is decent.
• A few attack skills, such as a Wall of Elements morph, Crushing Shock, and Crystal Frags
• Whatever personal defense, sustain or buff skills you feel like. (I favor Empowered Ward.)
• Radiating Regeneration, especially if you ever get gear that procs on heals.

When picking your armor sets:

• Necropotence is great, because your main heal scales solely off of max magicka.
• Whatever you have of Mother's Sorrow, Seducer or other general stat bonus sets is fine.
• All monster set choices are questionable. Don't let that bother you.

Are there any zones where you haven't done the quests? I like Summerset and Clockwork City a lot. I liked Wrothgar when I did it too. People say good things about Elswyr, but I haven't done it yet.

I hate Murkmire. Not everybody agrees.

FierceSam wrote: »

Hey Davor,

My gut feeling is that maybe you should extend your break. Because much as we’d all want you to get back into the game, there’s no point in doing it if you’re not going to enjoy it.

If you want to get an ESO fix, but don’t feel enthused to play, there are many streams, YouTube channels and podcasts out there to get you in the mood for the game. I really enjoy the Loreseekers’ podcast.

Take your time and come back when you want to, not because you feel you should.

Good luck and have fun

I agree with this. I got burnt out on the game *really* hard over the last couple years because I kept coming back and tried to make myself enjoy it. I’ve now been away from the game for about 10 months and I’m finally feeling interested in playing again, so I’ll probably come back in March.

When I was really burnt out, I kept making tons of new characters in the hope that I’d make one that I really liked and could enjoy the game again, but that just made things worse. If you’re feeling like you need something fresh, it may be better to find it in another game until you specifically feel the urge to play ESO again.

We can offer character concepts, but I find that the most interesting ones are the ones we come up with ourselves.

I tend to start with a race and an interesting character concept. At it's simplest, I use:
Race
Reason for adventuring (the more interesting, the better)
Attitude about the adventure

One method I use is to ask "Do I want this character to happily go along with the questlines? Or do I want this character to be disagreeable in how they approach the questlines from an RP standpoint?"

For example, my main Vestige is a fairly standard EP hero who fights to protect the people she cares about from the Covenant, Dominion, and the Worm Cult. As she got older, she gets a lot more tired and bitter in her attitude as all her deeds seem to change little about the selfish conflicts that spring up over Tamriel.
My DC hero is a Dark Brotherhood Silencer who moonlights as a secret agent for Queen Maryah, so she was happy to kill the enemies of the Covenant.

My disagreeable characters, on the other hand, include:
(Replaying the AD Questline): An AD Kinlord who happily backed the Veiled Queen's bid for power until she let the Maomer invade his home island and got him killed by the Worm Cult. Now he wants revenge, even though he thinks Ayrenn's ideals are the stupid dreams of an incompetent child queen.
(Playing Elsweyr): A Dunmer Slaver who's gotten himself stuck in Elsweyr and the only way out seems to be defeating a rage of dragons in the company of a bunch of Khajiit. His catchphrase is pretty much "You have got to be kidding me," when he's not complaining that "Necromancy on beasts isn't illegal in Morrowind, you uncivilized cats!"

The key to playing those characters that have a very different viewpoint than what the game expects is to take time during and after the quests to imagine their reactions and how that impacts their story and character arc. ESO isn't going to let my Kinlord be as jerkish and arrogant as he is in my imagination, so I have to make the time to imagine that...along with his steadily growing suspicions that his much vaunted Altmer superiority might not be all its cracked up to be. If I just rush through the quests and don't allow time for the imagination to work, I quickly get bored of redoing content I've already seen.

Bottom line, there's no character concept that's magically going to make redoing content you've already see more interesting. Your imagination, on the other hand, is boundless especially when you give it the space to work.

Langdon64 wrote: »

Sadly, you can't go home again. I have played RPG games for almost 40 years and I've learned that you can never re-capture that feeling of discovery and amazement you get when playing a great game for the first time. My advice is to find a new game entirely.

That's so true, and have been one of the hardest parts for me to get back into the game as well, the whole nostalgia around discovering the world, learning skills, playing 8 hours in a row in a raid with a close bunch of friends and getting that first clear. Moments like these are amazing. Replicating this and knowing how much time and effort it takes, which with real life coming "in the way", makes it harder to get invested in the game.