Also just ran into a problem where the main artifact, which seems to always be 2-4 blocks, was placed at the edge of the dig area so that half of it was outside of the area and couldn't be dug up.

• Did you use a copied character or template?

Copied.

• What did you think of the introduction and tutorial quests? Were you able to find them?

I went to Solitude for the purpose of trying out Antiquities, and I found the flyer on the wall easily enough. Picking up the quest got me to the building. So no real issues there.

The first confusing thing that happened was that when I walked into the Antiquities Circle building, I saw a subtitle for some Gabrielle dialogue, but heard no voiceover and couldn't find Gabrielle in the building at all. These subtitles popped up multiple times while I was there. After doing the tutorial, I understand that the text is what she says to people who are attempting to scry. You need to remove the subtitles for people who are not on that step of the tutorial.

As most everyone has said, the tutorial quest is confusing and does very little to help players understand how to do anything. I too spent an inordinate amount of time wandering around the building spamming my new memento until I finally did a search on the forum that led me to this thread. You need to have something telling people to open their journal and go to the Antiquities tab to scry. It's not intuitive at all and the directions are terrible.

Gabrielle's voiceover dialogue during the tutorial scrying attempt (which I assume is supposed to encourage players and give them tips) is distracting and obtuse. I couldn't tell you what she said or how it related to the minigame. Something about focusing on the center and drawing essence from the corners? The game itself is not that complicated, especially at the easy beginner level, but you pretty much have to figure out how it works on your own because the tutorial dialogue has nothing to do with the actual gameplay.

The dirt mound in the courtyard was bugged for me too and didn't appear until I relogged. It didn't help that I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for. The excavation minigame wasn't too hard to figure out, although Gabrielle's cautionary dialogue about not rushing and not breaking things was hard to connect to what I should or should not be doing.

• Did you discover any Antiquity Leads while playing?

Yes, I found one early on in a thieves trove and a few more raiding safeboxes in different zones. The drop rate seemed reasonable, although they were all purple or gold so I couldn't do anything with them yet.

• Did you understand how Scrying and Excavation worked? What did you think of them?

Okay so. Once I had spent a couple of hours working with the system, and consulting the forums to explain things that I had no other way of figuring out, I felt pretty good about how to do things. I even developed some strategies for each minigame when I got access to some of the powerup-type abilities. But it took a while to get there, and I wouldn't say the learning curve was very much fun.

I wish the scrying minigame showed me exactly how many moves I have left, like the excavation one does. Seeing the bar/crystal thing at the bottom gradually filling up is vague and doesn't help with strategizing.

Similarly, it could be clearer that the "timer" at the top of the excavation minigame is actually moves remaining, not a time-based countdown.

I failed? I guess? my first Nord scrimshaw excavation because it told me I had discovered the antiquity, making me think I was done digging it up and could use the rest of my moves on bonus loot, and then it didn't give me anything and I had to find another dirt pile to dig up. Upon reflection I think that's because you have to unearth 4 squares instead of 2, but it gave me a success message after only 2. So this messaging could be clearer.

The other possibility was that I failed because I didn't find all of the bonus loot before I ran out of moves. If that's the case, and you have to completely start over just because you didn't find all of the bonus loot after finding the main antiquity, then that's pretty rotten. Especially since there's no strategy involved in finding the bonus stuff and you just have to get lucky with your random stabs.

I eventually figured out that the "codex" thing is just the lore notes you get each time you find an antiquity, but upon initial perusal of the journal it seems like some kind of quest objective. Could be clearer +1.

• What did you think of the rewards themselves?

The list of furnishings and collectibles looks cool, and I guess that gives you something to aim for, but to start with everything you get is vendor trash, intricates, and the occasional piece of overland gear. These rewards are negligible and the whole thing is basically grinding the skill line up so you can start doing higher-tier leads for the good stuff.

On that note, it wasn't super clear how to level the skill lines up. The tooltip says something about getting achievements, but there aren't that many of those, and I think it was giving one point for each antiquity found as opposed to points for each scrying/excavating activity. That's gonna result in a lot of grinding.

The lore notes I saw were a nice touch, although not terribly exciting for the noob-level stuff I was finding. I honestly didn't spend much time reading them since I mostly wanted to get my skill line grinded up. I'll pay more attention to those on live.

• Were you able to find the individual locations within dig sites within a reasonable timeframe?

This is another area where once I figured out how things were supposed to work, it got easy, but until that point I wasted a lot of time running around. I was expecting the memento to highlight dig spots or have the mote of light hover over where I was supposed to dig. When that didn't seem to do anything, I just did a lot of running around until I finally stumbled over the sparkly pile of dirt. I had to be told that the light was a directional indicator, and then I figured out that you had to compare its position to where you're standing when you use the memento. After that I didn't have a problem following directions, but again, there are no instructions and the learning curve kind of sucks.

I didn't run into this issue myself, but I agree that dig sites should not be within aggro distance of mob spawns. Being helpless while in the minigame screen and getting knocked out of the minigame screen before you can complete it are not cool.

There was one time when I used the memento and no light appeared, so there may be some bugginess there too.

• Do you have any other general feedback?

I'm glad I took a crack at this on PTS so I'll have a clue what to do when it goes live. Unless some major things change with the tutorial and some of the minigame mechanics (like indicators), player guides are going to be essential for people to get anything done without going crazy, and zone chat is going to be filled with confused people asking questions and experienced people playing tour guide.

There are a loooot of skill points to be dumped into these skill lines. Not really an issue for my main character who's done pretty much everything, but that's gonna be tight for newer characters who don't have 30 points they don't know what to do with.

It would be nice if the "New Lead Acquired" bit in the excavation rewards said what lead it is.

It's not possible to use R to loot all from safeboxes and thieves troves if they contain a lead. I had to hit E to loot each lead individually and then I could use R to get the rest.

Do duplicate leads stack in the journal so that we can actually do them multiple times? If not then they should.

I do appreciate that the noob-level green items in each zone can just be done without having to find a special lead item. That helps with the grinding.

It could be clearer in the journal that you have to go to the specific zone to scry for the listed item for that zone. I had about 6 Nord scrimshaws before I found out I had other options.

I didn't get my skill line up very far, so I don't know anything about fissures and stuff. I assume that'll be more learning curve.

I agree that the fill-up bar for using the trowel should probably be moved so it's not covering up squares. I also had no idea what "Intuition" was or how to get it to fill up that bar. I figured out on my own that you fill up the bar by using the brush. Make clearer plz.

I used a copied character.

The tutorial is bad. There are many ways people that are paid to write could have come up with a better tutorial.

One person earlier said to look in the help section in game. That was the key to me taking the time to actually do this side thing. My advice to anyone out there is to read that section. It gives you all you need. Ignore Gabriel!

I am getting leads from multiple places but can not scry them because I need to invest skill points into this. I foolishly thought just anyone could start this. New players might as well not even try. Many skill points are needed.

Did you use a copied character or template?
Copied

What did you think of the introduction and tutorial quests? Were you able to find them?
The Antiquarian's Circle isn't marked on the map, I had to wander around aimlessly for a bit until I found the quest marker.

Did you discover any Antiquity Leads while playing?
None that weren't in the codex so far.

Did you understand how Scrying and Excavation worked? What did you think of them?
There is next to no tutorial or explaination on how these to minigames work. I have eventually figured out most of it I think but there needs to be tutorial text during the quest while you're inside the minigame to show you how it works.

What did you think of the rewards themselves?
So far I've only found things to sell. I was hoping to find more interesting things a little sooner.

Were you able to find the individual locations within dig sites within a reasonable timeframe?
Finding the locations isn't that bad. Honestly I think the keen eye passive for the digsites is redundant with the Antiquarian's Eye tool.

Do you have any other general feedback?

• The Large Shovel tool during excavation doesn't seem to affect all squares in it's area sometimes.
• I constantly get kicked to the log in screen for "exeeding the message rate limit" during excavation. We need to be able to click quickly here so this needs to be looked at.
• It is unclear at first that you have to be located in the zone for the lead you want to scry
• The "charge" meter for the larger tools in the excavation minigame should be off to the side or above or below the main area. In the middle it is distracting.
• It would be nice if there were some more specific examples of where to find more leads.

So those "leads" are complete rng drop?

So today, I had my first instances of both getting booted from the server for "exceeding messaging limit" while excavating (1x) and having the main object I was hunting going across the boundary of the excavation area and thus being unobtainable (2x).

• Did you use a copied character or template? I have tried Antiquities on both my main character who was copied and a max level template character.
• What did you think of the introduction and tutorial quests? Were you able to find them? The Tutorial needs a LOT of work.
  • It MUST direct the player to open Journal or Map to Scry (i tried using the Tool from collections/quickslot and was really confused) I had to ask nearby players for help...
  • Second, my first go at scrying it wasn't very clear what Gabrielle said, she says Foci differently than I do lol, also if the tutorial could highlight a swirly thing and say - hey you want to get all of these. That would be great. The "moves remaining" meter at the bottom should have a counter on it and same with the top Magicka thingy which uses portions of each crystal when using special abilities and since all abilities were appearing the same to me it was hard to tell what was available.
  • Finding the Dig Site - my dig site bugged on tutorial and I had to relog, which reset the Scry portion, but did spawn my dirt pile.
  • I learned this yesterday from a guildie, you can use the Eye from quickslot to get a blue-white arrowish magic effect that points towards the dirt pile once you are in the site. I did NOT understand that at all from the tutorial. It may be better to have the dirt pile NOT directly in the backyard but down the street and a prompt to quickslot and use the Eye to know which way to go down the street.
  • Scry "arrow" is very hard to see in snowy environments, I know it is blue/white but perhaps another added colour would help with the visibility in snowy spots.
  • Excavation: It could use a pictoral info box saying red-orange-yellow-green AND their flare animated effects so the player knows what they are looking for (red = far, green = near; not red = hot/close). I didn't even register the animation effect was different on each colour until a colour blind guildmate was asking about the Scry function in Excavate. I think it is TOO subtle and depending on the type of colour blindness it might hard to see the difference between the background and coloured box/animation. So I think you could either change the shape from a square or add a shape inside the square. Example: Red = Pentagon, Orange = Square, Yellow =- Triangle, Green = Circle and the pattern is decreasing number of sides to the shape = closer to goal. It would still benefit from a picture on the popup info tab.
  • Excavation and its tools: I find it too vague "deep narrow hole" "wide area but shallow". The width is OK because the selection box changes BUT it would be great to have it say how MANY layers it can dig up at once. I also found the charge-up shovel/trowel box in the middle of the screen rather distracting as it covers 1 or 2 dig squares.
  • The health bar of the relic isn't changing from relic to relic properly and it isn't clear how much "health" your relic has; are all relics equally durable? how much health does hitting it with trowel take away? how much health is taken away if a fissure explodes at a distance? We can't really judge this without a better health bar.
• Did you discover any Antiquity Leads while playing? Yes, this is actually what I am working on testing right now, but I wanted to give some feedback a bit earlier than when i finish testing. One question: Does your skill level/skill point investment change which leads are available to find? Can I only find Legendary leads at a skill of 10? I worried about this as I was trying to track down leads. I picked Bal Foyen as my test area. My character has previously done all quests there. (I didn't want to pick a zone with WB/Dragon etc that I wouldn't necessarily be able to solo, as I aim to find ALL the leads in the zone). I haven't managed to find them all in Bal Foyen yet (are the leads always in the zone they are found in??).
  Bal Foyen leads: Guar Statue and Altar were stolen from Safeboxes. I tried fishing and got nothing, treasure chests nothing, pickpocket/stealing nothing, talk to all merchants/npcs nothing. I explored everywhere in case there are some laying around in the open world, nothing. I worried that having done the quests I was missing something so. I made a template, but the Bal Foyen quest is a continuation of Bleakrock - so Bleakrock leads: Legendary Gear piece lead from Frostedge Sentry (I excavated it and got a second lead but cannot scry it again , guessing we have to use the one we currently have to make the gear piece before we can) and I got the Ruby Dragon Skull lead twice, once from a treasure chest and once from a wood node. I also fished, stole from safeboxes, pickpocketed and just normal stealing from containers and haven't located any other leads yet. But not exhaustively I guess. I will be trying to get ALL the hidden relics revealed for Bleakrock and Bal Foyen now but it seems I get the leads pretty quickly from a given source (safebox, treasure chest, mob) so I may be missing where the missing leads are...
• Did you understand how Scrying and Excavation worked? What did you think of them? These mini games are good (see above notes about tutorial). I am finding Antiquities very fun even with the few hiccups it has.
• What did you think of the rewards themselves? I think the rewards are great. May want to emphasize in a tutorial (maybe the written in game one in the help menu) that the easy leads (from excavating) are treasures and the collectible/furniture/gear/etc requires more hunting/searching. I did see one player in the tutorial area by Gabrielle mention that everything was a treasure and yes, all the green ones you start off knowing how to find are treasures - it could turn some players off.
• Were you able to find the individual locations within dig sites within a reasonable timeframe? Before I knew you could use the Eye to get an arrow, not really - some of the dig sites are HUGE and multi-tiered like Craglorn by Skyreach and CWC - up, down, all around - and I was riding around looking for the sparkly dirt mound. However, since discovering the Eye arrow thingy it has been a lot better. I am still confused why some dig sites are so enormous and others very tiny in similar sized zones (beginner zones, eyevea have a smaller area and notably smaller dig site areas to search)
• Do you have any other general feedback? Some UI improvements would be nice. On the Map tab it could show how many times you have Found a given relic/codex entry completion. In the Antiquities journal tab under the zones it would be nice to see the same format as under the "scry" part; where "need lead", "need skill" are separated into sections. Especially useful for browsing and trying to decide which zone you want to go to as that information isn't available until in the zone via the scry page. Excavation says "Time" which is misleading because the game is NOT timed, the meter is number of actions you have left. Maybe change "time" to "Stamina" - how long you can dig before exhausted and forced to stop? Lastly, due to achievements my Scry and Excavate started to level at different rates, it did seem that each skill got progress AFTER a relic was found (+1 green, +3 blue, +5 purple) so they are even until achievements add random progress - not a big deal but seemed strange and I had to investigate why they became mismatched if a relic acquisition gave the same progress to both.

Hotdog_23 wrote: »

Can the "leads" be given to another character on your account or does the character that finds the lead have to scry and find the item. I would perfer my main to do all the scrying and digging but I am not on that character all the time.

I did some investigating on this, and it seems that leads are account-based. I logged in on a different character, and she had the same leads as my main character in the Antiquities journal. (I did have a message saying that scrying required the skill line available in Solitude, so I couldn't do anything with any of the leads.)

I took this character thieving in a zone my main hadn't found any leads in, and I did eventually find a purple lead in a safebox. When I switched to my main character, the lead showed up in the journal for her (although I can't scry it yet because my skill line is too low).

So this tells us two things: You can find leads on characters who haven't done the Antiquities tutorial quest or unlocked the skill lines, and leads found by one character can be pursued by other characters.

Okay. I need to stop myself from playing this system so I can savor it more when it comes out. Even though I'd like to test it more thoroughly, I think I'd better stop and give my feedback now.


Did you use a copied character or template?
Both! I tested it with two copied characters and one template.

What did you think of the introduction and tutorial quests? Were you able to find them?
I'd like to echo what others have said: the tutorial quest is super broken right now. It seems like Gabrielle is missing dialogue at the beginning of her quest that is supposed to explain how to actually use the system and the tutorial dig site doesn't spawn consistently--I had to drop the second tutorial quest and restart it on both copied characters in order to get the dig site to appear.

On the subject of Benele, she and I have had our differences in the past, but I appreciated getting to talk about a certain mutual friend with her. However, I noticed that she still appears in the Anvil Mages Guild after you talk to her here, and she doesn't appear to have any new dialogue to reflect the change in her circumstances. Perhaps she does have it, but it didn't fire it properly. I spoke with her in Anvil on a character who had completed Coldharbour and the Antiquities tutorial but not Summerset, so it was kind of okay but a little strange... maybe I'll swing by on my character who completed all three to see if she has something else to say in Anvil.

Did you discover any Antiquity Leads while playing?
I found three leads in a fairly short amount of time:
- On sale at a merchant's shop
- In a Psijic Portal
- While excavating another antiquity

Did you understand how Scrying and Excavation worked? What did you think of them?
I think I've got a comprehensive grasp of Scrying. Getting all of the circles while trying to minimize your moves was actually pretty fun, and I can see myself going out of my way to not use the special abilities because they look like they might trivialize the game.

I don't really understand Excavation fully. Finding the main treasure is easy enough, and once I unlocked the trowel I usually had enough turns left to find two or three bonus treasures by blindly stabbing the dirt. Benele indicated that you can kind of judge where treasure might be based on the shape of the dirt, but I haven't figured out the pattern yet. I also saw some people talking about "fissures", and I have no idea what those are.

What did you think of the rewards themselves?
I mean, I'm looking forward to the new motifs (YAS), mythic items, and the mount. The furnishings will be nice, too. But for my testing, I didn't even take a look at them.

You know what got me really excited? Reading the notes between the antiquarians that unlocked as I found items! Those were rad! More of that, please!

Were you able to find the individual locations within dig sites within a reasonable timeframe?
Yep, absolutely.

Do you have any other general feedback?
I want to thank you for two design decisions you made here:

1. Thank you for letting non-scrying characters pick up leads and for letting any scrying character follow any lead on your account. I was worried I'd have to complete all of the game content on my main antiquarian just to unlock all of my leads, which goes against my general policy of only doing content that makes sense for the character.

2. Thank you for not locking this skill line behind the story quests! While it made sense in Summerset from a lore perspective, having the Psijic Order skill only available after starting the main zone quest did cause some issues for characters that weren't ready to start that story.

I do think the UI could use some clarification. One of the leads I picked up was a fragment for the Thrassian Stranglers, but I couldn't quite figure out which zone I needed to scry on to find the fragment. Also, it's a little disconcerting how leads just kind of dissolve into the Antiquities journal when you pick them up--it seems like it'd be easy to miss if you auto-loot a lead without paying attention. Finally, I think the patch notes mentioned that leads have a time limit, but I couldn't find any indication of this in the UI, so... where's that info?

Hotdog_23 wrote: »

Can the "leads" be given to another character on your account or does the character that finds the lead have to scry and find the item. I would perfer my main to do all the scrying and digging but I am not on that character all the time.

It seems like all Antiquities progress is account-wide. If you find a lead on one character, all of your characters get access to that lead. I spent a few hours testing this out, since I also plan to have one character do all of my excavation.

So in the end, after a second full day of antiqueing, I got kicked twice from the server for exceeding the message limit. If this is a thing, perhaps the skills should have a short cooldown/delay before using them again to prevent overly zealous clicking (1s, or something)

I found three reward items that crossed the border of the excavation site and were therefore unobtainable. I had to cancel the excavation and find another dig site in each case. None of these errors happened yesterday.

The Northern Elsewyr excavations still don't turn up for me. After yesterday's failed attempt I rescryed them and luckily they were both in the same area (a small slip of land outside Tenmar Temple). However, neither excavation site showed up, and using the Eye didn't work because there was no mound for it to point to.

Today I also made a level 25 Greymoor char. It logged into the game at maxed out Scrying/Excavating, but after doing the intro quest for antiqueing was reset back to nothing.

In general, I think the hardest thing about scrying is seeing the symbols at the highest difficulties because they are so small. It would be nice if Scrying came with extra achievements to make it more challenging like "rule out 2/3/4/5/6 sites in one go" or "collect 20/30/40/50 of the same facet in one click" or something. I'm challenging myself to do this anyway, and it makes it a bit more fun. Otherwise I can just click coalesce, collect, coalesce, collect...rinse repeat.

Internet_Mask wrote: »

The furnishings are great but would work better if be stored in the collections tab instead of the inventory so they wouldn't need to be repeatedly farmed for. (i.e, the same way that the talking skull rewarded at the end of the Psijic questline is stored.)

Items from the collections tab (not from the inventory) can't be placed more than one time in one house.