What is the TLDR version of the antiquities and scrying system?

coop500 · June 2020

I quit playing around Scale breaker and came back about a week ago and saw this mentioned

I looked up the Skilline, but that just confused me more, so what is the basics of it and why should I care about it?

Tryxus · June 2020

Scrying is a "connect-the-dots" type of minigame that gives you a location where you can find an artifact (treasure, furnishing, part of smth greater). The more dots you connect, the more precise the location you get

Excavation is another minigame at that location where you can dig up the item you're after

Why you should care? There are Mythic Items you can assemble, a 1pc set with quite some powerful effects (you can only wear one of those tho)

Kosef · June 2020

Also...if you are broke...well fret no more!....Spend an entire day doing repeatable leads and you too can throw money at the peasants!

kathandira · June 2020

Kosef wrote: »

Also...if you are broke...well fret no more!....Spend an entire day doing repeatable leads and you too can throw money at the peasants!

Seriously! The money has been nice.

FrancisCrawford · June 2020

You should care if you enjoy the rewards, which are:

A choice of five "Mythic" armor or jewelry items. You can only wear one at a time. Look up the list to see whether you care.
A number of really well-designed furnishing items. They're some of the best -- perhaps the very best -- in the game's history. You may or may not care.
A little over 300K gold, and a few other rewards, but that's the total over numerous hours.

You do it by getting leads and then digging stuff up in accordance with the leads.

You get "leads" through ordinary game play.
Digging the stuff up after you get leads is like playing a couple of iPhone games, plus traveling to the digging locations and in some cases killing a few trash mobs so that you may dig in peace.

coop500 · June 2020

Is it worth doing it on a character not level 50 yet?

coop500 · June 2020

Sounds like I definitely should care either way though, thanks guys.

Currently I am questing in Elswyre and I think I found a weird glowy rock but it just had me pick it up, no minigame so probably not related.

bluebird · June 2020

Just don't buy Greymoor. And you won't have to bother with Antiquities.

Pro tip.

It's an ill-conceived system that requires a repetitive upfront Skill Line grind, and is huge Skill Point sink. Leads for Antiquities are gated behind all sorts of absolutely unrelated activities like Fishing and gathering Psijic Portals. Leads are untradeable and aren't guaranteed to drop, so even if you look up a guide for their specific locations, be prepared to farm for hours.

After getting a Lead, you need to make sure your Skill Lines are high enough to actually use the Lead, otherwise it will expire in 30 days. But let's say your Skill Line is high enough, you then need to connect the dots in the Scrying minigame that sends you to a location in the world.

You then need to find a pile of dirt within that location, and you can start the Excavation minigame where you uncover squares with little shovels to unearth the Antiquity, or a part of it. Most worthwhile items are split into Fragments, so you need to farm the Lead, Scry for the fragment, and Excavate the fragments for every part.

A large number of Antiquities is gated behind other DLCs too, so even if you have Greymoor you won't be able to get all Mythic items, and certainly not nearly all furniture. Overall, Antiquities are a mind-numbingly boring and repetitive system that exists as a carrot to send players to dead zones and make them do content nobody wanted to do anyway.

deLioncourt · June 2020

"Play stupid mini-games, win stupid mini-prizes"

JimmyJuJu · June 2020

Leads: overland and dungeon grinding
Scrying: connect the dots
Excavating: minesweeper
Skill lines: all the skill points
Loot: barely worth it

Darkenarlol · June 2020

TL;DR - TB;DD

(too long did not read - too boring did not dig)

jokes aside - poorly designed mobile phone style "mini-games"

with mosly bad and some so-so rewards

method__01 · June 2020

if you pvp,go get the lancer

Bradyfjord · June 2020

It's a more elaborate version of Archaeology from Wow. And like Wow, it took a novel idea and made it boring.

ForzaRammer · June 2020

JimmyJuJu wrote: »

Leads: overland and dungeon grinding

Scrying: connect the dots

Excavating: minesweeper

Skill lines: all the skill points

Loot: barely worth it

Well said about 1-4, but I like the some of the loot

Ethyarion · June 2020

It's a skill line designed to be such a tedious grind that you happily pay 3000 crowns to bypass it with other characters.

ImmortalCX · June 2020

What no one mentioned is that there are lists online of where to find the leads, so if you want a particular item, you can do a "targeted" search.

1) Look up on Alcast where the lead(s) you want may be found.

2) Grind that event/node until you get the lead. They are found in crafting nodes, by killing world bosses, public bosses, delve bosses, certain kinds of mobs, fishing, etc...

3) Play the scrying minigame. If you get a perfect score, it will tell you exactly where the item is buried.

4) Go to the dig site and play the excavation minigame. If you do well, you will get other items besides the antiquity, including the "Indeko" rune which has around 4K gold value.

Some of the mythic items that have five pieces are BIS for certain things. There is a DPS set of gloves and a movement speed ring that are very well received.

Gythral · June 2020

Join the dots
then play minesweeper

sort of, with pRNG and a bit of running around

Asardes · June 2020

Candy Crush meets Minesweeper.

Varana · June 2020

coop500 wrote: »

Is it worth doing it on a character not level 50 yet?

I would hold off, in that case. Both skill lines need 24 skill points, combined, when maxed out, and while you can skip a few of those, it's seriously expensive to do properly.
Also, focus doing the skill lines on one character, don't spread them out.

coop500 wrote: »

Sounds like I definitely should care either way though, thanks guys.

Currently I am questing in Elswyre and I think I found a weird glowy rock but it just had me pick it up, no minigame so probably not related.

You don't find antiquities in the wild. You will find "leads" - they should give you an onscreen message once you find one, and they go directly in your journal, they're not an actual inventory item. Additionally, you have one lead per zone already discovered - your map screen has a new section for antiquities, it should be there (if you have the skill line from Solitude).
You need to Scrye for the thing, and only then will you get a kind of glowy dirt mound in the location that you discovered.

FrancisCrawford · June 2020

coop500 wrote: »

Is it worth doing it on a character not level 50 yet?

Reasons not to are mainly:

Likely shortage of skill points.
The fact that you don't want to collect hard-to-get gear until you're CP 160.

JimmyJuJu · June 2020

JimmyJuJu wrote: »

Leads: overland and dungeon grinding

Scrying: connect the dots

Excavating: minesweeper

Skill lines: all the skill points

Loot: barely worth it

I do too. So, worth it...but barely

Edit: I accidentally replied to my own post. Epic fail.

Pyr0xyrecuprotite · June 2020

TLDR version: Antiquities is a VERY grindy souped-up Treasure hunt system, with no shortcut options (e.g. to "force the lock").

Longer versions:

two new mini games and
a ton of related passives, mostly useless for anything else (skill point sink) EXCEPT that the treasure chest keen eye is nice
grind out vendor trash treasure hunts at first to level up the skill lines (with a one-time 100k treasure obtainable after doing all the others)
grind out other content (dungeons, bosses, etc.) to get leads for the good stuff
repeat
Treasure maps and lockpicks are much more valuable now as a result, since you can get motifs from treasure maps in many zones

Davadin · June 2020

TLDR; Nord iPad.

Cortimi · June 2020

Pyr0xyrecuprotite wrote: »

TLDR version:
[*] a ton of related passives, mostly useless for anything else (skill point sink) EXCEPT that the treasure chest keen eye is nice

Having big blue glowy mist on chests in dark ass dungeons is the most criminally underrated feature to ever drop in ESO and made the entire grind %100 worth every second. Dead serious.

JimmyJuJu · June 2020

Cortimi wrote: »

Pyr0xyrecuprotite wrote: »

TLDR version:
[*] a ton of related passives, mostly useless for anything else (skill point sink) EXCEPT that the treasure chest keen eye is nice

Having big blue glowy mist on chests in dark ass dungeons is the most criminally underrated feature to ever drop in ESO and made the entire grind %100 worth every second. Dead serious.

I agree with you here. It's the best feature we never knew we needed (or maybe we did). I've found quite a number of obscured and hidden chests with this passive. A welcome addition to the game.

SickleCider · June 2020

Go to Artaeum. Small island, no enemies. Do the green lead in your inventory (journal -> antiquities -> scryable), the blue you get from doing it, back to the green, and back and forth to level up to purple leads. (Optional: open psijic portals and maybe do a little fishing while you're at it to get two leads for Thrassian Stranglers, a mythic magicka DPS set piece.) Now that you can do purple leads, visit starter zones--small zones, weak enemies. Do green lead, blue, get purple, do the purple. Do this until you level up to gold leads. Sell all your treasures for silly amounts of gold. Look up antiquities online to figure out which items you want, search for those specifically. Play game as normal. You'll be drowning in leads for things you aren't specifically looking for soon.

Feric51 · June 2020

Don't think I've seen anyone mention this, and the game does a poor job of explaining it as well, but the leads you discover will expire after 30 days. Now, you can always find them again once they do expire, but some of the mythic/legendary ones are fairly rare or hard to get drops so don't get carried away stocking up on leads before you level the scrying line high enough (level 7-8 for mythic/legendary) to locate them.

Also, you can only have one each of specific leads active at a time. IE. You get the lead for ancestral orc gloves motif, you will never get another lead for it until you scry it and either abandon it, excavate it, or let it expire. Furthermore, you can only have 5 leads actively scryed at any one time and have to excavate/abandon one before you can scry another.

coop500 · June 2020

Oh another question, I don't own Greymoor, is it possible to still do any of these things?

CassandraGemini · June 2020

Ethyarion wrote: »

It's a skill line designed to be such a tedious grind that you happily pay 3000 crowns to bypass it with other characters.

Except that - unless I'm missing something - there is no real need to have these skill lines maxed on more than one character. Nothing you find is character bound, AFAIK, so you can just put it in your bank to use with whomever you want. So unless you really, really want the "Keen Eye: Treasure Chests" skill (which, I admit, is nice to have, but it's just a QoL improvement, essentially) you can safely skip the whole thing, because this is the only skill in all the Scrying and/or Excavation skill lines that is unrelated to the mini games. So, the way I see it, it's enough to take one of your toons and level them to 10 in Scrying/Excavating and then use them whenever something new comes up.

Feric51 · June 2020

coop500 wrote: »

Oh another question, I don't own Greymoor, is it possible to still do any of these things?

You will find the leads. Oh will you find the leads. But, unfortunately without Greymoor you will be forced to look at them in your journal every day for 30 days and not be able to do a single thing with them.

TL;DR No.

Ardaghion · June 2020

coop500 wrote: »

Oh another question, I don't own Greymoor, is it possible to still do any of these things?

No, to unlock the skills you’ll need to be able to visit Western Skyrim and find the quest giver that runs the tutorial.