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Tamriel Improved

The 2020 Q1 Elder Scrolls online DLC is a way to let you know, just like we have been from the very beginning, that we are still committed to improving Elder Scrolls Online in a way that feels more like the Elder Scroll experience our players have been wanting and waiting for. It may seem like we have happily settled on a strict cadence of dolling out only dungeons, beautiful landscapes, rich story telling, mostly locked structures, and aggravating skill changes (sorry!), but we have also been hard at work improving the base game experience, culminating in a large dream patch designed specifically for one user, the OP. However, you may all share in the luster that is Tamriel Improved. From now on, no matter what intricately decorated home you exit from in Tamriel, take just a few steps in any direction and you will likely find excitement, danger and just generally a good time. This patch focuses on the Overland experience and further character customization. General combat and class balance, pvp, end game trials etc., although important, are not a part of OP’s dream update, so if that is all your heart desires from this game, you may want to stop reading now. So, get ready, because here we go. Lots of great changes ahead!

Optional Higher Difficulty Overland

For players that are looking for a more exciting Overland experience, we have added a story-related opportunity to debuff your character without having to remove armor or change your Champion Point layout. After completing a heroic questline, an NPC can be found within the Fighter’s Guild that will grant players an optional debuff that greatly increases damage done to the player by Overland mobs, quest mobs, World bosses, dolmen denizens, etc. Tamriel has never felt more terrifying. This debuff can be added or removed at any time when engaging with this NPC. However, you must be level 50 and champion point 160 or above on at least one character to have access to this gameplay. Once debuffed, there will be a faint heroic golden glow surrounding your character to indicate to others your grit and determination to finally be on equal combat footing with the world around you. This debuff will not be applied in Cyrodil, Imperial City, battlegrounds, dungeons or trials.

• The debuff only affects the amount of damage done to you. It does not restrict the amount of damage you can do, nor does it increase the health of mobs which would effectively turn them into boring damage sponges. Nope, no one likes that, and none of that is happening. You may want to run for your life, though, at least more than before, because things will just hit a lot harder now.
• With more danger comes better rewards. We have implemented a Televar-like system using Hero stones. This system multiplicatively increases the amount of Hero stone currency you can acquire while fighting in Tamriel and remaining alive. The longer you live, the more of this currency you can earn. If you die while debuffed in this way, you will lose all Hero stones you currently have in your wallet. Unlike Televar stones, though, you will not bank Hero stones (because that would be as easy as summoning a banker assistant after every fight). In order to keep this currency for spending, instead you will have to return to the Fighters Guild, speak with the new vendor NPC and exchange Hero stones for Blessed Hero stones, which are yours to keep. You can then use Blessed Hero stones to purchase exciting items. You will find these items very costly, though, as we don’t want people to feel they are missing out too much by not opting into Higher Overland Difficulty.
• The vendor items will include the following: Motif Bag: This will grant a random purple Motif from anywhere in the game. Furniture Recipe Bag: Either a random purple recipe or two blue recipes from anywhere in the game. Outfit Page Bag: A yellow-quality Outfit style page from either PVP or PVE/event content. All of these offerings will grant you items that you do not yet own on any character, much like how outfit pages in PVP work now. Only in cases where you own them all, will a repeat be given to you. All items are tradeable. Also included on the vendor are bags containing crafting materials and exciting new furnishings.
• For those participating in this system, in an effort to keep things balanced, you will not be able to receive buffs or healing from other players not participating in this system and will receive some, but a significantly diminished amount of Hero stones from killing mobs who are also tagged by unheroic (non-debuffed) players. As of note, you can also receive this currency from completing quests while debuffed.

Followers

We are finally adding followers to the game! Now that Optional Higher Difficulty Overland is available to our players, we thought it the perfect time to give our players a little bit of help and companionship via our new Companion System. You can find Companions all over Tamriel through new quests or just lazing around Cities, Inns and Taverns, waiting for mercenary work. Once you employ a companion, your companion will always be available to you through the collections tab. Like pets, you can cycle through them, picking the perfect follower for whatever task is at hand. Although our followers are meant to help out when situations prove difficult, they are not at the same power level as players. In fact, their damage is exceedingly mediocre in comparison. Combat wise, they mostly serve the purpose of taking a little heat off the player by directing some attention to themselves instead. That said, you do have a choice of magicaka types, sword and board tanks, healers, brutes, rouges, etc. who employ their own unique forms of crowd control, damage and/or healing. Our new companion system will also allow for the following:

• Players can interact with their companions via dialog options.
• Some companions are also romanceable! You can even get married.
• Companions will carry your burdens and can be asked to carry more and more burdens (inventory) by leveling this up through the Champion System.
• As far as survivability is concerned, after a good bit of fighting, if a follower becomes too overwhelmed, they will enter into a temporary downed state, but will soon regain their strength and rise again to fight by your side.
• Unfortunately, due to performance restrictions and, um, for aesthetic reasons, companions will disappear when entering major cities, but will reappear once a player leaves the city.
• Companions are only summonable in both Overland content and player homes and are not available in dungeons, trials, or PVP. The Overland increased difficulty debuff is not required to use a companion.
• All companions are fully voiced and have a lot to say!
• Players will be able to place companions in their homes and customize their appearance via costumes, outfits and personalities.
• Not only can you dress your companions, but you can also slot them with gear to improve their builds and stats.
• In your homes, you can command your companion (or multiple companions) to remain sitting on a chair, resting on a bed, or standing still somewhere, but you can also instruct them to path around and cause their own mischief. This command allows them to wander around using their emotes, taking a seat when it pleases them, laying down for a rest in any room they like, reading books they may find, and just generally keeping themselves occupied. Who knows what you will find them doing when you get home!

We think our followers are a lot of fun and we hope everyone enjoys their banter and customizability. So get out there and find them all!

New Weapons

In this update we are offering two new weapon skill lines: One Hand and Rune and, also, Spear. One hand and Rune is a magicka-based skill line while Spear is stamina based, both with their own Ultimate, 5 active and 5 passive abilities. This gives players two new weapon types to play with, Spear and Rune. As you might guess, Spear is a two-hand weapon while a Rune is one-handed and is used with an axe, mace, sword, or dagger. We are eager to introduce more weapons over time, so give us ideas on what you would like to see the most!

Roamer Bosses

Added to most land masses in Tamriel are chance encounters with a new kind of dynamic event called Roamer Bosses. A Roamer boss is a large migratory encounter consisting of several bosses and large packs of additional mobs. Each map will have multiple unique encounters with mob types that directly fit the story and environment of the zone. These large, exciting events are fairly rare and have no noticeable schedule or time table. If a Roamer event spawns in the zone you are in, you will see a notification on your screen that the event has started or, if just joining the zone, that it is in progress. An icon for the current location of the event can be seen on your map. These boss encounters are intended to bring excitement and chaos to the general questing experience and are not going to be easy to defeat. It will take a large amount of players to finish these packs of deadly mobs, who will be migrating across the map until they have reached one of the map borders. At that time, if not defeated, the event will end and only minimal rewards will be received. So, rally and tell your friends to join and help! If defeated, the rewards will be worth all of the fun!

• Rewards for successfully completing one of these events, along with other items, can include new furnishing patterns and furnishing ingredients (such as gatherables for your homes, discussed a little later in the patch notes), and other new furnishings and patterns. We have a tremendous amount of furnishings already in game that have not been released yet. You can now find these, and their patterns, as rewards for these events. Also, for the first time, ever, you will earn small amounts of crowns or crown gems. Very rarely, you may loot random, unowned crown store items or outfit/weapon pages specific to the theme/bosses of the encounter.
• It’s worth mentioning, again, that these events are rare. There may be none to only one or two a day throughout all of Tamriel. Make sure to tell your friends when something comes up, but keep in mind, once a server is player capped, no one else will be able to ‘travel to player’ in that zone and trying to enter a full server will put you in a different instance where no event is taking place.
• If you crash during an event and your server is full, you will have a window of 2 minutes to return before the spot opens for someone else.

Our artists and combat team have put a lot of work into creating unique, fun and deadly encounters to spice up the maps a little more and we are very much looking forward to your feedback! If the difficulty level and rarity seems too unbearable, we will consider scaling it back in future patches, so keep us up to date on how the events are going and enjoy!

Champion System

The champion system has received a complete overhaul and we can’t wait for you to check it out. Firstly, to keep things exciting for all players, including high champion point players, we have removed the cap on champion points. Our original intent with champion points was to give a strong sense of progression for players as they continue to advance through the game long after reaching level 50. We found that putting a cap on points greatly diminished this sense of progression as a large amount of our player base has steadily been reaching the cap. At the time we implemented the cap, we felt we needed to curb a growing disparity in power between lower and higher champion point players, but with our new system, this should no longer be as large of an issue. Although we are not removing the power and defense increases from this system entirely, we are reducing the amount of power/defense that can be obtained and greatly increasing the amount of champion points required to reach endgame power goals. We have done a complete balance pass in the game to ensure these changes are not too overwhelming for players. We are also including a great many more power-unrelated passives as close and far reaching goals for players. They will not be automatically given once you reach a point threshold, but carefully selected by players, which is as easy as checking or unchecking a box. These passives include but are not limited to:

• Passives that change the look (color) and feel (animations) of certain class skills.
• Passives that change the look of the demon/undead/pet type of animal companion spells.
• Passives that change the way weapons act, such as giving you the ability to zoom the camera in on a target while aiming an arrow.
• Passives that advance Justice System gameplay such as incrementally increasing the fences haggling bonus percentage, a lesser detection radius while in stealth, a greater chance at pickpocketing furnishings, furnishing recipes, motifs, or high gold yielding treasures, acquiring the ability to glimpse what the NPC might be carrying for you to steal (and the percentage chance of getting caught), increasing the number of items NPC’s carry, and choosing what loot you may want to attempt to steal, and much, much more.
• Passives that grant more functionality to bankers, merchants, fences, and followers, allowing laundering on fences, guild store availability on bankers, armor repairs on merchants, and giving followers the opportunity to carry your burdens at varying levels.

There are many more new passives not listed here, so let us know what you think when you see them in game. Is there anything you want that we haven’t included? Let us know!

Spellcrafting

Although controversial to some, we are finally adding Spellcrafting to the game. We can assure you that we have painstakingly attempted to balance these spells and look forward to your feedback. With Spellcrafting, you will have access to some of the most iconic spells in the Elder Scrolls series and will have the capability of choosing and dismissing spell functions to create exactly what you are looking for in a build. A special questline has been added to the game via the Mage’s Guild that takes you all over Tamriel, searching for spellcrafting tablets. As previously discussed, you will first acquire a spell that allows you to chase a speeding ball of luminous blue light into once forgotten classrooms where you might find partial or whole tablets that contain these new spells. It’s your job to make copies of these spells, add them to your spell book, and collect all the parts. Because we want the obtaining of these spells to feel like an epic exploration experience, their locations will be randomized and you will not be able to trade spells or spell parts with other players. Happy hunting everyone!

• Not to worry stamina users, all spells have a stamina variant as well.

Open Doors

When asking for feedback about what players liked and disliked about the Morowind chapter, there seemed to be an overwhelming frustration players had with finding areas within the map that were off limits. Players complained of a great many doors that were shut and locked, buildings, tents and rooms that could not be entered. We took this feedback to heart and made sure not to make similar mistakes in the following Chapter, Summerset. Due to time constraints in creating Elsweyr, though, we have left even more doors chained and locked than ever before, and we greatly apologize for how unfun this has been for our explorers. We would therefore like to share with you what we have done to open more doors in Tamriel.

• All previously locked doors in every zone, including DLC and chapters, that do not have a quest or story-related function requiring them to remain a closed instance, have now been made open to the public. Ostensibly, there should be no more locked doors in Tamriel, anywhere. This includes removing doors that functioned only for decorative purposes.
• Furnishings and, in some cases, NPCs and thief chests, have been added to all previously closed off areas.
• Passes have also been made to all rooms in quest, town and city areas in maps that were created long before the Justice System. We have added new assets, lootable containers and thief chests to places we felt were lacking in such things.

Dolmens

Dolmens across Tamriel have been rebalanced to Summerset Geyser difficulty scaling. As group content, we feel they should be slightly more challenging than they currently are.

Bears, Trolls, Giants, Mammoths, Wisp Mothers and Ice Wraiths

There are some classic mob types we felt needed a boost to more resemble the Elder Scrolls experience. The damage (and sometimes health) of such mob types have been increased significantly. I wouldn’t upset too many at once, especially if you change your Overland experience to higher difficulty! As special note: Giant encounters can now leave you airborne. Very… airborne.

Morrowind Dailies

For easier access and ease of navigation of Vavardenfel World Boss and Dungeon dailies, and to bring things more in line with other Chapters, the zone starter quest requirement to open these dailies has been removed. Also, the turn in location for these dailies will now be with the same NPC’s that give out the dailies. You should no longer feel like you are navigating a confusing indoor maze at quest turn in when you would rather be quickly off fighting more dangerous group content with friends.

Rumors at the Taverns and Inns

Interested in the latest gossip? Innkeepers at Inn’s and Bar keepers at Taverns all over Tamriel should now have a lot more to talk about. You can find the latest rumors about quests nearby you have yet to complete, delve and world bosses that can be marked on your map, roamer bosses rumored to have once been seen nearby, new daily quests, and more. Also, should you fancy yourself a rest in one of the Inn rooms, the Innkeeper will be happy to give you a room (for a small fee)!

• We have added new areas to local delves and caves with traps and puzzles for you to find and fight your way through with the new daily quests you can pick up via Innkeepers and Barkeeps. Each map should have it’s own dailies. These new quests more so resemble the level of detail and intrigue of quests in previous Elder Scroll series. Be prepared to get very lost and for your companions to fall into each and every trap.
• We have also added Barkeeps. Taverns should be a little more lively now.
• Rested bonus: You can now interact with beds! We have added a sleep function to beds. When interacting with a bed, your character will animate with first a yawn and then will lay down on the bed and close their eyes. After sleeping in a bed for 10 or more seconds, you will receive a rested buff lasting 2 hours. This buff gives you 100 Health Recovery, 100 Stamina Recovery, 100 Magicka Recovery and 10% bonus to XP. You may always sleep for free on owned beds in your Inn rooms or homes. You are also allowed to pay an Inn Keeper 100 gold to use any bed in their Inn, or, if you kill all the residents in homes across Tamriel, you will be able to sleep in their beds for free, because they are dead, so those are your beds now. That is, until they respawn.

Housing

You've been asking for it and now it's finally here. We are removing any and all limitations on how many furnishings you can have in your homes, this includes every sized home from Inn room to Notable home. Furnish until your heart's content! Please keep in mind, though, if you or your friends notice lag, long loading screens, and items slowly appearing in your home, this is likely due to over furnishing. Removing items will be your best course of action to remedy this. Don't say we didn't warn you!

We have also added more fun and functionality to homes with the following additions:

• Furnishing storage. No longer do you have to lug around bags full of furniture for weeks and months while decorating your homes. Also, you can free up all those beautiful wasted homes you are currently using for furniture storage (we've noticed that some of you have quite a lot of them!). A new UI has been instituted that stores every item you own, organized by category, subcategory, style or type with a visual representation of each item. This took a lot of tireless hours and consultations with specialists in this field to figure out, so, um, you're welcome? Yes, you’re welcome.
• New gatherable furnishing recipes are now available as plots for gathering cloth and plants, nodes for mining ore and jewel crafting dust, dead animal carcasses for harvesting leather, runestone patches for gathering runestones, and dead fallen trees for cutting wood. There are a great many of these recipes of varying sizes, appearances, and racial styles. They will be available as (rare) drops, but a little more prominently on the loot tables of the new Roamer bosses. You can also very occasionally find them from pick pocketing slaves, alchemists, hunters, laborers, gatherers, and farmers.
• Not only can you loot your gatherables once a day, but you can also loot all urns, barrels, trunks, dressers, wardrobes, etc. that are placed in your homes. The loot tables for these items follow the same ones in the base game (you are slightly more likely to find a Dark Elf furnishing recipe style in a Dark Elf vase for example). In an effort to not crash the economy, each account will be allowed to loot 30 containers or gatherables every day, so choose wisely what you are wanting to harvest the most!
• Other new furnishings include mannequins (of all races and genders) and weapon display racks, designed to display weapons and full sets of armor, along with a great many styles of display cases that activate to open and close. Recipes for these items are purchaseable using writ vouchers at the new writ vendor located next to Rolis Halllau and Faustina Curio.
• Also available for writ vouchers are Service furnishings recipes: Writ Board, Writ Turn in, Stablemaster, Dungeon Pledge NPCs. Hey, if you’re a hermit, more power to you. You can now access more social activities from the convenience of your home than ever before. Enjoy!
• As a result of the addition of so many new furnishing recipes, there are also many new furnishing ingredients, which can be found all over, but some are more likely to be found on the Roamer bosses, as rewards from the new Inn and Tavern dalies, and in seashells, a new harvesting node found along beaches in every zone with an ocean view in Tamriel. If you like aimless beach wandering and shell gathering, this patch is definitely for you.
• There is now an option to choose between a day and night cycle and varying weather types as seen outside your home. The weather patterns include rain, heavy rain, rain and sunshine off and on, light snow, blizzardy, heavy winds, or, simply, a sunny day.
• Any and all of your other characters, along with followers/companions can be added to your home for your enjoyment. The same options apply to your characters as discussed earlier with followers in terms of customization and movement. Good times, ahead, everyone.

Additional wardrobe functionality

• Ten additional outfit slots have been added, bringing the total you can now obtain to 20.
• We’ve heard every one loud and clear and agree that outfit slots are a little more pricey than they should be. We have slashed their prices by 50% permanently and will continue to have regular sales for them, reducing their price even further.
• Casual cloths (grey quality clothing drops) have been added to the wardrobe system! They are tradeable and will now be looted as blue quality style pages. You can also add quest clothing to your wardrobe, which will be granted as epic quality style pages after quest completion. Quest style pages will, however, not be tradable.
• You can now customize your look more than ever before. Not only can you create the perfect look using dyes with armor and weapons, but you can now add other appearance features as well, such as Hair Styles, Head markings, Body markings, Major and Minor Adornments, Facial Hair, Skins, and Personalities. Essentially, every way you can customize yourself, you can do so when creating and saving an outfit!
• You can now dye and combine costumes with hats, weapons, and other appearance features as nameable outfits.
• In our appearance UI, you can favorite the things you like the most and these will appear at the top of their respective windows.
• The hair colors at character customization are now available to purchase as a set in the Crown Store. New colors have also been added that you can purchase separately.

And that’s it for now! It’s quite a big patch when you think about it. So big, it’s obviously impossible to do all at once, but that’s what dreams are for… for dreaming. So, what’s next? You can let us know. What changes and features would you like to see to spice up the Overland experience more? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section of this thread.

*A few things here were taken as suggestions from other forum users and are not the ideas of OP herself. If she could remember their names, she would include them, but she cannot, so, um, she’s sorry.