Ok, maybe not all, Undaunted is alright and pretty much levels by itself as long as you like doing dungeons. Fighters guild gets a good chunk of xp if you level a new character on dolmens, but it gets tedious if you later want to max it out in a hurry. Leveling the Mages Guild is rather boring and ideally requires you to have access to most of the wayshrines. The Psijics are by far the worst of the lot, good luck doing that in a timely manner without a guide, and even with one it still takes too long.
Fortunately, they added guild commendations that drop from the dailies and give you some xp for the respective skill line, but the one that needs it most, the Psijic Order, still has nothing. Just about any additional way of leveling their skill line would be an improvement.

we have daily quests for all of the base game guild skill lines.

fighters guild is super easy to level by just killing monsters.
and for undaunted you just have to do dungeons.

and psijic order just levels by doing its story quests.
it would be fun to have daily quests for the Psijic Order though.

undaunted should have an ultimate skill as it's the only one of these without one.


but i wouldn't call any of them archaic.

I've no problem at all with doing the dailies to level up FG, MG, Undaunted. And changing the FG daily to just one dolmen was great. It is leveling psijic that is painful - enough so that no more alts for me. I have several fully leveled characters that didn't work out and I no longer play - we need class change tokens!

I actually enjoy undaunted but outside of that - yes. Special mention for:
- Psijic
- Excavation and scrying
- Mages guild
- Legerdemain

I’m fine with doing these once but it is FAR from fun doing them again. It feels like they are intentionally creating monotony and selling the “fun” solution in the store. I get it - make your money in a live service game. But if I purchase a skill line skip, armory slots, outfit slots, mount training, etc. it NEEDS to be account wide

The mages guild line is the worst by far, it's just so tedious and annoying, but rather than fix it you can buy it in the Crown store!

+ fighter's guild - alikr dolmen runs

+ dark brotherhood - random contract missions

+ antiquities - artaeum farm

+ legerdemain - craglorn/betnikh apple farm

? thieves guild - random side quests on the wall-thing

- mage's guild - lorebooks (NO! #1)

- psijic guild - time rifts (NO! #2)

- undaunted - random normal dungeons (NO! #3)

I really just dislike how passively integrated the guilds are with the rest of the game and how all the Guilds become completely USELESS after you are done with them.

• Mage's Guild (Lore Books) (2/10)
  • I like that you have to go around and read books scattered around the world in order to level your reputation in the Guild!
  • I dislike how the books are just sitting in the Overworld, requiring just a passive click to signify you were there. It's so bare bones and poorly integrated into the game.
  • The Endless Archive is Mage's Guild 2.0 (Class sets, Archival Fortunes).
• Fighter's Guild (Lore Books) (2/10)
  • I like that you have to fight monsters?
  • I dislike that you can just farm Dolmens for it. It's monotonous, it's all surface / no substance, and it's boring.
  • The Undaunted is Fighter's Guild 2.0 (Monster sets, Undaunted Keys, connection to dungeons)!
• Dark Brotherhood (Quests) (4/10)
  • I like the unique Assassination mechanic in the Overland. It feels more integrated with the game to be killing people in the open air, in populated cities!
  • I dislike how monotonous and boring the assassination quests are. I never thought it'd be so boring to be an assassin.
  • I like the Assassination instanced mini-games. It's a nice touch, but it just doesn't go far enough. There isn't enough map variety, or unique contracts, to make it interesting. Plus, it's buggy as hell.
  • I HATE the Dark Brotherhood skill line. It's completely useless 99.9% of the time and, while the Blade of Woe mechanic is nice for Dark Brotherhood quests, it's completely pointless to the rest of the game as a whole. Shadow Rider passive is the only LASTING thing about the Dark Brotherhood... that's disappointing.
• Thieves Guild (Quests) (4/10)
  • I like the Thieving mechanic and Justice System. It's kind of buggy sometimes, but it's ok.
  • I like the instanced Thieving contracts, but like DB, there aren't enough, with interesting contracts, to make them fun.
  • The whole skill line is pointless. They were really reaching for stuff to add and it shows. I'd say Clemency is the most LASTING thing, but who cares? Most players never have stolen goods on them and the cost is a penitence.
  • Treasures are pointless. They have been relegated to game litter and stolen items are even worse. I wrote a whole article on Treasures and how disappointing they are. Just sad.
• Psijic Order (Time Breaches) (1/10)
  • Monotonous, boring. Nothing good to say about Psijic Order. They went with the laziest route in tying the level to the story quest. Players that want to farm it find it annoying, players that wanted something immersive and rich are sorely disappointed. Just poorly thought out all around, I hardly think of them as a proper Guild in ESO, they are just a DLC story questline.
• Undaunted (Dungeons) (8/10)
  • Now, Undaunted cheated a bit, but I don't hold that against them. They got proper content by being integrated into Dungeon system, and they get some good rewards for their dailies that make players want to do the content.
  • They have unique Monster sets that are a staple of ESO at this point.
  • They got Antiquities integration with Leads through Dungeons and bosses. Motif integration with Mask pages and Arms packs. Transmute integration with gems and Dungeon loot.
  • Decent skill line with good, relevant Skills.
  • All in all, very well integrated into the rest of the game. Would like to see a revamp of Undaunted Keys and more things to spend them on... but it's a good Guild.

TLDR;

Except for Undaunted, all of the Guilds designs are dated. Mage's and Fighter's Guilds leveling is uninspired. Thieves, Brotherhood, and Psijic are monotonous. I'd like to see a Dark Brotherhood 2.0 and a Thieves Guild 2.0 that goes the way of Endless Archive to really give these guilds more of a prevalence and importance, as well as good interesting content.

Mages Guild is fine because it makes your new toon go places and discover wayshrines as you go.
Fighters Guild for me is levelled naturally by simply fighting Daedra while doing regular activities. I use dailies only for levelling the respective line for the companions. Dailies are not worth it to me for levelling FG for the characters themselves.
Undaunted is fine.
Psijic on the other hand was horrible.

There are so many things which have made leveling these skill lines a breeze with enough effort.

Mage's Guild: The dailies are shareable and as per user BenevolentBowed in this thread: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/627456/what-is-the-fastest-way-to-level-up-mages-guild

"If you have access to the mages guild dailies, you can do 15 dailies a day to earn 150 reputation points a day. This will take 9.5 days to max out the skill line but you will earn extra gold, loot some draugr motifs, and boost your companions mages skill line."

Fighter's Guild: Alik'r Dolmen farm, it's a bit of an investment, but little bit of grind out there will max out your Fighter's Guild. On top of that they nerfed the Dolmen daily to 1 Dolmen a Day.

Psijic: Sorry console users, this one doesn't help you much, but Beam me Up, or housing helps tremendously with this. It's a little exploration and teleporting for skills, not that big, you can knock it out in few hours if you're efficient.

Thieves/Assassin: They pulled the level reqs to complete the story and they don't have "meta" skills, purely passives tied to the level up.

That said, they JUST added Citations to the daily rewards bags so you can potentially get more rep per day, or buy it off the guild trader.

That said, I'm with @Tandor, there is no NEED to change these things, just a want to make things super easy. But here's the thing, this isn't an Elder Scrolls solo game, this is an MMO, grinding is a huge part of them and always will be, or else it would just be single player game where when you're done you move onto the next.

It is nice and dare I say even a good design that there are aspects to the game that have their own mechanics.

They are absolutely fine.

Nobody forces anyone to level them and has special way to do so on each.

As for Fighters Guild also is the most dumb to level too as it only requires activation.

Fighters' Guild: Is a bit of a slog but okay as you can either significantly speed it up via dolmen runs, or just level it passively if you don't need it RIGHT NOW!!! because it benefits from stuff you probably do anyway.

Mages' Guild: Is well annoying without an addon, and boring with one. At least you can do it while listening to an audiobook or whatever.

Undaunted: It's fine. It's also really fast once you can do pledges on veteran level. That means you'll have to gain X to level the skills while at max level already, which is the main drawback.

Psijic: It could be great. Tying it to a quest is fine, as a concept, and better than running around clicking on books. If only ... if only that quest wasn't so mindnumbingly boring and tediously bland. The Morte-ordered-on-Wish gets old halfway through the first time you do it, and then it's just running around. beats Mages' Guild by being shorter.

Legerdemain: That's a real grind. But generally not worth it in my opinion, so whatever.

Thieves' Guild: Is okay. You get decent amounts of skill xp from the quests and can do a heist in between. I despise the heists but you can just run through the area killing everything and get stuff, so that's fine. If you plan on stealing stuff, it's worth the effort. If not, you can just ignore it.

DB: Same but imho even less useful.

Antiquities: Oh God. First time it's okay because fresh and new and you have the purple area loot. From the second character onwards, it's annoying and boring as hell and brainwreckingly slow and did I mention boring? Running around Artaeum doing the same mindless stuff over and over again is peak gameplay. Even more boring than fishing, and that's saying something.
---

Will they change them? Probably not. Buying the skill lines makes money.

Speaking strictly from my personal playstyle, I am fine with almost all. I appreciate that they are related to activities that you would be performing as a member of the guild, anyway. That said, a greater variety of associated quests would be fantastic!

The only one I strongly dislike is Psijic. While I love the idea of levelling the guild skill line directly through the guild questline, as some others here have pointed out, the questline itself is... unsatisfying, to say the least. Put more bluntly, it is dull and repetitive, clearly meant to drag out. The meat of the questline could be easily abridged to one or two quests, with no need to remove dialogue.

I don't really care for the phrase "completely happy," but I'm reasonably satisfied with the current methods of guild leveling.

Are they perfect? No.

Could they be improved? Yes.

But I'm reasonably satisfied with the way they currently work, especially with the recent addition of guild commendations or citations or whatever they're called.

A daily Psijic quest might be interesting, depending on what kinds of jobs we would be tasked with doing and what kinds of potential rewards were offered.

For that matter, a daily Antiquities quest might be interesting as well, if it rewarded additional points toward leveling up the Scrying and Excavating skill lines, as well as perhaps an occasional rare lead that can otherwise be difficult or painful to grind for, or something like that. I mean, I know Antiquities isn't a Guild per se, but it sort of is.