Seems like you're not doing enough arc 2 or Marauders. Weapons and jewelry filled first for me. Use the character with the most damage to blast through arc one and Marauder. If you're over half way or so to arc two thoat, might as well kill the atro.

If you don't enjoy IA it is going to be a grind, but I was able to finish mine up. I just wish more of the sets were useful.

Orbital78 wrote: »

Seems like you're not doing enough arc 2 or Marauders. Weapons and jewelry filled first for me. Use the character with the most damage to blast through arc one and Marauder. If you're over half way or so to arc two thoat, might as well kill the atro.

If you don't enjoy IA it is going to be a grind, but I was able to finish mine up. I just wish more of the sets were useful.

I farm arc 2 every day, and at least as far as the marauder in arc 3. With a lucky draw for visions I'll continue to complete Arc 3 if the pace is going well. But beyond that point it slows down enough that time vs reward just isn't worth it (IMHO). As well, choosing whichever character can blast throug the fastest is out of the question, because my Arc and Sorc are not guaranteed to get a Necro drop.

Erickson9610 wrote: »

Why not just spend the Archival Fortunes you earn on the curated boxes you can purchase from Filer Brax? Ideally you'd want to buy the non-curated boxes when starting to collect the set (because they're cheaper), then switch to buying the curated boxes when you've got only a few pieces remaining to collect. Of course you'd be running IA to get Archival Fortunes, so you'd be getting curated pieces from there, too.

I do spend my archival fortunes on the boxes.

Dragonnord wrote: »

It's easy to get the sets/pieces, since you can farm them (and no need to go higher levels, you can repeat Arc 1, plus one marauder if you want), or you can buy them curated at the IA vendor.
 

The issue I bring up is not the difficulty. The pieces are easy to get. It's the number of times needed to acquire them that I bring into question.

Dungeon sets have fewer items to collect as they don't include all 3 weights of every armor piece, has the added advantage and benefit that you can acquire them on any character, and you can group with 3 other people to trade for the pieces you need as the opportunity arrises. IA sets have more pieces, doubled even that with the addition of a second set per class, and does not give you those options.

DenverRalphy wrote: »

Dungeon sets have fewer items to collect as they don't include all 3 weights of every armor piece, has the added advantage and benefit that you can acquire them on any character, and you can group with 3 other people to trade for the pieces you need as the opportunity arrises. IA sets have more pieces, doubled even that with the addition of a second set per class, and does not give you those options.

Dungeon sets are still an insane grind, though, because weapons and jewelry only drop from from the final boss, and each dungeon has 3 or 4 sets. With 50+ dungeons, it would take a couple of years to fill the sticker book if someone is running one or two dungeons a day. That's an insane grind and ZOS needs to do something about it. It was okay when there were only the base game dungeons, but now there are so many more that they need to rethink. Curation helps, but it can still be a multi-year grind. Nobody trades in pugs, so if that's all someone has available (or soloing), then trading won't help.

Having said that, I agree with you about the IA sets. Just wanted to point out that dungeon sets aren't much better.

The only class I have all the armor for is sorc. I would approve of this system.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

It should honestly just drop in slots like motifs do instead of by weights (e.g. Soulcleaver Chest, Hierophant Legs).

that is also definitely valid.

It goes by pretty quickly if you do IA with someone. Just create a listing in the GF saying you're farming sets. I can easily get someone within 5 minutes tops. With 2 people, it's super easy to finish Arc 4 within 1h 30 - 2h including side rooms. The marauders are pretty much guaranteed kills too as long as it's not gothmau. After a run, you should have enough tokens to buy about 7 random boxes. Do this really at most 2 more times and you'll complete a set. I used to do it solo and it was such a slog by mid arc 3.

As far as I can tell, starting from arc 5, you got chance of double loot, and it looks like increasing with the number of arc, and at arc8 or 9, it's always double drop. Post arc10 always drop weapon, so if you need more armors to collect, you might want to just stop there.

As of the so-called tokens that you suggested, you can already purchase the boxed, curated or not depending on the ratio of your stickerbook. Some numbers for the runs depending on arcs are (duo, doing all contents, time for rest not included) :

• A run of 4 arcs is roughly 14k AF, 7 set pieces, 1.5 hours.
• a run of 6 arcs: 27k, 13p, 3h
• a run of 8 arcs: 44k, 20p, 5h
• a run of 10 arcs: 65k, 28p, 7h
• a run of 12 arcs...(yes I did have done those a lot, but no I don't want to do the calculation or counting or recalls)

Some analysis to those numbers:

• for first 4 arcs, rate is around 0.21h/p, it slightly increases as you go high
• till 10 arcs the rate of time per piece is around 0.25h/p
• if you don't want to spend any AF, do 1 4-arc run and 13 3-arc run gives you the exact number of all set pieces for a class, which can be around 15 hours in total.
• to farm for AF to buy boxes (and potentially other things), the higher you go the better
• 3 10-arc runs will get you almost full sticker in one class. Some armors might be missing due to that there are more armors to collect than weapons and that high arc run drops almost same number of weapon and armor, so in practice 2 10-arc runs will be enough and buy the missing ones, you have plenty of AF.

If IA get those tokens, why not pvp sets and BG sets? The reward of each BG is completely random with no curation at all! They should be brought up on par with all other drops!

Or, we should bring up the class set of the other classes to make them Meta as well, only corpseburster being disired is so UNFAIR!

Or, let's just bring corpseburster down so that it becomes not so overpowered as of the other sets, so that you wouldn't want to farm it.

As of the aspect towards new players, this game has already a vast content: zones, sets, questlines, dungeons, trials, motifs, etc. None of them can be fully completed in a very short time. So if I'm a new player, what am I going to do? I might not even realize the existence of IA or bother to do it before I venture deeply into many other contents (in fact that is what happened in my first year or even second year of playing this game, only back then there were no IA yet)

Imagine back in the days when you don't get curated drops.
Imagine back in the days when you don't even have the stickerbooks.

Regardless, let me provide some of my own understanding of IA:

• build a tank, invest into survivability
• avoid ALL aoes
• interrupt things
• kill fabled in proper priority order
• take Focused Effort, take advantage of elemental susceptibility (and trample and elemental explosion with assassin's misery, if you have scribing)
• know all the boss mechanics, so that you may understand their variants in IA
• A dragonknight partner built into perma-magma can be really helpful above arc8 for maurauders and some bosses

One more thing: don't take grinding as your objective, think more about beating your own records, all the AFs for monster mask pages and those shiny class pages that adds cool aura around you, :P
And don't do it too often. I only run once a week but it's already burning me out, since recently each run goes to arc12.

Speaking of those aura, making it available to toggle on once you have all pieces collected of a class so that you don't have to sacrifice a bunch of possibility to wear 5 armor pieces from outfit!!!!!!!!

The infinite time sink is awful. When I next quit ESO, it's definitely going to be a factor.

I don't find it difficult. I find it boring, uninteresting and time consuming. I hate how long it takes to ramp up difficulty. I think the environments and story are generic.

I recently completed the vet vateshran grind for the first time and it was such a breath of fresh air compared to IA. By the time I completed my weapons collection, I was just getting terminally bored of it, so it worked out well.

I love that I was rewarded for success with shorter runs.

Before I started the vVH grind, I wasn't looking forward to it, but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. In contrast, IA is like a 1000 floor tower stretching into the clouds with no end in sight.

I feel IA was designed to maximize the time sink while spending as little money as possible by recycling encounters.

It's really frustrating to me that there are meta drops gated behind IA because on this I'm not going to capitulate. I'll quit before I commit to IA. Every time they add more rewards to IA, these feelings intensify.