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Favorite Non-Combat Activities (self.elderscrollsonline)

submitted 3 months ago by Essence_of_Meh to c/elderscrollsonline

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Hi there! I hope there's enough lurkers to get some interesting ideas here.

I just came back to the game after a year or so. I'm not really in the mood for combat at the moment so I decided to take a stab at a pacifist character for a change.

Right now I'm just traveling randomly, taking screenshots and looking for quests that can be completed without combat (even through cheesing, I'll take what I can get). While fun, this approach means I'm probably missing things obvious to more active players so I was wondering if anyone has any fun non-combat activities to share.

The only DLC I have are Morrowind and Murkmire but I'd be interested in things available in any other expansions as well.

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[–] superduperpirate 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Late to the discussion, and I’m not sure how much this is worth from someone who is on his own break from the game, but my favorite non-combat activities included:

daily crafting writs on 20 toons (probably part of why I’m burned out)
cashing in a fat stack of master writs
trait research
collecting mat surveys, for a small number of surveys (if surveys weren’t account bound, or if you could collect multiple surveys at once, I’d be willing to start crafting writs again)
using market tools to locate a furnishing plan I wanted, or a piece of gear I needed to finish out a set in the sticker book

[–] Essence_of_Meh 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Late or not I do appreciate additional replies, it's always interesting to see what other people lean towards.

Were you really into crafting or did you just end up doing all those activities after getting bored with other parts of the game? I'm guessing it's the former considering the amount of tasks mentioned here.

[–] superduperpirate 2 points 1 month ago

I got into crafting writs because I was looking for easy reliable sources of gold. With the craft bag and a bunch of characters, it was a pretty steady source of income. I started doing trait research to improve my chances of dropping master writs. 18/20 of my characters are full 9 trait researchers. The other 2 are 7 or 8 traits. I don’t remember for sure, since my last login was back in April.

I did a lot of crafted gear for my characters.

I never really got into housing, yet I still spent untold millions of gold buying furnishing plans for my main crafter to learn. I would occasionally craft stuff on request for guildmates. Someone would link a plan in guild chat, ask if anyone knew the plan, and I would sometimes be able to swap to my crafter and help out.

[–] ErrorCode 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Fishing is entertaining for a little while, especially if you have Sharp-as-Night. His comments for that are great.

Crafting & building out houses is also a good time if you like that type of thing. And there is the new Housing Tour option, so you can show off your designs.

[–] Essence_of_Meh 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Fishing is one of the first things I did after coming back actually. I don't think I touched it before so it was a nice way to use some of the bait I've accumulated until now. Still need to get into housing though, all I have is a basic setup in one of the inn rooms. Thanks for the ideas!

[–] ErrorCode 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Snugpod is cheap and close to the action for both Undaunted Enclave and Rolis (Master Writs), I use Deshan / Mournhold to quickly get to Fighters Guild and Mages Guild. I saw this in someone else's Snugpod, so I cannot claim credit, but you can get much more usable space there if you put in the Clockwork Spiral Stair to make it effectively 2 levels. Here is a youtube video I found about getting all the Inn Rooms and the Lunar Champ home (if you have ESO plus or the Elsweyr DLC)

[–] Essence_of_Meh 2 points 2 months ago

That's some good info. One of the reasons I stuck to the inn was that I found many house interior lacking, tips like this might push me to finally take a plunge. Thanks again!

[–] CMLVI 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Non-combat stuff? I guess I have (had?) a habit of sitting in zone chat and if I found anew player, I'd take the to a guild house and craft them some gear, run them through a dungeon or two, just to help them learn some of the game. Otherwise, I also stack my survey maps and do them all at once. My current stash is was about 700, I'm through about half of it. I'm also tracking the total mats I get and the gold upgrade mats just to see. It's not entirely accurate, as I'm still picking up stuff as I play, but I figure it's close enough. I also help run a ~1k player guild/discord on Xbox NA but that's only tangentially related to gameplay lol.

[–] Essence_of_Meh 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It might be a bit out of scope of my original question but running a guild is no easy feat and is (or at least should be?) mostly about combat avoidance anyway :P I've never been much of a guild player, let alone one this big, so I'm wondering - does a beast like this even feel like a "guild" anymore? Or is it more like a bunch of smaller guilds working together?

[–] CMLVI 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

It does. It's more of a Discord than a guild at that point, as the guild roster is more used for fills for runs in game, but that's kind of the nature of it. But we probably have ~100+ active members in chat, we do trial races where teams race for score in a 2 hour window on a trial; we've (I've) done (tried to do) PvP nights during midyear to get people some AP and stones, but they aren't too popular. We up until the last maybe 9 months did somewhat regular training trial runs where we'd take 4-5 newer players through content to help them learn a role without fear of messing up a clear. It's a decent bit of effort, but the pay off is nice.

Outside of that, we have a Fantasy Football league, we do Game Night every now and then where we play party games like Among Us, Party Animals, Golf With Friends, etc just to change it up.

[–] Essence_of_Meh 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Makes sense. I'm mostly a solo player in general so it's always nice to take a peek at how the things look on the other side. Thanks for the insight!

[–] CMLVI 2 points 1 month ago

If you are ever looking for more, I highly recommend the larger guilds. You may have to "shop" around, but we spend a lot of time helping people on parses, training runs, and general content questions. More often than not, I'd say people on ESO are helpful. Most still around like playing it and want to help, as opposed to people chasing scores and trying to be "the best". I think a lot of our members joined off of zone spam and word of mouth from friends, and to a lesser extent, pug runs we've organized. The barrier to hard content has never been lower than it is now!