[ESO] Time in “One Tamriel”

My VR2 sorcerer before I re-learned how to turn off the UI. And before I disabled the FTC add-on too.

I finally gave in and popped in to ESO to check out how it all works now that it’s “One Tamriel.”  1st logging in was a little interesting since I really didn’t recall much of how to play or how crafting worked or anything, but it came back to me fairly quickly.  This was helped by the fact that only half of my characters had had background changes to the point that an automatic re-spec was given.  The others still have their old builds in place, so I didn’t have to try to remember which morphs I’d chosen for them and such.

The thing I found most interesting is that while “everything scales” this actually makes it so that in practice “nothing scales.”  I’ve got several characters at level 50.  They used to be “veteran rank” but now are simply shown with the number of champion points that they have.  Which are account wide, so when I created a new character it already had the 66 CP that every other character that I logged in had as well.  But anyway… level 1 character starts with about 16,000 HP, Magicka, and Stamina.  And my (formerly VR6) 66 CP end-game Templar has about 16,000 HP, Magicka, and Stamina.  Mobs I’m fighting at level 1 have about 32K HP, and mobs I’m fighting at (formerly VR2) with my sorcerer have about 34K HP.

The new Khajit Nightblade I made to finally “go rogue.” Though this shot was more to see the anchor in the sky than to show him off. He was maybe level 6 in this pic, and I’ve got him to level 11 now.

Gear doesn’t really change as you level.  The amount of protection given depends solely on whether it’s light, medium, or heavy, but even there the differences aren’t very large, so it’s mostly “light for magicka, medium for stamina, and heavy for health.”  Alternately, it’s light for magicka damage, medium for weapon damage, and heavy for tanks.

Enchantments scale a little bit as you level, but it’s a very shallow curve.  The procs from crafted sets also changes a little, but again…. shallow curve.  So yeah, other than not having a bunch of skills to pick and choose from, nor weapon swapping unlocked yet… level 1 and endgame “CP 66” really didn’t feel much different when fighting.  So becuz everything scales, nothing scales.  Knowing as I do that eventually you have skill points coming out your ears (I seriously have 20+ unused points on all of my level 50+ characters becuz I just have no place I care to put them) the low-level choices don’t even feel very interesting as a result.

On the other hand, I’m completely hooked again and pretty much played all day on Saturday and Sunday, so there is that…..  and I am used to the control scheme enough that I kept messing myself up in FFXIV’s expert dungeon run this morning and missing dodges.  Gotta love it, no?  I still haven’t even logged in to all of my alts to try to remember all of their concepts.  But I’ll get there eventually.

Happy gaming out there!