ESO – The Mind of David Krider

EXCLUSIVE | Microsoft plans Starfield launch for PlayStation 5

According to sources, we understand that currently Microsoft are planning a launch for Starfield on PlayStation 5 post the release of the already announced “Shattered Space” expansion for Xbox and PC, which is on target to arrive at some point later this year. We’ve also been informed that Microsoft have made additional investment into PlayStation 5 dev kits to support ongoing development efforts – adding further fuel to the fire.

Source: EXCLUSIVE | Microsoft plans Starfield launch for PlayStation 5

During COVID, I and several friends started playing Elder Scrolls Online together on PC. It’s a long story, but we all eventually drifted away from it. Eventually, I literally threw away the 12-year-old potato that I used to play it, and had moved all my gaming to a Playstation (except Civ V on my Mac). Then I suddenly developed serious health issues, and started playing ESO again, on the PlayStation. I was rather enjoying the simplicity of NOT having mods, and liked using a controller for combat much better than a keyboard and mouse.

A year and a half ago, Microsoft was saying that Starfield would be an PC/Xbox exclusive. I was kind of ticked. I had long since made my bed with Playstation, but I expected that the game would be Skyrim-level good, and I got sucked into the hype. So I bought an Xbox in anticipation, months ahead of time. I was replaying Fallout New Vegas in glorious 4K at 60 FPS, but I got the bug to go back to PC for ESO, where I could get mods again, mainly for inventory management. So I sold the Xbox and bought a low-spec gaming PC just for ESO.

Microsoft’s stance on making Starfield an exclusive was heralded by the head of the Xbox decision as a serious business strategy, and something on which they were going to build a new era of gaming competitiveness. When they bought Bethesda, they also made a promise not to touch pre-acquisition IP. Hold this thought.

I bought the digital deluxe pre-release of Starfield on Steam. I played over the weekend before the general release, and thought it sucked. After a dozen hours or so, you will hit a wall with inventory management, and you will naturally build a base to try to fix the problem, and find that bases do not solve anything. Unlike Skyrim or Fallout, there simply is no concept of a bottomless container that keeps a game like this from being insane. Being a pre-release copy, I found that I could refund the purchase before the actual release, so, after 13 hours, I did.

Now that the Microsoft purchase of Activision has “gone through,” they now own Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft. It is, superficially, very similar to ESO, but has over ten times the number of players. You can just smell that someone high up in Microsoft is asking the question: Why are we paying to develop ESO when we could kill it, and most of the player base would probably move over to WoW? The “synergies” from these two acquisitions must be frighteningly tempting.

They’re reversing course on keeping Starfield exclusive, and now I worry that the other “half” of their promises at the time of the acquisition are similarly precarious. Will they, in fact, start messing with pre-merger games? Will they somehow change the offerings or their monetization to better fit within a corporate strategy which now must be conducive to other franchises that were previously competitors? Microsoft breaks a lot of promises. A lot. Just search on it for yourself.

I’m worried for the future of ESO.

And, while I want a vibrant, competitive landscape in gaming and consoles, and this announcement does not bode well for that, the saltiness of the tears of the fanboys in the Xbox subreddit over this announcement — as Microsoft pulls off their mask, and shows them the face of the monster that hasn’t changed since the 90’s — is just too delicious.

My ESO DPS Journey

I started Elder Scrolls Online a few years ago. I read up, got some gear, tried to do “weaving” as I played, and thought I was getting somewhere. I mean, I could beat the “hard” overworld creatures, so I was good, right? Then I discovered the Combat Metrics mod, joined a guild, ran normal Sunspire (trying to farm that sweet, sweet False Gods gear), and saw that I was doing something like 8K total, and contributing 3% of the DPS, when my bogey was 12.

Depressed, I re-tooled, learned how to “hump a dummy,” worked with some kindly rando who helped me one night, at his house, to understand that I needed to slow down. I got my parse up to 25K, and then quit the game in disgust, because I concluded that I would never hit the magical 70K mark most guilds require for vet trials.

I quickly got pulled back into the game due to peer pressure from IRL friends who were still playing. So I worked on getting more meta gear. I leveled trees from which the build guides recommended using just one skill. I hoped that making my build exactly like the Alcast builds would magically get me those numbers. I managed to get up to 42K.

Then I watched some Youtuber parse in different setups, and demonstrate the effect of using purple and gold on your equipment, and how using various levels of CP affect the numbers. Through this, I finally came to the brutal understanding that 80% of hitting high DPS numbers in this game really is about skill, and not about the equipment. At this point, after all this time and effort, I was still only about half way to where I need to be to run vet trials, and I had no idea how to do any better.

I quit in disgust again.

Fast forward a couple years.

In a very, very long story I have yet to write about, I developed chronic pain (almost literally overnight) to the point of being pretty much home bound. I had started playing Fallout 76 on my Playstation 5, so I decided to try playing ESO on the console, too. This turned out to be pretty fun. I liked using a controller much better, despite the fact that running writs, surveys, and treasure maps are kind of a pain without mods. Additionally, I found that the economy on consoles is not “broken” like it is on PC. The gear you loot and sell actually means something there, meaning that you can buy significant things with it. Like, run some random dungeons, and you’ll have enough money to buy a perfect roe on console. On PC? You’ll need to run 100 of them. I decided to live with the tradeoffs. I decided to just go ahead and play for fun, to help pass the time, and deal with my mental situation.

I found a decent guild. I discovered “oakensorcs” and the new Arcanist class. I pulled the Oakensoul Ring together, did my best to copy a build, and found that I could do about 53K. I had some discussions on the forums and Reddit, and found out that my substitutions were costing me a lot, and again focused on making my build exactly like the build guides.

Along the way, I learned why my substitution of Knight Slayer for Storm Master — even though both are “heavy attack sets” — mattered. I learned about how heavy attacks deal damage per tick. I learned about setting off-balance and using Exploiter to take advantage of it. I get all the way up to 68K.

My friends hear that I’m playing ESO again. They want to play. So I move back to PC to play with them. I buy a whole new PC for the thing. Then, naturally, they quit playing.

Sigh.

I find a guild that only requires 65K for running vet trials. Yeah, that might be too low. We fail a lot, but the company is good, and I continue to pick up bits of non-perfected trial gear. Discover several others in the guild are in the same boat as me, in that we couldn’t do more than low-40’s before oakensorc and Velothi-based arcanist builds came along. (It’s curious to me that there’s a natural breakpoint around there, but I don’t know what it means.)

I continue to improve my gear. Get Pillar body in all divines. Sell some Crowns and buy Deadly Weapons, including one dagger, which I then reconstruct a mate for. Gold everything out, including the Slimecraw helm. Make sure all my enchants are correct. Learn that bloodthirsty on jewelry really is a must, though it’s “expensive” to remake them with that trait. Find that I’m reaching 83K now with my oakensorc. Learn that they nerfed oakensorcs such that 90K is probably the upper end of my possible output, and figure that crit farming is the difference, but I don’t want to fuss with it, and I am NOT changing my morph to Twilight Tormenter for the extra damage. Matriarch is just too good of a burst heal, which can also help someone else at the same time. My DPS still doesn’t hold a candle to the stamarc’s in the group, but I am leading the rest of the DPS’s in the runs, and I figure that’s enough to hold my head high.

I have one more skill morph I’m leveling, and then I will have literally all skills on this toon, so that I can put anything a build suggests in my rotation. Based on someone’s comment in guild comms, I try my own theory crafting, and swap Deadly for Undaunted Unweaver. Coincidentally, it’s clear why no one suggests to do this, even though it looks good on paper. 🙂

I’m finally starting to get some of the prominent buffs stuck in my head. Where am I getting major prophecy and sorcery? If I take the Ring of Oakensorc off, where do I make these up? Where am I getting crit percent, crit chance, and penetration? You know, these kinds of things. I build up a simple two-bar, two-pet, stam-based sorc build. I get some off-meta trial gear together. I find that I can parse 53K with actual weaving. I’m not sure that’s any better than a 42K from years ago, because of “DPS creep” in the game, but at least it’s a start.

I see people post parses from CMX on Reddit, and notice that they have near-millisecond weaving timing. Like, seriously, one dude’s weaving was 0.03 seconds. That’s 30 millisecond timing, over several hundred clicks, over the course of about 3-5-4 minutes. I don’t understand how this is possible without programmatic help. But even if they are using a script or some automatic button clicker, I know that these are the theoretical maximum numbers that should be possible, and that’s what I can aspire to with their setups.

Toxic people on the forums and the subreddit want to say that “anyone” can learn to parse 80-90K — even in non-set gear! — if they “want” to. Unfortunately, this assertion is trivially disproven by just trying to run pledges. I ran all 3 undaunted pledges yesterday, doing 40-50% of the damage AS THE TANK in all of them. (And, sure, I can parse 83K with my DPS build, but I don’t want to wait for randoms queuing as DPS.) “IF they want to” must be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because it’s my experience that random DPS’s hardly ever do more than 10-15K, and no one can say, with a straight face, that their experience in random dungeons is materially different. It’s probably a 1-in-4 chance that we have the DPS to just breeze through. So either almost no one “wants to learn,” or it’s much harder to parse at vet-trial-level DPS numbers than these kinds of people want to admit. My money is on the latter.

There’s just nothing for it but practice. Lots and lots of practice. This is the part that gets elided in these discussions because there’s so much else going on that is concrete, and takes the focus, but the skill required to hit high DPS numbers is very real, and requires a LOT of practice. One of these days, I still want to be able to do 100K with a sweaty, 2-bar, complicated rotation. Some how, some way, some build. And I’m going to have to practice. A LOT.

Stealing Dolmens in Cyrodill

I’ve completely ignored achievements in Elder Scrolls Online up till now. There are so many, it’s overwhelming. But coming back to the game after over a year, I notice that I “already” have about half the “points” in the game, without even thinking about it, so I’ve started paying more attention.

Finally managed to get all achievements. It was a long run but finished.

Source: I have finished the game. — Elder Scrolls Online

This guy “finished” the game on PC. In the comments, he says the new command in the game \played says he has 1,000 days in the game. That’s 24,000 hours.

I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)

Source: I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)

This guy “finished” the game on Playstation. He figured he has 18,000 hours in the game.

What I’ve discovered is that, after a couple thousand hours in the game, I have a whole bunch of achievements which are almost done, just by nature of having played the game, and finishing them just needs a couple more things to be done. I’ll admit, it’s been its own kind of fun doing them. Most unlock new titles or colors to use in the dye stations, which are so esoteric and unimportant, they become special in their own right.

I “ran” all of the delves in Cyrodiil a long time ago, to farm their skyshards, but in the achievement tracker, I noticed that I had not killed the secondary bosses in a half dozen of them. I ran to the far corners of the map to complete the achievement, and then thought, hey, why not keep running the vast landscape to at least discover the dolmens, so that I could see which one was active on the map, so that I could come back, and eventually do all of them too.

Came up on one, and saw that it was actually running! Great! Except I saw that there was an enemy player doing it… He was on the last boss… and it looked like he didn’t have full health… What the heck!? A dude so weak that he’s half dead fighting a dolmen boss? I immediately overcome my reticence, jump in, and basically stab him in the back. He dies easily. I finish the boss, and get the chest.

My heart is POUNDING. I’m out of breath. I run to the next closest dolmen. It’s running. He’s there. On the last boss again. I kill him again.

I can see that one of the dolmens I recently discovered is running now. I run all the way over to it. Yup! Again, he’s there, and, again, on the last boss.

I “stole” 3 dolmens on the last boss from this poor guy in 15 minutes.

I felt a little bad.

Then I ran into a ditch and died from lava, and quit while I was ahead.

Honestly, there is NOTHING in this world that makes me so nervous as PVP in ESO.

It’s kind of sad to say, but, at least in a way, I never felt more alive than getting the skyshards in the enemy bases in Cyrodill, running away from a dude trying to chase me in my “speed gear” to get the very last one.

Of course, chasing down the easy-to-complete achievements will just lead me to the ones that need a whole lot of work, and then to the trial trifectas. Where do I cut it off, and do other things? I don’t know. But again, the recent additions to the game that allow “marginal” people like me to access “the whole game” make it fun to at least explore, and see where that line lies for me.

Elder Scrolls Online has Me by the Short Hairs

On Sunday, I had a bad migraine, so I literally sat in my recliner and played ESO for, like, 12 hours. During this time, I…

Did writs on 7 toons.
Ran all the surveys and maps I had. (About 15.)
Completed all the master writs I had. (About 12.)
Dug up every antiquity I had a lead for. (About 30.)
Moved into the house you get from the Northern Elsewyr missions, and did a little decorating.
Bought all the storage boxes you can get, and all the crafting stations. (Using up almost all my writ vouchers.)
Finished learning all but the 4 most expensive recipes.
Bought enough motifs to complete several more lines. (I still need 13 more for Master Crafter.)
Created 3 more toons. (Was making an even 10, one for each race, then realized that you can actually have 20 on one account now, if you pay for the slots.)
Did HOURS of inventory management. (Can’t quite bring myself to de-con old meta gear I still have.)
Ran my Arcanist through a random dungeon and all 3 pledges.

Yeah, it was a long day, but the weird part was that I could have played more. I had a great time. I finally have a couple of toons that can do vet trial-level damage numbers, and it feels like I’m finally freed to enjoy everything the game has to offer. And, sure, it’s only the new mythics like the Oakensoul Ring and Velothi’s Amulet that have allowed me to do break into this tier, but I don’t really care. It seems pretty obvious that this is the reason those items were added into the game: to allow people like me — on the DPS bubble — to access end-game content. I don’t really want to run vet trials, as it usually takes hours of concentration and coordination, but it’s nice to know I can. One of these days, I’ll sign up and give it a try in my main guild.

I still don’t really want anything to do with PVP, though I have a bunch of siege-related items clogging up my bank. It intrigues me to find a good PVP guild, and just run with a huge pack to 1) use that stuff up, 2) earn some Alliance Points, and 3) finally get all the skill points related to PVP, and finish the Assault and Support skill lines.

My Shame is Ever Before Me

A couple years ago, I broke free of playing Elder Scrolls Online, for the second time. I had quit before, in frustration of not being good enough to run the end-game content. It annoyed me that there were parts of a game I was paying for on a monthly basis that I effectively could never take advantage of, so I quit.

Then I picked it back up again for a little while, mentally bargaining with myself that this situation was acceptable because there is so much to do in the game besides the vet-level dungeons and trials. But, as a massively-multiplayer online game, it tends to suck you in, and dominate your leisure time, so I decided to quit again. And, since ESO was the only thing I was using it for, I literally threw my 12-year-old, Athlon-XP-based dinosaur of a PC in the trash, as a sort of “burn the ships” move to prevent going back to playing it. Playing ESO on a Mac is basically a non-starter due to crappy performance, so it wasn’t a realistic option.

Then I developed a medical problem that causes me to live with constant pain in my abdomen. That’s a whole book’s worth of another story, but the relevance to this story is that I now spend basically all my extra time playing games. I mean, I was a pretty heavy gamer before, but this is a whole other level.

Bored with everything else, I tried going back to Fallout 4. I couldn’t stand it on the PS5, because it only runs 30 FPS. Bethesda recently released a refreshed version of Skyrim on PS5 with all the Creator Club content, and running at 60 FPS, and it was like a whole, new game. I replayed it all over again, and love it. But I can’t go back to 30 FPS for Fallout.

I decided to buy an Xbox Series X, for several reasons, and waited for Starfield. Then, after the Redfall launch fiasco, Bethesda admitted that Starfield would also be capped at 30 FPS on console. Like I said, I can’t go back to 30 FPS.

So I sold the X, and bought a new PC.

I know, I know.

This one is a loss-leader from Microcenter. Realistically, it’s a $1,000 build, which you can get for $700.

The amount of friction from trying to run Windows again is astounding, and everyone just glosses over it because it’s so pervasive. I’ll be complaining about these things in later posts.

Fallout 76

I screwed up. I’ve been wanting to play Fallout 4 again, but I’m waiting for the next-gen refresh, which is supposedly due “this year.” Fallout 76 is an MMO by Bethesda, which are the same people that do Elder Scrolls Online, which I’ve played a lot of. Even though I’ve loved the Fallout series, I had avoided it when it came out because of terrible reviews, but it was free on the PlayStation Plus collection, so I finally gave it a try.

I was up till 3 am.

Fallout 76 has a difficult time feeling like an MMO. If you run across the map in ESO, you’ll always run into a lot of people. In 76, you can go hours without running into anyone. If you look at the “social” menu on the map, there are usually less than a dozen people listed in the entire instance. That’s just not enough people playing to make it interesting as a multi-player game.

There are in-map “events” which are kind of like ESO dungeons. There are out-of-map “expeditions,” which are kind of like trials. In ESO, you have to queue and wait your turn to run a dungeon, because it’s a very popular thing to do. Half of the events on 76 expire because no one is doing them. The screenshot above shows the most people I’ve ever seen at one time on the server, still, 35 levels later.

If you look on the Steam charts, ESO has like 16K people playing all the time. FO76 has about half that. And that’s for PC. Player counts on consoles are usually about half of those numbers, for both platforms. Combined with this is how they do world/instance provisioning. However, it works out, there are usually only a dozen or so people in any particular instance of 76, compared to hundreds in ESO. (Apparently, the Xbox version has cross play with PC, so that would work better, but that — especially after Bethesda’s acquisition by Microsoft — will never come to Playstation.)

As with ESO (and probably all MMO’s) inventory management is a pain. Like ESO, the monthly subscription includes a bottomless container to hold all your resources, and that alone makes it worth the price.

It’s much simpler than ESO, as there are no classes. Fallout has seven stats, to allocate 56 skill points, and you pick perk card “skills” to go along with the stats you choose to boost. You can easily swap out different allotments of skill points and stacks of perk cards. This part seems really, really nice compared to leveling a main and managing alts for each class in ESO. (Of course, that is a critical part of ESO’s in-game economy, but I digress.)

Unfortunately, I’ve reached level 50, and I seem to have chosen an unwieldy approach. Thinking and feeling like this game was very similar to Fallout 4, I thought I was safe working up an explosive shotgun build. I even managed to “roll” an explosive legendary perk for my combat shotgun on the first try! However, it’s often painful having to close distance to make the shotgun useful. I find that I need more range. Maybe I could make another shotgun for “long” range use, but the whole thing feels really underpowered, even at point-blank range. What I’m noticing, in my admittedly-limited interactions with other people, is that almost no one at higher levels is using shotguns, and it seems that I should be taking the hint.

So now that I’ve leveled up through 50, and chosen all the shotgun-related perks, I find myself needing to spend the next 20 levels or so unlocking perk cards to switch to a different build setup, like commando, for automatic rifle perks. Or maybe rifleman, for single-shot? Or maybe heavy guns? I don’t know.

I see a lot of people in the servers running around at levels ~200-500. I watched a few minutes of a guy on Twitch at level 5025. Yes, I typed that correctly, and you read it correctly. Like, I literally can’t even. Every MMO has “bucket people,” I guess. These people have builds that kill anything in one or two shots, and it’s maddening to me.

To make any build viable for the hardest group content, you have to get really specific about stacking your perks, your legendary effects on armor and weapons, your mutations, your food, and then your chem buffs. Of course, getting the plans and legendaries and recipes and serums is where all the grind is.

I would guess that all MMO’s wind up breaking down like this. Ergo, to do the “best” content takes 1000 hours of grinding to get your build setup to be able to pull your weight doing group activities. I jumped into one event where there were 3 other people who had god-tier builds, and we lost out on the rewards within a minute because we were so overwhelmed. So it’s a bit different than ESO in how you group and do things, but it’s really… the same.

I couldn’t get into ESO’s “single player” experience because the base-game exploration quests were so boring. At least Fallout 76 is kind of Fallout 5, if you don’t get into the “end-game” content. But I think I’ve seen enough. My build is so whack, it’s taking 2-3 clips of ammo to kill random bugs in the world. The ammo situation is a joke, and this is certainly part of the reason why. But, hey, at least there’s no “light weaving” type of real-world-agility-check in the game.

Update

So it turns out that, really, there is a “light weaving” physical dexterity skill involved in the game, if you use a VATS-based build. I’m level 80 now, and I’ve maxed out all the perk cards for VATS-related skills. There’s trick to watching the critical meter fill up, and listening for the sound when it procs, and then hitting a different button to make your next attack a critical. Because the perks can make the meter randomly fill up at any time, there’s no set pattern to the timing. The best way to manage this is to… wait for it… slow down, just like in… ESO.

Sigh.

Gaming on a Mac, Update

We’re upgrading all the main service production computers at my church. As part of this effort, I bought 3 M1-based Mac mini’s. As an experiment, I installed Elder Scrolls Online on one of them, to see how well it would run. I expected it to be at least passable. Oh how wrong I was. It ran, and at 60 fps, but I couldn’t run it at any decent resolution. The best the game offered was 1367×768 or something. Of course, this looked like pixelated garbage on a 4K monitor. So, I consider the whole thing an abysmal failure. I’m actually glad. It’s a relief to know that a stock M1-based Mac does not, in fact, run the game amazingly, and that I’m not really missing out on this single data point with my Intel-based Mac.

Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Source: Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Lawn mowing — I prefer to call it “LARPing Qix” — has its own video game.

I was going to post some super-snarky comment about how much I hate yard work, and therefore not being able to imagine either the desire to make a game about it, or the desire to play it, but then I remembered that I’ve been doing some fishing in ESO, despite hating it in real life, and I guess that would make me a hypocrite. In my defense, fishing in ESO is the only way to farm one of the most valuable commodities in the game, and, done in particular ways, can get you achievements, and any time there’s a two-for-one deal in a video game, I’m in.

M1 Max Chip May Have More Raw GPU Performance Than a PlayStation 5

Source: M1 Max Chip May Have More Raw GPU Performance Than a PlayStation 5

So what?

Back in 2019, I was starting to think about an upgrade to my 2014 MBP, which is a darn-near perfect machine. (My son has it now.) However, I didn’t want a TouchBar, nor to put up with a lack of a physical ESC key. There was never a “killer app” for the TB to make it interesting, and I use ESC extensively when running vim. So I thought I’d just wait, and see what the next generation would bring.

But then my wife started saying that we probably had the money for me to upgrade, and I don’t need to be told twice. When your wife is open to you making a major purchase, you do it, even if you’re not quite ready. So I bought a 2019 with an i9, 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD, and a Vega 20, hoping beyond hope that it would play some AAA games passably well. The total was $4,000.

The only thing I was really playing on the PC at the time was Civilization V. It played it about as well as my old PC, so I just kept playing it on there, to keep the heat load off the MBP.

Then I started playing Elder Scrolls Online, so I tried it on my Mac. It stutters every few seconds, like it’s texture thrashing, and I thought, well, Bethesda just didn’t optimize it for the Vega, and that’s too bad. But then I saw it running on a friend’s 2020 MBP, with only integrated graphics, and it runs… pretty well, actually! So I spent an extra $750 upgrading to the best GPU I could get, and it actually made gaming on the Mac worse for me. So I continue to play ESO on a twelve-year-old PC with an Athlon64 and a nVidia 9xx-series GPU. The fact that this rig plays the game pretty well only adds salt to the wound that my expensive MBP basically can’t play it at all.

The new MacBook Pro’s look perfect, and base models start out about half the price of this one. Ouch. If I had just waited a couple of years, and given up on the stupid idea that gaming on a Mac is ever going to be a thing, I’d be in computing nirvana now.

Whatever “power” they may put in the thing, I just don’t see gaming companies supporting it. Bethesda has already said that will not be porting ESO to M1. This isn’t surprising. I mean, there were only a handful of AAA titles ported to Mac when they were running Intel CPU’s and AMD GPU’s. Now that both halves of the whole are completely different architectures than their PC brethren, I don’t see any gaming companies making the effort.

Mac for programming. Playstation for gaming. Windows for ESO. God, I wish I could cut Windows completely out of my life. I’ve been tempted to move to PS for ESO, but I can’t give up my investment, and I couldn’t live without a whole slew of mods I rely on. I started playing ESO again because I’ve been shut in with health problems for a long time. Once I get better, if I would stop playing ESO again, I could put the PC back in the closet.

P.S. It’s so great to see Apple responding to clamorous and sustained criticisms of their MBP hardware from power users in places like Hacker News. (Including last night’s update to the Monterey public beta, which restores proper tabs in Safari.) It gives me hope that the platform will continue to be a good one for developers, and not be morphed into a mobile-like experience.

P.P.S. World of Warcraft has been ported to native M1. Maybe I should just switch MMO’s. I wonder what New Worlds’ situation is… Oh. Bootcamp. Nevermind. I didn’t buy a Mac to run Windows. I dual booted my PC’s between Linux for work and Windows for gaming for decades. No more. I think you should just buy a PC laptop if you’re going to do that.

The Continuing Saga of ESO

So I continue to be tortured by ESO, and my inability to hit “high” DPS numbers. I can still only do about 32K DPS. I’ve reached a point where I don’t have to be ashamed about running any non-trial content in the game, but trials seduce me. There’s a pretty clear delineation between trials and the rest of game; you have to be intentional about playing them. You have to group up, and block out time to do it. But it’s the only way to get the best gear in the game, and if I can’t ever get to a point of being able to run veteran trials, it really turns me off from playing the game at all.

The reason this is all coming up again is because I tried to jump into a PUG to do a vet trial while I was running around scrying and collecting in Craglorn. Someone was pointing out that there were currently double drops happening! Well, count me in! Except that I was told that I needed to hit 70K to be able to join the effort. Oops. At least he wasn’t a jerk about it.

I’ve continued to gear up. I’m carrying around False God’s, New Moon Acolyte, Mother’s Sorrow, Law of Julianos, and a set of Willpower jewelry. (And I also have a set of Coward’s Gear, with swift-traited jewelry for collecting!) I’ve tried many combinations in the armor and weapon/jewelry slots, but all of these tests only seem to confirm that — despite the endless arguments about the “best” gear or traits or abilities or weapons or enchantments or Mundus boons — it’s all essentially a wash. There’s enough going on with all the math involved that losing particular bonuses seems to get made up for by gaining different ones.

I ran the Maelstrom solo trial, and actually got a Crushing Wall inferno staff on the first try. (So the RNG actually worked in my favor for once. Meanwhile, I’m 0 for 9 on a 2-in-6 chance at getting the shoulders I need to complete one of my monster sets in a configuration that will satisfy the Undaunted Mettle passive.) This alone was supposed to boost my DPS numbers by “5-6K.” I can’t see that it makes any difference at all. (And, yes, of course, I’m pairing it with Wall of Elements.)

Because of the way the game stacks and scales the various modifiers, it gets very confusing to see which components of a build combine to produce a particular result. I understand that’s by design, and I guess Zenimax has enough people who can get past the learning curve and find enjoyment in that to make the service profitable, but I find I’m sliding back down the hill before getting over the hump.

I finally found this video, by one of the most detailed-oriented people I’ve ever run across on the internet (and that’s really saying something). I also just found this video as I looked for the other video. Both prove about the same thing. The difference between 300 CP and 810 CP is an increase of about 20-25% DPS.

The first video also tries to account for the difference between using end-game, trial-level gear versus mid-tier, dungeon-level gear. The difference from this also seems to be about about 20-25%. All of these examples are using all-gold everything, even at the lower CP, so it’s an unfair comparison with my setup, which is still limited to purple gear and blue jewelry. (The gold jewelry alone would cost $1M in-game gold to get to.)

I still can’t get anywhere near a number that gives my hope I will ever hit 70K. If I were to expect that getting gold-tier, end-game gear, and maxing out CP would get me to 70K, I estimate that I would have to be hitting about 50K right now, with current gear and CP. I’m only hitting 30K. I need to find another 20. This means I need to somehow find a way to increase my DPS by two-thirds, just by improving my rotation and animation canceling. So it should be obvious why I despair at the prospect.

I actually stumbled on an unbelievably-helpful person a couple months ago, who ran me through Skyreach about 6 times, then took me to his guild’s house to show me how to weave. I shared my screen on Discord, and he respeced my character, setup my bars, and helped me break into the 30’s. I saw 34K at one point. Clearly not the answer to everything, but he got me to slow down, and actually be conscious of my button presses. I’m still not perfect at it, but I’m a lot better now. This video is pretty good at illustrating the timing of the pattern, where the others are not clear.

I’ve loaded up the “light attack helper” mod, to show when I’m actually hitting the light attacks. My percentage is around 0.77, which is low, I know. But I also understand the amount of DPS I would get if I could manage to hit 0.90, and it’s not the difference-maker. Even when I’m screwing up and only hitting, say, 0.58, my numbers only drop by 1-2K.

I’ve loaded up my bars with the best abilities everyone says I should be using. Different combinations of abilities always seem to work out about the same, if you do the math. Sure, you can use, say, the Psijic order ability to boost your next light attack, or, say, the Mage’s guild ability that gives you a 30-second spell crit boost, but then you give up a slot where you could be using a DoT effect. Again, like gear or boons, it all seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other to me.

The whole business just makes me feel like there’s this magical membrane which, if I could pierce, would usher me into a luminescent enlightenment. I’d smack my forehead, say, “Oh! Of course!,” and be able to hit 60K without even looking at the screen. This Zen-like state has eluded me, but, even if I were to suddenly “get it,” what would that mean? That I could run vet trials, finally? And so what if I did? I could start collecting the best gear? For what? Running harder trials? Running around, griefing noobs in PvE? Neither of those things particularly appeal to me. So I guess there’s not much point in mastering the technical mechanics of the game. Except for the principle of the thing, which I find I can’t escape.

My friends find enjoyment in playing the single-player aspect of the game, but I don’t, particularly. Which leaves me the multiplayer aspect, but I don’t enjoy the online-only nature of the relationships that this style requires to play. So, after 880 hours invested in the game, I feel like all the options are closing off to me, and I think I’m going to retire again. But they’re going to start the Halloween event soon, which tempts me, as it’s the only time you can get some of the best recipes in the game, which can sell for hundreds of thousands of gold. Gah! What to do!?

If all this seems obsessive, you’ll certainly get no argument from me. Of course, it’s this sort of obsessiveness that’s caused me to fight with computers for hours, weeks, months, and years, to learn their deepest secrets, and which makes me good at being a full-stack developer. So I guess I got that going for me, which is nice, even if I will never be good at ESO.