For starters, LOOT EVERYTHING! Part of the last beta patch involved a small change to the loot mechanics of the world. Barrels, crates, urns etc (NOT LOCKED CHESTS) are all instanced individually. So theoretically, you should be able to loot anything you like on your own resetting timetable. This is extremely beneficial at the start of the game. Going through the introductory story prison escape, there are innumerable lootables that contain everything from weapons and armor to recipes and lock-picks. It is a nice boost to your character early and can help jump start gaining experience with the various armor skills. Additionally, all the recipies and what-not can either be learned if you want to work on your professions or be sold to vendors (or players!) for a nice profit to boost your bank roll.
Next up, CONTINUE TO LOOT EVERYTHING! Redundant? I know. If you’re a min/max player like myself, you’ll be needing a lot of runs to town and all your gold at the beginning will go to upgrading your bags and bank. I say that again because once you get into the world, you will find there are resource nodes all over. In case you didn’t know, there are 6 basic types of resources that you can loot raw from the world: cloth, ore, wood, runes, herbs and provisioning reagents (read food stuffs). The cloth, ore, wood, runes and herbs will simply be around in the world for you to harvest. The provisioning reagents will be looted from barrels and crates etc. Again, you’ll need lots of raw materiel to skill up your various profession lines, but if that isn’t for you, an easy way of making some early cash is collecting and selling raw mats; they stack to 100 and sell for 5g per. So a stack of 100 ore will net you 500g from a vendor. A last side note, the skill points in the various profession lines to make the resources easier to see are more or less wasted except for the alchemy one. The herbs can be difficult to see until you know what you’re looking for so dropping a point there I would recommend.
Mix and match your armor. Sounds odd right? I know. Not only will you have access to more things, but it’ll boost your available stats at the start. Often times, you’ll find that light armor boosts magicka, medium armor: stamina and heavy armor HP or armor. By mixing and matching a few pieces of each, you can balance your character and won’t run into any soft caps on the base statistics. The bonuses from running a whole set are pretty specialized and won’t really help too much at the start as you’re still exploring the possibilities of your character and skill set. Once you have not only a direction in mind, but the gear and skill set to support it, then drop your points into the armor lines and focus your character.
Balance your skill selection. At least at the start, again, until you can focus your character and support it through gear it helps to choose a few magicka based skills and a few stamina based skills (excepting a pure spell caster, but even then… there are a few stamina skills that are fantastic: read- silver bolts for daedra/undead from the fighters guild skill line). Nothing worse than sitting in a tight fight willing your resource to regen while you have a full stam or magicka bar and nothing to use it on. Until you get your weapon swap at 15, your “build” will be limited to 5 skills and an ultimate. Choose wisely.
Research, research, research! The crafting system allows you to break armor and weapons you find in order to learn the patterns for traits. The time it takes to research an item is long and doubles each time you learn a new trait. For example, lets say you find a sword with the trait Sharpened. You break the item to learn how to make a sword with that trait. The research time is 6hrs. The next time you research a trait on a sword, it will take 12hrs, then 24 etc etc. Later on in the profession skill lines, there are ways to speed up research, but until then, it will be a bit of an arduous task to learn everything you want. For clarification, those times are in real time, not game time and they continue when you’re offline as well. So, like I said, always be researching something. It will pay off in the end.
Explore. Sure, this may not be your style of play, but the more you explore, the faster you will level up. Also, it allows you to find the skyshards (every 3 you find grant you a skill point). Currently, the xp gain goes something like this: questing>exploration>grinding. Actually dispatching of the baddies is only a small amount of your overall experience gain. Now that could change, but currently, exploring nets you a huge amount of experience and opens up lots of possibilities for questing or adventuring or whatever you so choose to do.
Grouping. While a bit quirky at the moment, grouping gives a small boost to xp gain and allows you to take out the elites that are placed around the world with good (read: rare and better) loot. If you can snag a strong weapon for your level, it will make your experience that much better. It pays to find a few people and tackle the challenges around the world, be it a public dungeon or a named mob for some high end loot.
Use your bank. Um, “duh” you say and yes I know this is a fairly obvious statement, but hear me out. ESO designers were clever enough to allow you to craft directly from your bank. Personally, I use my bank to hold all of the enchanting runes (there are a freaking boat load of them) and all the random gemstones used for creating armor and weapons with traits. This frees up my adventuring bag for raw materiel and armor and weapons that I’ll not only find along the way, but need to use to keep myself alive and kicking. I can’t suggest more strongly to upgrade your bank and inventory at least once or twice. The huge amount of random stuff you will loot around the world will have you constantly running back and forth to clear up space. Random side note, the concept of bank alts is fairly limited in ESO. All your characters share a bank (much the same as the stash in Diablo 2 or 3 if you’ve played either). Additionally, in order to utilize a guild bank, the guild must have 10 members.
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0. If you have zero patience for starter areas and have no strong choice for faction or race, Aldmeri Dominion is
the most streamlined and efficient starter area in very many respects.
1. Create as many alts as you can, preferably all 8, for crafting storage and Coldharbour mats. Coldharbour takes
about 15mins to run, tops, even with looting, so well worth it.
2. Keep at least one slot clear at your bank and park all your alts at the bank. That way you can spread the
goodies around the alts.
3. Have at least one filled Soul Gem on you from the very first time you leave Coldharbour by checking the nearest
vendors for empties and using your Soul Trap ability on the nearest mob. In early zones after the starter area,
depending somewhat on your faction, it can be very difficult indeed to get hold of Soul Gems. Believe me, you will
need them, even if by some miracle or amazing play, you never die in ESO while levelling, they can be used to
revive others. This is particularly useful in siege PvP because of the huge distances to travel on death.
4. Even for the starter areas, it is useful to walk everywhere, i.e. minimise use of Wayshrines, because of (the
few) hidden quests, pluss exploration XP. I prioritized travelling to quest objectives that included as much
territory, which typically were the furthest distance, inbetween that I had not explored.
5. There are no easy ways to sell goods to other players in this game, unless they suddenly decide to add auction
houses or market stalls for individuals before release. So, no point saving up anything at all that is purely
gained from levelling unless it is for crafting or for a guild bank. So, if you do not need it, craft with it or
sell it, especially anything to do with Provisioning.
6. Make sure to never leave a zone, including the PvP zone, without looting all the Skyshards in it. Every
Skyshard represents 1/3rd of a skill point, the very thing you are levelling. A quick way to check your Skyshard
progression per zone is to look at the Achievements screen or use a sky map locations site, e.g.
http://teso.mmorpg-life.com/skyshards/7. Crouching/sneaking, especially with enough Medium Armor pieces, can be very useful. This works even in pvp
since you can use it to effectively be invisible out in the open.
8. Make sure to use player Synergy abilities that pop-up from allies using special normal abilities when playing
in a group, especially healer ones. Synergies like Purify of healers are really strong in PvP. The default Synergy
activation button is X, I believe.
9. Bug workaround: if you get stuck at an NPC screen, pressing ‘ (apostrophe) or typing /reloadui will clear the
screen.
10. Emotes in ESO often conjure items out of thin air, e.g. /sit. Great for RP or just fun.
11. /playdead could be useful in pvp.
12. If you are creating a character that may PvP, especially in early levels, be careful with skills. Focus on CC,
burst damage, burst healing, escaping and cleansing. Keep in mind, however, that most kills and probably
contribution comes from using and supporting Siege machines.
13. do not underestimate the usefulness of basic attacks and Blocking (especially MMO players who are not used to such mechanics). All basic attacks and directed attacks (not aoe) cannot miss, though they can be Blocked or Evaded (talking about a stat, not the dodging roll). This applies to NPCs too. Using a Heavy attack when a player is “Off Balance” will knock them down, opening up combos with special attacks. A Sorceror’s heavy attack with a Frost weapon will Snare the target with the right passive, or their Overload Ultimate, etc.
14. melee interrupt can be useful to stop elites from casting powerful nukes. Past the very first starter area,
timing such skills and other forms of CC can be critical to the success of soloing elites and later, at your first
dungeons, completing them without excessive pain.
15. bosses in public dungeons can drop great loot and respawn quickly…
16. chest loot is not personal loot, can be better than dungeon boss loot, and is easily ninja’d by randoms (e.g.
in public dungeons) or other group players. If chest loot matters to you, be careful who you run with or who is
around or who gets to a chest first…
17. Addons/mods can make a significant difference to the look and feel of a game, and hence your enjoyment. This
is particularly the case for experienced MMO players. There are already addons that can show specific numbers like
health, mana, stamina, percentage health of yourself and target, scrolling combat text for your damage/healing
output and damage/healing input, as well as status effects on you and your target including remaining durations.
18. Keep as many lockpicks as you can on you. Coldharbour tutorial area also provides a ton. Chests loot can be
very lucrative or useful!
19. Almost unknown: there are special profession workbenches scattered throughout zones that provide special
crafting bonuses for “Set” items. The bonuses are often quite significant…
20. Classic MMO tip: get a mount as early as you can. This is especially important in ESO because mounts are not
only movement speed upgrades (even come with their own sprint bar) but also storage/inventory upgrades. Yes, they
are super, super expensive, but that does not remove from their usefulness.