One thing that has always bugged me about The Elder Scrolls Online was the lack of a need to login to do something. As much as it bugs me to admit this, World of Warcraft did it right with dailies. Dailies give an additional reason to login every day, and give another avenue for players to feel like they are progressing. At least they had that in WoW, no so much ESO. However patch 1.5 is trying to change that.
With the introduction of Patch 1.5 comes with it a whole plethora or dailies for us to do. Some dailies are more difficult than others, a lot more difficult. When this patch goes live, we’ll have daily quests we can complete for each of the crafting professions (Alchemy, Provisioning, Enchanting, Woodworking, Blacksmithing, Clothier), and Undaunted dailies which are the more difficult ones.
Before I get into what these new dailies are let me explain why dailies are a great addition to the game. I know some people are sitting there reading this with, “OMG, I hate dailies, they are so boring”. I couldn’t agree with you more. Dailies are typically boring, but they do exactly what they are designed to do. They make people login every day, or more often than normal. Prior to patch 1.5 the game was starting to feel a little stale. Nothing was ever happening. I have the best gear I can get on my character. I’m not an altaholic. I primarily focus on one character, so I was starting to not have a reason to login unless I was scheduled to do a Guild Run of some sorts, either PvP, a Trial, or just a simple dungeon. If nothing was scheduled I didn’t have a reason to login, and if I did login I was typically sitting in Belkarth debating if I wanted to bang my head on my desk as I attempt to PUG (Pick up Group) Veteran Dragonstar Arena. Now with dailies I have a reason to login, and I’ve been logging into the PTS every day to do the dailies.
The one aspect that the ESO dailies are lacking is a form of progression. The ESO dailies reward crafting materials or Undaunted armor pieces which are great. But what happens when you either collect all the pieces of gear from Undaunted or don’t need any crafting materials? Eventually that’ll happen, and we’re stuck at the same place we are now, questioning if I should login or not.
Zenimax if you’re reading this, add some form of progression to the dailies. Make me feel like my time investment is being rewarded in something useful and not meaningless crafting mats. World of Warcraft dailies commonly had reputations’ attached to it. As much as I hated this system, it did make me feel like I was progressing towards something. I truly hope ZOS doesn’t do this. But, for example, after I have proven myself by doing dailies, maybe I could get a rare motif that is only available via the dailies. Or perhaps as I progress through the dailies, I can choose different options for when I craft my items. This could be similar to a skill morph, but for crafting. I could change the way my crafted blade looks, or change the hilt. As I type this, I really would like a system like this where I could customize my crafted items more so than I can now.
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Crafting Writs
In order to open up the crafting writs you first need to become certified in your craft of choice. You can become certified in all the crafts if you wish, and for doing so, you’ll earn an achievement “Certified Jack-of-All-Trades which will reward you with an awesome looking green dye called “Woodsman Green”. This process is more of a tutorial for crafting, it goes into very basic yet important information about how crafting works and what you’ll be doing.
Once you’ve completed the certification process you’ll now have access to the crafting writs. In any of the major cities you’ll find two types of boards, Equipment Crafting Writs and Consumable Crating Writs. These boards are located near their respected crafting locations. Equipment is near the blacksmithing locations, and consumables near the enchanting or alchemy stations.
You’ll be given a task for your selected profession. If you’re certified in all professions you can take all six crafting writs. These tasks will be to craft three different items in quantities of two or three. I’ve only done a week’s worth of writs so the tasks may change and become slightly harder or more difficult later on, but as of right now you can do all six writs in under 15minutes if you have the materials. If not you’ll have to go farm them. One of the really great features of the writs is, even if you’re level 50 in the craft they’ll still ask you to craft lower quality items. I really enjoy this aspect as it will force those higher level players who only hoard the top tier materials into the lower level zones to farm the materials needed. Artists and Developers put so much of their time into zone creations and a lot of times the lower level zones are never visited by top level players. So anytime a game makes a design decision to have players go back to those zones, is always a good thing to me.
Once you’ve completed your task you’ll be asked to return the items to a specific locations. These locations are based on the level of materials you were asked to make. For example, I was asked to make Ebonthread items which I had to return to Bangkori and Shadowspun items I returned to Belkarth. When you return these items to the locations you’ll be rewarded with inspiration points for that craft. At Veteran Rank 14, level 50 in clothier, I was given 20,000 inspiration and 75 gold coins, as well as a Crate.
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These crates contain our rewards, so far I’ve received trait items, repair kits, and a white piece of gear with a random trait on it. It seems that this might be a very good way to get those missing trait pieces you need to finish off your research, with a possibility of looting a Nirnhoned Traited item (maybe, haven’t seen one yet, but fingers crossed). You can also loot a survey which is the “golden ticket” of items from these crates.
The survey is best explained by comparing it to a treasure map. It shows a location on a piece of parchment that if you find, you’ll be able to loot high yielding resources. For example, if you are doing the Alchemy Writ and you obtain a survey in your crate, the location will be littered with alchemy herbs. Each flower yielding 3 or 4 reagents per node. When I say littered, I mean littered. They are everywhere!
These locations are always out in the open of the world, so you won’t have to go into a dungeon to find them, similar to treasure maps. Like treasure maps, you’ll only be able to see and loot the resource nodes if you have the map with you. I can’t wait until I find an enchanting survey. Ideally I’d like to loot multiple Kuta stones, but my luck every Aspect rune I find there will have a Ta.
As you can see the crafting writs, least as of right now, aren’t complicated in any means. They require little to no effort to complete and could potentially yield a large sum of reagents. However, that feeling of progression or accomplishing something is missing, as I stated earlier. Eventually if nothing is added to the writs they will become useless. So hopefully ZOS can think of some fantastic idea to make doing dailies feel slightly more rewarding to the player that isn’t just a crafting material.
The other type of daily being introduced into ESO is the Undaunted Enclaves. As of right now, I haven’t had much time to progress through them and get detailed information on exactly how they work. If anyone is interested in doing some of these Undaunted dailies or doing Veteran City of Ash (which is incredibly fun, and if you’re a vampire, you won’t like it, so much fire) please hit me up in game @Garbrac.
