Beginner’s Guide to ESO

ESO is a rich and diverse game with almost unlimited paths, playstyles and activities that can be overwhelming to new players. This guide is intended to give new players a straightforward path to get to end game content with options for differing playstyles and interests (though the options are too varied and numerous for this to be a comprehensive guide.

Character Creation

When you create a character, you will have many options. What your first “toon’s” class, race, appearance, etc matters little. Create what you think you’ll enjoy; if you don’t like something, you can either modify it or create a new character with different traits – you’ve got 10 chances before you have to start deleting characters so don’t feel obliged to play something that you don’t enjoy…it’s a game! It is now possible to change the Character’s stats and skills easily and without cost, so feel free to experiment. You can change race and alliance by buying tokens from the Crown Store. Champion Points can be reallocated for 3000 gold. (Champion points accrue after you reach level 50 and provide additional abilities/buffs/perks)

Leveling

You can level a new character many different ways, but here are a couple of suggestions that I’ve used successfully.

For your first toon, I’d suggest just following the intro quest line and pay attention to the tutorial for learning how to move, fight and navigate in the game. Then follow your alliance’s quest line as it leads you around the “world”. It is possible to level by just doing dungeons (after level 10), by grouping with a high level player and getting carried through endgame content, or by doing PVP dailies and events- or any combination of the above.

To maximize your leveling gains, keep an Experience scroll active as much as you can. You’ll get a few as you level and you can buy them in the Crown store in packs of 5 for 800 crowns or so.

There are a few milestones that you may miss if not made aware of them, so here is my to do list for a new toon:

Join the Fighters Guild and Mages Guild as soon as you get to a major city in your intro quests. They will each have a quest chain that will reward you with loot, gear, gold and reputation points with the guilds.

Train crafting skills as soon as you get to your capital city as well. You can train in Clothing, Blacksmithing, Woodworking, Provisioning, Enchanting and Alchemy in your Alliance’s capital city, but you must go to Summerset in Alinor (a guildie can give you a lift if you don’t have that wayshrine but you must have the Summerset Chapter to get there and use it). Do crafting writs daily on all your toons and start “researching” traits as soon as you can. This will come in handy later and in the short term you’ll get mats, gold and experience for doing the writs.

At level 10 there are several options that open for you.

1. You can start queuing for dungeons (more will open to you as you level up). Dungeon groups are 4 character groups with a tank, a healer and 2 damage dealers (DD or DPS). You can queue for a group by hitting “P and selecting Dungeon Finder. Make sure that you have the proper role select (upper left of screen) and JOIN QUEUE. You can continue to quest while you are waiting for the queue to “pop”. You will get 100K+ experience (Be sure to pop an Exp Scroll before completion) for the first random dungeon that you complete on each toon each day. You will also get a transmute crystal geode(with 10 transmute crystals) and some armor and other loot in addition to what you get from running the dungeon.

2. You can start riding (account wide so your next toon can get around fast sooner. There are riding trainers in most towns and some villages and you should train every day. There are three riding skills to train: Capacity, Speed and Stamina. I’d suggest training Capacity first, then Speed and finally Stamina,
   but you will decide for yourself what is most important to your play style.
   
3. You can start queuing for PVP in Cyrodiil. Even if you don’t plan to PVP, the Assault and Support Skill lines have very useful spells for PVE play, so it’s a good idea to do the introductory Cyrodiil quest (Welcome to Cyrodiil). The quest giver and location will depend on your alliance, but if you hit “L” and join a campaign, you will be teleported to the base town for your alliance and the quest giver and intro quest will be available there with no PVP fighting required for completion. Finishing this intro quest (This is one time that you should be sure to pop an Exp Scroll before completion) will get you enough skill levels to use the basic spells and passives that you’ll need. This intro quest takes only a few minutes to complete. Later you will probably end up grinding up the levels to get access to more skills and passives that you find necessary or helpful.
   
4. You can join the Undaunted Guild by talking to an NPC in a city (which depends on your Alliance so just google it when the time comes). There is an introductory quest (enter a dungeon…you just have to go in the door, you don’t have to complete it or even kill anything). At level 45, you’ll get an invitation in the mail to be inducted into the Undaunted (Even if you’ve joined earlier, you need to formally sign the roster to be able to get the daily pledges and you will then be able to do the Undaunted Daily Dungeons…there are three each day and they are given by NPC’s in major cities for each faction. They reward a couple of Transmute crystals and “Undaunted Keys” which are traded for “Monster Set” shoulders at the same NPCs that give the quests. (don’t worry about it, Monster sets are an end game thing that we’ll get into later)

Gear

You will get random pieces of gear as you loot and complete quests while leveling. Wear whatever suits you. As you level up, deconstruct the gear that you are discarding as this will give you some crafting materials (mats) and help level your crafting skills (I think).

As you complete Main Story Quest line, you will receive 5 pieces of “Training” gear after each quest segment. This is GREAT leveling gear as it increases the exp gain passively (and stacks with exp scrolls). I’d suggest doing a main quest line and gearing up every 5 to 10 levels as you go.

As you progress, the gear you loot is at your current level (ie, level 26 toons will get level 26 gear) and you can’t equip gear that is higher level than your toon. “Max Level gear” is level 50 160 CP (champion points). Any gear lower than that is deconstruction fodder.

As you acquire gear, “Bind” it…(right click and select bind). This will add it to the “stickerbook” (accessed by hitting U and selecting the “SETS” tab. When you get to end game content and want to create (with your leveled crafting skills) a specific gear set, you can make your desired pieces with appropriate traits and weight (light, medium, heavy) by going to a “Transmute Station” and reconstructing items from your stickerbook. The more items of a set that you’ve collected, the lower the reconstruction cost.

Storage

Storage space quickly becomes a limiting factor so let me say a few words about it here. You can expand you bag capacity by paying gold at a vendor in the major alliance cities (google it if you can’t find one) and you gain bag capacity by increasing your riding capacity skill. You can increase your bank space capacity by paying gold to the banker. In the Crown Store, you can purchase small (30 item capacity) and large (60 item capacity) boxes, but you can only get 4 of each. There are also 3 pets that you can buy in the Crown Store that increase your bag capacity by 5 slots each. Bag capacity tops out at 215 slots and Bank capacity tops out at 240 slots. (Bank capacity is account wide, Bag space is per character).

There is a chest available free in the Crown Store that allows you to store a large amount of “furniture” items.

ESO Plus membership gives you a “craft bag” that holds an unlimited amount of mats (materials), doubles your Bank space, doubles your Furnishing and Collectible storage and doubles your cap for Transmute Crystals along with a bunch of other perks and bonuses not the least of which is access to all the DLC packs.

Game Interface:

The stock user interface is OK but there are a few settings that you can(should) change to make your life easier:

1) ESC - Settings- Gameplay- Turn on Combat Cues; Custom Colors and set the friendly and Enemy Colors to something that you can see and differentiate easily.  I use green for friends and red for enemies, but whatever works for you is fine.  Also make sure that the brightness of both is maxed (at 50).  Scrolling down you can turn on Consolidate area loot and Auto Loot. (My preference but adjust as you prefer)

2) ESC - Settings- Camera -  Maximize the Field of View (and play in 3rd person     99% of the time)

There are lots of other settings that you can play with…I suggest scrolling through the options and trying whatever looks good to you…easy to change back and forth as you like.

This is a lot of information I know, but my hope is to bring a little order to the chaos and hopefully make your ESO journey less random and more enjoyable.

Baron Paracelsus
*NOR/BA