#me 15 minutes after posting this (a fool): hm what if i queued for vet on my healer tomorrow... it should be fine with a decent group right

[sleepymarmot]

Guess why I haven't been posting much for the last few days? I've been spending my free time on ESO again.

So in the middle of the Undaunted event I realized that it pretty much gave double drops from the final boss, and started frantically grinding dungeons. I normally don't do them, because they're either boring or frustrating and take too much time, and you need to spend an enormous amount of time on clearing the inventory before and sorting the loot after. So this was my best chance to gather at least some of the sets I wanted for the foreseeable future. The grind was not something I'd call fun, but it sure had me spending time and energy on the game for the first time in a couple of months. And combined with the excitement of the new update (and the rush to figure out what's going to happen to jewelry prices and to sell off my hoard while it's still worth something), that suddenly gave me the motivation to take care of my huge in-game to-do list.

And one of the most important entries on that to-do list was, uh. To progress in the storyline. Where I've been stuck between Murkmire and Season of the Dragon for years. You see, ZOS really fucked me over when they decided to make group dungeons part of the storyline. I can't stand the thought of begging random strangers to take pity and wait for me to do the quest instead of doing a speedrun like 99.9% of them want, and I wouldn't be able to enjoy the quest with them breathing down my neck anyway. So I'd prefer to do these dungeons for the first time by myself — but I'm also a very casual player, not the kind of person who soloes DLC dungeons. When the companions were released, I hoped they could replace human teammates, but they turned out to be not that strong. When the armory system was released, my stamsorc main could finally become a healer, which solved the problem of long queue times and the shame of low dps — but didn't solve the problem of questing vs speedrunning. When I discovered Oakensoul after barely touching the game for a year, I hoped it would be my ticket — but it didn't turn me into a superhero either. Nevertheless, I dutifully grinded the gear (fuck Wayrest Sewers) and tried to imitate the online builds. Today, right after the end of the event, I still had leftover adrenaline and willingness to go to dungeons left, and that pushed me to tweak my gear again and hit my personal high on a trial dummy (which was still much lower than the Oakensorc parses other people post). So I decided to ride that wave, ran through the Volenfell quest on an alt to remember who Tarayya and Quintus were, and headed to Depths of Malatar (on Normal, obviously).

At first, I was really enjoying the leisurely stroll, taking screenshots of the lovely scenery. The first boss either glitched or hid too well, because I couldn't find him and had to reset the fight, after which it went well. Everything melted so fast I asked myself why I had been even worried — are the DLC not as scary as they seem?

Then I got to the fucking Dark Orb. And died. And died. And died. I spent fifty minutes there. I changed my champion points; changed them again; unlocked some skills because by some stroke of luck I had free skill points and had not purchased the alternate morphs on this profile. Every time the fight was very easy at the beginning, then around the final 5-10% there would be an absolutely overwhelming amount of aurorans spawning faster than I could kill them, and they would stunlock and kill me. Finally, I tried to copy a solo video where the player "cheesed the boss", and miraculously, after two or three attempts it worked. Maybe that didn't give it time to spawn enough aurorans to be deadly? On my last attempt, Bastian died pretty early, and that always meant that I'd follow him soon, so I was surprised to survive.

Even the trash mobs of aurorans after that boss were hard enough to make me drop ultimates on them. By comparison, Narilmor and Symphony of Blades were easy. Or, at least, Symphony was relatively easy after I read what I was supposed to do. During that final fight, I discovered that Bastian had apparently been traumatized by his many deaths, because he refused to fight and only walked around. Luckily, Mirri didn't have that problem when I called on her to replace him. If I remember correctly, the final fight took three attempts. On the first, I didn't know what to do with the wall. On the second, I got to the last phase in the Colored Rooms (spectacular transition btw!) and when the boss was in single digits I walked backwards from one wall and right into another.

As I type this, I'm still coming down from the adrenaline — an hour later. According to the screenshots, this single run of a normal dungeon took me almost exactly two hours. I guess I'll have to find a group for all of the following ones after all... Even this one was completed only by the skin of my teeth, and it would be awful to spend hours in a dungeon and have to give up and start over anyway. I do certainly feel a Sense of Pride and Accomplishment, though! Even one solo DLC has been a big achievement for me. But I'm still mad that ZOS balances things like this for multiple players and refuses to make a solo version. This would have been a fun adventure in a pretty location, available to any solo player without the need for grinding or a specific build. But instead, the difficulty level makes it feel like an arena — a place where you come to test yourself in combat and nothing else.