Hi there! I hope there's enough lurkers to get some interesting ideas here.
I just came back to the game after a year or so. I'm not really in the mood for combat at the moment so I decided to take a stab at a pacifist character for a change.
Right now I'm just traveling randomly, taking screenshots and looking for quests that can be completed without combat (even through cheesing, I'll take what I can get). While fun, this approach means I'm probably missing things obvious to more active players so I was wondering if anyone has any fun non-combat activities to share.
The only DLC I have are Morrowind and Murkmire but I'd be interested in things available in any other expansions as well.
Late to the discussion, and I’m not sure how much this is worth from someone who is on his own break from the game, but my favorite non-combat activities included:
daily crafting writs on 20 toons (probably part of why I’m burned out)
cashing in a fat stack of master writs
trait research
collecting mat surveys, for a small number of surveys (if surveys weren’t account bound, or if you could collect multiple surveys at once, I’d be willing to start crafting writs again)
using market tools to locate a furnishing plan I wanted, or a piece of gear I needed to finish out a set in the sticker book
Late or not I do appreciate additional replies, it's always interesting to see what other people lean towards.
Were you really into crafting or did you just end up doing all those activities after getting bored with other parts of the game? I'm guessing it's the former considering the amount of tasks mentioned here.
I got into crafting writs because I was looking for easy reliable sources of gold. With the craft bag and a bunch of characters, it was a pretty steady source of income. I started doing trait research to improve my chances of dropping master writs. 18/20 of my characters are full 9 trait researchers. The other 2 are 7 or 8 traits. I don’t remember for sure, since my last login was back in April.
I did a lot of crafted gear for my characters.
I never really got into housing, yet I still spent untold millions of gold buying furnishing plans for my main crafter to learn. I would occasionally craft stuff on request for guildmates. Someone would link a plan in guild chat, ask if anyone knew the plan, and I would sometimes be able to swap to my crafter and help out.
Non-combat stuff? I guess I have (had?) a habit of sitting in zone chat and if I found anew player, I'd take the to a guild house and craft them some gear, run them through a dungeon or two, just to help them learn some of the game. Otherwise, I also stack my survey maps and do them all at once. My current stash is was about 700, I'm through about half of it. I'm also tracking the total mats I get and the gold upgrade mats just to see. It's not entirely accurate, as I'm still picking up stuff as I play, but I figure it's close enough. I also help run a ~1k player guild/discord on Xbox NA but that's only tangentially related to gameplay lol.
It might be a bit out of scope of my original question but running a guild is no easy feat and is (or at least should be?) mostly about combat avoidance anyway :P I've never been much of a guild player, let alone one this big, so I'm wondering - does a beast like this even feel like a "guild" anymore? Or is it more like a bunch of smaller guilds working together?
It does. It's more of a Discord than a guild at that point, as the guild roster is more used for fills for runs in game, but that's kind of the nature of it. But we probably have ~100+ active members in chat, we do trial races where teams race for score in a 2 hour window on a trial; we've (I've) done (tried to do) PvP nights during midyear to get people some AP and stones, but they aren't too popular. We up until the last maybe 9 months did somewhat regular training trial runs where we'd take 4-5 newer players through content to help them learn a role without fear of messing up a clear. It's a decent bit of effort, but the pay off is nice.
Outside of that, we have a Fantasy Football league, we do Game Night every now and then where we play party games like Among Us, Party Animals, Golf With Friends, etc just to change it up.
Fishing is entertaining for a little while, especially if you have Sharp-as-Night. His comments for that are great.
Crafting & building out houses is also a good time if you like that type of thing. And there is the new Housing Tour option, so you can show off your designs.
Fishing is one of the first things I did after coming back actually. I don't think I touched it before so it was a nice way to use some of the bait I've accumulated until now. Still need to get into housing though, all I have is a basic setup in one of the inn rooms. Thanks for the ideas!
Snugpod is cheap and close to the action for both Undaunted Enclave and Rolis (Master Writs), I use Deshan / Mournhold to quickly get to Fighters Guild and Mages Guild. I saw this in someone else's Snugpod, so I cannot claim credit, but you can get much more usable space there if you put in the Clockwork Spiral Stair to make it effectively 2 levels. Here is a youtube video I found about getting all the Inn Rooms and the Lunar Champ home (if you have ESO plus or the Elsweyr DLC)