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.
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.
If you are ever looking for more, I highly recommend the larger guilds. You may have to "shop" around, but we spend a lot of time helping people on parses, training runs, and general content questions. More often than not, I'd say people on ESO are helpful. Most still around like playing it and want to help, as opposed to people chasing scores and trying to be "the best". I think a lot of our members joined off of zone spam and word of mouth from friends, and to a lesser extent, pug runs we've organized. The barrier to hard content has never been lower than it is now!