Choose My Adventure: Necro Kitty proves to be a reasonable Elder Scrolls Online tank

I’ve had some minor grouping experiences in The Elder Scrolls Online before. I was around for some of the game’s early days when people were running through public delves, steamrolling through enemies at an absolute mad clip. And as I wrote earlier, I had some similar sort of experiences in the few public dungeons I’ve been in in Blackwood. So going in to the dungeon queue for this MMORPG, I had no delusions that I was going to be entering a measured, slow-paced, and carefully arranged instance experience.

But even so, I kind of ended up leaning into the chaos of it all. And ultimately I was able to actually tank as a Necromancer in a pretty effective manner. Or at least effective where it counted, anyway. But before I did any of that, I had to follow some good advice and get some taunting skills.

You see, up to this point I’ve been using a two-handed weapon, which has been pretty good against both single targets and small groups, especially when I picked up the passive ability that applied damage to everything in front of me whenever I did basic light or heavy attacks. But as much fun and as effective as that has been solo and in some informal grouping activities, nothing I was doing was generating actual threat. So with that in mind, I elected to start leveling up the one-handed and shield skill line in order to get at least one tanky ability on my second weapon set.

Of course, that meant that a fair deal of my playtime for this column was spent continuing to follow the questline of Blackwood as instructed by the polls, so it all sort of worked out. Also, the story started to get pretty interesting, as things went from a murder mystery into an entire plot about someone trying to summon Mehrunes Dagon and absorb the power of some NPCs known as the Ambitions.

As ever, it wasn’t necessarily the finest writing I’ve ever experienced, MMOs or otherwise, but it was still that good, classic RPG goofery. Hell, I was even starting to get a slight attachment to some of the characters. None of the Ambitions, necessarily, but the generally pixie-like Eveli started to grow on me, and Elam was an immediate favorite (primarily because his voice actor was so good). By the end of it all I had cleared all of the zone’s main quests, had gotten to a point where I could modify my one aggro skill, and overall felt like I had a pretty good handle on how my Necrocat would handle things in a proper group setting.

It was time to queue.

I’m a big fan of the big fat stack of goodies that were being offered to me for entering the random queue, and as a tank I didn’t really have long to wait. Sure enough, even in an individual instance with a specific group of three other people, the pace was high as everyone simply ran like absolute mad through each of the rooms of our dungeon. I was beginning to get kind of worried, especially since things were dying too fast for me to effectively herd anything and I didn’t really have any AoE or cleave threat skills.

As it turns out, that didn’t really matter because when we got to the first boss room, I was able to hold threat by some judicious spamming of my one threatening stab button. I know that sounds pretty awful on paper, and I’m not necessarily going to argue that this was the greatest tanking experience I’ve ever had in MMORPGs, but mostly I was happy that I was able to keep the boss focused on me and let these other presumably higher-level party members blend foes into paste.

After that first boss fight, I swapped back to my two-handed weapon and joined in on the murder blender madness, swinging my cleave skills as fast as I was able to. What would have otherwise been a point of frustration turned into an entertaining, if somewhat depressing, jog through packs of mobs until we got to the next boss room. Once there, I simply switched back to my knife and shield kit, kept the aggro, and let my party do its work. Lather, rinse, repeat.

By the end of it all, I was doing my tanking duties with some confidence, I was getting all sorts of rewards, and I even got a little cheer from one of the party members when I admitted that this was my first time being a tank. It felt pretty nice, even if it was frantically paced.

I guess the reason this landed so well compared to other MMORPGs where grouping feels really disjointed and sloppy is that I felt as if I was truly contributing. Yes, I’m reasonably sure I was teamed with people who were well on their way to whatever constitutes as high-level content in ESO, and sure the normalization of everyone’s levels didn’t really put me on an even keel, but at the very least I was able to perform what I came here to do, and that was to make sure that the boss’ backaside was aimed toward my party so they could beat it down. That’s about all I could really ask for as a tank, honestly.

I also have to suppose that there are some mental hurdles that I’ve cleared when doing proper tanking things. Like basically leaning into the chaos. And of course, I’d be remiss not to point out how I got some tasty rewards out of the whole deal; I basically got a complete tanking set from that one dungeon run.

I think I’ve overall got a good thing going here with this Tall Spooky Kitty, and I think I’ll be hopping into queues on a pretty regular basis in order to continue honing my skills. But that’s pretty much something I can do while waiting for the polls for this week.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve finished up all of the main quests in Blackwood, and bar whatever side quests are still hiding out there, I’m effectively free to move somewhere else. There are a bare few options available to me in this regard, so the options are mostly going to focus on cardinal directions to head to whatever wayshrines I’ve apparently unlocked previously.

 Loading ...

For our second poll, I’m going to kind of ask a more general question. I’ve never done crafting in this game before, and I’m not entirely sure I would like it or that it has any uses. Still, I’d certainly defer to any experts that are reading this… or at the very least confirm my suspicions about whether I’ll enjoy doing this or not.

 Loading ...

Polling will wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, May 3rd. Until then, it’s looking like it’s more dungeon queues for me. Maybe I’ll start to actually figure out how to herd enemies effectively. But somehow I doubt it.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.