Character Creation in ESO.

The “Filthy” Casual’s Guide

Let’s say you just bought Elder Scrolls Online on sale, but you actually have a life, right? You’ve no intention of mindlessly grinding to get to endgame before whatever hardcore guides you’ve seen go woefully out of date anyway – plus, since you’re not a hardcore MMO addict, you’ve no idea whether you’re gonna stick it out for end game, ever. You just want to go out and explore Tamriel. Hopefully without your beginner’s ignorance causing you to make a character that’s gonna be totally gimped or frustrating to play. Right? Fear not, you’re probably just like me (Icehair) only without my over seven years’ experience playing ESO, on and off, on a very casual basis. Here’s my main advice about character creation:

You can change a lot about your character later on, so try whatever you want – but choose your CLASS carefully.

For a few gold you can change the skill morphs you chose as you leveled, or your stats (from, say, magicka to stamina). You can even change your race or physical stature if you pay gold crowns (which admittedly cost real world money.) So pick the race and physical appearance that you want to play when you begin. You can equip and start leveling the armor and weapons you feel like and you can always change them around later if, as you play, you realize there’s something you don’t like or you just want to try something new, or for that matter, something in the game changed with a recent update (which happens every now and then!)

I’ll repeat : pick your CLASS carefully because class is the only thing about your character creation that you still can’t change (of course even this might change, but right now it’s November 2021 and this has remained unchanged since launch). Essentially, while all classes can use all weapons and armour, your class give you three lines of abilities that only that class can use. So if you don’t want to re-level a new character from scratch, how do you choose which class when you don’t know anything about the game? For the casual beginner that I assume is my audience here, I recommend you watch this slightly old, but extremely succinct video by Vress Games.

The main thing that’s been added since 2017 when that video was made is the Necromancer class. That class is kind of self-explanatory; you’ll be littering the place with corpses, then use those to do damage, heal, or tank, depending on your build. Just be aware of two things: (A) Many Necromancer abilities are illegal and will get you in trouble with the law if you use them in populated areas. And (B) Necromancers do NOT command armies of permanent adds. You can summon a corpse and make it go blow itself up in your enemies’ face but Necromancer abilities are all temporary – no permanent undead servants. Elder Scrolls Online is NOT Skyrim. If you want to summon permanent pets, the class you want is the Sorceror, who alone in the game can command the Daedra.

I’m also going to add one thing that the video didn’t really emphasize enough. Do you want to be able to cast invisibility spells? Then you have to choose Nightblade. Everyone can spend Stamina and sneak around, but no other class has the ability to spend a bit of Magicka and go completely, magically invisible (admittedly, they can use invisibility potions, but those have a rather long cooldown). Now, going invisible basically isn’t ever done in high-end pro content, but for a casual player doing quests early on, it can be a godsend. And not just if you’re trying to do Thieves Guild stuff, either, but all kinds of questing – which is what beginning players tend to be doing in the game. Now, questing means fighting tons of easy overland trash mobs that will respawn very soon anyway. And fighting easy enemies is fun at first; also, it will let you learn how your skills work. But eventually, it can also get samey and boring. That’s why being able to just bypass enemies while invisible will get you to your next quest objective that much faster.

This isn’t to say that you can’t get around this with other classes, of course. Mobs have a really short detection radius and won’t follow you for very long, so you can simply sprint away from them a lot faster than sneaking invisible, especially if you decide to pump points into Stamina instead of Magicka (just don’t sprint right into the next mob group). And once your horse’s Speed gets properly leveled up, you can charge past them even faster – but unless you spend real-world money on feeding said pixel horse, you can only crank up that horse level one point per day, which means it will take months to get it maxed out. And in the mean time, invisibility or sprinting’s going to be your main alternatives – or simply grinding through the fights. It all depends how you want to play.

So the question is, what do you want to do? I already mentioned Sorcerors commanding Daedra. Want to be a nature-loving ranger type and command natural creatures like summoning a huge bear? Play a Warden. Want to breathe fire and flaunt ginormous dragon wings to reflect enemy spells back in their face? Then your class is Dragonknight. And all the classes can both tank, heal and deal damage, at least enough for a beginning casual’s needs; only in endgame, veteran-difficulty dungeons and raids will some classes be much better at a particular role than other classes. That’s the beauty of ESO – character building is extremely complex, but extremely flexible, so get out there, explore, experiment, learn and have fun!