Five Great Places to Grind XP Quickly in ESO
By Andrew | 6 Sep 2022 |
In the Elder Scrolls Online, there often comes a point when you just want to level up a character or skill line as fast as possible, particularly when making an entirely new build or repurposing an existing character.
At first this can seem like a very time consuming process, however there are luckily some locations in the game that can yield impressive experience gains. Note that this isn't really a "top five" list, but rather is intended to contain a range of different kinds of locations, so there is something for everyone.
Rkindaleft, Wrothgar
Rkindaleft is a public dungeon located in Wrothgar, containing a mixture of orc and dwemer automaton enemies. As long as you slot some AOE damage and a decent self heal, you should be able to grind here by yourself without too much trouble. A good way of going about it is to simply turn right after entering the dungeon, and keep following the path. You will eventually loop back around to the beginning of the dungeon, by which time everything will have respawned.For the best XP gains here, you would want to focus only on the trash mobs and avoid fighting the bosses, however if you don't mind taking a bit of time to fight the bosses then there is the added bonus that they will drop motifs from the Ancient Orc style, which you can use yourself or sell to other players for some extra gold.
Maelstrom Arena, Wrothgar
The Maelstrom Arena still presents a formidable challenge to many ESO players on Veteran difficulty, and is infamous among those who have struggled to beat it. However, setting it to normal difficulty completely changes the dynamic of the arena.On normal it is much easier to beat, the mechanics do a lot less damage, as do enemy attacks in general. It actually becomes a fairly decent way of generating XP. Simply port in, accept the quest, and progress through the dungeon. Upon completing it remember to hand in the quest for a bit more XP. You can then leave for about 5 minutes and the instance will reset itself, allowing you to repeat the process.
While playing Maelstrom on normal difficulty isn't too challenging, you should make sure you have a self heal at least. You can actually level up completely new characters here, but it's advisable to craft training armor with at least one 5-piece set that augments your damage output.
Spellscar, Craglorn
Spellscar in Craglorn is an area just to the north of Belkarth, where you can find many atronachs in large groups. There are enough groups that you can keep running around the area in a loop, and by the time you get back to where you started they should have all respawned.If you are a reasonably experienced DPS player then you can do this solo, but if you're newer to the game or your build is nowhere near finished then you might find it easier to bring a friend along to speed things up.
The main problem with Spellscar is that a lot of players know about it, so sometimes you might find it hard to get decent XP returns because there are already several players there killing the atronachs. In this case you could either ask to group with them, or try a different option on the list.
Skyreach Catacombs, Craglorn
Skyreach Catacombs is a dungeon in western Craglorn. It is filled with a huge amount of undead enemies, making it a great option for leveling up the Fighters Guild skill line as well as gaining a lot of XP. If you're newer to the game or are grinding on an unfinished build, then you should definitely take a friend with you to make things easier - there are a lot of enemies in here and it's easy to make a mistake and get killed, ruining the run as everything returns to its spawn.The best way to grind here is to turn left as you enter and follow the main path, aggroing every pack of enemies that you see. Every so often, stop in one of the rooms on the left and hide around the corner. This will cause the enemies you pulled to stack up in the doorway for easy AOE damage. Try to avoid pulling the bosses though, as they are a waste of time and can easily kill you when you are already busy fighting a horde of undead.
When you come to the room with the treasure chest, you can activate this to start a battle against a series of undead waves, which gives good XP and a modest reward from the chest. After doing the chest, continue following the corridor and you will eventually return to the first room. Then leave and reset the instance by switching it to veteran difficulty and back to normal again in the group menu (this might not work when solo, so it's good to be in a group even if its just with an offline character).
Blackrose Prison, Murkmire
To do this grind you should group up with one friend, and make sure the difficulty is set to normal. Enter the Blackrose Prison and proceed to the first arena. For the best XP gains, it is best to defeat the first four rounds of the first arena, then port out and reset the instance by switching the difficulty to veteran and then back to normal again. You can then repeat the process as many times as needed. This is one of the most lucrative XP farms currently available in the Elder Scrolls Online.You can take more than one friend if you really want to, but know that doing so will significantly diminish the XP gain each person receives. This is not a beginner friendly grind either, but if you have some experience with dungeons and arenas in ESO then you should be able to pull it off.
That concludes the list, but there is a bit more important information to share:
General Tips for XP Grinding
While having a good grinding location is important, there are other things you can do to speed things up by quite a lot.Using effects that boost your XP gains, such as XP scrolls (you probably have a lot of these lying around from daily login rewards) is very useful. You could also wait until there is an event on that provides a 100% XP boost, such as the Witches Festival. This boost will stack with XP scrolls.
Crafting gear for your character with the Training trait is another thing you can do to boost your XP gains. If you're new to the game, I recommend trying to research this trait early on.
And speaking of gear, you can speed things up by making your character more powerful with good gear. You don't need a meta build or anything like that, just craft item sets like Hunding's Rage or anything else that improves your weapon or spell damage, and remember that you can further augment this with enchantments, including weapon or spell damage enchantments on your jewelry and a weapon power enchantment on your weapon. It is up to you how much effort you want to put in this, and of course newer abilities will generally have less of an ability to do some of this than veteran players, but the more prepared your character is, the faster and less annoying grinding will be.
We hope you enjoyed this article about grinding in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
by
Andrew
6 Sep 2022
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