Starting Out
LINKING YOUR CHARACTER
One of the first things you should do is link your character to a Bethesda account. If you don’t have one, make one, so when (not if) the game crashes, you can log back into your account and all your progress has been saved. If you don’t have an account, you can lose ALL progress and have to start again!
Whilst the focus of this website is to prepare people for the arena, you obviously need to build your character toward that goal and therefore have to play the main game elements to get there.
We won't focus too much on how the game playthrough and how it works and just cover a few basics. For more help look through the https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrollsBlades/ sub-reddit, join Discord or ask in your guild.
If you want to change the name of your character or town, you can log a ticket at the Bethesda.net Help section. You can change your name once every 3 months.
BEING NEW IN THE ARENA
You don't get your full health or skill points until level 50. That alone can hinder you becoming competitive in the arena. Even then, you still need to work on your gear. However, we encourage you to try the arena far earlier. Just be aware that it's going to be difficult for you to be very competitive. You can use this time as a learning experience; see how others play, what tactics they use, how their builds are put together, etc. It's also a good method for earning lots of materials through chests.
One of the current issues with the arena is the player matching algorithm. Matching is primarily based on trophy count. When you have a relatively new level character, there won't be too many people for you to match against at a similar level. Don't fret though if you're level 5 - 15, as you are not going to stay there for very long. At lower levels, you can often move through levels in a day.
So at any one time, there's not likely going to be that many people (even from all over the world) playing at your level when you enter the arena. The majority of players you will match against are going to be levels well above you. Unfortunately, this means you're going to get a few beatings. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy yourself and learn along the way! It also helps build up your character and give you a better understanding of how things work. Note you will always earn more gold playing than the cost of the repairs, though it may not appear obvious, as repairs only occur every 3-4 matches. Time in the arena can be useful for boosting your gold
GENERAL GAME RECOMMENDATION
When you're working through the game quests, don't spend too much of your resources on crafting and tempering gear, mostly use what you find. You will probably go through a few quests, and then start to struggle. That generally indicates that your character isn't at a high enough level and you should spend some time in the Abyss, running jobs (yes, this can be tedious and grindy) or in the Arena. You will not be able to simply play through the game by only playing quests, as your character will not level up fast enough. You need to be doing other activities to build your character.
Note: It's best not to use your health potions or resurrection scrolls on jobs or the abyss, save them for Sigil Events and quests. If you die, just let yourself die and you can always go back again and do another job or abyss run, endlessly. (Perhaps, it makes sense to reconsider this if you're looking at an Elder chest beyond the current mob, or you have 2 enemies to go for the gold chest in Abyss.) The jobs are more or less endless, so just die, go back to town, repair your gear, and go on to the next job. If the jobs are all too hard, after several jobs where you are unable to finish, the game will reduce the difficulty to make them easier.
SIGIL EVENTS
The exception to the tempering and crafting rule of thumb are the Sigil Events that currently happen every day. Sigils are arguably the most valuable currency in the game. Since they're only available playing through these events, you should prioritize these over all else. Those sigils allow the purchase of ultimate super weapons and the best gear available. With these events running every day, in a few months you can have gear that would take many years to craft and enchant. So, we recommend prioritising those events and saving sigils until you are level 45 or above and the super weapons unlock for your character.
Consequently, you should start playing these sigil events and crafting gear specifically for those events if your gear from chests, quests and jobs are not suitable for completing all 5 stages of the events. You shouldn't need to temper them up to the max. There is more help available in Discord if you are struggling with any events, and even demos of events uploaded to YouTube. It is highly recommended that you have stamina enchanted weapons for use in events, as almost half of the events can be completed more easily with a stamina weapon. This removes all the attacking abilities of the enemies, and while it may take a little longer to kill them, they will not destroy you with their extra damage.
There is a section with helpful information each sigil event here
BLADES IS FREE!!
This game is free to play, and you don't need to spend IRL money. You can get by quite happily without spending any money and spending money is not even guaranteed to get you any better gear. It may get you better gear faster, but if you grind long enough, you will end up with the same sort of gear. That doesn't mean you can't spend any money; programmers need to eat too! Feel free to spend some money if you are enjoying the game as it will help you develop faster. The best value for money is the weekend legendary chest bundle (lovingly referred to as the "LCB"), and the daily gold chests. Those give you the most green gems per dollar.
Note: Chests will almost never have gear that will be useful in the arena, with the exceptions being a couple of artifacts. Chests are only useful for more resources, gold and green gems. The best thing to spend green gems on are upgrading your inventory size and the Incredible Treasure Pack ("ITP").
Side Note: When you're building your town, there's an imperial shipment pack that becomes available after your town levels up. This is by far the single most value for gems pack available in the game and you should aim to buy those. You have a week to pick up one of those after your town has levelled up and if you can buy one, it provides you enough materials to get halfway through the next level up of your town. So they're extremely valuable and should be targeted.
Resources
The game has various resource bottlenecks that occur at different levels. When you first start building your town, copper will become your most sort after resource, when you have finished building your town, copper, limestone and wood will accumulate endlessly and can be sold. There are many resources that you should be careful with, such as Grand Soul Gems and Transcendent Soul Gems, which become major resources you will constantly need long term. You should be careful with things that are needed to craft or enchant end game gear, such as ebony, dragon bones and dragon scales, jewels, pyrines, faerites etc. Many of these can be requested in guild chat and many can be purchased from your vendors and your guildmates vendors. However, this is expensive and you will quickly run out of gold if you are buying lots of resources from towns. Salvaging is a much cheaper way of getting many materials as are chests from jobs, the arena and the Abyss.
WHEN SHOULD YOU OPEN CHESTS?
Wooden and silver chests should be opened immediately for their resources, to help with town building. Elder and Legendary should be held onto until at least level 45. When you reach level 45, all artefacts can be found, and you can wield dragonbone weapons. Many believe you should hold onto these rare chests until level 50, as contents of the chests are related to your level. Note: some artefacts are only available at levels below 50, but the main two you want, Warlock’s Ring and Lord’s Mail are both available from Level 45. Other artefacts can be interesting and fun to play with in the game, but only Warlock’s Ring is really useful in the arena.
Opening gold chests will depend on your overall game strategy. If you are enjoying playing through the game and in no hurry, it is probably best to hang on to gold chests as well until level 45, though the chances of finding an artefact in these chests is very low (0.1% or 1 in every 1000 chests). However, if you are in a hurry to finish your town, wanting to level it up as fast as possible to become more competitive in the arena, then you will want the resources in gold chests for town building and you should open them as you get them. Once you become active in the arena, you will get a constant stream of gold chests.
ARTEFACTS
You can find the list of in game artefacts that can be found here https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Blades:Artifacts but there are really only 2 that every player wants.
WARLOCKS'S RING
Warlock’s Ring is a special artefact with a very significant effect of speeding up your attack speed by 24%. This makes heavy weapons users almost as fast as a versatile player and a versatile player almost as fast as a small weapons user. Traditional heavy weapons users regard Warlock’s ring as essential. It also has an elemental retaliation effect for all elements, but this effect is relatively small. The real benefit is the increased speed. Note it does not increase the speed of your swing, all weapons, regardless of size swing at the same speed, but it does reduce the time between swings, so you can attack 24% more often, so it increase the rate of attack.
LORD'S MAIL
Lord’s Mail is extremely useful in the PVE game with its increased health regeneration and spell resistance, and can be used in the arena under certain circumstances, which we may cover here at some stage. However, if you want to use Lord’s Mail in the arena, we recommend you find experienced players in Discord to discuss this complex subject.
YOUR TOWN
In terms of town layout, it pays to make sure all your vendors are near the spawning point at the main gate. This will save you a lot of time in the long run. If you have built anything elsewhere, you can demolish it and rebuild it closer to the spawn point. The sooner you do it, the lower the cost involved. However if you leave it until you have your town at level 10, all of the needed resources should now be plentiful in your inventory. There are a variety of ways you can lay out your town, but if you place the majority of shops straight down the main road, you'll find that is one of the most efficient ways to run around and visit each one.
Personally, I (Gretchen/TBK) like to put my Smithies to the left and the right of the main gate, as the first thing you do when you come back into town is repair your gear. Then the Enchanters, as long term they will be the most visited shop. Also, everyone in your Guild will come into your town looking for your enchanters. The next two up should probably be the Alchemist shops. We like these facing each other because you can visit one and turn around and visit the other. Lastly, the two Artisans. There are many other similar layouts, and the key point is to have all vendors near the spawn point.
WHY TWO OF EACH?
You may think to yourself "why do I need two of any of these?" Well, these become useful when you come back to town and want to sell the adventuring loot or items from opening chests. Once you visit a vendor, it takes 10 hours to reset their inventory and their gold. Multiple shops allow you to sell many things at once. Artisans usually end up with the most gold to buy your items with. Also, if you have only 1 Smithy and they are crafting an item for you, you cannot repair gear until you wait for the crafting to finish, or rush the crafting with green gems. Similarly, only 1 enchanter will allow only 1 enchant at a time. If you enjoy the town building aspect, you can build the houses in all the other spaces.
RAPID TOWN BUILDING HACK
Houses do not have to be built and a trick to build up your town level quickly is to build only 1 house, demolish, then rebuild it, then demolish etc. By repeating this many times, you will build your town’s prestige faster using less resources. The same can be done by changing the style of walls and gates. Town prestige is never lost once it is gained. Many long time players have created alternate characters, using this short cut to get their town to level 10 quickly.
If you enjoy the town building feature, there is new game from Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls: Castles that has focus on this aspect. Note: it is still in early release and not available everywhere.
Joining a Guild
Guilds are an extremely useful part of the game and long term, to be successful in the arena, you will need to be in a guild which has the majority of guild members with Level 10 enchanters to allow you to buy Grand Soul Gems (a significant bottleneck in the game) required for your regular enchanting. The Blades gamer community is an extremely helpful group, always eager to help and very encouraging to new players. All of the top guilds have experienced players who are willing to help and any of the guilds in the top of the table and below will be very helpful to new players.
HOW DO YOU FIND A GUILD?
The best way to find a suitable PvP guild is in the Blades GG server here
You can also apply direct to a guild by looking through the leaderboard for guilds with available slots. However, unless you already have a level 10 town and a significant number of trophies, you will likely not meet the minimum requirements for the guilds at the top of the leaderboard and may be quickly kicked out.
Most of the top guilds have 2 – 4 feeder guilds, so you can join lower guilds and progress up as your experience grows. Some are obviously linked like Akatosh Empire and Akatosh Chantry, Bloodborn (x 4), Shadowblades and Shadowblades II, The Wihtwara I, II, III, IV etc. Some are less obviously linked like The Moderately Formidables, True Blades III, None Shall Pass and Crack Headz, or that Inconceivable is part of Bloodborn and the various Cyrillic alphabet guilds have a shared server.
Some of these guilds have their Discord server in the guild description and you can join their server from there.
Note: you will probably start in a welcome room as a guest where you can discuss what you are looking for and they can sort out an appropriate guild. Some guilds have their servers listed here:
If you have a guild of active players that you want to remain in, and want access to experienced players, we would recommend joining the GG Discord server and searching out some of the guild masters of the top of the table guilds and discussing an associate guild status access to their server, for helpful information and the ability to discuss the game with their pool of experienced players.
If you leave a guild, you can return at any time, however, if you are kicked from a guild and try and reapply, you will have 1 week stand down before you can reapply. If the guild master leaves the guild, the player with the highest arena score at that time, will become guild master.
Game Crash and Reset
If you game crashes and then you reload the game and find you are back at the start, there are 2 ways to get your character back. The first is to play through beginning few minutes until you reach your town. You can then access your character's setting menu and link to your Bethesda account, which will restore your character. Note, however, the game now has 2 characters associated with your account and you will be asked to choose which one you want to keep. If you make a mistake, and choose the new character, you old one will be lost, erased forever!!! Do not make this mistake!
A mush safer method is, when you find yourself back at the start of the game. Stop the game, clear the games cache and data files and restart. Note that you will have to download the game data again and log back in. The login button appears during the splash screen animation when the Thalmor warrior appears.