Antiquities Leveling Guide, for all of you who want to be Indiana Jones but don’t want to waste your time getting to the good stuff.
ESO Antiquities can be found all over Tamriel, they come through Green, Blue, Purple, and Gold Leads. Every zone has a Green Repeatable Lead, when you dig that up you get a Blue Lead (Non-repeatable), which leads you to a Purple Lead that you can do only once per zone. Gold Leads are found in Dungeons, Chests, Harvest Notes, random mobs, or Boss drops.
To find Antiquities in the Elder Scrolls Online, pick up the quest by talking to Verita Numida at the Antiquarian Circle in Solitude in Western Skyrim. You then get the Antiquarian’s Eye and can Scry for Leads. The quest is a little tutorial on how to Scry and Excavate.
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You get two new skill lines, Scrying and Excavation, which you find under the subheading “World”.
You level them by scrying leads and excavating ESO Antiquities. Let’s take a look at how much experience it takes to level up your ESO Antiquities skill lines, and how much experience each lead/excavation yields.
Experience Needed per Level of Scrying and Excavating.
- Level 1-2: 8 EXP
- Level 2-3: 12 EXP
- Level 3-4: 30 EXP
- Level 4-5: 40 EXP
- Level 5-6: 60 EXP
- Level 6-7: 85 EXP
- Level 7-8: 115 EXP
- Level 8-9: 150 EXP
- Level 9-10 200 EXP
Experience Gain pr Lead
- Green – 1 EXP
- Blue – 3 EXP
- Purple – 5 EXP
- Gold – 10 EXP
- Red – 10 EXP
If you press J and navigate to the Antiquities tab, you will see the following overview and Leads you have. However, you are not able to scry for any of them if you are not in the right zone and have enough experience in Scrying.
You can always scry for green leads, but you need level 3 in Antiquarian Insight for Blue Leads, level 5 for Purple Leads, level 7 for Gold leads, and level 10 for Ultimate Leads (orange).
Antiquities Leveling Guide Step One.
Ok, you got the skill lines and you want to level them up fast so you can get that sweet passive that makes you spot Chests faster right?
Go to Arteum and press M to open your map, you have an antiquities tab to the far right, click on that and you will see your available leads. For now you only have the green one and that’s fine. Right-click it and choose scry.
Now the mini-game scrying begins as you tried in Solitude when you did the starter’s quest.
Stay in Arteum doing green leads until you get to rank 3 in Scrying and Excavation at least, then you could go to any of the starter zones, but I would recommend you just stay in Arteum until you reach rank 5 and can do purple leads.
Purple leads can only be unearthed once in every zone, so it’s better to wait until you can do Purples and then finish every zone you go to before moving on.
Once you reach rank 3 in Scrying you can do Blue Leads and as you read in the table that will yield more experience, and speed things up a bit, even though it still feels slow. But when you have done the legwork in Arteum and can handle Purple Leads you are ready to speed things up and earn some extra gold as well.
Gold Leads for leveling Antiquities from level 7 to 10.
Gold quality Leads can be found out in the world in treasure chests, World boss drops, Psijic Rifts, Public Dungeons, and drops off of random monsters. Some Gold Leads can give you Mythical item parts.
You need to be Scrying level 7 and have skill points set in Antiquarians Insight to use Gold Leads, but you don’t need it to find Gold Leads they can drop for anyone. If you have played the game for a while before beginning to level Antiquities chances are you already got those 47 Gold Leads you need to go from rank 7 to rank 10 just waiting to be found.
Once you hit rank 10 in ESO Antiquities.
Two reasons to power level ESO Antiquities skill lines, one is to be able to spot chests faster, and the other, and probably why most people power level Antiquities is to be able to scye for Ultimate Leads that can be combined into Mythical items like the Snow Treaders.
How Do I Antiquities Leads in ESO?
Join the Antiquarians Circle! You will automatically get at least one Green Lead per Zone in Tamriel and they are repeatable. You can also find leads in Dungeons, Chests, and Harvest Notes, random mobs drop them, and you get a Blue Lead by Excavating Green Leads and Purple Leads first time you Excavate a Blue Lead in each Zone.
You join the Antiquarians Circle, by talking to Verita Numida at the Antiquarian Circle in Solitude in Western Skyrim.
Scrying Minigame.
Once you get the hang of it, this is VERY easy. It’s just like solving small puzzles and I have to say I really enjoy this little in-game game from time to time, but when I power level I get tired of it really fast, especially the animations once you have solved it seems to take forever!
There is sadly no way around this, as this is one of the few skill lines you can’t buy for crowns after one of your characters has done it. Luckily you don’t need this on more than one character unless it’s because you like to be able to spot chests more easily.
Digging for Gold, mythical items, and other ESO Antiquities.
This however never gets old, who doesn’t like a great treasure hunt and digging up treasure?
You can find litteral gold coins, decorative figurines, and other stuff that can be sold to merchants so you never go lootless. The real price though is when you find housing items or mythical item parts and start your collection.
It is hard to quit once you get started on ESO Antiquities, but then again we play ESO for fun don’t we?
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