The Elder Scrolls Online – Scrying Basics Guide, How to Scry Antiquities

You’ve unlocked the Antiquities system in The Elder Scrolls Online: Greymoor, and now you can start scrying leads for new items and loot. How does Scrying work, and what are Leads? With this guide you’ll learn the answer to both question.

Scrying basics.

You use Scrying to locate antiquities based on the Leads you have on hand. Leads can be found damn near everywhere – from world bosses, chests, public dungeons, delves, and within digsites of other antiquities – and these can all be viewed from your journal. Once you unlock the activity and the Scrying skill-line you should notice a new Antiquities tab at the top of your journal, now the second option available after quests.

Within this tab you’ll notice a section titled “Scryable”, followed by zone names below. The Scryable section is where you’ll find a list of all the Leads you have on hand that you can scry within the zone you are currently in. The sections for the zones below highlight what leads you have on hand for that particular zone, but you’ll need to head there first if you wish to dig up those Leads.

From the Scryable Section select the Lead you wish to unearth. At the start this will be the free green-quality Leads: these are the easiest Leads to scry, and are not locked behind your Scrying skill-line level. Once you are ready to hunt down a lead tap the Scry hotkey as displayed in the bottom-right of the screen to bring up the Scrying mini-game.

You’ll notice a whole bunch of grids (“facets”) covered in different icons and six glowing points. You’ll start from the central grid at the very bottom of the board (above your turn indicator), and the goal is to connect to all of the glowing points. If you miss a few you won’t fail the scry, but you will have to bumble about more digsites before finding the actual item. Connect them all and you will have only one digsite to deal with.

The trick is to click on grids connected to other grids with a matching icon. This will activate all of the matching icons adjacent to one another, and the goal is to connect to as many of the glowing points as possible before you run out of moves. This is pretty simple to do with green-quality leads, but as you climb the ladder netting all six glowing points will become more of a challenge. Thankfully, there are skills you can unlock as you level Scrying that make the task easier to accomplish.

First is the Coalescence skill: this will unite a hexagonal cluster of grids, turning all the grids within into the same icon as the central grid. The Dilation skill will claim all icons of the selected type that touch your area of control, in addition to any matching icons that are adjacent. Farsight will will allow you to claim a line of icons stretching out from your area of control.

You’re essentially playing a complex game of connect the dots. Connect the bottom-central grid you start at to as many of the glowing points as possible, and use the skills you have available to make the task easier. Once you’ve successfully located the proper digsite it’s Excavation time. To keep things simple I wrote a separate guide for that, so be sure to check it out if you’d like to know more.