Skyrim talk:Dragon Hunting

Unexpected quest start

I was put in the middle of this quest before even starting it, and without doing 'Rebuilding the Blades'. I just killed a random dragon at a word wall and suddenly I got the update 'Return to Esbern'. It took me a while to figure out which quest the message referred to as I hadn't been sent by him in the first place! Vlad the Imperial 07:37, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

It's a (well-known) bug, but I can't find which page it's on. It's probably NOT worth noting here though, because there's no indication at all in the game that this is the quest that owns the (meaningless-to-the-player) Misc Quest update. Esbern's page is likely the best place, since his name the only piece of information you actually have when the bug triggers. Aliana 09:01, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I've updated the bug note on Esbern's page to link here, and added a note to this page that the broken quest can only be fixed via console. (This bug appears to happen if you kill a dragon after starting "Rebuilding the Blades" but haven't asked Esbern for a dragon location.) Kutulu (talk) 18:01, 25 December 2012 (GMT)

Repeating this quest.

Is there any data available about what determines if Esbern will give you (another one of) this quest? I have been trying to find the quickest way for him to give me a new one, but it seems very random. Some times he will give me a new dragon when fast traveling from the balcony to the front door of Sky Haven Temple, taking under 1 hour ingame time before I talk to him again. Other times I return to him after doing a bunch of other stuff taking 3, 4 or even 5 ingame days and he won't have found a new dragon yet. Maybe someone with CK skills can shed some light on this? 62.194.197.15 13:25, 14 January 2013 (GMT)

No dragon souls?

This quest is an extremely unreliable way of racking up dragon souls. I've been repeating it in an effort to test some settings in Dragonborn, and what I'm finding is that roughly only one in three dragons is providing a soul. If I take the blades to a new dragon lair that I've never been to before, I always get a soul, but now that I'm pretty much out of those, it's been very thin on the ground. --Morrolan (talk) 19:57, 5 April 2013 (GMT)

Probably due to the bug where respawning dragons do not give souls. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 03:02, 6 May 2013 (GMT)

Except that sometimes they do give souls. The impression I was getting is that if I'm away from the dragon lair long enough for the dragon to respawn normally, then I get a soul, but if I just keep on hammering away with this quest, going to lair after lair, the dragons spawned by this quest don't give souls. --Morrolan (talk) 19:57, 6 May 2013 (GMT)

Return to Esbern can sometimes crop up (again) even if you have recruited Blades and done a dragon run

I had recruited 3 Blade members and even did a dragon run with them.

Then some time later, I got this Misc quest line pop up again, nominally whilst I was casually killing some other dragon which had the bad idea of crossing my path.

Given that I am on 360, I presume that I am resigned to putting up with it cluttering my quests.

It is too late for me but maybe the solution is to always have a dragon slaying quest task on the back-burner?

Chaosworrier (talk) 12:26, 20 May 2014 (GMT)