So, I was beginning to track the rewards that were dropping for me from doing my writs daily. I do writs on 27 characters a day (36 of them now!!), so I felt like I would have enough data to over ride any "noise" that was in the data from random RNG. I was initially tracking it on a spreadsheet, when I began to talk to a friend who writes add-ons, at the possibility of creating an add-on to track the drops of each. This led me to be searching the ESOUI add-ons, and come to find out, that Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter (BEST ADD-ON EVER FOR DOING WRITS!!!! Love you
@Dolgubon ) has been tracking this information for me for a while now. I just had to parse it out of the output that it gives me in chat. So I took the data and plugged it into Google Sheets to come up with some data about the drop rates of the major rewards from doing crafting writs.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yQDUjYNQVsIFl0ktkbkSlfYPkzP6pgCOTMQ-qCuzfaI/
*Spreadsheet has data about the returns from several crafting professions
1. Refining - Drop rates of Gold, Purple, Blue, and Green improvement materials, along with prices to purchase raw materials at to "break even"
2. Writ Rewards - Summary of the percentages of drops for "big" drops from doing daily writs. Data is aggregate across all characters, some of whom have limited motif knowledge, some that were learning traits while data was collected
3. Requirement/Writ Profits - FOR MAX LEVEL WRITS ONLY - Rotation of writ requests, materials needed, as well as profit analysis based on my own recorded drop rates
4. Master Merchant - Prices of the relevant items needed either to do writs, or writ rewards, to evaluate profits/costs. Updated every few weeks or so when I remember.
5. Remainder of the tabs are just where I record my individual information that the other tabs pull from.
A couple of notes about the data:
* Alt account does not have access to Summerset, so there is no Jewelry Crafting data for it (Gained access with release of Elsweyr, so is leveling JC line)
* Jewelry drops were changed after the release of Summerset, to only include Chromium Grains (they initially included Terne, Iridium, and Zircon), so the drop rate is artificially low for Jewelry Chromium Grains
* This data stretches back approximately a year, pre-Summerset release, my main account was therefore leveling up Jewelry Crafting through the data collection, as well as researching traits in Jewelry, this will bring down the drop rates for Jewelry crafting.
* For a majority of the data collection, Jewelry Writs were done at 8 a day at level 5 (Platinum), and 7 a day at level 1 (Pewter), this will also bring down the Chromium grain collection (but not surveys, it appears)
* All crafters know the 9 basic racial styles, all 4 base game purple, as well as Hollowjack and Skinchanger motifs.
* 15 crafters are full 9-trait, 15 are full 8-trait, the last 6 are learning traits.
* All crafters know all traits for Alchemy (with the exception of Clam Gall and Powdered Mother of Pearl and Dragon Bile and Blood on some), and all stones for Enchanting translated (a few are missing Hakeijo)
* For provisioning, crafters are only learning the purple recipes that drop from doing provisioning writs as I accumulate them. They also all know the Psijic Ambrosia gold recipe, since I have gotten thousands of fragments for that as well. This is why the drop rate of provisioning is so low, since only 1 character knows all the purple/gold recipes. I have started doing Tier 2/3/4/5 provisioning writs to gain access to drops of other purple recipes, which will slowly be learned by characters.
*The alt account was created during this time frame, so all the leveling of the skill lines, as well as the trait research and motif learning was all done while they were doing writs, which is probably why the drop rates on the alt account are slightly lower than those on the main account. Other than surveys which seems to be pretty consistent across both accounts.
I'm just sharing this here so that people who are looking for information about drop rates have a place to find this. I'll plan on periodically updating the spreadsheet every couple of weeks as I collect more data from doing writs.
*It appears that surveys have an approximately 1/8 chance of dropping while doing a writ. This is consistent at all levels of writs.
*It appears that the drop rate for a gold improvement material is a little under 30% (will have to check more on Chromium, but the recent tracking seems to support a similar drop rate)
*Alchemy/Enchanting master writs drop the more commonly, probably due to the ease of getting the drop rate highest (at about 1/7, or 14%)
*Without most motifs, the drop rate for Blacksmithing/Woodworking/Clothing master writs appears to be around 1/15 or 6% (but going up to about 1/10, or 10% with some basic motif knowledge)
EDIT: ADDED on 3/9/19
Added another tab to the document to try and determine profit from doing writs on a daily basis. It looks like writs on a single character will net approximately a 467k profit per month.
By necessity, some things needed to be estimated while creating it.
I used MM numbers from PC/NA (I'm in 3 trade guilds in 3 different locations, all with more than 50 million a week in sales guild wide)
I used values calculated from the drop rate of the writs that I've been tracking.
Master writs were valued based on a voucher sell price of 650g/voucher.
UPDATED: 7/24/19
EDIT 8/11/19
With Scalebreaker's release on PC tomorrow 8/12, data has updated with the last of the writs that will be done for this patch.
*notes
1) Master writ drop rate seemed to go up, I believe this is due to the sheer number of motifs some of my characters learned during the anniversary event.
2) Provisioning rates were low. 6 new characters who knew virtually no recipes probably bought this down some.
3) Chromium rates are still artificially low for the overall (alt account only has 4 characters doing max level writs) it's at nearly 25% for the main account.
4) Survey rates might be off because of bugs early in Elsweyr.
5) Individual rates for accounts can be seen on other tabs at the end, just didn't want to clutter the initial pages.
Edit 2/13/23
Things included in the spreadsheet linked:
1. Advice & Suggestions for doing daily writs, refining materials, leveling alts, add-ons. What affects drop rates of gold materials, surveys, and master writs.
2. A color-coded sheet showing survey reset paths (what I've found to be the shortest, but if you find a shorter one, please share!)
3. Results of refining millions of materials both pre- and post- Meticulous Disassembly being added to the game... yes, it most definitely increases your improvement materials received when refining
4. Detailed results of drops from daily writs with nearly a quarter million writs done total across all 7 crafts! Special jewelry rewards tracking for the 4 grain types you get from those!
5. Writ Rewards and Writ Profits calculated out for both max level writs and level 1 writs (hint 1: do your writs at max level!)
6. Individual refining results for the 4 crafts both pre- and post- Meticulous Disassembly (as well as even pre-Multicraft). (hint 2: refine all at once, save yourself time)
7. Per patch results of drops from daily writs to check for any major changes (there aren't really many)
8. Prices included from the average of the 3 trading guilds I'm in on PC/NA so the value of all the rewards can be continuously updated.