top level crafting writs a net loss of mats?

stewg73

That is, unless the survey report drop rate is higher from higher level writs. Does anyone know? Have gone through the last 3 years of patch notes but there is nothing regarding survey report drop rates.

If the RNG on survey reports is the same on level 1 as level 10, then, for example on a clothier writ:

level 10 : cost of around 40 ancestor silk/rubedo leather for a reward of 15, so a net loss of around 25 of a mat that is currently going for around 40g in guild stores > 1000g
in addition you'll get 10 of a lesser mat and about 700g, so a smaller loss, but still a loss, plus your time to do this writ when you could be doing many other things in game.

the trade off of course is the chance of a survey report for a chance to get from 72 up to 160 ancestor silk for eg (assuming max CP into "plentiful harvest" perk for the char you use to do the surveys)

Level 1: cost 15 jute for eg for a reward of 20 jute and 5 flax for eg. a net gain of mats - granted not overly useful mats - but still a gain, PLUS 545g

plus the chance for a survey report.

So it seems to me you're FAR better off saving 10 skill points (per craft!), and your top level mats, and just waft around the crafting tables on level one and just wait for the survey reports to drop for your (max craft levelled) farming char to harvest your top level mats from, UNLESS they have a lower drop rate.

(I'm ignoring hirelings in this discussion)

Am I missing something?

Zodiarkslayer

Rank 10 writs have much higher chance to drop upgrade mats. Their drop chance isn't low at all, depending on the craft and RnG you can get 2 to 5 gold mat drops per week, per character. There are double drops possible. And with every reward coffer comes a guaranteed drop of one piece of equipment drom that specific craft in either with either ornate or intricate as a trait. Ornate two handed weapons are worth 281 gold. That is quite substantial, if it pikes up daily.

As an example, I have 40 chromium grains dropped over the last 15 days or so with 7 characters doing the writs (I was on holiday, so it's difficult to estimate, but you get the jist, right?). That is 1.2mil gold on PC EU, where I play exclusively.

And it is my experience that the mats gathered from surveys are enough to sustain your daily writ crafting. What I do is to let the surveys pile up, until I run out of mats and then collect everything in one sweep. That will also give me a lot of upgrade mats from refining.
I also buy around 3k of each if the style stones from the ingame merchants every ESO+ free trial. That will get me through a year, roughly.

I do not do Alchemy, because of the amount of super expensive mats, that I would have to stockpile, because they are very inconvenient to acquire from farming and the surveys do not give the mats back that you need to do the alchemy writs. These surveys are entirely random and compose of only flowers and mushrooms, and not animal remains.

Bottom line: Don't do Alchemy, the others are fine.

freespirit

I do 8 sets per day and all crafts....

I did an experiment a while ago, on my crafting dailies only characters, I decided to save the gold up and see what happened!

What happened was that they all fairly quickly became millionaires!!

I always have ESO+ so all my material rewards immediately go into my craft bag, I pay no attention to the minor rewards BUT always keep an eye on the gold mat drops. I don't farm mats ever, I sometimes pick up nodes as I am doing other stuff but I never buy anything except for basic style stones from npcs.

My conclusion from this is that crafting dailies, when taking into account surveys are totally self sufficient, otherwise I would have to farm or purchase mats at some point and I don't.

As far as Alchemy dailies are concerned, it appears at least from my perspective that the reward containers contain enough mushrooms(which btw don't drop from surveys only flowers/plants do) and animal parts(butterfly wings, scrib jelly, mudcrab chitin etc) to be able to be self sufficient too. Again I never farm mushrooms or animal parts but frequently actually have enough spare to sell some!

Edit :- I have storage chests full of surveys too, I find them mind numbingly boring and do them rarely!

stewg73

Thanks guys. I do agree with you freespirit, the alchemy writs are the most profitable. I have to say I did spend 30 minutes farming mudcrabs at one stage about 6 months ago but that has been the only time I've needed to put in time to sustain doing them, and the surveys that drop provide a ridiculous amount of the useful reagents eg columbine, that I have more than I could ever use so I sell it.

I have started keeping track of the writs, surveys and tempers that I receive on my "level 1" craft-skilled chars vs my max level craft-skilled chars, to see if there is a difference in drop rate of surveys, writs and tempers and will post back once I have enough data to be meaningful.

Dagoth_Rac

stewg73 wrote: »

Thanks guys. I do agree with you freespirit, the alchemy writs are the most profitable. I have to say I did spend 30 minutes farming mudcrabs at one stage about 6 months ago but that has been the only time I've needed to put in time to sustain doing them, and the surveys that drop provide a ridiculous amount of the useful reagents eg columbine, that I have more than I could ever use so I sell it.

I have started keeping track of the writs, surveys and tempers that I receive on my "level 1" craft-skilled chars vs my max level craft-skilled chars, to see if there is a difference in drop rate of surveys, writs and tempers and will post back once I have enough data to be meaningful.

There are people who have been tracking this kind of data for years and years across hundreds of thousands of daily writs. It is a 3% chance of a gold upgrade mat at Level 1 and a 30% chance at Level 10. Jewelry is a little weirder because you can get any type of upgrade mat, not just legendary, and there is a chance of double drops, and a chance for full platings instead of grains. It gets pretty complicated. But it is still more upgrade mats and higher quality upgrade mats at max jewelry crafting level.

FireBreathingNord

"Tracking Daily Writ Reward Drop Rates & Refining Rates Bookmark"
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/459690/tracking-daily-writ-reward-drop-rates-refining-rates/p1 *

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yQDUjYNQVsIFl0ktkbkSlfYPkzP6pgCOTMQ-qCuzfaI/

stewg73

Wow. thanks so much FireBreathingNord! I searched the forum specifically for drop rate on surveys with respect to crafting level without success, and this was in the post from the link you posted

"*It appears that surveys have an approximately 1/8 chance of dropping while doing a writ. This is consistent at all levels of writs."

This was exactly what I wanted to know. My impression was that level didn't seem to make much difference.

The google doc was very helpful on other things I hadn't considered. Worth a read for anyone that does the daily crafting writs on multiple chars

Thanks again!

stewg73

Wow again. Reading that first tab in the google docs in second link from FireBreathingNord, I see that Dolgubins lazy writ crafter addon (which I have used forever) keeps tracks of all these things. It looks like the creator has updated this function since the google doc was created.

In the doc it states typing /outputwritstats give you the stats, but I noticed as I typed in chat, that /outputwritchances is also now an option. I selected that and got the following in chat, which I just copied using the pChat addon. It lists for every craft, and it includes EVERYTHING you've ever received though (including style stones, trait stones etc) so it is long. Here is the edited version (ie all the individual "white meat" and amethyst" eg taken out) for anyone interested in more recent stats (the work done in the spreadsheet was 2019). I do have a mixture of levelled alts about half level one and half maxed

Total Writs Completed: 10883

Blacksmith Stats
num: 1595
[Tempering Alloy]: 1 in 4.71
survey: 1 in 7.67
master: 1 in 29
voucher: 1 in 1.03

Clothier Stats
num: 1594
[Dreugh Wax]: 1 in 4.86
survey: 1 in 8.17
master: 1 in 21.84

Enchanter Stats
num: 1575
master: 1 in 18.53
survey: 1 in 7.88
voucher: 1 in 5.81
[Kuta]: 1 in 4.32

Alchemist Stats
num: 1565
master: 1 in 12.04
voucher: 1 in 3.31
survey: 1 in 8.55
lead: 1 in 1565
[Powdered Mother of Pearl]: 1 in 43.47

Provisioner Stats
master: 1 in 47.78
voucher: 1 in 6.02
green recipes: 1 in 1.18
purple recipes: 1 in 76.45
blue recipes: 1 in 8.45
[Bervez Juice]: 1 in 1.01

Woodworker Stats
num: 1578
[Rosin]: 1 in 4.65
voucher: 1 in 1.26
survey: 1 in 7.66
master: 1 in 24.66

Jewelry Stats
num: 1447
voucher: 1 in 0.25
intricate: 1 in 1
[Terne Plating]: 1 in 723.5
[Zircon Plating]: 1 in 361.75
[Chromium Plating]: 1 in 723.5
[Terne Grains]: 1 in 6.55
[Iridium Grains]: 1 in 2.85
[Zircon Grains]: 1 in 3.71
[Chromium Grains]: 1 in 4.17
survey: 1 in 8.32
master: 1 in 12.16
lead: 1 in 1447
[Ancestor Silk]: 1 in 96.47
glyph: 1 in 1447

So about 1 in 8 surveys still is about right. I didn't realise I ever got full platings in jewelry writs (a total of 6 out of 1447 writs so forgive me for missing those!

I also didn't know you could get ancestor silk and glyphs doing jewelry writs either! (15 and 1 respectively out of the 1447 writs)

Thanks again FireBreathingNord, you saved me a [snip] of time!

[edited for profanity bypass]

zaria

In my experience doing crafting writs is that I tend to not get enough platinum. Wood, ore an silk I have plenty of but platinum I have to buy. Its not that I don't do jewelry surveys, it the I prioritizes.
Does all the surveys on the same two alts.

FireBreathingNord

zaria wrote: »

In my experience doing crafting writs is that I tend to not get enough platinum. Wood, ore an silk I have plenty of but platinum I have to buy. Its not that I don't do jewelry surveys, it the I prioritizes.
Does all the surveys on the same two alts.

I can relate to that feeling. When I'm out, I like to complete a bunch of jewelry surveys at once, usually around 20 or the highest stack I have available (I put them all in storage chests) in one session. That gives me enough for at least a little while.

JARTHEGREY

I've been wondering about the this for a couple of days now, since coming back to being able to spend some decent time in game. The past 2 weeks I've just been completing daily writs on my 7 (all at max level) characters and then at the weekend - found that I ran out of Platinum and TA runestones.

At first I thought the number of Platinum ounces needed had been increased, but I don't think that is so. But I did a quick calc and for Jewelry Writs - Ring = 10 Oz and Necklace = 15 Oz.

Each daily writ rotates to require 3 rings / 2 Necklaces / 1 & 1 - so an outlay of 25 - 30oz.

As we all know - there are no Jewelry Hirelings so in the reward coffer (for Jewelry) you get 7 Platinum ounces and usually a Platinum Necklace or Ring (to deconstruct). So around 10oz in total, leaving a deficit of 15 - 20 oz which you can get from Platinum Nodes (3oz per node I think) which means you need to find 7 nodes - per day.

As for TA runestones, every single enchanter writ requires 2 TA Runestones which never used to be a problem (for me). I used to get TA from the reward coffer, from emails and from deconstruction of glyphs as well as from the runestone nodes out in the wild. But again, just recently it seems the frequency of TA runestones I'm getting has declined.

As has been mentioned, the cost of buying these mats make completing the writs unprofitable. But imo - the bottom line is, 'you dont have to do the writs' and that is how I will proceed. If I have the mats I'll do the writs, if I dont have the mats - I don't.

vsrs_au

I created a thread recently begging ZOS to add jewelry hireling emails, but after a while the thread just dropped out of the first page. We really need this feature for long-term jewelry crafting to be viable. We don't all have the time (or motivation) to do the boring task of jewelry farming.

zaria

Now I will say jewelry crafting writs are still profitable primarily because you have an decent chance for Chromium grains, its just not self supporting.

Necrotech_Master

for me personally i believe that daily writs are absolutely a waste of mats and i hate doing them lol