Scribing is going to render the community insane (and not in the positive way)

Gorø · April 25

Edit: it seems that grimoires cost 50k if you don't have a char that learnt them. Thus bringing the pricing to 450K gold for your first char then 700k gold for your other chars for a total of 1.15m gold. Not only that, it seems that redoing the same dailies doesn't guarantee a script. Thus, if you want to complete 12 everything on 12 chars, it will take nearly a year.

So, I've been testing scribing for these two weeks. I was more interested on how to earn the system when it will hit live than on the actual skills themselves.
Even made this scribing walkthrough for a better reference when the update hits live that you should totally checkout.

During my testing, I've noticed something that will anger your community which is the amount of repetitiveness that this system will make us endure. Scribing was mostly designed for combat oriented gameplay, thus, it comes to no surprise that it will peak the interest of the dungeons, arenas, trials and PvP community. Do you know what these communities have in common? They don't want to be imprisoned by an endless amount of questing.
For those who don't know, in order to access scribed skills aka grimoires (wield soul excluded), you'll have to buy them from the NPC after finishing the wing of the indrik quest (2 scribing quests: Starter quest + First wing quest), these grimoires are character bound.
So not only, you're forced to do the 2 same quest on all of your characters but you're also to spend 100k gold per character as those grimoires come at 10k gold each.

Let's assume you have 8 characters, this implies redoing the same quests 16 times and spending a total of 800K gold (720K if you're doing all the quests on all the chars to unlock soul burst for free)

The worst part is yet to come as in order to fully customize said grimoires, you'll need access to scripts, these are also bound. At the moment, there's a total of 66 scripts. 49 of them are behind daily quests and rewards of the worthy, 7 comes from the wing of the indrik (I won't count them as you're already forced to do this quest to access the grimoires), one from an achievement (I will come back to this later) and 9 comes from specific mages guilds (I won't count these as they're static and are located in the major cities).

If we go back to the 8 characters theory, this means you'll have to do a total of 392 daily quest (or reward of the worthy but you won't obtain all of them from that)

What about that one script from that one achievement? In order to unlock class mastery, you need 50 scraps that have low drop rates (30 master writs and only 1), so a total of 400 scraps.

In total, for the scribing system on 8 characters you need ~800K gold, ~408 quests and 400 scraps.
This is obviously not good. Especially if you have more than 8 characters.
Please just make the scripts and grimoires account learnt or at the very least only grimoires account learnt.

Gorø · April 25

Other suggestion would have been to make scripts unbound so it can at least create a purpose for the economy (other than the ink that is a whole problem on its own)

VixxVexx · April 25

Scripts will be available in your local crown store next quarter! For only 19.99! /S

Jolipinator · April 25

I thought they said something about the system being account wide, but every character still needed to do the intro quests? I must be misremembering.

Gorø · April 25

Jolipinator wrote: »

I thought they said something about the system being account wide, but every character still needed to do the intro quests? I must be misremembering.

Only the account upgrades are account wide. Everything that I stated in this post are character wide

Faulgor · April 25

Gorø wrote: »

Jolipinator wrote: »

I thought they said something about the system being account wide, but every character still needed to do the intro quests? I must be misremembering.

Only the account upgrades are account wide. Everything that I stated in this post are character wide

Account upgrades are account wide ... that's ... not surprising. What the heck are account upgrades though? If I understood you correctly, even scripts are character bound (what the falmer, ZOS?). So what's left to unlock account wide?

I don't mind the gold sink, or having to grind resources to scribe skills. But having to unlock everything on 20 characters is a no-go ZOS.

ZoeliTintanie · April 25

It is a bit confusing, why make it so tedious in regards to alts. Its sending mixed messages in regards to alts being encouraged or discouraged.

LunaFlora · April 25

Faulgor wrote: »

Gorø wrote: »

Jolipinator wrote: »

I thought they said something about the system being account wide, but every character still needed to do the intro quests? I must be misremembering.

Only the account upgrades are account wide. Everything that I stated in this post are character wide

Account upgrades are account wide ... that's ... not surprising. What the heck are account upgrades though? If I understood you correctly, even scripts are character bound (what the falmer, ZOS?). So what's left to unlock account wide?

I don't mind the gold sink, or having to grind resources to scribe skills. But having to unlock everything on 20 characters is a no-go ZOS.

the upgrades are the ability to use scripts i believe

xylena_lazarow · April 25

I never understood either why so many games these days hard lock competitive combat minmax stuff behind grinding casual non-combat activities like questing or crafting. These activities appeal to completely different player demographics that rarely overlap. The competitive combat players end up bored out of their minds feeling like they're wasting their time, the casual grind players lose interest because the rewards aren't important to them.

JerBearESO · April 25

Is it ever random which ones you get? If so that's kinda too much work but if everything is at least selectable then I can just get the specific things I need per Character which for me would be fine

Lykeion · April 25

Yes, as far as I can tell, it's a much more time-consuming system than the Psijic skill line. If zos really thinks this system is full of potential and expects it to shine in the community, they need to seriously reconsider how boring it is to get it

KlauthWarthog · April 25

That is what the crown store is there for.

Gorø · April 25

Faulgor wrote: »

Gorø wrote: »

Jolipinator wrote: »

I thought they said something about the system being account wide, but every character still needed to do the intro quests? I must be misremembering.

Only the account upgrades are account wide. Everything that I stated in this post are character wide

Account upgrades are account wide ... that's ... not surprising. What the heck are account upgrades though? If I understood you correctly, even scripts are character bound (what the falmer, ZOS?). So what's left to unlock account wide?

I don't mind the gold sink, or having to grind resources to scribe skills. But having to unlock everything on 20 characters is a no-go ZOS.

@Faulgor - Accounts upgrades are the ability to get the scripts by questing lol and ink with resources and enemy drops. That's about it lol

JerBearESO wrote: »

Is it ever random which ones you get? If so that's kinda too much work but if everything is at least selectable then I can just get the specific things I need per Character which for me would be fine

@JerBearESO - Yes (kinda), like all "affix" scripts will be unlocked with the same type of quests but the affix script you're getting per said quest is random yep. Drop chance is guaranteed tho. So let's say you need brittle on a char, you either are lucky and do 1 quest and get it OR unlucky and have to go through 18 more quests to get it.

Soraka · April 25

Hey we actually get something in Rewards of the worthy? At least there's that. Yeah I don't want to do endless pve grinding as I spend 95% of my time in Cyro.

Gorø · April 25

Soraka wrote: »

Hey we actually get something in Rewards of the worthy? At least there's that. Yeah I don't want to do endless pve grinding as I spend 95% of my time in Cyro.

@Soraka as a PvP player you can get 16 scripts with rewards of the worthy, 14 with Cyro dailies and 19 with IC dailies. For the remaining 10, you have a chance to get scraps from pvp (Unsure since PvP on PTS is barely possible sorry) and 9 you will have to fetch in specific location.
The guide I posted above shows them all

Soraka · April 25

Gorø wrote: »

Soraka wrote: »

Hey we actually get something in Rewards of the worthy? At least there's that. Yeah I don't want to do endless pve grinding as I spend 95% of my time in Cyro.

@Soraka as a PvP player you can get 16 scripts with rewards of the worthy, 14 with Cyro dailies and 19 with IC dailies. For the remaining 10, you have a chance to get scraps from pvp (Unsure since PvP on PTS is barely possible sorry) and 9 you will have to fetch in specific location.
The guide I posted above shows them all

Thank you! Good information.

CaperGuy · April 25

I have 40 characters between 2 accounts. I am not looking forward to anything that is only unlocked per character

Gorø · April 25

CaperGuy wrote: »

I have 40 characters between 2 accounts. I am not looking forward to anything that is only unlocked per character

Woah, that's like 1k quests for everything

Good luck (you're gonna need it)

Tannus15 · April 25

On the bright side most of the initial grimoires are pointless and not worth the effort to unlock.

robpr · April 25

Isn't it like BG styles, page is char bound but unlock to use is account wide?

Gorø · April 25

robpr wrote: »

Isn't it like BG styles, page is char bound but unlock to use is account wide?

no, all BGs style pages are account bound, that's why you never get them twice

Volckodav · April 25

thanks for very good information, that really give me a cold on the hype and make me recoinsider bying the chapter, NOT INTRESTED in endless same quest as I've got 17 char.

Soarora · April 25

I’m really concerned about the scripts. There’s no way that we can farm for all of them for every character… it needs to be account wide or this will become one of the worst grinds in ESO’s history.

Edit: if you can buy the scripts from the vendor then it at least makes things better, but then also if luminous ink has a low drop rate… cumulative amounts of grind…

Ingenon · April 25

Gorø wrote: »

If we go back to the 8 characters theory, this means you'll have to do a total of 392 daily quest (or reward of the worthy but you won't obtain all of them from that)

What about that one script from that one achievement? In order to unlock class mastery, you need 50 scraps that have low drop rates (30 master writs and only 1), so a total of 400 scraps.

In total, for the scribing system on 8 characters you need ~800K gold, ~408 quests and 400 scraps.
This is obviously not good. Especially if you have more than 8 characters.
Please just make the scripts and grimoires account learnt or at the very least only grimoires account learnt.

I play on PS/NA, so I can't hop onto PTS and try this myself. I am curious how long it took to do all the quests on the first alt. I see where you said in your online Scribing walkthrough that each additional alt will take 20-30 minutes to do the first 2 quests. I'm trying to get a handle on how many hours this scribing will take to unlock, total of how many hours on first alt, plus 20-30 minutes for each additional alt.

Separately, clock time wise, this sounds a lot like the grinding for rare style pages that many folks complained about during the recent Anniversary Event. I see in your guide where you said "Drop rate for luminous ink seems low".

Gorø · April 25

Ingenon wrote: »

Gorø wrote: »

If we go back to the 8 characters theory, this means you'll have to do a total of 392 daily quest (or reward of the worthy but you won't obtain all of them from that)

What about that one script from that one achievement? In order to unlock class mastery, you need 50 scraps that have low drop rates (30 master writs and only 1), so a total of 400 scraps.

In total, for the scribing system on 8 characters you need ~800K gold, ~408 quests and 400 scraps.
This is obviously not good. Especially if you have more than 8 characters.
Please just make the scripts and grimoires account learnt or at the very least only grimoires account learnt.

I play on PS/NA, so I can't hop onto PTS and try this myself. I am curious how long it took to do all the quests on the first alt. I see where you said in your online Scribing walkthrough that each additional alt will take 20-30 minutes to do the first 2 quests. I'm trying to get a handle on how many hours this scribing will take to unlock, total of how many hours on first alt, plus 20-30 minutes for each additional alt.

Separately, clock time wise, this sounds a lot like the grinding for rare style pages that many folks complained about during the recent Anniversary Event. I see in your guide where you said "Drop rate for luminous ink seems low".

Maybe give it like 3 hours max? And I say 3 hours while taking count the fact the waiting for WBs and delve bosses (since PTS is empty, the wait is nonexistant)

Gorø · April 25

Soarora wrote: »

I’m really concerned about the scripts. There’s no way that we can farm for all of them for every character… it needs to be account wide or this will become one of the worst grinds in ESO’s history.

Edit: if you can buy the scripts from the vendor then it at least makes things better, but then also if luminous ink has a low drop rate… cumulative amounts of grind…

@Soarora You can buy scripts from the vendor in the scholarium and the endless archive. But their shop changes every week and isn't guaranteed to have what you need

Soarora · April 25

Gorø wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

I’m really concerned about the scripts. There’s no way that we can farm for all of them for every character… it needs to be account wide or this will become one of the worst grinds in ESO’s history.

Edit: if you can buy the scripts from the vendor then it at least makes things better, but then also if luminous ink has a low drop rate… cumulative amounts of grind…

@Soarora You can buy scripts from the vendor in the scholarium and the endless archive. But their shop changes every week and isn't guaranteed to have what you need

Can you buy the scripts from the vendor before you’ve gotten them elsewhere? If not then there’s no reason for the vendor to be rotating. If so, then that’s good at least.

Gorø · April 25

Soarora wrote: »

Gorø wrote: »

Soarora wrote: »

I’m really concerned about the scripts. There’s no way that we can farm for all of them for every character… it needs to be account wide or this will become one of the worst grinds in ESO’s history.

Edit: if you can buy the scripts from the vendor then it at least makes things better, but then also if luminous ink has a low drop rate… cumulative amounts of grind…

@Soarora You can buy scripts from the vendor in the scholarium and the endless archive. But their shop changes every week and isn't guaranteed to have what you need

Can you buy the scripts from the vendor before you’ve gotten them elsewhere? If not then there’s no reason for the vendor to be rotating. If so, then that’s good at least.

@Soarora Yeah, they're available at any point as long as you did the wing of the indrik quest. Even if you haven't unlocked a single script in the past you can still buy them. They should have 3 scripts to 4 scripts per week

sarahthes · April 25

Gorø wrote: »

In total, for the scribing system on 8 characters you need ~800K gold, ~408 quests and 400 scraps.
This is obviously not good. Especially if you have more than 8 characters.
Please just make the scripts and grimoires account learnt or at the very least only grimoires account learnt.

Are you saying PC NA finally has another gold sink???

EF321 · April 25

sarahthes wrote: »

Gorø wrote: »

In total, for the scribing system on 8 characters you need ~800K gold, ~408 quests and 400 scraps.
This is obviously not good. Especially if you have more than 8 characters.
Please just make the scripts and grimoires account learnt or at the very least only grimoires account learnt.

Are you saying PC NA finally has another gold sink???

That's hardly a gold sink, 2 mil per account once.

Real new gold sink is empty soul gems, 156 gold from merchant

And less gold generated by vendoring filled gems.

Seraphayel · April 25

Scribing should be an account wide unlock and not per character. The same as ToT maybe, you get access easily, but still can do the quests on each character. But grimoires, scripts and everything should be per account. Otherwise this whole system will be terrible, even worse than Mage‘s Guild or Psijik on alts.