Where is the ink?

sarahthes

virtus753 wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drops can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

Do they mean the drop chances or only the amounts for their comment regarding Plentiful Harvest?

Plentiful Harvest should not change drop chances unless it is bugged. When it works properly, it can only proc when you draw an eligible mat from an eligible source. It thus only improves the amount you get, not how often you get it. The yield is improved by the chance quoted in the tooltip: a 50% chance means 50% greater yield on average.

There are a couple of cases where it is bugged so it does improve drop rates, but these are rare exceptions: Pulverized Titanium from jewelry nodes and bait from clothing survey nodes are the only cases I'm aware of where PH works but not as it should.

It doubles the drops if ink drops, some of the time. I get a lot of double ink drops.

Konstanz

cyclonus11 wrote: »

CrashTest wrote: »

Do all mob types drop ink or is it just bosses?

I only got 1 ink from killing something, and it was a trash mob in a delve. The rest of the inks I've found were in nodes and containers.

i got ink from IA in a urn. on xbox btw.

ZOS_Kevin

virtus753 wrote: »

Do they mean the drop chances or only the amounts for their comment regarding Plentiful Harvest?

We should have clarified better. We meant the amount when referencing Plentiful Harvest. Thanks for asking for the clarification. Adjusting the original comment now.

virtus753

sarahthes wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drops can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

Do they mean the drop chances or only the amounts for their comment regarding Plentiful Harvest?

Plentiful Harvest should not change drop chances unless it is bugged. When it works properly, it can only proc when you draw an eligible mat from an eligible source. It thus only improves the amount you get, not how often you get it. The yield is improved by the chance quoted in the tooltip: a 50% chance means 50% greater yield on average.

There are a couple of cases where it is bugged so it does improve drop rates, but these are rare exceptions: Pulverized Titanium from jewelry nodes and bait from clothing survey nodes are the only cases I'm aware of where PH works but not as it should.

It doubles the drops if ink drops, some of the time. I get a lot of double ink drops.

Yes, as have I. I'm asking Kevin to confirm it is working as it should, since his wording is ambiguous about whether PH in this case affects drop rates or drop amounts. We know that PH is programmed in some cases to work abnormally.

virtus753

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

virtus753 wrote: »

Do they mean the drop chances or only the amounts for their comment regarding Plentiful Harvest?

We should have clarified better. We meant the amount when referencing Plentiful Harvest. Thanks for asking for the clarification. Adjusting the original comment now.

Appreciate the quick reply!

BlueRaven

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I have plentiful harvest on all of my characters. Does not seem to make much of a difference concerning inks.

But I have kind of already mentally crossed off scribing. I am actually getting annoyed by it. Mainly, because it does not seem very alt friendly, I keep thinking about all the rigmarole it’s going to take to unlock things on all of my alts, and quite frankly I feel over it.

It’s a nice chapter but to me anyway, this “extra” system is a bust.

Elvenheart

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I’ve played Gold Road every day since it came out. The first thing I did was all scribing quest on one character. Then I did the first scribing quest on 10 other characters. Then I collected all the free scripts at the mages guilds. Then proceeded on the first character to start doing five dailies a day, the three new dailies in West Weald and the mages guild and fighters guild dailies. I’ve done them daily and have almost all of the scripts. So that means I’ve done lots of Mirrormoor incursions, delves, world bosses and their adds, and I’ve done the quests in both public dungeons. For the weekly endeavor, I poisoned enemies and have that done.

After doing all of that, along with lots of node harvesting here and there on the way to these events, I have the initial 12 inks that I got from the scribing quest, and three more have dropped for me - only three. I think the drop rate is way too low. How can we feel comfortable experimenting with these new scribing skills if it is so hard to obtain for some of us? People with a ton of gold can buy them from guild traders I guess, but what about everyone else?

Edited to add: I have the Plentiful Harvest CP, but I also usually have a companion out most of the time. I wonder if that somehow affects the drop rate like someone hypothesized above?

Necrotech_Master

Elvenheart wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I’ve played Gold Road every day since it came out. The first thing I did was all scribing quest on one character. Then I did the first scribing quest on 10 other characters. Then I collected all the free scripts at the mages guilds. Then proceeded on the first character to start doing five dailies a day, the three new dailies in West Weald and the mages guild and fighters guild dailies. I’ve done them daily and have almost all of the scripts. So that means I’ve done lots of Mirrormoor incursions, delves, world bosses and their adds, and I’ve done the quests in both public dungeons. For the weekly endeavor, I poisoned enemies and have that done.

After doing all of that, along with lots of node harvesting here and there on the way to these events, I have the initial 12 inks that I got from the scribing quest, and three more have dropped for me - only three. I think the drop rate is way too low. How can we feel comfortable experimenting with these new scribing skills if it is so hard to obtain for some of us? People with a ton of gold can buy them from guild traders I guess, but what about everyone else?

Edited to add: I have the Plentiful Harvest CP, but I also usually have a companion out most of the time. I wonder if that somehow affects the drop rate like someone hypothesized above?

to be fair they have confirmed that boss enemies dropping ink is bugged right now, and not dropping at all

and the drop chances from basemobs are so low as to be almost 0

hopefully that will be fixed on the next incremental so combat might actually be more rewarding for ink than it is now

Konstanz

Yamenstein wrote: »

Harvested like 20 nodes. Nothing. Would have liked at least 1. Honestly. Introduce a system like this why? I can only assume because you need to stretch out the grind for longer because you don’t have your normal release later this year.

has anyone gotten inks in craglorn?

virtus753

Konstanz wrote: »

Yamenstein wrote: »

Harvested like 20 nodes. Nothing. Would have liked at least 1. Honestly. Introduce a system like this why? I can only assume because you need to stretch out the grind for longer because you don’t have your normal release later this year.

has anyone gotten inks in craglorn?

Yes. Including 2x when Plentiful Harvest procs.

virtus753

BlueRaven wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I have plentiful harvest on all of my characters. Does not seem to make much of a difference concerning inks.

If you have ever gotten 2x Ink at once, that is Plentiful Harvest working.



Kevin confirmed above that it doesn't change the drop rate, only the amount you get when it does drop. So far my pulls from resource nodes have been exactly equally divided between 1x and 2x, as I would expect with PH at max (50% chance to roll again for Ink). I have not yet seen a double drop from enemies.

Elvenheart

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Elvenheart wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I’ve played Gold Road every day since it came out. The first thing I did was all scribing quest on one character. Then I did the first scribing quest on 10 other characters. Then I collected all the free scripts at the mages guilds. Then proceeded on the first character to start doing five dailies a day, the three new dailies in West Weald and the mages guild and fighters guild dailies. I’ve done them daily and have almost all of the scripts. So that means I’ve done lots of Mirrormoor incursions, delves, world bosses and their adds, and I’ve done the quests in both public dungeons. For the weekly endeavor, I poisoned enemies and have that done.

After doing all of that, along with lots of node harvesting here and there on the way to these events, I have the initial 12 inks that I got from the scribing quest, and three more have dropped for me - only three. I think the drop rate is way too low. How can we feel comfortable experimenting with these new scribing skills if it is so hard to obtain for some of us? People with a ton of gold can buy them from guild traders I guess, but what about everyone else?

Edited to add: I have the Plentiful Harvest CP, but I also usually have a companion out most of the time. I wonder if that somehow affects the drop rate like someone hypothesized above?

to be fair they have confirmed that boss enemies dropping ink is bugged right now, and not dropping at all

and the drop chances from basemobs are so low as to be almost 0

hopefully that will be fixed on the next incremental so combat might actually be more rewarding for ink than it is now

If bosses have a higher chance of dropping ink than other mobs, that could be a good thing that could help this issue.

Orbital78

@ZOS_Kevin Do you know if Archive boss chests will have a chance to drop ink after the incremental patch? What bosses are intended to have ink drops, and is it better odds than harvesting or general npc/mob slaying?

kind_hero

Elvenheart wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I’ve played Gold Road every day since it came out. The first thing I did was all scribing quest on one character. Then I did the first scribing quest on 10 other characters. Then I collected all the free scripts at the mages guilds. Then proceeded on the first character to start doing five dailies a day, the three new dailies in West Weald and the mages guild and fighters guild dailies. I’ve done them daily and have almost all of the scripts. So that means I’ve done lots of Mirrormoor incursions, delves, world bosses and their adds, and I’ve done the quests in both public dungeons. For the weekly endeavor, I poisoned enemies and have that done.

After doing all of that, along with lots of node harvesting here and there on the way to these events, I have the initial 12 inks that I got from the scribing quest, and three more have dropped for me - only three. I think the drop rate is way too low. How can we feel comfortable experimenting with these new scribing skills if it is so hard to obtain for some of us? People with a ton of gold can buy them from guild traders I guess, but what about everyone else?

Edited to add: I have the Plentiful Harvest CP, but I also usually have a companion out most of the time. I wonder if that somehow affects the drop rate like someone hypothesized above?

Wow... this sounds harder than my busiest day at work

I really hope the devs are collecting this kind of feedback.

As others have said, I don't understand what they wanted to achieve by implementing this system in this way, with a drop rate so low. Why not have some ink be bound, so it won't affect the market?

Scribing is great in theory. I loved the presentation videos. But as it is right now, it's a system for a small minority who don't mind to invest many hours in grinding or tons of gold in buying it. It's certainly not a feature that everyone can enjoy by learning the system, after finishing the quests. Where is the fun in experimenting with your new abilities? Especially with a system that alters the visuals and behaviour of your skills?

My experience is that I found the system too grindy, so, I can live without it, I don't care much about it. What saddens me is that ZOS never learns from it's mistakes, they are so confident in their analysis, but fail to really innovate the game, to keep it fresh in a market busy with very good titles. Even this chapter is not mindblowing, apart from some eye candy that people were nostalgic about (Skingrad), the zone and it's quests only repeat the same formula that has been done in the past years, only with more fetch quests and unrewarding time sinks.

FeedbackOnly

The grind is unrealistic.... reminds me of when cp was account wide.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

The grind is unrealistic.... reminds me of when cp was account wide.

Not at all, you can buy ink from other players should you wish to.

Aurielle

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

FeedbackOnly wrote: »

The grind is unrealistic.... reminds me of when cp was account wide.

Not at all, you can buy ink from other players should you wish to.

At a rate of 80k-100k per ink? So 240k-300k gold per skill? And what if the skill you ultimately scribe is terrible in actual use? Now we’re up to 480k-600k to try again?

Not all people who play this game have millions upon millions of gold in reserve, unlike those of you who make grinding for lucrative items your full-time in-game activity. I personally have ~3 million gold, and have never had much more than that. The grind is unrealistic if you plan to actually play the game, rather than spending every moment of your available play time running the crafting mode circuits on Bleakrock Isle.

Aurielle

kind_hero wrote: »

Elvenheart wrote: »

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Jaraal wrote: »

Can you guys confirm or deny that all characters on an account that has unlocked the Sigils have an equal chance to acquire ink?

Checked in with the dev team on this. Yes they do. The base drop rate is account-wide. However an important caveat, the drop quantity can be impacted per character if Plentiful Harvest CP is invested in on a specific character.

I’ve played Gold Road every day since it came out. The first thing I did was all scribing quest on one character. Then I did the first scribing quest on 10 other characters. Then I collected all the free scripts at the mages guilds. Then proceeded on the first character to start doing five dailies a day, the three new dailies in West Weald and the mages guild and fighters guild dailies. I’ve done them daily and have almost all of the scripts. So that means I’ve done lots of Mirrormoor incursions, delves, world bosses and their adds, and I’ve done the quests in both public dungeons. For the weekly endeavor, I poisoned enemies and have that done.

After doing all of that, along with lots of node harvesting here and there on the way to these events, I have the initial 12 inks that I got from the scribing quest, and three more have dropped for me - only three. I think the drop rate is way too low. How can we feel comfortable experimenting with these new scribing skills if it is so hard to obtain for some of us? People with a ton of gold can buy them from guild traders I guess, but what about everyone else?

Edited to add: I have the Plentiful Harvest CP, but I also usually have a companion out most of the time. I wonder if that somehow affects the drop rate like someone hypothesized above?

Wow... this sounds harder than my busiest day at work

I really hope the devs are collecting this kind of feedback.

As others have said, I don't understand what they wanted to achieve by implementing this system in this way, with a drop rate so low. Why not have some ink be bound, so it won't affect the market?

Scribing is great in theory. I loved the presentation videos. But as it is right now, it's a system for a small minority who don't mind to invest many hours in grinding or tons of gold in buying it. It's certainly not a feature that everyone can enjoy by learning the system, after finishing the quests. Where is the fun in experimenting with your new abilities? Especially with a system that alters the visuals and behaviour of your skills?

My experience is that I found the system too grindy, so, I can live without it, I don't care much about it. What saddens me is that ZOS never learns from it's mistakes, they are so confident in their analysis, but fail to really innovate the game, to keep it fresh in a market busy with very good titles. Even this chapter is not mindblowing, apart from some eye candy that people were nostalgic about (Skingrad), the zone and it's quests only repeat the same formula that has been done in the past years, only with more fetch quests and unrewarding time sinks.

It unfortunately seems like the intended purpose of scribing was to keep players logging in (and hopefully checking out the Crown Store) — not because they’re having fun with the new system, but because they’re having to grind and grind and grind to actually use the new system.

I honestly don’t understand this game, sometimes. On the one hand, we have fantastic QOL features designed to reduce grinding, like set collections and gear transmutation / reconstitution. On the other, we have … scribing, where in order to use the system, you have to grind for days to get scripts on each character, and then spend many, many hours mindlessly harvesting crafting nodes to experiment with the system. Scribing somehow bundles two mainly RNG-based grinds into one system. Bravo… *slow clap*

BlueRaven

Got my first two inks last night, from hitting a node I presume, while questing.

I thought about scribing an ability onto one of my alts and then froze. The inks seem far too precious to waste on experimentation, so I am just going to passively collect them for now.

darvaria

I'm just not playing until they make ink more readily available. The game isn't fun anyway. And I agree, there shouldn't even be any ink. This is just a way for guild stores to jack up the demand for gold. How are they still advertising "cheap crowns"? I really want to know how they do this? I have reported 2 players that do it in zone chat. Both of them contacted me on discord with some sketchy sounding transaction. Also, wanting to sell me any run in the game, any title. The price of jewelry mats and other upgrade materials has really gone down. And NOW, you are letting this creep back in the game with ink.

There should be no ink. And if you don't farm gold (which I don't ever do), you have to use your crowns to get it. TBH, this wouldn't really be a problem with me because right now I'm sitting on 35k of crowns. But I refuse to buy it because I'm convinced that those players that corner the market depend on players buying gold with crowns. And really what does some players do with $20-$30M gold a week. We've even had players on the forums say it was their right to "buy a potato from a guild member for $20M if they wanted to". There is only one reason to keep accumulating that much gold. I have around 60M and can't see a need for more. Unless I started buying up a lot of ink. I'm certainly not going to sell any gold or buy crowns to sell from anyone but ZOS. Don't open a door for RWT. I hope you have those "cheap crowns" under control. I have reported 2 from yelping in zone. I'm not on enough to see many. Anyone that sees players advertising these runs or cheap crown exchanges REPORT.

JUST GET RID OF THIS GOLD SINK. Eliminate ink and don't facilitate RWT

BergisMacBride

Apologies if this already been brought up since I haven't had the time to read all of this thread:

Seems to me one of the easiest ways to increase ink drops is to have them drop in surveys like ninrcrux. Would give incentive for all those folks banking their surveys and create abit more stable supply of ink without completely tanking the market for them.

darvaria

And YES. Players are correct in saying they have to "invest" to use the expansion they purchased. Either time or from selling crowns.

You will realize like you finally did with jewelry upgrades, that it costs too much for the average player to use. I pay my sub, buy my crowns for what I need in this game. I don't want to get jacked on a skill I've already paid for.

There needs to be a guaranteed way to get ink. From Rewards of the Worthy, Daily Dungeon & BG, Trial Runs, Even TOT daily. I'm not bothering with this RNG. Put some in daily rewards. FFS we don't need more research scrolls there.

Kallykat

I think this is a system we're meant to play and experience over time, not all in the first weeks. I also think drop rates won't seem quite so bad in a few months or a year when the boss drop rate has been fixed and the market has more supply. Additionally, I wouldn't be surprised if ZOS does add more sources like occasional inks from endeavors or daily login rewards. (Frankly, I think they should have put it somewhere on the June dailies calendar, but maybe you can't have ink collected on an account at all until you complete the quests on your first character?)

That said, it would be nice to have at least one guaranteed repeatable source of ink that didn't rely on RNG. I also understand the frustration of not being able to immediately experiment with a system that ZOS has been hyping for months. I think they could have implemented a way to test out scribed skills in the Scholarium's training room before "buying" them with ink (as someone else mentioned a few pages back). Alternately, they could have had a free scribing period for the first few weeks to allow players to enjoy the new feature and get a feel for the system while ink supplies were building. I seem to recall them doing something similar with skills/abilities/cp after implementing massive changes to that system a few years back. I don't think they managed expectations very well regarding this issue.

To sum up, I understand the desire to make scribing a system with longevity and to make new scribed skilled something players have to work to achieve; however, I think making it too difficult to experiment with the new system out of the gate while people were hyped was an error.

Jaraal

Kallykat wrote: »

That said, it would be nice to have at least one guaranteed repeatable source of ink that didn't rely on RNG.

There is. It's called completing the quest on each character. That is a guaranteed 240 inks over 20 characters, and you can delete one character and make a new one over and over again until you have thousands of ink collected. Zero RNG involved.

Necrotech_Master

Jaraal wrote: »

Kallykat wrote: »

That said, it would be nice to have at least one guaranteed repeatable source of ink that didn't rely on RNG.

There is. It's called completing the quest on each character. That is a guaranteed 240 inks over 20 characters, and you can delete one character and make a new one over and over again until you have thousands of ink collected. Zero RNG involved.

yeah, this is an option

though rerunning that questline in my opinion is about as mind numbing as grinding material nodes

virtus753

BergisMacBride wrote: »

Apologies if this already been brought up since I haven't had the time to read all of this thread:

Seems to me one of the easiest ways to increase ink drops is to have them drop in surveys like ninrcrux. Would give incentive for all those folks banking their surveys and create abit more stable supply of ink without completely tanking the market for them.

We asked for this on the PTS, or at the very least an acknowledgment as to intention. The current implementation does not align with the descriptions in the patch notes or in-game tooltips for Sigil of the Luminary Netch, which claim that Ink drops from “resource nodes” full stop. It clearly doesn’t.

We have not gotten any form of acknowledgment on this question, even to say this is intended.

Sarannah

Hmm. After playing a while with the possibility of ink drops, I have to think it is bugged somehow. Even from regular mobs and harvest nodes.

The reason I think this is because, the previous two days I found 25+ ink in two days(about 14h playtime total). While today I was online even longer(8h playtime), and did about the same things, but dropped 0 ink. Which is weird. This leads me to the conclusion something is wrong with the ink drops. Causing them to not drop at all for some reason.

The ink droprate seemed fine before today. Maybe this is something to look into.

PS: Those 25+ ink drops were: 4 from monsters, all others dropped from harvesting nodes.

madman65

I got 3 in 1.5 hr, what I did was wait 20mins and started gather resource nodes to get the rng working then after 10mins I got an ink. That is a total of 30mins per ink and I got 3 doing that, hope it helps.

Túrin_Vidsmidr

I wonder if those groups of bots running around in certain zones started farming ink yet.
They may flood the market with it soon™ so don't worry about missing out!

Elvenheart

Well, I scribed my first skill using the 3 precious inks I’ve collected. Although I have all but 3 affix scripts now on my character that did all of the scribing quests, I really wanted to try out shield throw on one of my other characters as soon as he got Multi-Target, which happened yesterday. He still needs a lot of the other scripts so my first version of shield throw isn’t the best one for me until he unlocks more scripts, but wasting the inks is on me because I didn’t want to wait to try out the skill. But it’s a shame I have to feel like I wasted something rare just to give it a try. I actually tried scribing the skill with just two scripts instead of three, but it wouldn’t let me do that.

Edited to add: Something I just noticed about Multi-Target, the damage seems backward. The damage goes higher for the second target and then higher still for the third target. It seems like it should hit the first target for the most damage, with the damage going down for each subsequent target. That would make it a better skill when using it during those times we only have one target. Just my humble opinion 😊