Why is medium armor so much harder to farm than light or heavy?

argouru

It seems much slower and harder to build up enough scraps to refine to get enough leather to make medium armor than it does ore or raw fabric. With ore and fabric nodes, you are guaranteed (assuming another player already used the node and left only the bait/style raw material behind) to get a minimum of 3 pieces. Sometimes it's 4. or on a lucky drop with the CP passive Plentiful Harvest, you can get 7 or 8. The same goes for Wood nodes.

Meanwhile, leather scraps can only be obtained by looting the bodies of specific types of beasts in the world and the loot drop rates for them are maybe 1 in 3 (I've gone as many as 8 kills before getting a drop of only 1 leather scrap. On top of that, there's a fair chance that leather scraps will not be part of the available loot and even when they are, you usually only get 1 or 2 pieces, or at most 4 on a lucky drop. When you need to gather 1000 or so pieces to refine to get the 940 pieces needed to make a full set of CP160 medium armor, the task only become much less enjoyable. True that you can buy from other players through guild stores, but those tend to be expensive, especially for players who have a harder time maintaining a BPM (Big Pile of Money) in gold.

Why make it so much harder to gather leather scraps than any other gear material? It seems a bit unfair to players who want to run medium armor over heavy or light armor as it takes much more work over a longer period of time (at let 3 times as long) to farm enough mats to make medium armor vs light or heavy. Perhaps 1 or 2 changes could be made to make for a more balanced armor-farming experience:

1. Increase the drop chance so that leather scraps could be looted more often.

2. Increase the amount dropped in each loot drop from beasts to equal the amounts gotten from plants, logs, and ore nodes. 3 per drop minimum would at least make the experience more balanced and faster, making it less of a chore to farm leather.

SirAndy

One word: Skeevers

They reliably drop multiple scraps and can be easily farmed since they have low health. There are several good spots in the endgame zones to do farm runs.

Nestor

Actually, if you do it right, gathering a lot of Leather in a short period of time is quite easy, away from the complication that is Node Scaling in the DLCs

Most zones have an area where there are lots of animals that respawn quickly. Figure out the pattern, go through the area kiting mobs until you have enough, then AoE them down. You can get a 100 to 200 stack of Raws in about 20 minutes. Animals like Wolves and skeevers and jackals and the like are quite squishy too, so easy to kill. They also can drop a lot of equipment for decon too.

GreenhaloX

Farming for mats for the medium is not so much as issue for me. I find tons of ancestor silks and rubedo scraps to refine. It's getting the good medium drops is a bit tedious. I found a crap load of heavies from Nightmother, Darkstride to Shadow dancer and the like, but I'm still looking for a couple medium nightmother pieces to complete my armor combo. Going on a month now and no drops or in guild stores.

ArtOfShred

Farming medium is easier than any other material. Get ye to Old Orsinium and re-enact pole shift 20,000 BC on the animal population. You can get like 300-400 scraps in an hour.

Averya_Teira

It's way easy to farm lesther..... fine a group delve with wolves or skeevers or bears and run loops.... the end. Hundreds of leather an hour.

PrinceBoru

because you have to fight for it.

SPE825

Agreed on Orsinium. I'm swimming in leather and don't even use it.

MickeyBN

I was going to suggest farming Tel var stones in IC/sewers, but with the ridiculous lag, random Terminator bosses and players ganking you it's probably more reliable to just farm animals as stated above.

Could be up for debate though.

Myrnhiel

When I was in Old Orsinium (Wrothgar) once, I was invited into a group. Turned out they were just farming. Meaning: they were running around the big loop and killing off the spiders, echateres etc. over and over again. Within about 30 minutes I had nearly 200 leather scraps... It was really worth it but it was..... boring! I will never do it again.

My main char also wears only medium armor, but I'm not farming for the leather, I just take the scraps as I get them - killing the random echatere when I'm going somewhere in Wrothgar. That's enough for me - I don't have to have the armor on 160 all at once. I'm still missing 3 pieces, but I will get there eventually.

But if you really want to get the leather quickly, I recommend to find a spot (p.e. Old Orsinium) where there are enough creatures that give you the scraps.

MickeyBN

I'm just gunna hijack the thread real quick with a nooblet question.

I have lvl 10 in Clothing on my main (so, nothing) but am CP165, will I have a decreased chance of acquiring rubedo scraps off animals in Orsinium compared to if I were 50 in crafting?

Beardimus

In the next update im sure Medium armour mats are included in the clothing writs for this very reason.

And @MickeyBN since DB yes, I think. Previously the scaled zones scaled mats to your crafting level, but people moaned about it so now I think you have a alternating chance of your crafting level Mat and your battle level Mat. So you will see a combo (well, actually that's for Metal / Clothing not totally sure how medium.around works but assume the same)

Brrrofski

Leather is way easier to get.

Some spots you can get 200 scraps in 45minutes to an hour

argouru

Maybe I'm farming the wrong places. I'm mostly going through Hew's Bane and Wrothgar (not the dungeons as I'm still in less than optimal gear so dungeons are still out of my league and I have a hard time finding people to group up with). Haven't explored Gold Coast enough to have found any good leather grinding spots.

Mostly killing skeevers, lions, mudcrabs, alligators, bears and harpies as well as those strange mammals in Wrothgar (the ones with bone legs and horn/antler... thingies.

Nestor

MickeyBN wrote: »

I'm just gunna hijack the thread real quick with a nooblet question.

I have lvl 10 in Clothing on my main (so, nothing) but am CP165, will I have a decreased chance of acquiring rubedo scraps off animals in Orsinium compared to if I were 50 in crafting?

@MickeyBN

In the DLC Zones, the nodes are scaled to either the character level or the crafting material level. So, you have a chance to get Rubedo from the animals in those zones if your above CP160. It is supposed to be 50/50 chance for one or the other. However in practice, it seems that Rubedo drops less than character scaled leathers. Although, that can change, as last night, most every animal my NB killed dropped Rubedo, but the night before, it was 1:10 to get a Rubedo Drop.

I guess one thing you could try is after 10 or so animals you don't get a few Rubedo's is to leave the zone and come back (go in and out of the Outlaw Refuge for instance) and see if it gets better.

argouru

I have 2 chars with maxed out and fully upgraded clothing skill line so I can obtain and work with ancestor silk and rubido leather.

argouru

So when I DO get drops from animals, it's always rubido leather. My issue is that I get them much slower than I can get any other mat due to drop rates and amounts compared to nodes.

Emma_Overload

My advice: grind GOLD, not mats. I've done the Old Orsinium rudedo scrap grind, and it's not as fast (for me) as simply grinding out the gold to buy the leather in guild stores.

Wearing 7/7 Prosperous, I can make about 30K per hour killing mobs in my favorite grind spot. This is enough to buy 500 pieces of rubedo leather at the price of 60 gold each.

The big problem with the Old Orsinium (and similar) mat grinds is that you keep running into other players doing the same thing. I don't like the added pressure of competing for mobs with other players, so I prefer to grind gold instead in spots that are remote and rarely trafficked.

KaleidoscopeEyz

My belief is that Medium Armor scraps are the EASIEST to farm. Go find some durzogs.

Trublz

Nestor wrote: »

MickeyBN wrote: »

I'm just gunna hijack the thread real quick with a nooblet question.

I have lvl 10 in Clothing on my main (so, nothing) but am CP165, will I have a decreased chance of acquiring rubedo scraps off animals in Orsinium compared to if I were 50 in crafting?

@MickeyBN

In the DLC Zones, the nodes are scaled to either the character level or the crafting material level. So, you have a chance to get Rubedo from the animals in those zones if your above CP160. It is supposed to be 50/50 chance for one or the other. However in practice, it seems that Rubedo drops less than character scaled leathers. Although, that can change, as last night, most every animal my NB killed dropped Rubedo, but the night before, it was 1:10 to get a Rubedo Drop.

I guess one thing you could try is after 10 or so animals you don't get a few Rubedo's is to leave the zone and come back (go in and out of the Outlaw Refuge for instance) and see if it gets better.

The level of the gear you are wearing has an effect on loot drops I've been told. I farm OO everyday and only get rube scraps, no ther kinds.(I'm cp340 with all cp160 gear) My buddy, who I farm with a lot also cp350, was getting about half as many rube scraps as me every time we went. We tested this for over multiple weeks but could never figure it out till someone mentioned that it was his gear level. Turns out, he didn't have on all level 50 gear. He went and got some new gear, came back, and sure enough his rube scrap drop rate increased to the same as mine.

Lightninvash

I found it opposite there are so many things to kill to get rubido leather from but I find it hard to find the silk I either have to buy it from TV or deconstruct stuff for it.

Rex-Umbra

Heavy is the most expensive to upgrade though.

Bigevilpeter

i always have a ton of leather from grinding, its mich faster for me and i even get xp in the process, i cant stand running around collecting nodes

luen79rwb17_ESO

I find leather to be the easiest matt to get. I don't farm any materials and I'm filled with leather matts from just doing dungeons and such.