Recipe Levels

Trayeth

My wife keeps trying to steal for recipes, but even though she is around level 40, she still only gets around level 5-9 recipes. (Even stealing in higher level zones, like The Rift) How do we fix this? Do we need to move to gold zones before finally seeing decent leveled recipes? Or is there something we're doing wrong?

Magdalina

What level is her provisioning? Recipes drops either partially or fully scale with your provisioning level, haven't really paid enough attention to know for sure. Changing zones doesn't actually change anything drops-wise since the scaling is the same throughout Tamriel, there're no even real "high level" zones anymore.

DiteHart

I don't think there was a new update with Morrowind and/or Horns of the Reach, but when the One Tamriel update came out they updated it to the following:

Updated the way Provisioning recipes drop as follows:
Recipes in Cyrodiil, the Imperial City, and Dungeons now drop based on your rank in the Recipe Improvement passive.
In other zones, recipes drop based on your passive rank 75% of the time, and the rest of the time drop the same way they dropped prior to One Tamriel, by zone.

So, if you're getting mostly really low level ones, she probably still has Recipe Improvement Rank 1. If you want to find recipes your level, you'll want to keep up with it. If you want to collect all recipes, it'd be good to slowly rank up as you collect most/all of the recipes at that level:
This page has the ranks explained: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Recipe_Improvement

You're thinking about the zones, which do factor in, but only with a 25% chance. Just in case you don't have a reference there's the following page: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Zones
There, go down to "Notes" and there's a grey show/hide bar for "Deprecated Zone Level Ranges (Champion Points, pre-Update 12)". You can use that to reference the levels based on your alliance.

To try to narrow your search for recipes, you could try to zone in on a level by having the right Recipe Improvement and stealing in the right zone (ex: an EP character would have the best chance to get level 25 recipes by stealing in Shadowfen with Improvement rank 2.).

Trayeth

Thank you.

davey1107

If she's trying to collect all of the recipes, here's a additional tip that might help.

The daily writs drop one recipe reward per writ...most writ ranks are set to drop two different levels of recipes with the higher being more rare. For example, top rank writs reward C100-140 recipes or C150 recipes. About 60% are green, 30% blue and 10% purple.

You can therefore use alts doing writs to "sweep" zones for missing recipes. Work their rank to the appropriate level, then have your provisioner make stacks of the writ recipes for them to do a quick daily turn in. Set them to work toward the recipe you're looking for. If you needed Twenty-Four Raven Pie, for example, being a level 40 recipe it drops in writs completed in zone 3. Writs completed there will eventually generate it. To collect all the purples I used two alts, starting them as rank 1 and rank 2. Once I got everything I wanted, I moved them to rank 3 and 4.

It's slow going to fill in the whole chart, but it's a heck of a lot faster than grabbing urns and hoping for a super rare level 40 purple recipe. And it's very profitable. Because the game is so overfilled with top level recipes, low level duplicates are really valuable. I sell extra purples for 30k+ and a lot of the blues for 10k.

I also recommend an iOS / android app called ESO Workbench for recipe collectors. It has a semi-complete recipe checklist you can mark off as you go. (It includes all green, blue and purple classic recipes, but doesn't have a section for the holiday and special recipes).