ZoS, why does the clothing writ require cloth (not leather) 90% of the time.

xaraan

Question in title, I can do writs on 14 guys every day and one guy will use Rub. Leather and the rest will ask for Anc. Silk. Why is this out of balance?

Feric51

The crafting writs for blacksmithing, clothing, and woodworking are all on 3-day rotations. The clothing ones happen to source two of their three from light armor materials (silk), and only one from medium armor material (leather).

Your claim of 90% is a little off - in reality it is 67% silk and 33% leather across the board assuming you're doing your writs daily and not skipping the day that the leather writ would come up in the rotation.

Could they have added a 4th writ utilizing leather products to better balance the material usage? Sure, but I guess they just felt it would be easier to keep clothing in sync with blacksmithing and woodworking. *Note: On the day you get blacksmithing writ calling for 1-hand sword, cuirass and greaves, you will always get the clothing writ for light robe, breeches, and epaulets. The same holds true for whatever respective woodworking writ matches up in that rotation.

Not all your characters will be on the same rotation: I.E. If you have robe, breeches, epaulets on character 1 (out of 14), characters 2-14 may, or may not, also get that same writ at the same time. This is based on the very first writ you do on each character and how that corresponds to the pre-existing rotation of any characters already doing writs.

TL;DR - Silk is 67%, leather is 33%. Been like that forever.

Feric51

To explain in more detail - the rotation and why your characters don't all do the same writs on the same day, take a gander at the chart below.

Writ rotation 1 (WR1) = light robe, light breeches, light epaulets
Writ rotation 2 (WR2) = light shoes, light hat, light sash
Writ rotation 3 (WR3) = medium bracers, medium helmet, medium arm cops

Day 1:
Character A does crafting writs for first time = WR1 assigned

Day 2:
Character A = WR2
Character B does crafting writs for first time = WR1
Character C does crafting writs for first time = WR1

Day 3:
Character A = WR3
Character B/C = WR2
Character D does first writs = WR1

Day 4:
Character A = WR1
Characters B/C = WR3
Character D = WR2
You're ambitious and do writs on characters E-N = WR1

Day 5 (The day you're relating to in your original post):
Characters A, and E-N =WR2 SILK
Characters B/C = WR1 SILK
Character D = WR3 LEATHER

In a vacuum, going off of day 5's experience, it would appear that 90%+ of the writs ask for silk when, in reality, the rotation just fell that way and the leather writs will balance out to the 67/33 split over the next two days.

xaraan

OK, I must be missing some leather days then because it's a lot more than 60/30 for me. You can look at what mats I have after months of doing them and can tell it's not split even that well (and that's considering the fact that most of the armor I've made for characters was leather, and it's still way higher). So I must definitely be missing leather days, and I'll have to start trying to hit those and skip some silk days.

Although - it should be 50/50 imo, no reason it should be weighted toward one over the other. So my issue still stands.

Integral1900

Probably the same reason I get ten wood surveys for every blacksmithing survey... somebody forgot

Feric51

xaraan wrote: »

Although - it should be 50/50 imo, no reason it should be weighted toward one over the other. So my issue still stands.

I agree in principal that it makes no sense to have an uneven split with regards to materials. I assume it was done on the idea of keeping clothing writs on the same rotation as the blacksmithing/woodworking, which only have 3 writs. Blacksmithing could easily be adjusted to 4 writs as well, but woodworking is the real monkey wrench in this whole mess.

ZoS, for their part, attempted to balance this out somewhat by having clothing surveys give a 2 silk : 1 leather return. Prior to one of the more recent updates (Homestead maybe?) surveys only gave out silk, and for some reason people complained that leather should drop too, so that when furrier cages were created and implemented.

One guess as to why you're seeing a larger supply of leather in your inventory, even after crafting a bunch of leather gear, is that leather scraps drop from a rather large variety of overland creatures, and you may be picking it up in your loot table a lot of times without even realizing it. Ancestor silk, on the other hand, is only available from nodes, and tend to be the rarest nodes to boot.

I support your cause to balance out the clothing writs, but because it's been the status quo for so long, and received minimal pushback to date, I have slim hopes of them changing it.

xaraan

Yeah, I have no doubt that my 90% is more salt than hard numbers, and I appreciate you guys that crunch the numbers like you did for us. But I guess I've come to this point after noticing it almost a year ago and trying to work against it, as in - stopping to pick up every anc silk plant I see like it's the most valuable alchemy plant, buying stacks in store when decent prices, etc. I never farm leather (just have what drops from mobs). And even with this, it's still out of balance, so I guess that's why I went from feeling it was just uneven to saying 90%. And we don't get enough harvest maps to counter the use of matts for there being more drops in those maps to even things out.

You are right though, probably won't be addressed. Bigger fish to fry.

Nestor

Feric51 wrote: »

Could they have added a 4th writ utilizing leather products to better balance the material usage? Sure, but I guess they just felt it would be easier to keep clothing in sync with blacksmithing and woodworking.

It is arbitrary decisions like this that just irk me to the Core. There is no reason as to why these have to sync. We make what we make and we make what is asked for.

It only took them, what, two years to finally make top end Alchemy Writs not ask for Nirnroot every single time.

davey1107

@Feric51 Wow...you were really dedicated to troubleshooting the math and that one, lol.

Feric51

davey1107 wrote: »

@Feric51 Wow...you were really dedicated to troubleshooting the math and that one, lol.

I was on the work computer, so I can usually give more detailed responses than when I’m sitting here (like now) punching little icons on the screen of my phone.

That said, misinformation leads to frustration for many people and I want to make sure I back up any of my objective responses with real facts/scenarios to remove any ambiguity. Plus, this is the crafting forum, and I’ve always been a craftsman at heart in any game I’ve played, so I like hanging out here helping people whenever I can.

@ZOS_GinaBruno keep that ^^^ last sentence in mind when you’re selecting your next batch of community ambassadors. I’ll volunteer to be the token console representative!

Apache_Kid

Why would we need a 4th writ? Just make it 50/50 instead of 66/33 in terms of leather to silk ratio.

ghastley

I think we're all missing the point that the writs didn't need to be all Light or all Medium. There are currently nine items in the three rotated sets. There could have been eight or ten, with an even balance of Light and Medium, if they were mixed in each writ.

I can only assume that some time before release, there were two separate Clothier skills that merged. One for Light only, one for Medium only. Since that's not the case, mixed writs would make complete sense. Provisioner always get mixed food/drink, don't they?

Jayne_Doe

I really disliked when they added leather to the clothier surveys. It makes it even harder to keep up with my silk supply.

On more than one occasion, I've actually gotten more leather than silk from a survey. Usually, silk give 18-20 per node (with 18 being way more common for me). When it doubles, it gives 36-40 (which I usually get the lower when it rarely happens to double).

Leather, on the other hand, gives 26-32 and when it doubles, which seems to happen more than silk does, I can get up to 64 from one leather node.

I suppose this is supposed to even out, but it never does for me. My leather supply keeps increasing while my silk supply is hard to keep up.

VoodooPlatypus

I've noticed (and wondered about) this same thing. I do equipment crafting writs on three toons on one server, one toon on another. On both servers I am constantly running low on silk where my leather supply just seems to continue growing.

The added issue of having two boxes of leather (which always be where the double-resource bonus RNG kicks in) at a survey site just seems insulting.

Wrubius_Coronaria

I've also noticed the same problem. The amount of silk that I farm doens't matter, because the number of dailies writs which require silk is really too high and unbalanced.

One other problem is coming from survey maps, when they replaced fews nodes of silk by leather. The return of ancestor silk is decreased, when the percentage of dailies writs which require silk remain the same. Hence this why we are runing out of silk.

It should be changed. If the writ require leather, it should give a map of leather only.

If the writ require silk, the map should give all the time a survey map for silk only. (and not those that we have who mix both mats on live actually).

Or decrease slightly, the number of items required with writs who need silk.