PTS Update 23 - Feedback Thread for Jewelry Crafting Master Writ Improvements

tmbrinks

baratron wrote: »

Has anyone actually received a purple or gold Jewelry Crafting Master Writ yet?

@Wicked_Shifty and I have been doing Jewelry Crafting Writs on PTS daily (me with two characters, him with one character) and so far we've received one blue Master Writ each. Mine was worth 29 writ vouchers and his was worth 28.



Right now, I'm not sure whether this would be worth doing. According to Tamriel Trade Centre today, the average cost of the materials on PC-NA today is as follows:
Triune stones (Dawn-Prism) - 22,236 gold
Iridium Platings - 4,722 gold
Terne Platings - 1,240 gold
Platinum Ounces - 10.76 gold

Therefore the value of the materials needed to make that writ (1 Dawn-Prism + 2 Iridium Platings + 1 Terne Plating + 10 Platinum Ounces) would be 33,027.6 gold. This works out at 1,138.9 gold per writ voucher. This does not encourage me to want to do it, especially as I have done purple Jewelry Crafting Writs on Live which were only around 900 gold per writ voucher.

Basically, writs which involve the style stones which have to be bought, i.e. Triune (Dawn-Prism) and Swift (Gilding Wax), need to be increased in writ voucher value relative to writs which involve style stones which drop for free. I personally have had more Antimony, Cobalt, Zinc, Dibellium, Slaughterstones and Titanium than I will ever use - and it isn't very hard to find Aurbic Amber from Psijic portals.

It's looking like the ones that use Dawn Prism and Gilding Wax will be similar to the epic enchanting writs that use Hakeijo, and the Provisioning writs that use perfect roe, in being special cases that aren't worth doing, whereas the rest of the possible drops will be worth it.

It's an improvement... better than it was.. but still far from perfect.

Banana

My destroy button will still be in hot demand

Finedaible

The real problem is the absurd dust/plating system. If we received platings instead of dust from deconstructing trash jewlery sets and also had hirelings as potential sources of platings, this may not have been a problem in the first place. Crafting is still by-and-large a *** and unrewarding investment to get into, even though we were promised since beta that crafting would be relevant until end-game. Sure, there are a FEW decent sets which can give you a reaching point until you get better dungeon or trial sets, and there's the ability to transmute, but transmutation itself is plagued by the ridiculous stone caps that have been put in place. I've resigned to the sadness that ESO will never have a meaningful crafting system compared to other MMOs, even though it promised to be so much more. The best crafted sets aren't even 9-trait sets ffs, sets which requires MONTHS to over a YEAR or more of research in order for you to even craft them. If you want us to care about writs, make crafting rewarding and fun.

Lord_Eomer

tmbrinks wrote: »

baratron wrote: »

Has anyone actually received a purple or gold Jewelry Crafting Master Writ yet?

@Wicked_Shifty and I have been doing Jewelry Crafting Writs on PTS daily (me with two characters, him with one character) and so far we've received one blue Master Writ each. Mine was worth 29 writ vouchers and his was worth 28.



Right now, I'm not sure whether this would be worth doing. According to Tamriel Trade Centre today, the average cost of the materials on PC-NA today is as follows:
Triune stones (Dawn-Prism) - 22,236 gold
Iridium Platings - 4,722 gold
Terne Platings - 1,240 gold
Platinum Ounces - 10.76 gold

Therefore the value of the materials needed to make that writ (1 Dawn-Prism + 2 Iridium Platings + 1 Terne Plating + 10 Platinum Ounces) would be 33,027.6 gold. This works out at 1,138.9 gold per writ voucher. This does not encourage me to want to do it, especially as I have done purple Jewelry Crafting Writs on Live which were only around 900 gold per writ voucher.

Basically, writs which involve the style stones which have to be bought, i.e. Triune (Dawn-Prism) and Swift (Gilding Wax), need to be increased in writ voucher value relative to writs which involve style stones which drop for free. I personally have had more Antimony, Cobalt, Zinc, Dibellium, Slaughterstones and Titanium than I will ever use - and it isn't very hard to find Aurbic Amber from Psijic portals.

It's looking like the ones that use Dawn Prism and Gilding Wax will be similar to the epic enchanting writs that use Hakeijo, and the Provisioning writs that use perfect roe, in being special cases that aren't worth doing, whereas the rest of the possible drops will be worth it.

It's an improvement... better than it was.. but still far from perfect.

No confirmation if Blue writs with 25+ voucher will not drop in traits like Infuse, protective etc.

If they drop in infuse, protective etc. then are worth doing.

tmbrinks

Lord_Eomer wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

baratron wrote: »

Has anyone actually received a purple or gold Jewelry Crafting Master Writ yet?

@Wicked_Shifty and I have been doing Jewelry Crafting Writs on PTS daily (me with two characters, him with one character) and so far we've received one blue Master Writ each. Mine was worth 29 writ vouchers and his was worth 28.



Right now, I'm not sure whether this would be worth doing. According to Tamriel Trade Centre today, the average cost of the materials on PC-NA today is as follows:
Triune stones (Dawn-Prism) - 22,236 gold
Iridium Platings - 4,722 gold
Terne Platings - 1,240 gold
Platinum Ounces - 10.76 gold

Therefore the value of the materials needed to make that writ (1 Dawn-Prism + 2 Iridium Platings + 1 Terne Plating + 10 Platinum Ounces) would be 33,027.6 gold. This works out at 1,138.9 gold per writ voucher. This does not encourage me to want to do it, especially as I have done purple Jewelry Crafting Writs on Live which were only around 900 gold per writ voucher.

Basically, writs which involve the style stones which have to be bought, i.e. Triune (Dawn-Prism) and Swift (Gilding Wax), need to be increased in writ voucher value relative to writs which involve style stones which drop for free. I personally have had more Antimony, Cobalt, Zinc, Dibellium, Slaughterstones and Titanium than I will ever use - and it isn't very hard to find Aurbic Amber from Psijic portals.

It's looking like the ones that use Dawn Prism and Gilding Wax will be similar to the epic enchanting writs that use Hakeijo, and the Provisioning writs that use perfect roe, in being special cases that aren't worth doing, whereas the rest of the possible drops will be worth it.

It's an improvement... better than it was.. but still far from perfect.

No confirmation if Blue writs with 25+ voucher will not drop in traits like Infuse, protective etc.

If they drop in infuse, protective etc. then are worth doing.

Base game traits were worth 28 vouchers on PTS for a blue, rare traits 30. Infused and Swift have the same voucher values on Live, so it'd be a safe assumption they are on PTS.

However, I'm still not going to do hundred of Jewelry Writs on the PTS, just to test that, when ZOS could just be forward with us for once and just give us samples of them.

I honestly don't understand what the difficulty is... it's astounding.

Shantu

Do you feel these writs are worth completing?
No

Do you anticipate doing these once the update goes live?
No

Do you have any other general feedback?
As long as mats are prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain, the writs will be worthless.

I do think it's humorous that there is an add on that will type the word "DESTROY" in for you when destroying the writ. Somebody truly needs to get a clue. 80k for a single gold plate, nearly 1 million to update a single set of rings, is ludicrous. Other than transmuting jewelry traits, the entire craft is essentially worthless and will stay that way until this exorbitant, artificial price bubble is popped.

silvereyes

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

• Do you feel these writs are worth completing?

No

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

• Do you anticipate doing these once the update goes live?

No

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

• Do you have any other general feedback?

I don't really have anything I want to spend vouchers on. I only do master writs for leveling new toons or boosting CP on alt accounts during double XP events.

I sell all non-JC writs with more than 30 vouchers, since someone usually buys them for at least 200g/voucher, which makes it worth my while with higher voucher counts.

I trash everything else.

If the new blue JC master writs have the voucher counts increased slightly more, I'll probably at least sell the highest voucher ones that don't need expensive trait stones. The others will just be decon trash.

silvereyes

By the way, is there any chance we could please, please, please make sealed writs worth a small amount of gold at the vendor? If for no other reason than the fact that we can sell all junk with a single keypress?

DreadDaedroth

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

This is the official feedback thread for the improvements made to Jewelry Crafting Master Writs. Specific feedback that the team is looking for includes the following:

• Do you feel these writs are worth completing?
• Do you anticipate doing these once the update goes live?
• Do you have any other general feedback?

No, it'd be a waste of materials that could be used in way way way better ways.
No,they are jewelry materials sinkholes...
Make jewelry crafting the same way you did other crafting skills, without grains, don't worry golden vendor and the precious top player rewards will not lose anything.

Dusk_Coven

silvereyes wrote: »

By the way, is there any chance we could please, please, please make sealed writs worth a small amount of gold at the vendor? If for no other reason than the fact that we can sell all junk with a single keypress?

I thought you can class all sorts of items as junk, then go into the Junk tab and use a destroy-all?

vesselwiththepestle

I will make three points in this post:
1. You should reduce the amount of sealed jewelry writs, so we don't treat them like junk and the amount of sealed writs gets into a better relation to the amount of materials we get. Currently and on PTS jewelry sealed writs are not worth doing.
2. Sealed Writs in generally are declining in worth, which impacts the worth of Jewelry sealed writs.
3. You need to add stuff to the voucher vendors.

1. Reduce the amount / probability of getting writs.

We just get far more sealed writs than we could possible craft, because we ain't got the ressources. If you don't decrease the amount of sealed writs for jewelry crafting, the increase in vouchers (which is necessary!) won't help at all, because demand and prices would just go up again.

Add possibilities to get more green, blue and purple grains, like adding a jewelry hireling. I did crafting writs for a while daily on 8 characters and I got to Jewelry crafting 50 like 3 days after Summerset release (I grinded Dolmen 2 whole days to get enough jewelry to level Jewelry crafting). I collect my crafting surveys. Currently I don't have ESO+, so I don't do crafting anymore, although I plan to get Eso+ again with U24. Still, Just by crafting writs and doing a lot of vet pledges I've got enough materials to upgrade a set of jewelry to gold once in a while, or a craft a complete new set.

I only golden out Jewelry when it drops from dungeons or it is a crafted set, although the only crafted Jewelry I currently use is Clever Alchemist in a specialized pvp build, still with purple jewelry, because I am not sure if I keep the set at all, and Hunding's Rage, also for a pvp build, which seems like not a bad choice currently with the nerfs to Veiled Heritance and Ravager (I am not sure if I consider Seventh Legion change as a straight-out nerf). I don't upgrade overland jewelry, because it's still cheaper to wait for them to appear in the "golden merchant" in Cyrodiil. They cost only 150,000 while dungeon jewelry costs 250,000 IIRC. So it's just not worth to golden out overland gear. Also it's not worth to golden out trial gear, of course, except maybe something like Winterborn jewelry, so the "off-sets" of the Maelstrom and Dragonstar arenas. I never would upgrade PVP jewelry like Deadly Strike, because I am waiting for the Midyear Mayhem. Btw, I find it very annoying, that when you skipt Midyear Mayheam, you didn't at least put up Cyro jewelry in the golden vendor anyway. Please consider this for any future event, best would be the next one, if we won't see a Midyear Mayhem this year.

So, what I wanted to say is, no, with more than a year of jewelry crafting, yes, I do bring sets up to gold. I never sold Chromium grains. I collect them all and I am not one of those players saying it's not viable to upgrade jewelry. I think when the sum of the cost is lower than buying golden jewelry at the golden merchant in Cyro, it's definitely viable. But still I wouldn't do those sealed writs.

2. Then there is another reason. Sealed Writs are declining in worth generally.

People got their stuff from the voucher merchants. You need more incentives to get vouchers in the first place. Prices for sealed writs are declining. Currently I am getting like 500-650 gold per voucher (calculating taxes and house cut in) if I buy something for vouchers and sell it on guild store (PC/EU), while many sealed writs - not jewelry crafting, but like clothing or woodworking - are in the range of 500 gold per voucher in material cost, if you consider the selling prices in guild stores. So often you are better off just selling the sealed writ, anyway, and here's the thing. When I started the game with Morrowind, I was informed by experienced players I could sell those writs for 800-1000 gold per voucher. When I later actually got those writs and had an understanding of the guild store and trading system, prices were down to 600 gold per voucher. Prices went down and down, now I can often sell only for 200-300 gold per voucher.

This has two reasons. Prices for materials seem to go up, this is possibly because of many set changes in the recent patches, so players have to craft and upgrade more, and with increase of new players. Many new players are grinding their characters fast to level 50 and to get into endgame, so they don't get crafting materials by themselves, but have to buy them. I think this is ok, prices go up, hopefully they will go down again.

3. However, the vouchers aren't as attractive anymore.

There's not much stuff you get for several characters or over and over again. I think you should add more interesting stuff to voucher merchants. This would increase a demand in vouchers, thus prices for sealed writs would go up and thus an increased demand in jewelry sealed writs would make them more attractive, too.

I am thinking in the line of voucher-buyable mounts, voucher-buyable food and potions, maybe even... call me a heretic... voucher buyable Hakejo runes.

BlissfulDeluge

vesselwiththepestle wrote: »

voucher buyable Hakejo runes.

I would be fine with this. Other materials are already sold with vouchers. I think that to make the Hakeijo rune purchaseable with vouchers wouldn't be too big a deal.

I also want to stress that writ vouchers for jewelry are worth less than the dirt under my boots. The best option for jewelry is, and has always been, to standardize the Jewelrycrafting and put it in line with other skill lines. I can understand having made gold jewels from pre-Sumerset indestructible, to prevent flooding the market, but to also make the system more grindy is just not feasible.

Get rid of the grains. Put Jewelrycrafting in line with Blacksmithing, Clothier, and Woodworking.

Contraptions

[*] Do you feel these writs are worth completing?

No.

[*] Do you anticipate doing these once the update goes live?

No.

[*] Do you have any other general feedback?

Writs are supposed to be material sinks, meaning people will only do them if they have excess materials, or if the material cost isn't too high. JC materials and tempers are still too rare and expensive for master writs to be worth doing even if their voucher reward is really high. I don't even have enough mats to make my own jewellery much less waste them on a sink. For comparison a chromium plate on PC NA is selling for around 70k each on average which means you are essentially asking players to blow 280k gold MINIMUM to do a single writ which is absolutely bonkers.

Just remove the stupid 10 grains = 1 complete material requirement. You are essentially making JC 10 times grindier compared to other craft skills for no good reason. Compensate current players by running a script or something that converts all fragment pieces into 1 complete material, and all complete materials into 10 of the corresponding material. Add jewellery hirelings or something. We need more sources of these mats overall for normal JC crafting to even be worth doing, much less the master writs.

RedBull_IR

Do you feel these writs are worth completing?
No

Do you anticipate doing these once the update goes live?
No

Do you have any other general feedback?
Adjusting voucher count for Jewelry Crafting Master Writs does nothing to address the core issue with Jewelry Crafting - Scarcity

Perhaps this is working as intended and the scarcity of grains/platings is a "feature" of Jewelry Crafting?

Unfortunately, the current reality is why would I invest gold/time into Jewelry Crafting Master Writs when I can spend less gold and time completing all other Crafting Master Writs for the same end result = a voucher.

Rather than toy with voucher counts maybe focus on pulling back from the self-inflicted scarcity meta we currently have with Jewelry Crafting.

silvereyes

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

By the way, is there any chance we could please, please, please make sealed writs worth a small amount of gold at the vendor? If for no other reason than the fact that we can sell all junk with a single keypress?

I thought you can class all sorts of items as junk, then go into the Junk tab and use a destroy-all?

That's what I do now, but it requires vendoring any junk that's worth gold first, putting up with an annoying notification that some items can't be sold, and then going back to the junk tab and destroying all.

I realize it's a total first-world-problem to have, but it doesn't hurt to ask...

ganzaeso

From:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6187209/#Comment_6187209

Jewelry Crafting Master Writ Improvements
In this update, new Jewelry Crafting Master Writs received from daily Jewelry writs will most commonly request a superior piece of jewelry, with a rare chance of epic, and a very rare chance of legendary. The number of writs awarded from newly received epic and legendary Jewelry Crafting Master Writs has been significantly increased. This change is not retroactive.

@ZOS_GinaBruno

I was going to test this today to see how functional the changes are but the template characters don't have the new sealed writs in their test kit and earning them through crafting will take too much of my real play time.

If players on PTS could post more screen shots of the new sealed writs that would be awesome. I assume the drop rate is still roughly 12%.

I would really like to critic this change, but it is currently not testable for myself.

I am disappointed that some retroactive change is not being made for the older sealed writs.

Some possible changes could be down grading the current ones by one improvement level or allowing them to be traded in for a single grain of their current improvement level. As it stands on live it is not rewarding to receive a sealed jewelry writ from your daily writs.

@ZOS_PhilipDraven

Some additional information on how this system is supposed to be working would be appreciated. The patch notes are very vague.

baratron

ganzaeso wrote: »

If players on PTS could post more screen shots of the new sealed writs that would be awesome. I assume the drop rate is still roughly 12%.

I've done the Jewelry Crafting Writs on two characters every day, except yesterday when I couldn't be bothered to log in. I've posted every Master Writ that I've received.

Yes, every one Master Writ that I've received.

I echo @tmbrinks and @Lord_Eomer's comments above. We need to know what the range of writ voucher rewards for blue, purple and gold Jewelry Crafting Master Writs will be before we can state whether it will now be worth doing said writs.

baratron

Alright! I've got some data, and you aren't going to like it.

Remember this guy from the other day?


Here he is joined by his friends:




Triune - Willow's Path (6 traits) - 28 writ vouchers
Triune - Spectre's Eye (8 traits) - 29 writ vouchers
Protective - Eyes of Mara (8 traits) - 29 writ vouchers

WTF?! The Protective trait stone is Titanium, and you get 1/10th Titanium for free as you mine jewelry crafting nodes.
The Triune trait stone is Dawn-Prism which costs 100,000 AP per unit from a War Researcher in Cyrodiil or Battlegrounds Merchant.

There is no comparison.

On PC-NA, Titanium can easily be picked up for 500 gold. Dawn-Prism is 15-20k!

Dusk_Coven

baratron wrote: »

Dawn-Prism is 15-20k!

Or you could do PvP / Battlegrounds.
I think that's part of their design of Jewelry. It's "special" because it's spread out over all content. Even content some people don't want to do.
Maybe their internally collected data is showing that some people have so much AP they don't know what to do with them (have you looked at the cost of some of the random loot boxes in the PvP store??)

Part of Jewelry writ adjustments is to try to address cost, but OUR benchmark is Guild Store prices, which are player-controlled. I'm not sure internally ZOS uses a player-controlled variable for their benchmarks. So what makes sense to their metrics is screwed up by Guild Store prices.

Kidgangster101

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

baratron wrote: »

Dawn-Prism is 15-20k!

Or you could do PvP / Battlegrounds.
I think that's part of their design of Jewelry. It's "special" because it's spread out over all content. Even content some people don't want to do.
Maybe their internally collected data is showing that some people have so much AP they don't know what to do with them (have you looked at the cost of some of the random loot boxes in the PvP store??)

Part of Jewelry writ adjustments is to try to address cost, but OUR benchmark is Guild Store prices, which are player-controlled. I'm not sure internally ZOS uses a player-controlled variable for their benchmarks. So what makes sense to their metrics is screwed up by Guild Store prices.

100,000k ap is still not worth 1 extra writ though lol. I don't care how "easy" ap is to get, something that takes more time should definitely be worth more (1point is a joke lol.)

Tomato_Slayer

yeah REMOVE grains! it makes NO sense at ALL to get them from refining.

Dusk_Coven

Kidgangster101 wrote: »

100,000k ap is still not worth 1 extra writ though lol. I don't care how "easy" ap is to get, something that takes more time should definitely be worth more (1point is a joke lol.)

Or maybe they're suggesting Dawn-Prism is worth only 1 voucher and it's grossly overpriced in Guild Stores.
But then Swift is 20 vouchers. Hmm.

RedBull_IR

All of this just proves that adjusting Jewelry Crafting Master Writs does nothing to address the core issue with Jewelry Crafting.

Address the scarcity meta of Jewelry Crafting before trying to balance Writ values.

Unless changes are made to how rare Jewelry materials are you might as well assign arbitrary values to Jewelry Crafting Master Writs.

There have been plenty of suggestions on how to infuse more Jewelry crafting materials. That’s because all crafters know that without an abundance of materials Writs get sold, banked, or trashed.

My recommendation - if you’re not willing to adjust scarcity just remove Jewelry Crafting Master Writs altogether and give me some more grains instead!! 🤣🤣

Dusk_Coven

RedBull_IR wrote: »

There have been plenty of suggestions on how to infuse more Jewelry crafting materials. That’s because all crafters know that without an abundance of materials Writs get sold, banked, or trashed.

Banked? Some.
Trashed? For sure. I know people who will trash even writs worth over 400 vouchers.

But Sold? Who's buying? Either people here are liars and actually do Master Jewelry Writs, or all those jewelry writs put up for sale are just waiting for a sucker to buy them.

This touches on the issue of Guild Stores -- why a kiosk is so important and why that is a problem. Guild Stores are a way for people to find suckers to buy their garbage. That mentality makes the Guild Store system broken.
And it's on us, not ZOS.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/485610/guild-stores-the-real-reason-the-guild-store-system-is-broken

lillybit

Mostly I'm fine with how JC works but the pain point for me is Zircon. I do writs on several characters so have a good flow of Chromium grains but I almost always have to buy the Zircon to actually upgrade something to gold. It's even worse now I'm not doing pledges so much. You don't get many purple drop from overland unless you just grind dolmens and the return rate on deconning is horrible. Adding purple grains as a writ reward when gold doesn't drop (ideally every time but I'd be ok with a 2:1 drop rate - you should be able to upgrade more purple than gold!)without changing the gold drop rate would help a lot.

And about that drop rate on deconning. I know mats are supposed to be rare but if you're only going to get a single grain, at least make it guaranteed. At the moment you have to decon 20-30 items for a single plating. That's 80-120 vet trials to upgrade a single piece to gold (assuming you have enough Zircon!). 40 trials is still high enough to make them rare without it being a stupid amount of effort for the reward. Alternatively, make grains drop a random number with a very rare chance of a plating.

I don't know what the new values for purple and gold writs will be but at just under 30 for blue it'll be borderline whether I'll do them, with a hard no on expensive traits like swift and triune. I'll probably do arcane/robust/healthy ones at that level but I'm not sure that I'd do any of the others unless I had a lot of mats - which isn't likely!

baratron

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

baratron wrote: »

Dawn-Prism is 15-20k!

Or you could do PvP / Battlegrounds.
I think that's part of their design of Jewelry. It's "special" because it's spread out over all content. Even content some people don't want to do.

I could do PvP, but 100k is a hell of a lot of PvP.

I asked how long it takes to make 100k AP in my PvP guild, and was told "about an hour in Cyrodiil if the raid leader is explicitly farming AP, 2-3 hours in Cyrodiil otherwise, and a guaranteed 4 hours in Battlegrounds even if you lose every match." That's quite a time investment.

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Part of Jewelry writ adjustments is to try to address cost, but OUR benchmark is Guild Store prices, which are player-controlled. I'm not sure internally ZOS uses a player-controlled variable for their benchmarks. So what makes sense to their metrics is screwed up by Guild Store prices.

It's both, actually - cost AND time investment.

Arcane, Healthy and Robust are completely free - drop from Refining and decons.

Protective is free - drops from mining ore.
Infused is free - drops from Psijic Portals.
I don't spend a lot of time gathering my own materials, but nor can I walk past a Platinum node or a Psijic Portal without harvesting it.

Bloodthirsty is free for me - drops from Trial coffers. I enjoy Trials and would do them anyway. A typical Trial is 20-40 minutes.

Harmony is free for me - drops from Random Normal rewards. I do Random Normals whenever I have a newbie to level or a lot of Enlightenment to use up. Random Normals can be as little as 5 minutes and are typically 20 minutes, unless you're daft enough to run with 4 x max CP characters and risk getting a DLC dungeon.

Then we get onto the two rip-off traits:
Triune - apparently 1-4 hours of PvP gameplay. Fine if you really enjoy PvP or are in a group actively farming for it. Kinda pricey otherwise. The AP:gold ratio is fixed by the value of items which can only be obtained through PvP, such as Akaviri motifs.

Swift - costs 20 writ vouchers from Rolis Hlaalu. So you have to spend writ vouchers in order to gain writ vouchers. It's just ridiculous. Even more so for blue Jewelry Crafting writs which are only worth 28-29 writ vouchers in the first place!

Other people have mentioned doing away with the grains and platings, so that you get a plating from decon or refining. Another simple change would be to include ALL of the traits in the pool for refining. If I could slowly build a Triune or Swift stone from gathering ore and refining it, that would make it seem less of a rip-off.

baratron

RedBull_IR wrote: »

All of this just proves that adjusting Jewelry Crafting Master Writs does nothing to address the core issue with Jewelry Crafting.

Address the scarcity meta of Jewelry Crafting before trying to balance Writ values.

Yeah - I've been quite sad not to see a /lurk in this thread from @ZOS_RichLambert. You'd think he LIKES it when disgruntled fans send him their unwanted Jewelry Crafting Writs through the mail instead of doing them!

RedBull_IR wrote: »

Unless changes are made to how rare Jewelry materials are you might as well assign arbitrary values to Jewelry Crafting Master Writs.

Based on the three writs that @Wicked_Shifty and I have found on PTS, they are arbitary values. 28-29 writ vouchers for a blue writ regardless of how expensive the trait stone is

baratron

lillybit wrote: »

And about that drop rate on deconning. I know mats are supposed to be rare but if you're only going to get a single grain, at least make it guaranteed. At the moment you have to decon 20-30 items for a single plating. That's 80-120 vet trials to upgrade a single piece to gold (assuming you have enough Zircon!).

The drop rate on decons is actually 75% with 3/3 in the passive. (Source: My data from deconning around 500 purple jewellery items.) It's been a very long time since I did probability calculations, but I think that means it should be an average of 13-14 items per plating.

If it's taking you 20-30 decons to make one plating, check that you do have 3/3 for Jewelry Extraction.

Dusk_Coven

baratron wrote: »

I asked how long it takes to make 100k AP in my PvP guild … a guaranteed 4 hours in Battlegrounds even if you lose every match. That's quite a time investment.
…
Bloodthirsty is free for me - drops from Trial coffers. I enjoy Trials and would do them anyway. A typical Trial is 20-40 minutes.
Harmony is free for me - drops from Random Normal rewards.

Right here I think we MIGHT have some insight into how ZOS views Jewelry crafting in general.
Without definitive word from ZOS about their internal design goals, it's of course SPECULATION.

My theory is they completely take out the gold cost consideration of the trait material. Which turns out to be one of the things that skew the cost per voucher, especially when the voucher reward is lower.
Here's why:

SUPPOSE Jewelry Crafting trait materials are designed in part to encourage and reward endgame grinding.
For someone who loves PvP and does it regularly, over time they may well have AP in the millions. And for those people to drop 100k for a trait mat might mean nothing to them. Sort of like how an established crafter player might think nothing of giving away for FREE a stack of ingots or alchemy ingredients to a newbie player, simply because they are sitting on literally thousands of units and can't make a dent in that inventory.

Similarly, you feel Bloodthirsty and Harmony trait mats are "free" because you regularly do the activities that get you those mats, and over time you'll accumulate them. For you, unlike other players, especially unlike newer players, you do not have a scarcity mentality about these mats.

Maybe ZOS doesn't feel they have built in a insurmountable scarcity mentality either. Maybe:
(a) they want us to grind the array of activities to get the mats, (because we're doing it anyway) OR
(b) they want us to trade the mats with each other so we DON'T have to do the full array of activities.

Either way, gold cost of trait materials for jewelry writs is out of their calculation.
Whereas we're so focussed on buy-and-sell that the gold cost in the Guild Stores determines how we barter. But that's on us, not ZOS. They didn't set Guild Store prices.
And furthermore there's a mentality of Guild Stores being a way to look for suckers to buy overpriced garbage. That's definitely on US and not ZOS.

In support of this SPECULATION I point to how they haven't really accounted for the scarcity mentality around these special trait mats for blue writs. Either
(a) they overlooked it; which is possible
(b) it's just RNG in creating the writ and they are counting on us to not be stupid
(c) their design of Jewelry Crafting is such that they expect some players to look at the cost as being "free" -- sort of like how you feel Bloodthirsty and Harmony trait mats are "free" -- and to therefore do only certain writs and pass on others even if someone else would do the writ that you're passing on because for them different trait mats are "free"

BUT with OUR prevailing gold-cost mentality, "free" still doesn't mean you can't find a better use for them. Like selling them to a sucker wanting to do a blue writ involving that trait mat.

Dusk_Coven

baratron wrote: »

It's both, actually - cost AND time investment.

Speaking of Time and Cost of mats for writs -- why aren't we also talking about Hakeijo Enchanting Writs at a time ZOS is willing to tweak master writs?