Elsweyr had the Best Furnishing Plan Droprate - Greymoor is a step back again

Sporvan

Elsweyr homes were great fun to decorate and a large part of what made it fun was being able to collect all the furnishing plans and craft everything yourself.

They really hit the sweet spot with it and after dismal droprates from previous chapters and DLCs it was a welcome respite.

Two months after Greymoor's release Solitude Plans are still rare as hen's teeth. It really puts a dampner on decorating marvellous new homes set in the chapter and the annoying thing is one has to wait for writ voucher envelopes before this will become even remotely viable...

This is my mini rant that we need much more mechanisms like in Elsweyr to up the drop rate to reasonable levels. Housing suffers from it.

Cireous

I completely agree. I have only found two Greymoor furnishing-related recipes so far, looting containers and questing. Harrowstorms only seem to want to dump edicts on us. I don't understand why they have strayed so far away from giving us furnishing recipes again. How have they not learned how unhappy this makes us?

StabbityDoom

serious question, not being snotty, but isn't it all just rng? not tweaked drop rates?

SickleCider

StabbityDoom wrote: »

serious question, not being snotty, but isn't it all just rng? not tweaked drop rates?

It's not tweaked droprates per se, but another brutal layer of RNG if you're trying to farm Harrowstorms. Dragons always dropped a container of some kind and there was a good chance one would be a document pouch. Containers are not guaranteed from Harrowstorms, and afaik they consistently contain fewer items.

Tbh look to urns for the best chance of getting Greymoor furnishing plans.

Sporvan

StabbityDoom wrote: »

serious question, not being snotty, but isn't it all just rng? not tweaked drop rates?

Not at all, it's not RNG related at all. Elsweyr provided document pouches frequently when killing dragons. Greymoor only has Harrowstorms which sometimes rarely gives Vampiric recipes only. So no Greymoor has no reliable mechanism for Solitude plans...

We'll get the new plans with quests but that still leaves the 150 odd Solitude plans which you pretty much have to urn farm or fork out ridiculous amounts of cash for.

Minyassa

I've been urn farming and holy cow the drop rate has been low for me. Yeesh. Feels bad, man.

HiLyfe808

Totally agree, sucks when you finally see a furnishing plan and it's khajitt bed... sucks... even in vKA when i get plans its usually never a solitude one. I also agree that i don't want to buy them because i don't want to spend tons of gold for a table plan.

I want the vampire blueprints but i don't have the patience to farm harrowstorms. The feeling of excitement that turns into a huge disappointment to finally get a satchel and there's a edict inside........... nothing else. I stopped wasting my time.

OldManJim

Agreed. The drop rates are total garbage.

I bought Proudspire Manor, thinking I'd furnish it with the new Solitude style. I wish I'd checked the cost of furnishing plans before I'd bought it. What a waste of 1 mil gold.

StabbityDoom

true story: I didnt even know why people farmed HS because after I did it a few times I saw nothing good in it. I get my furnishing plans from stealing everything... thanks for the answers!

volkeswagon

they are def harder to find. 90% of my prints I've bought in traders

katanagirl1

That Blackreach public dungeon has been mentioned as the best place to get plans and I’ve been hitting it a few times a day if I can. It takes nearly an hour to run through and check all the urns.

I checked some numbers of what I got this last run. Note that I only fully loot containers and never leave anything behind, but if it’s just lockpicks or Lorkhan’s Tears I do not take, or if it has a provisioning recipe or non-area furnishing plan that I already have I do not take either. So there are a number of urns that I do not get anything from.

Here’s what I had when I had finished:
Dwarven Gears - 81
Lockpicks - 79
W Skyrim furnishing plan - 1
other provisioning recipes/furnishing plans - 0 (no new ones)

The lockpicks I did take were from urns that also contained crafting mats.

I am guessing probably a dozen urns had the other recipes/plans that I did not take. Who knows how many urns were only and Lorkhan’s Tears, but it seemed like a lot.

So I would estimate at least 200 urns total, could be closer to 300. One area furnishing plan out of that is discouraging. One time I got two plans but often I get none.

Also, there are a lot of chests in that public dungeon yet I have never found one of the area-specific paintings, as I have mentioned in another thread.

MornaBaine

Both the Solitude and Vampiric things are stupidly difficult to get. I've really lost my taste for housing with Greymoor which is such a letdown because I was SO excited for it.

Jaraal

Not only the plans, but Elsweyr introduced several very nice lootable furnishings that could be stolen as well. Greymoor has one ugly egg furnishing that drops.

They really phoned this chapter in.... in more ways than one.

MornaBaine

Jaraal wrote: »

Not only the plans, but Elsweyr introduced several very nice lootable furnishings that could be stolen as well. Greymoor has one ugly egg furnishing that drops.

They really phoned this chapter in.... in more ways than one.

They really did. And maybe we can blame covid for that but I really feel like they should be working overtime to rectify these issues by now. Better late than never.

katanagirl1

It seems like the drop rate for furnishing plans in each new region is determined by a dice roll or something. Why can’t it be consistent?

They do have the random envelopes later on which helps but why not bump up the drop rate itself? I am still trying to get all the Morrowind purple plans with my vouchers.

I ran that public dungeon again two times today and only got a purple dark elf canopy bed (cool that I didn’t have it already) but no Solitude or Vampiric plans.

Batgirl

Weren't the greymoor furnishings drop rate ninja - nerfed few weeks ago? On a month or two ago patch, when I read that people farming urns complained about farming results becoming even more horrible suddenly?
I certainly see it in sharp prices increase - my friend was Lucky and managed to buy all greens for 10k ish and blues for 20k ish, while i waited for price drop and ended with either empty guild stores or 40g green and 100k blues - my price addon screams in red with literally every recipe and show that price is 300% higher 😕
And no, I dont think its because people stopped farming - all reasonably available plans drop in time, see Elsweyr, alinor, or CC after buffing drop rate.

wnights

Harrowstorms are just not worth the effort overall. That's why not too many people farm them too.

For WS is just not an interesting zone overall. Like there is nothing drawing me to the zone once I've done all the quests. I still visit Summerset, Vvardenfel and Elsweyr frequently because those zone either have good farming potential or explorability.

And yes, abismal blueprint drop rates make the zone even less attractive.

Jaimeh

I've only done a few Harrowstorms, but I've done the main quest, some side quests, WBs and delves, and have only found one blue plan so far. They definitely seem much rarer than Elsweyr plans. i wonder if it was because they were counting on people going to the CS to get their corresponding vampiric furniture, since there was great anticipation for Bastion Sanguinaris.

Sporvan

I've run public dungeon urns and looted every container in Solitude more times than I care to mention and I've reached the conclusions that it simply isn't worth it and that's very sad.

I asked myself after yet another fruitless day of running them to try get a purple recipe - "Am I having fun doing this?" The answer was a definite NO.

All I want to do is to have nice recipes so I can furnish homes with and it seems the ZOS has made the roadblock almost impossible in this chapter.

I expect the prices will rise even more when the two new homes arrive.

Can someone from PTS confirm if it's only the new Solitude recipes from the Dungeon DLC which will get added to Daily quests or if it will include the previous and old Greymoor Solitude recipes??

Housing really is the red-headed stepchild of this game.

Fur_like_snow

I’ve been checking urns everyday something with the drop rate haven’t hit a purple solitude plan in days of farming.

KMarble

I finished doing a round in the Blackreach PD and containers in Solitude. I also hit a Harrowstorm just before I entered the dungeon in Blackreach. Total loot from a 2 hour activity of looking for plans = 1 (one) Solitude plan.

I thought that we had a bigger chance of getting plans related to the zone we're farming in, but for the last month or so I've gotten exactly zero solitude and/or vampire plans from the public dungeon in Blackreach.

I suspect that part of the problem is that the loot "pool" is too diluted there - we can find solitude, vampiric, dwemer and base game plans in there, plus all the other stuff (mats, lock picks, white gear). There is some serious imbalance going on with the drop rate when a lot of people are all reporting the same thing - getting base game plans, but not getting the zone specific plans.

deleted210809-001958

If every one has solitude furnishings (for example) it won't make your house unique. So i think they should be rare enough.

Fur_like_snow

Just a more consistent way to farm for solitude plans would be helpful.

KMarble

Kyatos wrote: »

If every one has solitude furnishings (for example) it won't make your house unique. So i think they should be rare enough.

Not really. We're all different people with different views, ideas and aesthetics.

As for rarity, I always assumed that it's tied to the plan's color: white > green > blue > purple > gold . This can be seen on the price assigned to furnishing plans in guild stores (the exception being Murkmire because of the weird drop rate*), with the price increasing as the quality of the plan goes up.

*Murkmire green plans still sell for an astronomical price because they are rarer than the purple ones, and the only way to acquire them is to farm, whereas blues and purples can be acquired with writ vouchers.
I'm afraid the same thing will happen to Greymoor plans once we get those envelopes on the master writs vendor.

Sporvan

KMarble wrote: »

*Murkmire green plans still sell for an astronomical price because they are rarer than the purple ones, and the only way to acquire them is to farm, whereas blues and purples can be acquired with writ vouchers.
I'm afraid the same thing will happen to Greymoor plans once we get those envelopes on the master writs vendor.

Yup, green plans will be impossibly rare and command premium. I can't see them going down really.

Aside, it looks from the patch notes that only the new 24 solitude recipes will be rewards from dailies... that means we'll have to wait till the writ vendor to get the other purples and blues at a semi decent price... so annoying. Will I even be playing ESO in a year's time? Idk....