Why Jewel Crafting is Broken - 300,000 gold/1 chromium plating

blackweb

I just spent 3 days farming blacksmithing nodes in Glenumbra looking for the Stone Shank Frame lead for the Oakensoul Ring. At one point I had 243 Platinum dust in my inventory so I decided to refine it to see what would happen. I refined the entire stack and got 1 Chromium grain. This gives a rough estimate of the probability of obtaining 1 chrominum plating by harvesting Platinum Dust from blacksmithing nodes:

pChromiumPlating = 1/(100*10 grains/1 plating) = 1/1000= 0.001*100 = 0.1% chance of obtaining 1 chromium plating by harvesting platinum dust

Lets compare that to the probability of obtaining 1 legendary temper from 100 of a given raw crafting material. In my experience that probability is about

pLegendaryTemper = ~8/1000 raw material or about 8/1000*100% which is 0.8% chance or almost 1%

The cost of 1 Tempered Alloy is currently about 20,000 gold and one Chromium Plating is about 300000 gold. That is 1.2 million gold to improve one jewelry item from epic to legendary. This puts Chromium Plating and crafted legendary jewelry in ESO outside of the range where most casual players can afford. This makes crafting jewelry very difficult for casual players and possible for only the most hardcore players and successful traders in eso.

I am a master crafter of all professions with all traits. I have never crafted or improved a single piece of jewelry for any character since Jewel Crafting was released. Jewelcrafting is just too expensive. I just made a full set of lvl 20 armor and weapons for a friend for leveling and I counseled him against my making any crafted jewelry for him. Crafting 1 piece of blue lvl 20 jewelry would have cost 2*90,000 gold at the time just for the blue platings.

How to fix Jewelry Crafting:

Make the probability of finding Chromium plating the same as that of finding legendary tempers from refining raw materials. This means increasing the probability 10 fold. I would also love to see a jewel crafting hireling but I dont think that will happen. Make jewelry crafting accessible for the rest of us zenimax.

Edit: It was much less time consuming to obtain the Oakensoul ring than it would have been to obtain 4 chromium platings for one legendary crafted jewelry item.

Nestor

A chrome grain every 200 raw mats is the expected drop rate. So you are pretty close with your small sample. If you want a reliable steady supply do top tier jewelry writs on your alts. The temper return is quite good.

No way would i ever make improved jewelry for any gear level less than CP160. Even then, it would only be an Attribute Trait.

As for Tempers the difference between plain jewelry and gold is quite small, the set bonus is much more of a factor on your build. Gold or Purple Jewelry is not required to be successful.

And, if you want cheap jewelry, farm dropped sets for jewelry.

People have been complaining about the gold temper drop rate since jewelry became a thing.

blackweb

Nestor wrote: »

A chrome grain every 200 raw mats is the expected drop rate. So you are pretty close with your small sample. If you want a reliable steady supply do top tier jewelry writs on your alts. The temper return is quite good.

No way would i ever make improved jewelry for any gear level less than CP160. Even then, it would only be an Attribute Trait.

As for Tempers the difference between plain jewelry and gold is quite small, the set bonus is much more of a factor on your build. Gold or Purple Jewelry is not required to be successful.

And, if you want cheap jewelry, farm dropped sets for jewelry.

People have been complaining about the gold temper drop rate since jewelry became a thing.

We are going to have to agree to disagree. For me the status quo in ESO jewel crafting is not acceptable. Jewel crafting is unusable in its current state. All it is good for is deconstructing jewelry items and refining raw materials. Jewel crafting in eso is essentially useless for making new crafted jewelry items. Jewelry crafting in eso is too expensive and too time consuming for casual eso players.

Edit: In fact I am seriously considering selling all of my existing plating of all quality levels because I seriously doubt I will ever use any of them. I dont expect to have the necessary mats to improve or craft even 3 jewelry items in the next year or before the next DLC or expansion comes out.

ganzaeso

They are not going to change it from its original design. We got lucky with the first change that reduced Zircon Plating needed from 4 to 3 and Chromium Plating needed from 8 to 4. Their original intent was not to make the crafting of legendary jewelry too easy that everyone could do it.

The price of the materials are completely driven by the players and the amount of gold in the game. A player account with 18 max level characters doing 7 writs daily for an entire week nets 639,450 gold plus items such as gold upgrade mats, sealed writs, and surveys.

A player doing 7 writs on 9 max level characters per week can afford to buy materials for roughly 1 golden jewelry pieces within 2 weeks and will likely receive enough chromium to craft 2 more pieces from the writ containers.

Assuming there are roughly 1600 players that do crafting writs with 18 characters, that would be upwards of 1 billion gold entering the game economy every week. Thankfully the one major gold sink in the game helps curb this gold generation and the inflation it causes; Namely Guild Trader Bids.

I would suggest to any new player to get into crafting early and start doing those writs. The new Event: The New Zeal of Zenithar is the perfectly timed for this

Edit for miscalculated figures.

katanagirl1

If you do the jewelry daily crafting writs and the surveys you get from them, you can do quite well. I only have five crafters doing them and I could gold out anything I wanted.

Farming rubedite nodes for platinum is an extremely low-yield way to get platinum dust, even farming platinum nodes would be better.

phaneub17_ESO

I usually let my writ boxes stack up, collecting them all at once at the end of the week. With 18 characters, all at rank 5/5 Jewelry Crafting you get 1-2 Chromium Dust at a rate of about 1 in 5 boxes, with a rare chance having a Chromium Plating. That's about 2-3 Chromium Plating a week, not a bad investment and I'm not out farming or refining so much, only to restock my platinum ounce supply.

I'd say about 75% of my characters Jewelry slots are upgraded to legendary, all are at least epic, because I'm a solo player (no guilds) so I can't actually sell anything through traders; its all hoarded. I have never bought any plating, its all self-gained through deconstructing, refining, and most of all through daily writ boxes. When you can't sell to traders, those stockpile of epic rings are great for decon and leveling alt's Jewelry Crafting or just gaining more zircon plating at the least.

Amottica

Nestor wrote: »

A chrome grain every 200 raw mats is the expected drop rate. So you are pretty close with your small sample. If you want a reliable steady supply do top tier jewelry writs on your alts. The temper return is quite good.

No way would i ever make improved jewelry for any gear level less than CP160. Even then, it would only be an Attribute Trait.

As for Tempers the difference between plain jewelry and gold is quite small, the set bonus is much more of a factor on your build. Gold or Purple Jewelry is not required to be successful.

And, if you want cheap jewelry, farm dropped sets for jewelry.

People have been complaining about the gold temper drop rate since jewelry became a thing.

In agreement. Very good points. I also understand that Zenimax specifically intended for upgrading jewelry to be less common than upgrading armor and weapons so it seems it is working as they designed it.

tmbrinks

Gold jewelry also drops in-game.

The only source of gold weapons/gear is from weekly rewards.

Many of most used sets of gear can be re-constructed in gold quality at no plating cost, because the minimum level it drops is gold (most "perfected" gear)

Purple jewelry is perfectly capable of doing all content in the game.

Necrotech_Master

the reason why jewelry is so dang expensive is because of EVERYTHING having unrefined versions

trait mats have unrefined versions
tempers have unrefined versions

so instead of decon something and getting 1 purple plating, you decon and get 1/10 of a purple plating, so you have to decon 10x as much to make 1 useable temper

then you have to burn 3 purple temper to do 1 upgrade which means you had to sink at least 30+ deconned items into 1 item upgrade

Aelorin

Hello blackweb,

I do agree that the prizes of jewelry mats are really high, and this was to be expected since they introduced it.
I think ZOS reduced the cost of platings to upgrade jewelry allready. I don't expect they are going to do any further changes.

However i want to give you an advice: When making low level armor and jewelry: Since one can not wear monster sets yet there is no need to make 3 jewelry pieces:

- Set one: chest, pants, shoes, gridle, gloves
- Set two: you can fill it with head, shoulders, weapons x2 and 1 piece of jewelry.
- The other 2 jewelry slots can be filled in with whatever you find from doing quests or dungeons.

Also I strongly suggest to upgrade that 1 piece of set jewelry only to green for levelling. You will outlevel that gear soon enough.

MidniteOwl1913

The cost of upgrading jewelry is so high that it isn't a cost-effective way to generate writ tickets. Just try and sell a purple/gold jewelry master writ, I end up destroying mine a lot of the time. I've got some stored and am hoping to sell them this event, but I'm not that hopeful.

festegios

Laughs at 80k per plate on pseu

xilfxlegion

also gotta ask the op if he has his champion points set up to facilitate the better reward chances ?

VaranisArano

Jewelry Crafting is fundamentally broken because ZOS decided they didn't want players to rush to max rank within minutes of logging in to Summerset after the Chapter launched. They simplified the material tiers to better represent the leveling experience, but then made the improvement materials even harder to acquire on top of the limited drop rate for raw mats.

(It took a few hours, instead.)

They made Jewelry mats needlessly complex, with too many steps for improvement materials, all so that players would have to farm longer and farm more materials to get what they want. Make no mistake - the staggeringly high effort and prices to get jewelry mats compared to other crafts plays right into ZOS' hands, since more players feel compelled to engage with content like crafting writs or moneymaking activities to get what they want. High player engagement = more time spent in game, even if those players aren't happy about what they are doing.

ZOS could change the status quo instantly by bringing Jewelrycrafting into line with the other Crafts, if they wanted to.

But if they did, they would see less player engagement as players who wanted jewelry mats found themselves able to farm less materials, do less writs, and make less gold in order to get what they wanted. That's a loss, in ZOS' books, even though it would make players happier. So ZOS almost certainly will not fix Jewelrycrafting.

Necrotech_Master

VaranisArano wrote: »

Jewelry Crafting is fundamentally broken because ZOS decided they didn't want players to rush to max rank within minutes of logging in to Summerset after the Chapter launched. They simplified the material tiers to better represent the leveling experience, but then made the improvement materials even harder to acquire on top of the limited drop rate for raw mats.

(It took a few hours, instead.)

They made Jewelry mats needlessly complex, with too many steps for improvement materials, all so that players would have to farm longer and farm more materials to get what they want. Make no mistake - the staggeringly high effort and prices to get jewelry mats compared to other crafts plays right into ZOS' hands, since more players feel compelled to engage with content like crafting writs or moneymaking activities to get what they want. High player engagement = more time spent in game, even if those players aren't happy about what they are doing.

ZOS could change the status quo instantly by bringing Jewelrycrafting into line with the other Crafts, if they wanted to.

But if they did, they would see less player engagement as players who wanted jewelry mats found themselves able to farm less materials, do less writs, and make less gold in order to get what they wanted. That's a loss, in ZOS' books, even though it would make players happier. So ZOS almost certainly will not fix Jewelrycrafting.

it wouldnt be that much to fix

standardize the number of tempers to match other crafts (doubling the current costs)
remove unrefined versions of tempers and trait materials (should reduce costs by a factor of at least 5)

there would still be no jewelry hireling, nothing else about the system would change really

if the cost to upgrade was doubled, that would be a standard 8 gold tempers

removing unrefined tempers should theoretically increase the supply of chromium plates by a factor of 10, but doubling the upgrade cost would mean that it would be effectively factor of 5 decrease on the cost

so if this happened a single chromium plate would drop from 350k to 35k (due to 10x the supply), but might still remain priced around 70k due to the fact you need twice as many to upgrade

it would still be much more costly than other tempers potentially due to it being less common, but it wouldnt be so expensive as to be prohibitive to actually try to upgrade

Lumsdenml

Jewelry crafting will never change because one of the stated reasons they didn't want it to be as easy as upgrading armor and weapons is to have a reason to continue doing content that dropped gold jewelry.

Amottica

Lumsdenml wrote: »

Jewelry crafting will never change because one of the stated reasons they didn't want it to be as easy as upgrading armor and weapons is to have a reason to continue doing content that dropped gold jewelry.

This.

And Zenimax did reduce the requirements early on, cutting it in half from what I understand but has not budged since.

Do max-level jewelry writs on all alts to get the materials. Supply and demand will set the price for this very high so best to farm the matts oneself.

daim

Its fine asit is. You need to invest into crafting to get them more easily, so i would say its working as intended.

Jaimeh

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

blackweb

Nestor wrote: »

A chrome grain every 200 raw mats is the expected drop rate. So you are pretty close with your small sample. If you want a reliable steady supply do top tier jewelry writs on your alts. The temper return is quite good.

No way would i ever make improved jewelry for any gear level less than CP160. Even then, it would only be an Attribute Trait.

As for Tempers the difference between plain jewelry and gold is quite small, the set bonus is much more of a factor on your build. Gold or Purple Jewelry is not required to be successful.

And, if you want cheap jewelry, farm dropped sets for jewelry.

People have been complaining about the gold temper drop rate since jewelry became a thing.

Jewelry is not a thing because it is too expensive and time consuming to be a thing.

blackweb

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

Jaimeh

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

I'm talking about the daily crafting writs, not the master writs. The daily ones, even on one character, are very much worth doing. You get intricates that you can pass off to alts, and surveys as well. Then as you level jewelry crafting on your alts you'll keep getting intrictates to decon for inspiration, and it will snowball, so it will level faster on other alts. Eventually if you can do daily crafting writs on max level on a few alts you'll start getting enough grains to make platings, and be self sufficient.

blackweb

Jaimeh wrote: »

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

I'm talking about the daily crafting writs, not the master writs. The daily ones, even on one character, are very much worth doing. You get intricates that you can pass off to alts, and surveys as well. Then as you level jewelry crafting on your alts you'll keep getting intrictates to decon for inspiration, and it will snowball, so it will level faster on other alts. Eventually if you can do daily crafting writs on max level on a few alts you'll start getting enough grains to make platings, and be self sufficient.

I do Jewelry Crafting writs every day which is marginally useful. However, I NEVER make nor improve jewelry in ESO because it is too expensive to do so. Jewel crafting is not a viable profession for casual players in ESO.

blackweb

Jaimeh wrote: »

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

I'm talking about the daily crafting writs, not the master writs. The daily ones, even on one character, are very much worth doing. You get intricates that you can pass off to alts, and surveys as well. Then as you level jewelry crafting on your alts you'll keep getting intrictates to decon for inspiration, and it will snowball, so it will level faster on other alts. Eventually if you can do daily crafting writs on max level on a few alts you'll start getting enough grains to make platings, and be self sufficient.

I have been doing Jewel Crafting off and on since it was released. I have mined thousands of jewel crafting nodes. I have 5 Chromium platings. Jewel Crafting is useless.

FlopsyPrince

Lumsdenml wrote: »

Jewelry crafting will never change because one of the stated reasons they didn't want it to be as easy as upgrading armor and weapons is to have a reason to continue doing content that dropped gold jewelry.

What they meant is not relevant. They meant many things for the combat system, yet we are getting a huge overhaul of that soon.

Things change. Original intent is not permanent, or at least not always permanent.

It is disappoint JC is so hard, needlessly so, but it is what it is. I only started pushing my own jewelry to gold on the PS4 after playing (and lots of daily crafting on many alts) for over 3 years. I have done it once on PC NA, but not otherwise yet.

I rarely sell my mats, so I ignore what I could make, or I would probably never make gold jewelry.

NordSwordnBoard

Wow, its so different on console. I sat on my platings for a while, wanted a surplus to cover a full set in an "emergency" and then started using them. I've golded out a lot of jewelry, even some Rattlecage "Gem of Curses" that cannot be deconstructed so I can link them lol. If I like my build I gold out the stuff.

I also remember selling gold steadfast hero rings from end of campaign rewards for like 30k each. PvP keeps my purple mats very high for jewelry crafting. I agree it is an end game activity, and that makes sense as end game/leaderboard type activity was the only source for gold jewelry before Summerset.

Jaimeh

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

I'm talking about the daily crafting writs, not the master writs. The daily ones, even on one character, are very much worth doing. You get intricates that you can pass off to alts, and surveys as well. Then as you level jewelry crafting on your alts you'll keep getting intrictates to decon for inspiration, and it will snowball, so it will level faster on other alts. Eventually if you can do daily crafting writs on max level on a few alts you'll start getting enough grains to make platings, and be self sufficient.

I have been doing Jewel Crafting off and on since it was released. I have mined thousands of jewel crafting nodes. I have 5 Chromium platings. Jewel Crafting is useless.

I think most of the players who've amassed platings have done so mainly via daily writs, so their usefulness is self-evident. I'm not sure what you mean by on and off, and on how many toons you did them on, but I've levelled jewelry crafting on all my alts and even though I don't do daily writs on all of them, I have enough for my builds and even sold some. However, like I said in an earlier comment, ZOS needs at the very least to allow more grains (and ideally, platings) to drop from deconstructing jewelry, because jewelry improvement has an extra tenfold step, so it doesn't makes sense for only one grain to have a chance drop from deconstruction.

FlopsyPrince

Jaimeh wrote: »

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

I'm talking about the daily crafting writs, not the master writs. The daily ones, even on one character, are very much worth doing. You get intricates that you can pass off to alts, and surveys as well. Then as you level jewelry crafting on your alts you'll keep getting intrictates to decon for inspiration, and it will snowball, so it will level faster on other alts. Eventually if you can do daily crafting writs on max level on a few alts you'll start getting enough grains to make platings, and be self sufficient.

I have been doing Jewel Crafting off and on since it was released. I have mined thousands of jewel crafting nodes. I have 5 Chromium platings. Jewel Crafting is useless.

I think most of the players who've amassed platings have done so mainly via daily writs, so their usefulness is self-evident. I'm not sure what you mean by on and off, and on how many toons you did them on, but I've levelled jewelry crafting on all my alts and even though I don't do daily writs on all of them, I have enough for my builds and even sold some. However, like I said in an earlier comment, ZOS needs at the very least to allow more grains (and ideally, platings) to drop from deconstructing jewelry, because jewelry improvement has an extra tenfold step, so it doesn't makes sense for only one grain to have a chance drop from deconstruction.

The limits may have made sense when Summerset came out, but they have much less meaning now, except for those who actively flip in this area.

katanagirl1

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

blackweb wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

It's funny how people back when Summerset released theorized that the market would be saturated in one year and prices would drop a lot. But so far they've only been rising (and also as a result jewellery master writs are still not worth doing for the most part). It's not just that getting one plating needs ten grains, it's also thefact that deconning jewellery has a chance to drop a grain and not a plating. At the very least they should increase the number of grains dropping from deconstruction. Anyway, my tip to your OP is that while you set up your characters to do jewellery crafting writs, in the meantime also farm gold to buy your upgrade mats, it might be faster, and hopefully when you do enough writs you'll be self-sufficient. Also, for some sets that have had their necks/rings appear in the golden vendor, it might be cheaper to search for them on traders and find a good deal, than upgrading them yourself.

Jewelry Crafting writs are prohibitively expensive and gathering the mats takes so long that it is impossible for casual players to do so. The materials required to complete blue and higher master jewelry crafting writs make them impossible to complete. Jewelry crafting is not a viable crafting profession for casual players in ESO.

I'm talking about the daily crafting writs, not the master writs. The daily ones, even on one character, are very much worth doing. You get intricates that you can pass off to alts, and surveys as well. Then as you level jewelry crafting on your alts you'll keep getting intrictates to decon for inspiration, and it will snowball, so it will level faster on other alts. Eventually if you can do daily crafting writs on max level on a few alts you'll start getting enough grains to make platings, and be self sufficient.

I do Jewelry Crafting writs every day which is marginally useful. However, I NEVER make nor improve jewelry in ESO because it is too expensive to do so. Jewel crafting is not a viable profession for casual players in ESO.

As has been mentioned previously by several players including myself, farming nodes is not a good source for plating, surveys and daily writs are.

Are you doing the daily crafting writs at top tier? I get chromium grains from them.

Jewelry is more grindy than the other crafts but not a waste of time as you suggest. I even do purple and gold master writs sometimes if I need a lot of writ vouchers and I have the mats to do them. I don’t gold out trials gear or anything like that, though. I use the plates for furnishing items for my house occasionally.

etchedpixels

It's a hyperinflation problem for in game gold (and really bad for newer players because what they generate in game is now basically worthless except to trade with NPCs). If you measure crowns versus dollars versus gold/crowns rates, or you look at the ToS violating gold/cash mats/cash site prices you'll see the value of platings is fairly flat. It's just gold was made worthless by mass automated crafting tools on PC, and by scrying.

The inflation then amplifies the problem because nobody is going to sell a plating when it's worth more every day. It's an inflation hedge. The one thing you don't want to hold in hyperinflation is gold.

blackweb

etchedpixels wrote: »

It's a hyperinflation problem for in game gold (and really bad for newer players because what they generate in game is now basically worthless except to trade with NPCs). If you measure crowns versus dollars versus gold/crowns rates, or you look at the ToS violating gold/cash mats/cash site prices you'll see the value of platings is fairly flat. It's just gold was made worthless by mass automated crafting tools on PC, and by scrying.

The inflation then amplifies the problem because nobody is going to sell a plating when it's worth more every day. It's an inflation hedge. The one thing you don't want to hold in hyperinflation is gold.

There is nothing to mitigate plating inflation. No daily hireling email and it takes several times longer to gather enough grains to make any kind of plating. I have been doing writs for months, I think I got 1 chromium plating all through the deadlands and high isle. Jewelry Crafting is an unusable profession. It takes too long to gather mats and they are too expensive to buy.