Sooo...Scribing

SilverBride

Aurielle wrote: »

...you’re suddenly all for account-wide unlocks?

I have always been for account wide unlocks. Unlocking a feature that we still need to develop on our characters, such as leveling rapport with our Companions, is very different from auto leveling our characters with all quests showing completed and all skill points filled in.

CrazyKitty

SilverBride wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

...you’re suddenly all for account-wide unlocks?

I have always been for account wide unlocks. Unlocking a feature that we still need to develop on our characters, such as leveling rapport with our Companions, is very different from auto leveling our characters with all quests showing completed and all skill points filled in.

Account Wide Achievements aren't necessarily account wide it seems. Lately it seems like they just want us to grind for stuff.

Necrotech_Master

Tannus15 wrote: »

the ink drop rate is kinda irrelevant imo.

right now it's low and no one has enough. you get a boost by doing the quests, but it's only 12, which is enough for 4 skills.

however, ink drops, rare as they are, will eventually bank up. you're not going to be changing scribed skills for every bit of content. most likely you'll setup one or two skills to use in a flex spot in some conditions and that's about it. in 6 months time we'll all have 100+ ink and no use for it.

the bigger problem is that the use cases for skills are all niche.

there are some good support abilities, there are some good pvp abilities, but there are no good straight up damage abilities. for most players, they are better off just not using scribing and sticking with class skills.

the ink drop rate is very relevant

it takes 3 ink to make 1 skill, i did scribing questline first and have received 0 ink drops in the entire venture through the west weald (im about 95% done the zone and 0 ink drops from either harvesting or enemy kills)

sure you wont be remaking them all the time, but right now you cant even play with the system at all because ink is so rare

theres supposedly ~4000 possible combinations of the various scripts on grimoires, but with ink as rare as it is makes this system unable to be experimented with at all

right now the ink is slightly rarer than nirncrux from harvesting nodes, and the approx drop rate from NPCs is somewhere between 0.5 and 1% which is basically the anniversary style page grind, but all the time

people are selling the ink for upwards 100k+ gold on PC NA right now, thats a cost of 300k gold to make a skill if you want to just experiment with the system

and then i see the system generally being unused because of how alt-unfriendly it is, sure the questline wont be a grind, but you have to grind every script and grimoire for every character, in addition to grinding for ink just to use the system

i think the system could be fun, but the extreme rarity of ink to do anything with the skills is a huge artificial bottleneck on the system, even before you start working on alts

RomanRex

Haven’t started. May be like ToT where I never touch it. ToT was because it just sounds and looked horrible. This for the grind.

The lame drop rates and amount of work for minimal benefit.

Aurielle

SilverBride wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

...you’re suddenly all for account-wide unlocks?

I have always been for account wide unlocks. Unlocking a feature that we still need to develop on our characters, such as leveling rapport with our Companions, is very different from auto leveling our characters with all quests showing completed and all skill points filled in.

No, it’s not different. Take the companion unlock quest, for instance. You want to bypass that on your alts after doing it once. So this companion that your alt has never met before (via the quest) is suddenly supposed to just be at your alt’s beck and call? And what about the intro to scribing quest? Your alt, who has no knowledge of scribing (because they didn’t do the quest), suddenly just knows how to scribe? These are all “things we need to develop on our characters,” so why should they be exempt, following your own logic?

And by the way, I personally never suggested alts should be “auto-levelled.” I firmly believe all new alts should start from level one and grow in power via acquiring XP. I simply suggested that zone story quest achievements (which are ALREADY account-wide) should also include access to the skill points associated with the achievement — that way, we wouldn’t feel compelled to repeat these insanely long, dull quests on our alts when our mains have already done them. You could still physically do the quests if you wanted to…

Aurielle

CrazyKitty wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

Aurielle wrote: »

...you’re suddenly all for account-wide unlocks?

I have always been for account wide unlocks. Unlocking a feature that we still need to develop on our characters, such as leveling rapport with our Companions, is very different from auto leveling our characters with all quests showing completed and all skill points filled in.

Account Wide Achievements aren't necessarily account wide it seems. Lately it seems like they just want us to grind for stuff.

Agreed. It’s very frustrating. There’s a reason why grindy MMOs are dwindling in popularity. People generally don’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, and also lack the TIME to do the same thing over and over again. My alts are just going to have to be at a disadvantage, as they always are…

Gasdream

The entire scribing system will surely be monetized in future updates. It's designed to be fatiguing so that it is marketable. Stay on the grind or pay for convenience, either way it's more profitable than delivering an account-wide system.

SilverBride

CrazyKitty wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I have always been for account wide unlocks. Unlocking a feature that we still need to develop on our characters, such as leveling rapport with our Companions, is very different from auto leveling our characters with all quests showing completed and all skill points filled in.

Account Wide Achievements aren't necessarily account wide it seems. Lately it seems like they just want us to grind for stuff.

I don't know how they decided which achievements should be account wide or not, but they made the ToT tutorial skippable on alts, and now Scribing only requires the first quests on our alts to unlock the skill... thankfully... because 2 days playtime doing nothing but this quest is brutal.

They seem to be doing this with unlocks and not all achievements, which makes a lot of sense to me, and I hope this continues with future unlocks.

Necrotech_Master

SilverBride wrote: »

CrazyKitty wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I have always been for account wide unlocks. Unlocking a feature that we still need to develop on our characters, such as leveling rapport with our Companions, is very different from auto leveling our characters with all quests showing completed and all skill points filled in.

Account Wide Achievements aren't necessarily account wide it seems. Lately it seems like they just want us to grind for stuff.

I don't know how they decided which achievements should be account wide or not, but they made the ToT tutorial skippable on alts, and now Scribing only requires the first quests on our alts to unlock the skill... thankfully... because 2 days playtime doing nothing but this quest is brutal.

it took me roughly 6 hours to do the entire scribing questline (~1 hour per quest, though i would say the first quest was only about 5-10 min tops, the other 5 accounted for the remaining time)

WhiteCoatSyndrome

sarahthes wrote: »

You can bank and trade them between characters. They're curated tho so once you learn it on your main you can't farm it on the main again until you've gotten everything in that type of script.

And this is why I’m banking all my Scripts outright. Once I have enough for all my alts, then I’ll start feeding them to my main.

SilverBride

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

You can bank and trade them between characters. They're curated tho so once you learn it on your main you can't farm it on the main again until you've gotten everything in that type of script.

And this is why I’m banking all my Scripts outright. Once I have enough for all my alts, then I’ll start feeding them to my main.

I'm just learning what I find on my main crafter because I doubt I will ever use the skill in the first place, let alone on all my characters.

I am unsure though if the skill we scribe can then be used on our alts or not, but it's not anything I care about at the moment.

DoofusMax

VouxeTheMinotaur wrote: »

What's your overall take on the chapter?
How's the Scribing?
Is the ink drop rate that atrocious, is it meant to be that way?

For the first question, I'm still debating. Outside of the scribing (which I'll get to), I have not enganged much with West Weald other than running around to get the wayshrines. It's a gorgeous zone and I'm very impressed with what the design team has done on that front. The music and audio are fantastic. OTOH, it's always about the graphics and combat and the sound team never gets the love they deserve. From the little I've engaged with thus far, the voice acting has been superb. Honestly, I'm running short on compliments when it comes to the audio and am too lazy to break out a thesaurus.

On the scribing front, I've finished three of the five sections of the Scholarium and am probably pushing close to six hours on the quest line (it's the first time engaging with the quest, so I'm not clicking through dialogue). I'm also doing it on a character who hasn't found all the wayshrines in a lot of zones, so there is often a bit of running around to get where I need to go. I suspect that those last two sections will also eat up an hour or two each. I understand that once any character has completed the Scholarium quest, subsequent characters can skip all of it (except the first, which is a scribing tutorial). I'm not quite old enough to remember this as lived experience (a few jokes in cartoons riffing on it excepted), but "is this trip really necessary?" seems apropos.

To the skills themselves, I think they're a nice addition. It's not the spell-crafting that a lot of folks had in mind, but it's close. The scribed skills are interesting and there's room for expansion within that framework, so I'll tentatively give it a thumbs up (except for the seriously grindy unlocking).

I can't speak to the drop rate since I haven't tried to harvest ink with the character that has unlocked those parts of the Scholarium and other characters are on the back burner while the first completes the Scholarium quests. Reports from other players are that drop rates are pretty bad. But I'll temper that by noting that "drop rates are too low" comments are about as common as "it's too hard/easy/grindy/fast." Completing the Indrik wing allows inks to drop as loot from defeated enemies and completing the Netch wing allows it to drop from harvest nodes and those unlocks are supposed to be account-wide. At a rough guess, the drop rate is intended to be about the same as Nirncrux or chapter style mats, but it's world-wide rather than zone-specific. Whether than proves to be the case remains to be seen.

Cobble123

So 57 master writs done, and one class script thing awarded. Just the one.


*sigh*

Necrotech_Master

SilverBride wrote: »

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

You can bank and trade them between characters. They're curated tho so once you learn it on your main you can't farm it on the main again until you've gotten everything in that type of script.

And this is why I’m banking all my Scripts outright. Once I have enough for all my alts, then I’ll start feeding them to my main.

I'm just learning what I find on my main crafter because I doubt I will ever use the skill in the first place, let alone on all my characters.

I am unsure though if the skill we scribe can then be used on our alts or not, but it's not anything I care about at the moment.

if you scribe a skill, its only for the toon that scribed it

each character has to learn grimoires, scripts, and scribe their own skills separately

SilverBride

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I'm just learning what I find on my main crafter because I doubt I will ever use the skill in the first place, let alone on all my characters.

I am unsure though if the skill we scribe can then be used on our alts or not, but it's not anything I care about at the moment.

if you scribe a skill, its only for the toon that scribed it

each character has to learn grimoires, scripts, and scribe their own skills separately

Thanks for clarifying.

I'm not sure why they are doing it this way, though, because we can use gear other characters craft and enchanting scrolls other characters craft etc.. Just another reason I dislike the entire Idea.

Aurielle

SilverBride wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I'm just learning what I find on my main crafter because I doubt I will ever use the skill in the first place, let alone on all my characters.

I am unsure though if the skill we scribe can then be used on our alts or not, but it's not anything I care about at the moment.

if you scribe a skill, its only for the toon that scribed it

each character has to learn grimoires, scripts, and scribe their own skills separately

Thanks for clarifying.

I'm not sure why they are doing it this way, though, because we can use gear other characters craft and enchanting scrolls other characters craft etc.. Just another reason I dislike the entire Idea.

They’re treating scribing as something each individual character learns, rather than as a physical, tangible thing they can craft and trade among alts or sell to other players. So the skills each character learns through scribing are not unlike the skills each character individually learns when they progress through the Mages Guild, Psijiic Order and whatnot. Those skill lines aren’t shared among alts, unless you purchase them.

What sucks about scribing is the RNG aspect of it. It would be like if in order to level the Mage’s Guild skill line to unlock MG skills, each character would only have a random chance at finding lore books in the environment, rather than finding them in guaranteed locations.

This would be way better without the RNG element. Due to the RNG element, the scripts we find really should be account-wide and not character specific. The current system is just so alt-unfriendly.

darvaria

INCREASE INK DROP RATE NOW. Already seeing more bots. Get a grip on this now before the RWT raise the price to where a lot of players won't even try it.

MORE INK now. Lack of ink is RUINING this.

ClowdyAllDay

I got a scribing thing in my bank and I can’t use it as I don’t have gold road. Looks sellable?

ClowdyAllDay

Signature script immobilizing strike .


ttc says it has no info on it so it must be worth millions!

BasP

I'm glad I experimented with the system on the PTS before and didn't find a single Scribing skill that I really wanted to use on one of my characters. So I don't feel the need grind for Ink, quickly get all the Scripts nor unlock Scribing on all of my characters.

That said, I still find the low drop rate of Ink a bit annoying. While I get that ZOS wants players to spend as much time as possible in ESO, I would've preferred it if Ink wouldn't be necessary for Scribing at all. I can imagine that people would've enjoyed experimenting with all of the different combinations to their hearts' content. As it is, I guess that quite a few players will just google "Best Scribing skills" and go with combinations other players suggest instead.

And being able to buy Ink from Guild Traders isn't really a great solution imo. Especially for players without a lot of gold buying all of the Grimoires is pretty costly already, and the prices for Ink might stay relatively high for a while too. Having more gold sinks might be nice, but I'm not sure if a Chapter's Big Feature should be a gold sink itself.

Shara_Wynn

Shara_Wynn wrote: »

So I am finally done with the scribing quest line and have become so fatigued by it, that now all I want to do is anything other than scribing spells. Ugh. Way to kill the mood ZOS.

However, I am now free to actually get out and start exploring West Weald! Yay! And maybe pick up some ink and scripts while I'm at it.

Well despite the fact that alts can scribe (and get the ink and script drops from nodes and mobs) by only doing the tutorial quest "The Second Era of Scribing", given how abysmal the ink drop rates seem to be, I reckon I shall have to endure the entire questline, again, just so I can get me some ink!

Oh ZOS.

SilverBride

Aurielle wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I'm not sure why they are doing it this way, though, because we can use gear other characters craft and enchanting scrolls other characters craft etc.. Just another reason I dislike the entire Idea.

They’re treating scribing as something each individual character learns, rather than as a physical, tangible thing they can craft and trade among alts or sell to other players.

When I first heard of this I thought of it as more of a craft similar to enchanting, where we could create skills for ourselves or for others to use... at least our own characters.

The more I learn the less I like this.

ClowdyAllDay

this was the thing people wanted ish... but not the way they wanted it?

Necrotech_Master

ClowdyAllDay wrote: »

Signature script immobilizing strike .


ttc says it has no info on it so it must be worth millions!

all scribing stuff is account bound, except for the luminous ink

ClowdyAllDay

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

ClowdyAllDay wrote: »

Signature script immobilizing strike .


ttc says it has no info on it so it must be worth millions!

all scribing stuff is account bound, except for the luminous ink

not so. i put it in my guild bank and traded it to another of my 11 accoiunts

Vrienda

A grind and a gold sink that punishes poorer players more than it ever will those with tons of wealth. Generally quite awful. The lore is at best boring and at worst confusing (How is this a lost art again?).

I just... don't understand why they did it like this. Unless they plan to monetise how bad it is.

SilverBride

Well I just finished this quest chain which took me about 6 hours total. I wish I could say there was something fun about it, but for me there wasn't. In fact, this chain seemed to hit on all the things I have not enjoyed in this game and put them all in one place.

Now I can get to the new zone and start having fun.

Dax_Draconis

I did the scribing quests and still don't understand what it is about or how it works or why I even need it.

Got a free horse though.

pklemming

Why are people saying they are doing the questline over again. You just need to do the quest from the mage outside the portal to the schoiarium up until the point you get given the way of the indrik. You do NOT need to do that. You are done. You only do all 5 doors on your first character. Alts are 10 mins to unlock.

ink is also a major pita. 1 in 500-1000 kills right now., sample size is too small to be more accurate than that.

Also The group heals and buffs are still broken from PTS, not applying correctly in trials.Don't use them to apply the likes of minor courage( as a zenas replacement) until fixed, only half your raid will ever be buffed.

.... and yeah, If I want to open the grimoires for all 20 characters it will set me back 2.4 million gold. I can afford it, but not very new player friendly.

pklemming

Also, the quest line reminded me of the psjic line, which is not a good thing... Oh, look... another focal point....

You can 'blast' through it all in around 2 hours 30, if you don't read quests, which I don't.