To answer your question: yes, hirelings are basically useless now. On average they are not quite as useless as you have found so far, though. A hireling should mostly send you a stack of 5 raw materials up to twice per day. However, harvesting two nodes gives you more than that. You will get a single purple temper once in a while, but I don't find it worth the effort any longer to log in twice a day to check what they found.

If you are short on skill points, they are better spent elsewhere.

I like my hirelings, sure they aint as good as they used to, but still im getting free stuff everyday logging in without lifting a finger

thats what I call effective lacy

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

The tooltip for the Hirelings says that when I go offline the hireling will find crafting mats for me.

Specifically the clothing Hireling says: An Outfitter hireling with send you cloth or leather and possibly other items everyday.

Over the last 10 days 90%+ of what my hireling has sent me has been Racial Style Items or Weapon and Armour Trait gems.

It almost never gives me cloth or leather.

I don't need style items, or trait gems I have close to 100 of almost everything.

I DO NEED Cloth or Leather though.

Really is time that Trait and Style items were taken off the loot table for the Hirelings so that actually do what we are told they should do.

All The Best

give us better hirelings

I get a steady supply of Blue and Purple tempers from my Hirelings, and the occasional gold tempers too. I don't know if the L3 Hirelings are totally worthless, as I frequently get a double shot of tempers on that email, and multiples more often than not. I just don't try to log in twice a day for them anymore.

ZaCormyr wrote: »

Doesn't make sense to me.. hirelings seems like a gimmick.

I liked the stories that came with their mail threads. Now, when all those stories are exhausted and nobody at ZOS cares to write new content for them, I'm no longer logging in every day, and my guess is that this was the entire point of hirelings: to make players stick around. The hirelings are no longer a contributing reason for me to log in, and certainly not to the point where I try to do it twice a day at specific times to get the most out of them.

ZaCormyr wrote: »

If hirelings are just there to kind of force people to want to log in each day.. then it is a gimmick. Which is just sad. I expect better from TES.

Well, yes. But so is Feeding your Horse, keeping up with Research on Traits, Daily quests, Pledges etc etc. MMO's are chock a block full of reasons as to why you need to log in. Its because they want you logging in. Now, it is lost on me with a B2P game why people need to be logging in every day, but it this is part and parcel of playing an MMO.

You don't have to have the hirelings, and as mentioned above, you can farm just fine in this game. The hirelings just give me a nice stream of Tempers that I don't have to go look for. I have never had to buy any tempers for any of my crafting as my hirelings send me enough to keep me going. I have bought some in the past, but only because they were bargains, not because i needed them.

Note, I have only upgraded a couple of things to Lengendary and the Hirelings will not keep me supplied with enough of those.

Alot of people feel they are useless but consider this, with all the quests, dungeons, all the skyshards from all 3 factions and cyrodil what else could you spend the points on? You have more than enough points to go around even as you level. The mats they drop off means there is one less thing I have to harvest when I do writs.

The only thing I could see not putting points in on crafting is maybe the research thing once you have all the research done. And yes hirelings still give gold stuff. I got one 2 days ago. Its not as much as I would like it but I am saving all that stuff for vet rank 14, currently rank 2.

Based on what I've seen post the Great Hireling Nerf, I'm suspicious that they reduced the rate of getting any kind of temper/aspect rune.

For example, pre-nerf, I would almost always receive all three types of runestones from my L3 Enchanter hireling. I would often receive one or two Kutas in a week, with the rest being mostly Rekutas, with a couple Denatas and maybe a Jejota. It was rare for me to ever receive a Ta. Post-nerf? I'm lucky if I get anything better than a Denata. Seriously - I've received maybe a handful of Rekutas since the nerf, and only 2 Kutas. All last week, I received either Denatas or no aspect rune at all. One day, I received only a potency rune - at L3!

The equipment hirelings aren't doing much better - I'm lucky to get anything better than blue. I rejoice now when I happen to get a purple temper (and I think I've only seen one or 2 golds in all this time). So, at least in my experience, the chance of getting any level of temper, not just gold, has been reduced.

That said, I still feel the hirelings are useful for getting a regular supply of ores/wood/cloth/leather/potency runes. However, I just recently got rid of my provisioner hireling, since I have 200 of all ingredients, and I find that the writs supply me with more purples than my hireling (L3) was sending me. That hireling isn't as necessary now that writs can supply you with purple ingredients.