Alchemy regents are getting out of control, need hirelings ASAP

Pyr0xyrecuprotite · September 2016

Xsorus wrote: »

Make a bunch of low level 6 characters
DO Alchemy writ on them daily
Profit
Seriously...sitting at over 1k Columbine and over 1k in most of the others...

Agreed. I was just going to suggest Alchemy writs as a way of getting mats. It is one of the few writs where you get a lot more back than the cost of resources required to do the writs. (There is still a cost in time to go collect from the survey map sites). Most of my alts are maxed out in Alchemy .... given the recent increased cost of Columbine, I should probably start farming alchemy mats this way.

Another option is to change your build to have less reliance on potions, or using cheaper potions instead. I tried one build which relied heavily on Spell Power tripots, but was going through stacks of them so fast that it didn't make sense. My regular build was more survivable and did not require as many pots, even if it might have slightly lower DPS.

For some tripot recipes, you can substitute ingredients. For example, a really great Restore/buff Health/stam/magic tripot uses Columbine, Bugloss and Mountain Flower, but there is a SLIGHTLY worse alternative using Lady Smock (I think) instead of Columbine.

BTW, the Dark Brotherhood "Shadowy Supplier" passive is fairly useless in this respect, as the poison-making mats given (or potions) tend to mostly be some of the newer mats (altho Nightshade can be nice if you like using poisons).

That said, I wouldn't mind having an Alchemy hireling. I just don't think that the OP's beliefs about mats being behind a paywall are valid. Alchemy mat prices used to be much, much lower (PC/NA) - it's really just changing because fewer people want to spend time farming gold (supplying the market) in that particular way. So like I said previously, we may have to end up going around picking up some of those flowers ourselves, at least some of the time.

Dromede · September 2016

Leandor wrote: »

This is a very logical result of the currently ongoing monopolization, and a very good indication of what will happen if they ever implement a global auction house.

You just need to check PC-EU server and look for that one tabbard. A conglomerate of trade guilds has formed and is growing daily. Every large trade spot has the majority of traders under the conglomerate's control, places like reaper's march and elden root are fully under their control.

This conglomerate controls the pricing their slaves put up, adjusting the market to their leaders whims.

Sadly, the majority of players comes here to complain instead of not submitting to them.

Ah well, now it pays off that I never leave ingredients be... gotta catch em all!

Um.. what? Obviously, buying out cheaper lots to resell them at higher price happens a lot, but this is crazy

I'm in one of the major trading guilds on PC NA, and noone ever sets prices forcefully. I get the whole 'evil conglomerate' argument, but it doesn't really apply here.

smacx250 · September 2016

nimander99 wrote: »

Am I the only one who thinks hirelings are basically worthless?

I had at one point a bunch of alts (have since deleted most of them for other characters) to collect the hireling stuff. Hirelings got nerfed. I found it more boring to log onto them just to collect mostly junk than to just go and play, so I stopped doing it. I now rarely log in to collect twice a day, even on a single character. Frankly, I'm happy not to - I like to play on my own time, and not have the game dictate my play schedule.

FortheloveofKrist · September 2016

ManDraKE wrote: »

alexkdd99 wrote: »

So what you are really saying is you want them handed to you with no effort.

Having to farm for items to do end game activities is a part of every mmo. Maybe you should think about spending a little less time in end game and a little more preparing for it.
You must either farm for the items or pay the asking price for convenience. Go farm your own or pay the price it is up to you in the end, but don't expect to have things handed to you just because you don't feel like farming the items yourself.

yeah no effort because hirelings will give me 100 regents per day lol. I'm requesting hirelings to inject more regents into the market, from a source that can't be over-farmed to avoid price manipulation by big traders.

I'm done with this kind of comments, is like trying to explain maths to monkeys.

Sort of like trying to explain civility to a thick headed ManDrake.

Ep1kMalware · September 2016

ManDraKE wrote: »

I guess this is happening in other servers too, but at least on PC NA, the alchemy regents prices are getting out of hand.
Columbine is already to expensive to be manipulated, but people is inflating prices of other regents like namira's roots, blessed trissle, etc. I literaly went to 15 guilds stores and found ZERO of them, just to go to reapers march (where the main trading guilds are) to found dozens of stacks with prices inflated beetwen 100-200% according to MM.

This need to stop. With the new trials, a lot of people is starting to use more brutality/spellpower pots, so the demand is way higher than a couple months ago, plus the always steady demand of tripots/inmmobile pots for PvP. This is not some rare endgame gear that is being manipulated, we are talking about something as basic as pots that are essencial to PvE and PvP, is a sink of gold that many players can't afford, specially new players that are also using the gold to get their gear. Where are getting to the point where people will stop doing trials cause they can't afford pots.

We need alchemy hirelings, please ZoS.

I've got about 900 na,iras rot, 3k dragonthorn, and iirc about 1.2k columbine.

Finally my stars line up xD

dodgehopper_ESO · September 2016

Gargath wrote: »

ManDraKE wrote: »

. Your 300k gold are nothing, the people that manipulate prices like this are sitting over 50+ millon gold, you are not even close to understand how the market works.

Why don't you manipulate these prices in opposite direction? Just join few of those biggest trading guilds, and keep selling Columbines for 1 single gold, you can do it with your trusted friend to avoid loosing too much. After many transactions you should see the price decreases in MM average. Be a good guy and help the market voluntarily. Actually imho anyone can manipulate prices for MM this way and we can either accept that or join the manipulators .

Are you joking? If you drop Columbines on the market for 1 gold each, people will price fix those things immediately. I would do it too because I know someone else would, and I know it would be an instant profit turnaround at no cost to me. You're talking about getting 500:1 on your investment. The only way to drop prices would be to continually put a supply a mass of lower cost units but not too low to put money in someone else's pocket.

zuto40 · September 2016

need hireling, paying 800 for single columbine is ridiculous

dodgehopper_ESO · September 2016

predareaper wrote: »

From the points people are bringing up this is a case of lazyness, lets say that we do get hirelings and that they would be roughly 4 herbs per mail twice a day if you invested all 8 (standard) characters into having alchemy at 50 that would be 64 herbs a day just from checking the characters and most of them wouldnt even be worth anything or be used in the sought after potions.
This is a case similar to when people requested that nirncrux should be obtained in all zones, people didnt want to go to craglorn where they couldnt get max lv mats just for the crux, and I greatly declined, having something valuable in one area rewards those who take their time to farm it, but it does not quite create a monopoly since you arent restricted from entering.
Now adressing the issue with raids, if you consume that amount of potions on a daily basis and you cant make enought to sustain the cost you should consider laying it off for some time, why would the people that take time of their playtime to harvest these mats be less rewarded, their time is worth as much as yours. Its like wanting to go to the movies everyday and asking for free tickets.

I actually wish more materials were specific to at least regions. In some respects this is true, you are far more likely to encounter scrib jelly in morrowind than you will elsewhere. I like this. If I had my way though there would be at least 3x as many alchemical materials.

While we're on the topic of materials, I'd also like to say that I find Rubedite atrocious. We can't re-color weapons either so we're stuck with candy apple red nonsense. It bothers me a bit because it doesn't also mesh very well with the theme of previous TES gear. Glass/Ebony/Daedric/Dragonbone were always top end gear. While Dragonbone was rare it did exist in Morrowind as a top tier piece of equipment. On the matter of Glass, it is a motif in this game and a motif that doesn't look like its forebears. I really wish they would have stuck with their original sketches of this material. It is my hope that if they want to keep upgrading better and better levels of gear (which I personally find annoying) I'd like to see them add alloys into the equation, or other such treatments to current metals. I think this would be more interesting (then again I'd love to see a SWG style crafting system but that's very unlikely to happen).

dodgehopper_ESO · September 2016

Surak73 wrote: »

ManDraKE wrote: »

And no, i can't farm enought regents to cover my own demand, no withouth spending considerable amount of time that would stop me from doing PvE/PvP.

Why on hell this shouldn't be true for anyone else?... Reagents don't run after me, I have to invest part of my time harvesting them if I want to use them. And - surprise... - this time is subtracted from my pve/pvp time as well.

So, bottom line is: if you want potions/reagents, buy them with your gold in stores or with your time in the wilderness; or, you can do pve/pvp without potions, it's not mandatory; or, you could also use the normal red/blue/green potions you find everywhere.

But if you want something more special, you have to pay for that doing the specific content; otherwise, you are acting exactly like the guys who want special maelstron weapons without having to complete VMA.

This is a great response. For an in game economy to function well, different playstyles need to be worthy of someone's time. In this case, someone who enjoys wandering the world picking flowers and playing the market deserves to get paid for his efforts.

dodgehopper_ESO · September 2016

UltimaJoe777 wrote: »

Look, regardless of whether or not an Alchemy Hireling is or is not a good or bad idea the fact of the matter is Snakeblood is useless and needs replacing and a Hireling is a good choice for a replacement. To keep it on par with Provisioning there isn't really anything else TO add in place of Snakeblood beyond a Hireling.

Because of the power of poisons, I'd personally prefer if Snakeblood afforded 2000-4000 poison resistance. (I'd also like to see Argonians and Bosmer both get a poison resistance in the ballpark of 3-4k instead of the piddly 1.2k they currently receive).

I think they can fit in a Hireling in a new dot. They've been jamming in more skillpoints on the other crafts over time, why not do the same for Alchemy? They can add something without taking away a feature.

dodgehopper_ESO · September 2016

Decado wrote: »

I love how many people are saying it's not possible to push the prices of these things up since anyone can go and farm when it's actually happening as we speak, do you not think about this stuff?

Let's take columbine for example, when I used to buy ingredients and craft pots to sell I used to go around every guild store and buy up all the columbine I could find up to the price of 400G each, I used to find literally thousands each time I did this, probably once a week (and yes for a long time after crafting bags) then I got told by a friend of btw xxx is back and has decided he wants to push the price of columbine up, and that week I started noticing less and less columbine in the traders and I saw this person spamming all guild chats and some chats I was in WTB columbine 450G each CoD any amount of people obviously send him loads is this was above MM price,

Then 2 days later you saw the same person WTB columbine 500G each etc and still little to 0 columbine in the guild traders, then I started to see the same person listing literally 1000s of columbine at 600/750+ gold each while still buying up the whole stock of any below and so MM price kept rising, simple rinse and repeat from there,

Unless this is just a huge coincidence and him claiming to rise the prices and buying it all
Up had nothing to do with the rise in prices? That's just because crafting bags and it took weeks for it to show?

I actually agree with what you're saying here @Decado but I personally don't have a problem with it on principle. I can see how it is frustrating to not have the good potions available for dungeoneering/Trial-runs/raiding/pvp. It hurts me too at times so I get it. By the same token I can honestly say I have never sold alchemical materials on the markets. Part of the reason is that I like crafting alchemy for myself, and when I have sold alchemical materials it was the finished product. The second reason though is that the pricing on most of the product was severely undervalued with respect to the time it takes and the value of certain flowers for their performance. I think the issue here is that the masses are starting to realize the intrinsic value of some of these materials, and I don't think cheap Columbines are going to be coming back any time soon.

dodgehopper_ESO · September 2016

danielpatrickkeaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Can we seperate this post into two categories?

1) PC people with MM who are complaining that they can't afford enough mats to drink potions every 45 seconds 24 hours a day and ...

2) Console people who pay prices 4 times higher who can barely afford to drink 50 potions a week.

The PC players complaints on here are laughable. Sorry. You have no idea what an expensive alchemy market looks like.

To be fair, if you're an Argonian to make use of your passives you NEED to be sucking down on alchemical materials. This in part nullifies point 1. There's a very good reason my Argonian Nightblade is also my main alchemist, and a character I've spent many hours farming flowers on.

Draxys · September 2016

I think there should just be more reagent farming spots added. Just throw a bunch of nodes into a few areas. Would help the price issue due to them being more widely available.

zuto40 · September 2016

Some people on Xbox are trying to sell 100 tri pots for 35k, good pots are too expensive

I_killed_Vivec · September 2016

1. Hirelings won't help much - particularly for the people swilling hundreds of potions a day. They just won't have an impact.

2. There seems to be some misunderstanding about how MM works. As a seller I know that buyers will also be getting information on prices. If I ask for too much then I won't get a sale. In order to get a quick sale (and make room for my next trade) I have to put items up for sale at slightly lower than MM average... which means that my sale will in turn reduce the MM average. In general, MM puts a downwards pressure influence on costs.

3. I want a legendary Vicious Death ring. The vendors are asking a cheeky 140K gold for it! Either I do without, or I pay the going price, or I do what has to be done to get it for myself.

I see no reason why someone who wants columbine shouldn't have to do the same.

Or give me a dungeon trawling hireling who sends me rare, top quality gear drops

Surak73 · September 2016

zuto40 wrote: »

Some people on Xbox are trying to sell 100 tri pots for 35k, good pots are too expensive

It's not too much at all, if you think about time involved. For crafting those potions, seller had to harvest 25 columbine, 25 mountain flowers and 25 buglosses: that is at least two hours work, probably more since it's difficult to find them in the same spot.

In two hours, you can do 4/5 runs of a normal trial and get at least 100k worth items to sell, perhaps much more if you are lucky enough to find some rare piece like an elegant sharpened sword.

Actually, I wonder why someone who have spent so much time harvesting flowers then sell them instead of keeping them for himself.

THEDKEXPERIENCE · September 2016

Surak73 wrote: »

zuto40 wrote: »

Some people on Xbox are trying to sell 100 tri pots for 35k, good pots are too expensive

It's not too much at all, if you think about time involved. For crafting those potions, seller had to harvest 25 columbine, 25 mountain flowers and 25 buglosses: that is at least two hours work, probably more since it's difficult to find them in the same spot.

In two hours, you can do 4/5 runs of a normal trial and get at least 100k worth items to sell, perhaps much more if you are lucky enough to find some rare piece like an elegant sharpened sword.

Actually, I wonder why someone who have spent so much time harvesting flowers then sell them instead of keeping them for himself.

As a potion maker, I have to say that most people truly have no concept of how expensive it is to make potions. Tripots are absurdly expensive to produce. It costs me 1000 gold to make 4 of the potions I use assuming I'm buying the mats in bulk and have gotten a good deal. If the seller in the above instance is using a similar recipe the cost of making those 100 potions was 25k and that's assuming they got the Lorkan's tears for free. Asking 10k over cost is a steal for the eventual buyer.

I price Tripots at 4 to 6k per 10 depending on the market and don't think twice about it.

Shadowshire · September 2016

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

Alchemy ingredients aren't level restricted you see.

If we had alchemy hirelings than I could create the maximum number of characters and level their alchemy enough to get hireling level 1on each. Then I could just log them everyday and recieve tons of ingredients for essentially nothing. That would hurt the farmers that rely on farming them for income.

What changes woud you suggest?

Alchemy solvents are currently restricted by the "level" of each Base Game zone, and is affected by whether the PC has completed Cadwell's Silver and/or Cadwell's Gold. Currently, in the DLC zones, the alchemy potion solvent from a Pure Water node depends upon the PC's Solvent Proficiency rank, and the poison solvent looted from various large mobs such as trolls, mammoths, bears, etc. also depends upon the PC's Solvent Proficiency rank.

When One Tamriel goes live, then the potion solvent or poison solvent that a PC can obtain will be determined by the PRNG each time that the PC accesses a node or loots an appropriate corpse. For 50% of the time, the solvent will be determined by the PC's Combat Level, and for 50% of the time, the solvent will be determined by the PC's current Solvent Proficiency rank. As far as I know, this change will apply to all zones, both the zones in the Base Game and the zones in DLCs that have them, such as Wrothgar.

SanTii.92 · September 2016

Double amount of pots you get from each craft.