Hello,

I would like to discuss some changes to the crafting writs introduced with One Tamriel:

Crafting & Harvesting

Survey Reports received from Crafting Writs may now send you to any zone throughout the world.
You may now pick up Crafting Writs from Writ Boards outside your home alliance.
Note: Deliveries sites are still determined by your original alliance.
When opening a Clothing, Woodworking, or Blacksmithing Writ reward box, you now have a chance to obtain a shipment of 25 refined materials from a previous tier of materials.
These shipments appear whenever you do not obtain a Survey Report.
You no longer need to be Champion 10 or above to obtain Crafting Writs for Craglorn and Orsinium.
Note: You still must have access to Orsinium in order to receive an Orsinium crafting writ.
All harvest nodes now scale to your combat level or applicable crafting passive rank.


Survey Reports

Fixed an issue that caused Lush plants at Clothier survey sites to produce more cloth than intended. This brings them back in line with similar nodes for other professions.
Furrier’s Traps are unaffected, with the result that Clothier surveys still provide more combined materials than Blacksmith or Woodworker surveys.

Some numbers from my experience, doing the writs on 8 chars for over a year:
At the moment survey reports cover about 40%-50% of the needed materials for the blacksmithing and woodworking writs and about 75%-80% of the clothier writs. With the changes to the clothing surveys the gold returns will decrease and crafters will have to farm or buy a lot more materials to do the daily writs. I would like to see the survey material coverage in the range from 50%-75%.


Gereral Feedback:
With smart management of materials and precrafting one can reduce the time to do the crafting part of the writs to few minutes per character. Actually the most time consuming part is collecting all the survey reports. My approach is to collect a few surveys of the same type and then go and collect them all at the same time, reducing teleporting and traveling to a minimum. With the removal of the region limitation the time to collect surveys will drastically increase, since you will likely only have one or two reports per zone even if you collect them for some days. At the moment crafting dailies are one of the most time efficient gold gain methods and the only real gold gain from crafting professions.

While I understand the exploring argument behind sending people everywhere to collect survey reports I think it will just discourage people to do the wirts. A low level character might not even have a wayshrine in a zone with the survey report, while a maxed character has seen most of the zones anyways and just has to travel more. You might have seen the discussion about crafting writs if they are worth doing or not even before these changes.

Compared to other farming methods doing writs has some high requirements: In order to be done efficiently you need to max out all crafting professions on several characters and spend a lot of skill points. Other gold farming methods don't come with such requirements, therefore crafting writs should stay the most time efficient.


Other Feedback:
There is still one blacksmithing writ that requires you to craft 5 instead of 3 items (the one involving daggers). This makes sense for the lowest level writs where daggers use much less materials than other items, but it makes no sense for the top tier writs.


Suggestions:
There is a simple, lore friendly solution I would like to present:
There are hirelings in the game, collecting materials for experienced master crafters every day. Why would a master crafter travel around Tamriel to collect materials, while he has hirelings?
What about introducing a rank 4 hireling for blacksmithing, clothing, woodworking and enchanting. When skilled, you are able to right click on a survey report and select "give to hireling". With some time delay (24-72 hours) you will get a mail with the survey materials. There might be some malus involed like not using the CP passive if unlocked, which results in about 10% less materials, or limitations like only one survey per hireling at the time, so you can't just move all reports to the character with the rank 4 hirelings skilled.This should not be too complicated to implement and would give people time to explore the new vet dungeons instead of traveling around and harvesting materials.

If anything like that is not possible to implement I would like to see the change reverted, at least for the top tier writs. Compared to lower tier writs they still have the worthless inspiration gain, that no one needs at max level, so give them at least a boost in efficiency.


How do you feel about the changes and my suggestions?

I'm going to tag @ZOS_GinaBruno and @ZOS_RichLambert since I'm not sure who is in charge of crafting and economy stuff.

Thank you for reading,

Gil-Galad


Update (PTS 2.6.2):

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Crafting & Economy
Survey Reports

• Survey Reports now drop half as often from Crafting Writs, but rich nodes at survey sites now provide twice as many materials as they did previously. This should result in roughly the same amount of materials from Survey Reports overall, but each individual report is now more lucrative.
• Survey Reports are no longer unique items, and now stack to 200. Only one Survey Report will be used each time you approach and harvest the associated survey report site.

These is definitely steps in the right direction, but I think it is not enough. The most efficient way to collect surveys will now be to save some and move them to one character. While dropping the unique property is a nice change it actually doesn't matter that much and here is why:
We have 5 professions with surveys as writ rewards (Blacksmithing, Clothing, Woodworking, Enchanting, Alchemy). Every zone has 3 unique survey maps per profession and we have at least 16 zones with survey locations. Thats a minimum of 240 unique survey maps. Assuming they will all drop at the same rate, it is very unlikely to get two identical ones. This will still fill up the characters inventory or the bank pretty fast.

So as we see the problem is still that survey maps will drop for every zone, instead of only the one zone where you turned in the writ materials. I'm still waiting for an explanation why that was changed, since I see no real reasoning behind it. The changes made in 2.6.2 are really good but still don't solve the problems caused by removing the limitation to one zone. No one asked for that change and so far I've only seen one comment that was not against it. Keeping the 2.6.2 changes and reverting the change that survey maps drop for every zone would make a lot crafters happy especially on the console, where they don't have addons like "Lost Treasures", wich makes a nice red X on the map depending on the surveys in your inventory, so you just need to open the map to see all survey locations instead of every single survey.

This kind of remembers me of the Dark Deal changes, where Wrobel said that he wants it to feel awesome if you manage to use Dark Deal in combat. Do you want it to feel awesome if we find a survey location where we have never been before?