The crafting writs for blacksmithing, clothing, and woodworking are all on 3-day rotations. The clothing ones happen to source two of their three from light armor materials (silk), and only one from medium armor material (leather).

Your claim of 90% is a little off - in reality it is 67% silk and 33% leather across the board assuming you're doing your writs daily and not skipping the day that the leather writ would come up in the rotation.

Could they have added a 4th writ utilizing leather products to better balance the material usage? Sure, but I guess they just felt it would be easier to keep clothing in sync with blacksmithing and woodworking. *Note: On the day you get blacksmithing writ calling for 1-hand sword, cuirass and greaves, you will always get the clothing writ for light robe, breeches, and epaulets. The same holds true for whatever respective woodworking writ matches up in that rotation.

Not all your characters will be on the same rotation: I.E. If you have robe, breeches, epaulets on character 1 (out of 14), characters 2-14 may, or may not, also get that same writ at the same time. This is based on the very first writ you do on each character and how that corresponds to the pre-existing rotation of any characters already doing writs.

TL;DR - Silk is 67%, leather is 33%. Been like that forever.

OK, I must be missing some leather days then because it's a lot more than 60/30 for me. You can look at what mats I have after months of doing them and can tell it's not split even that well (and that's considering the fact that most of the armor I've made for characters was leather, and it's still way higher). So I must definitely be missing leather days, and I'll have to start trying to hit those and skip some silk days.

Although - it should be 50/50 imo, no reason it should be weighted toward one over the other. So my issue still stands.

xaraan wrote: »

Although - it should be 50/50 imo, no reason it should be weighted toward one over the other. So my issue still stands.

I agree in principal that it makes no sense to have an uneven split with regards to materials. I assume it was done on the idea of keeping clothing writs on the same rotation as the blacksmithing/woodworking, which only have 3 writs. Blacksmithing could easily be adjusted to 4 writs as well, but woodworking is the real monkey wrench in this whole mess.

ZoS, for their part, attempted to balance this out somewhat by having clothing surveys give a 2 silk : 1 leather return. Prior to one of the more recent updates (Homestead maybe?) surveys only gave out silk, and for some reason people complained that leather should drop too, so that when furrier cages were created and implemented.

One guess as to why you're seeing a larger supply of leather in your inventory, even after crafting a bunch of leather gear, is that leather scraps drop from a rather large variety of overland creatures, and you may be picking it up in your loot table a lot of times without even realizing it. Ancestor silk, on the other hand, is only available from nodes, and tend to be the rarest nodes to boot.

I support your cause to balance out the clothing writs, but because it's been the status quo for so long, and received minimal pushback to date, I have slim hopes of them changing it.

Feric51 wrote: »

Could they have added a 4th writ utilizing leather products to better balance the material usage? Sure, but I guess they just felt it would be easier to keep clothing in sync with blacksmithing and woodworking.

It is arbitrary decisions like this that just irk me to the Core. There is no reason as to why these have to sync. We make what we make and we make what is asked for.

It only took them, what, two years to finally make top end Alchemy Writs not ask for Nirnroot every single time.

davey1107 wrote: »

@Feric51 Wow...you were really dedicated to troubleshooting the math and that one, lol.

I was on the work computer, so I can usually give more detailed responses than when I’m sitting here (like now) punching little icons on the screen of my phone.

That said, misinformation leads to frustration for many people and I want to make sure I back up any of my objective responses with real facts/scenarios to remove any ambiguity. Plus, this is the crafting forum, and I’ve always been a craftsman at heart in any game I’ve played, so I like hanging out here helping people whenever I can.

@ZOS_GinaBruno keep that ^^^ last sentence in mind when you’re selecting your next batch of community ambassadors. I’ll volunteer to be the token console representative!

I think we're all missing the point that the writs didn't need to be all Light or all Medium. There are currently nine items in the three rotated sets. There could have been eight or ten, with an even balance of Light and Medium, if they were mixed in each writ.

I can only assume that some time before release, there were two separate Clothier skills that merged. One for Light only, one for Medium only. Since that's not the case, mixed writs would make complete sense. Provisioner always get mixed food/drink, don't they?

I've noticed (and wondered about) this same thing. I do equipment crafting writs on three toons on one server, one toon on another. On both servers I am constantly running low on silk where my leather supply just seems to continue growing.

The added issue of having two boxes of leather (which always be where the double-resource bonus RNG kicks in) at a survey site just seems insulting.