Daily crafting writ - reward confusion

Magenpie · May 2018

Hi there folks

I'm probably being really stupid, so I apologise in advance, but I'm a bit puzzled by the rewards I'm getting from my daily crafting writs.

I have a level 22 character who is a level 37 blacksmith - so she's crafting Ebony gear for the daily writs. However, she only gets crates of iron in her reward caches.

I've very probably made a pain of myself in other threads about gathering, because I'd prefer it if mats were tied to particlar zones - don't worry I'm not going to bang on about that here - and in those threads, several people have suggested I should get appropriately levelled materials as daily writ rewards, and gathering the rest I need shouldn't be too much of a bother. Maybe I'm misunderstanding completely, but that's not what's happening. I have a metric ****tonne of iron, but I'm constantly running out of ebony.

I know I can go and gather with this character, and I understand I should find ore for both her character and blacksmithing level (I believe that's High Iron and Ebony, yes?) That's ok, but she's not the character I'm playing at the moment, so I'm not coming across ebony as I'm running about in the world, if you see what I mean?

I have a feeling I've just completely misunderstood how the system works.

Again, sorry if I'm being an utter pillock, but and if anyone could clarify I'd be really grateful!

Many thanks!

Asardes · May 2018

Half the materials in nodes are your level, half are your character's craft passive levels. For example if your character is level 25 and has level 37 blacksmith but only 4 skill points in Metalworking, if you go out and farm nodes, half of the ore ones will be high iron (steel) ones, half will be ebony. However, being level 37 blacksmith means you can put 3 more points in Metalworking and move to Quicksilver. If you added those points, but your character level stayed the same, you would collect half high iron, half quicksilver. If your character level went up to 26 you would get half orichalc and half quicksilver and so on and so forth.
https://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Blacksmithing
https://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Blacksmithing+Skills

The system is rather complicated to keep track of so I prefer maximizing my crafting skill as fast as I can by simply depositing useless CP160 gear (white, green, blue non set or bad trait pieces), logging in the trainee character and have him break them down. I only do that at level 50 though, since not being level 50 will not allow you to recycle the base material from those items. Since silk is 40 per unit in guild stores, and it can take hundreds of silk items to deconstruct, I prefer leveling the character to 50, then training the crafting. Another reason why I do that is that the monetary reward for turning in the daily crafting writs is also level, so an under 50 character will get much less than the 600 a level 50 one gets.

Ordinary writs only drop master writs if they are done at maximum tier. Those writs however will provide stacks of 25 lower level materials when they don't provide a survey, and once I have 200 I put them for sale on guild stores. In your case there will be stack of 25 Iron, High Iron, Orichalc, Dwarven metal but never Ebony. I can see plenty of sales for those in MM so they are by no means rare. If I had multiple low tier crafters I would simply go and buy them off the guild stores, since they are cheap, and it's much faster than gathering them myself. I do the same for top tier materials and only bother collecting the surveys, when I have them stacked a dozen or so deep.

Feric51 · May 2018

The material crates awarded when you turn in your daily crafting writs always give you 25 pieces of refined material that is at least 1 level below the material you are currently required to use to craft the items for the writs.

For example: On my main crafter I am at level 50 in all trades, with all points (10/10) put into the respective crafting passive. So I am using rubedite, ancestor silk/rubedo leather, and ruby ash for every writ. When I get a material crate from a blacksmith writ, it will NEVER award me with rubedite, but could potentially contain any of the lower tier material ranging from iron to voidsteel. Likewise with the clothing and woodworking writs.

Since you're using ebony, that means you're crafting with (5/10) skill points put into the metalworking passive. Your reward crates should have the chance to reward you with 25 iron, steel, Orichalc or Dwarven ingots, but NEVER ebony. This is all based on RNG unfortunately, so you might just be stuck in a rut of poor RNG that is only awarding you the iron ingots, or you might have a case of biased perception (not an insult - this is something I deal with too) that your mind only notices the iron rewards and doesn't really make note on the occasions you receive steel/Orichalc/Dwarven ingots.

This was implemented with the One Tamriel update in October 2016 to account for all zones being scaled to your character's level, including the materials in the crafting nodes. Prior to this, each zone was "leveled" and only spawned nodes in that level material. I.E. You would only ever find iron/jute/maple in Kenarthi's Roost, and Bal Foyen, and only find voidsteel/voidcloth/nightwood in Craglorn. Changing to scaling based on character became an issue for max crafters like myself who had no way of gathering lower-tier materials for crafting gear for low-level characters without respeccing and removing passives to kick in the 50/50 spilt on craft level vs character level that you already made note of.

Placing lower tier materials in the daily writ reward boxes was a type of Band-Aid fix for this that has worked out reasonably well. Sadly, since it is controlled by RNG, there is no way to maximize its effectiveness. These crates also were added to guarantee you would receive at least some return on materials for doing the writ if you did not receive a survey as part of the reward. If you notice, on the writs you receive a survey for, you do not get a materials crate. These surveys will then, theoretically, give you 50% (in your case) ebony and 50% high iron nodes to harvest. Thus replacing some of the ebony required.

I wish I could go on in further detail but I'm at work and have to run. Hope that helped at least somewhat.

Magenpie · May 2018

@Feric51 - that's exactly what I was after, thank you so much.

Running about it is then.

Feric51 · May 2018

@Magenpie what platorm/server are you on? If you're on XB-NA, give me your gamertag and I can send you a couple stacks of ebony. I'm a hoarder and have amassed quite the collection of materials from all-tiers thanks to crafting writs.

ghastley · May 2018

The return materials are intended to provide ones you can't directly gather, so there may also be an exclusion for the playing level, as well as the crafting level. Low-level characters have to get iron/jute/rawhide/maple back as there's nothing lower. Rank 2 writs can only give those materials, but at Rank 3 and above the rewards can finally avoid both the levels you gather. It is possible the returned mats will always be below either of those two, which may be why you're only seeing iron in the Blacksmithing crates.

With CP levels, you get a nasty no-mans-land where an entire account can't have any characters playing between CP 10 and the current CP level of the champions. So nobody gathers the materials at those levels except when they're crafting at them, and 50% of everything will be either higher or lower than the ones they want. Ranks 6 through 9 are a pain to get through, with the saving throw being that a Rank 10 crafter who's also CP 160+ will be getting back those materials from their writs, and not using them up.

The hardest part is getting that first character up to CP160 Master Crafter, so that they can supply the others. You'll still need surveys to cut down the gather grind, though.