Jewelry Crafting - Useless skill for new players?

acampbell · June 2018

Hello,

I've joined the game for the Summerset expansion with a few friends. Excited to make some money and useful gear, we all took a tradeskill or two. I took Enchanting and Jewelry Crafting.

Enchanting is just great, everything makes sense and I can make some really cool glyphs. A+.

Jewelry Crafting... appears to be almost entirely, 100% useless. I've got my skill up to around level 10 and I've deconstructed every ring I've had, refined perhaps close to 1000 pewter and crafted numerous rings and necklaces. I'm level 32, to give you an idea of how much I've played, and perhaps 20% of my time has been entirely dedicated to crafting. My enchantment skill is around 20.

I have enough grains to give me a 40% chance to create a single green ring.

All of my efforts culminate in 0.4 green pewter rings with an arcane trait.

There was literally no point in me choosing this profession. It's done nothing for me except suck up time and energy. Maybe this skill is useful to end-game players, or maybe there's some incredible pay-off at the end, but to me? It's worse than useless.

I can't use it to make an item that couldn't be found in about 0.01% of the time and effort by doing a dark anchor event. I think that's a really sad state of affairs.

What I don't understand is why the game developers made it so difficult to make a single darn green ring? Why are the resources for jewelry crafting worth 10% of what blacksmiths or clothiers need?

What are your thoughts - am I missing something major? Is jewelry crafting not intended for new players? If so, shouldn't the game developers do something about that? As it is , I bought Summerset exclusively for that tradeskill, so I feel like I've been had.

Preyfar · June 2018

Jewelry crafting is a skill that comes into its own over time. It's incredibly valuable but it's definitely more of an endgame skill. However, you should be doing the training/researching as you go. You don't need it to start, but if you stick around, it WILL become incredibly useful later.

Right now, the grains are incredibly hard to come by. Crafting of this kind is meant to keep rare jewelry rare, but be vastly useful later on. And it will be.

I have 8 characters that craft, and of those 8 characters, I do jewelry crafting writs on all of them. Those crafting writs lead to resources and grains (getting about 120-150 base raw per survey). The more you break down the more you get.

Jewelry crafting is more of an end game skill. I think more utility will come later (especially if/when ZOS adds in hirelings) but it's something to focus on as you go, just not as your primary focus.

acampbell · June 2018

Thanks for the reply.

You mentioned jewelry crafting writs - I do the writs for Enchanting, but where can I get the writs for jewelry crafting?

It's reassuring to know that it becomes more useful later, but perhaps some consideration should be given to making it more useful to me as I'm levelling up? As, for example, enchanting is! I use that all the time to make the very best glyphs for our equipment and it's perfectly decent - I can hammer out blue and purple glyphs with only minor effort.

Taleof2Cities · June 2018

acampbell wrote: »

You mentioned jewelry crafting writs - I do the writs for Enchanting, but where can I get the writs for jewelry crafting?

"To become certified to do Jewelry Crafting Writs, visit Felarian outside the crafting district in the city of Alinor, in Summerset." (from the natch potes)

acampbell wrote: »

It's reassuring to know that it becomes more useful later, but perhaps some consideration should be given to making it more useful to me as I'm levelling up?

Correct. The easiest way to take advantage of your newly found skills is to start researching traits. That way, you can start transmuting traits on your jewelry to whatever trait you like. That's what most players have found they could do right away.

Pops_ND_Irish · June 2018

Hehe Oh well !

Iselin · June 2018

You're not missing anything OP. Jewelry Crafting is just very poorly designed and makes no sense unless you're happy making white jewelry.

Green, blue and purple jewelry drops like candy form all monsters, chests, dungeon rewards, etc. You'd think the fact that it's so plentiful would mean that you can make your own of similar quality just as easily like you can with green, blue and purple armor and weapons, but you can't.

The difference is that all the other crafts were designed back in 2014 by people who were good at it and cared about player feedback.

Facefister · June 2018

Jewelry crafting misses its purpose : Crafting and upgrading jewelry like you do with armor or weapon pieces. Right now the resource requirements are unnecessarily high which makes jewelry crafting in that regard not feasible. For example:
You will need much less time and money farming crafted purple hunding's armor + purple sunderflame jewelry than other way around.

Pops_ND_Irish · June 2018

Gotta work a little harder.

Kelces · June 2018

I don't think either it's useful for new players.

First of all, there is the thought about sets of course when you look at crafting, so one would have to fill one slot with a ring or necklace. I don't know about you, but I replaced my training gear several times. I don't think one would make an upgraded ring just to throw them away after some levels. Having two complete sets all the time leveling wouldn't be worth the effort, perhaps not even possible.

Until the tempers get changed from powders to proper ones, we can get somewhere and most would probably not even mind only having 25% of nodes compared to the other materials.

STEVIL · June 2018

Iselin wrote: »

You're not missing anything OP. Jewelry Crafting is just very poorly designed and makes no sense unless you're happy making white jewelry.

Green, blue and purple jewelry drops like candy form all monsters, chests, dungeon rewards, etc. You'd think the fact that it's so plentiful would mean that you can make your own of similar quality just as easily like you can with green, blue and purple armor and weapons, but you can't.

The difference is that all the other crafts were designed back in 2014 by people who were good at it and cared about player feedback.

this was the key point for me.

crafted set jewelry is not much more valuable than the better overland drops and those lewels can be bought for easy gold or dolmens or moderate play. the differnce between gold and purple jewels is just not worth the 10x quality token costs.

ran like a dozen surveys plus volumes of jewelry writs a day for a while and not close to even thinking about crafting a set of jewels or upgrading... etc.

basically, plan to wait til next years anniversary event before worrying about it. otherwise cost does not equal or come close to gains - except for gold selling the pieces.

Slick_007 · June 2018

Iselin wrote: »

You're not missing anything OP. Jewelry Crafting is just very poorly designed and makes no sense unless you're happy making white jewelry.

Green, blue and purple jewelry drops like candy form all monsters, chests, dungeon rewards, etc. You'd think the fact that it's so plentiful would mean that you can make your own of similar quality just as easily like you can with green, blue and purple armor and weapons, but you can't.

The difference is that all the other crafts were designed back in 2014 by people who were good at it and cared about player feedback.

dont listen to people with this kinda attitude. i really dont know why they are even still here. Its not that bad, it just takes a bit of time and effort. A little more than the others but it will be worth it

Integral1900 · June 2018

With the upgrade material the way they are it’s a fairly redundant skill line. The master writs are set up like blacksmithing so you may as well bin those, Most end game builds use at least one dropped set so just get jewelry from that. The only use I have for it is turning blue rings from normal dungeons into purple ones at a rate of one every three months, I’m not even considering gold as that’s six months per ring at the very least, given my current drop rates. At least I can now avoid vet dungeons completely and upgrading to gold makes so little diffrence that it’s mostly a status thing anyway

idk · June 2018

The main benefit for jewelry crafting is the being able to change traits on jewelry we get once we learn the trait (on both pieces).

No jewelry will drop with the new traits so this will be the only way to get any jewelry in those traits.

So not worthless, but not as useful as the other crafts. I would suggest getting your research done, do writs and level the craft, but not as important as the rest.

Edit: writs are to get, slowly, get upgrade material just in case. Also good source of gold. Do not do master writs for jewelry though. Worthless since they cost to much to make.

Iselin · June 2018

Slick_007 wrote: »

Iselin wrote: »

You're not missing anything OP. Jewelry Crafting is just very poorly designed and makes no sense unless you're happy making white jewelry.

Green, blue and purple jewelry drops like candy form all monsters, chests, dungeon rewards, etc. You'd think the fact that it's so plentiful would mean that you can make your own of similar quality just as easily like you can with green, blue and purple armor and weapons, but you can't.

The difference is that all the other crafts were designed back in 2014 by people who were good at it and cared about player feedback.

dont listen to people with this kinda attitude. i really dont know why they are even still here. Its not that bad, it just takes a bit of time and effort. A little more than the others but it will be worth it

Don't listen to people like this that post nonsense.I don't know why they even post here. A "little more" lol. Do you even play this game?

acampbell · June 2018

Thanks everyone for the replies - I'm reassured that it isn't just me who is feeling this way.

My next question - what is the best way to appeal to the game developers for this to change? Is opening a support ticket the way to go, or is there a specific suggestions forum or something along those lines?

Thanks.

Slick_007 · June 2018

Iselin wrote: »

Don't listen to people like this that post nonsense.I don't know why they even post here. A "little more" lol. Do you even play this game?

my jc is going along quite well and iv spent a total of 0 gold on it.

Asardes · June 2018

Reaching level 50 and then going to CP160 is quite fast these days, you'll get there in a couple of weeks playing the game in a relaxed manner; if you grind you can do it in a couple of days but I don't recommend it if it's your first character since you'll probably get fed up. Once you're there you'll start getting CP160 platinum jewelry. Deconstructing those gives you much more inspiration, just like any other craft. Also when you reach CP you can get an additional 20% bonus by spending 30 CP in Tower constellation for Inspiration Boost passive. Overall leveling jewelry crafting is comparable to Enchanting. I've been able to train a character to 50 in a couple of weeks just deconstructing the drops from unrelated activities, as running dungeons and such. As for the traits, you can start researching those before you maximize the skill. Changing traits is the best feature of jewelry crafting. Overall there's no reason to consider Jewelry Crafting more punishing than other skill lines in the game, considering player level. It is more punishing regardless of level overall if you want to craft, since upgrade cost are 10x higher than other crafts.

Another advice I can give is to never refine unless you have all the passives, because you'll be losing out on most of the tempers you'll otherwise get. If you are low level and you don't have those passives it's actually more profitable to sell the raw materials on guild stores so other players can get the most out of it. Also refining doesn't increase your skill, since it doesn't give inspiration, or it gives very little.

Iselin · June 2018

Slick_007 wrote: »

Iselin wrote: »

Don't listen to people like this that post nonsense.I don't know why they even post here. A "little more" lol. Do you even play this game?

my jc is going along quite well and iv spent a total of 0 gold on it.

My jc is at 50 and I'm researching the 6th trait also without spending any gold on it. But what does that have to do with needing 10X the upgrade mats or the trait mats?

No one has ever said that getting it to 50 or researching the traits is an issue with JC. That is no different and in fact it's easier than other crafts since there are only 2 items to research X 9 compared to for example, blacksmithing's 14 X 9.

The problems with the implementation are obvious to anyone who has first hand knowledge by having harvested and refined for the past two weeks. People that don't acknowledge that are either lying about having actually done jewelry crafting or lying about what it's really like in their haste to white knight for ZOS. In other words your "a little more" statement brings your credibility to zero and you're not helping any new players who ask what it's like in the least with your lies.

It's perfectly OK to like certain things about the game and not others in case you haven't quite figured that out yet. The important bit is being honest about it.

These are the glaring issues with JC:

Crafting anything but whites takes 10X the upgrade and trait mats compared to crafting any other wearable item - not a"little more", ten times more.
The relationship between crafting any other wearable item and the drop rates for those items in equivalent quality goes out the window with respect to jewelry crafting and its corresponding equivalent drops.
If anything were to reasonably be carved out to be more of a grind to craft than other wearables assuming there were a valid game play reason to do so, it should be weapons since they have by far the greater impact on your performance. Doing this with jewelry makes no sense whatsoever.

And if you'd actually been around in 2014 you'd know that the game director at that time, Paul Sage, regularly engaged with the players in an honest effort to improve the game. Enchanting as a matter of fact, had a remake shortly after launch due to that player feedback. The current developer crew hides in their bunker and neither engages nor acknowledges the overwhelmingly negative feedback jewelry crafting has been receiving right here and elsewhere.

So stop lying to new players. You are doing more harm than good by doing so.

phaneub17_ESO · June 2018

The way to really benefit from jewelry crafting is to have it on multiple alts. Do the Daily Writ on all of them and hope you get good materials out of your reward containers. Eventually you'll get enough upgrade material from doing that to get a few items worthwhile, it'll be a long time before you get anything Legendary status. Ignore Master Writs, they're just a waste.

Slick_007 · June 2018

Iselin wrote: »

In other words your "a little more" statement brings your credibility to zero and you're not helping any new players who ask what it's like in the least with your lies.

im not the one deluding myself by playing a game that i hate. and tell others that it sux while continuing to play it. Thats what you are here for apparently.

So stop lying to new players. You are doing more harm than good by doing so.

Im sorry i dont find the game as challenging as you do in this regard. why the hell would i lie to some random internet stranger about how difficult or not i find something in a game? Im obviously a much more relaxed and happy person than you are and i dont try to turn away new players by being a jerk on the forums to the people who made the game i spend a lot of time playing. This doesnt mean if you arent happy with something dont speak up. But theres ways to send that feedback, and then theres what you do.

Iselin · June 2018

Slick_007 wrote: »

Iselin wrote: »

In other words your "a little more" statement brings your credibility to zero and you're not helping any new players who ask what it's like in the least with your lies.

im not the one deluding myself by playing a game that i hate. and tell others that it sux while continuing to play it. Thats what you are here for apparently.

So stop lying to new players. You are doing more harm than good by doing so.

Im sorry i dont find the game as challenging as you do in this regard. why the hell would i lie to some random internet stranger about how difficult or not i find something in a game? Im obviously a much more relaxed and happy person than you are and i dont try to turn away new players by being a jerk on the forums to the people who made the game i spend a lot of time playing. This doesnt mean if you arent happy with something dont speak up. But theres ways to send that feedback, and then theres what you do.

Dude, you're really not worth the effort. And neither are any of your posts.

Cya

STEVIL · June 2018

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

The way to really benefit from jewelry crafting is to have it on multiple alts. Do the Daily Writ on all of them and hope you get good materials out of your reward containers. Eventually you'll get enough upgrade material from doing that to get a few items worthwhile, it'll be a long time before you get anything Legendary status. Ignore Master Writs, they're just a waste.

As someone who runs 23 daily jewelry writs and who has cashed in a lot of surveys and decons all the raw mats on a full jewl crafter with all the passives, i feel this overstates the matter by a lot. "eventually" and "really benefit" are not how it has seemed to output so far. It is not really benefitting to get enough mats to upgrade a single piece to gold maybe every six months.

The way to really benefit AFAIK is to produce some white off-trait items and sell them for research before folks figure out no point in it.

Joosef_Kivikilpi · June 2018

acampbell wrote: »

Hello,

I've joined the game for the Summerset expansion with a few friends. Excited to make some money and useful gear, we all took a tradeskill or two. I took Enchanting and Jewelry Crafting.

Enchanting is just great, everything makes sense and I can make some really cool glyphs. A+.

Jewelry Crafting... appears to be almost entirely, 100% useless. I've got my skill up to around level 10 and I've deconstructed every ring I've had, refined perhaps close to 1000 pewter and crafted numerous rings and necklaces. I'm level 32, to give you an idea of how much I've played, and perhaps 20% of my time has been entirely dedicated to crafting. My enchantment skill is around 20.

I have enough grains to give me a 40% chance to create a single green ring.

All of my efforts culminate in 0.4 green pewter rings with an arcane trait.

There was literally no point in me choosing this profession. It's done nothing for me except suck up time and energy. Maybe this skill is useful to end-game players, or maybe there's some incredible pay-off at the end, but to me? It's worse than useless.

I can't use it to make an item that couldn't be found in about 0.01% of the time and effort by doing a dark anchor event. I think that's a really sad state of affairs.

What I don't understand is why the game developers made it so difficult to make a single darn green ring? Why are the resources for jewelry crafting worth 10% of what blacksmiths or clothiers need?

What are your thoughts - am I missing something major? Is jewelry crafting not intended for new players? If so, shouldn't the game developers do something about that? As it is , I bought Summerset exclusively for that tradeskill, so I feel like I've been had.

Bless your soul. You took one for the team, mate. You got the two most difficult professions to level up.

Also... don't get left behind with your other friends doing the other professions. Research traits in all the other professions now... you won't regret it

erliesc · June 2018

Facefister wrote: »

Jewelry crafting misses its purpose : Crafting and upgrading jewelry like you do with armor or weapon pieces. Right now the resource requirements are unnecessarily high which makes jewelry crafting in that regard not feasible. For example:
You will need much less time and money farming crafted purple hunding's armor + purple sunderflame jewelry than other way around.

I've pretty much maxed crafting (some furniture I can't make due to a shortage of skill points) with everything except jewelry.

Another character has many skill points and is doing the jewelry crafting...finding very few rings, etc...and am at level 4 or so...I TRY not to end load the game...that is...to not have some specific goal that forces me to run around like many of the maniacs I see in the game. I generally intend to advance my characters where I can...but I realize that at any point I need to play and enjoy the game to keep on with it.

Leveling up jewelry crafting will take a LONG TIME. I've accepted that....

It's the game as a whole that counts...be IN IT...ENJOY IT.

kringled_1 · June 2018

erliesc wrote: »

Facefister wrote: »

Jewelry crafting misses its purpose : Crafting and upgrading jewelry like you do with armor or weapon pieces. Right now the resource requirements are unnecessarily high which makes jewelry crafting in that regard not feasible. For example:
You will need much less time and money farming crafted purple hunding's armor + purple sunderflame jewelry than other way around.

Another character has many skill points and is doing the jewelry crafting...finding very few rings, etc...and am at level 4 or so...I TRY not to end load the game...that is...to not have some specific goal that forces me to run around like many of the maniacs I see in the game. I generally intend to advance my characters where I can...but I realize that at any point I need to play and enjoy the game to keep on with it.

Leveling up jewelry crafting will take a LONG TIME. I've accepted that....

It's the game as a whole that counts...be IN IT...ENJOY IT.

It's not leveling the skill that's an issue. I haven't really done anything special (no dolment farms, no spending money/AP on rings to decon, etc) and my crafter is at jewelry level 32.
It's the sheer effort or expense required to get the upgrade (and to a lesser extent trait) materials. Even when you've fully leveled the skill line, that amount of gathering/buying will be required for each and every piece of jewelry that is crafted from scratch. As such, in almost all cases, it's far more efficient to mix a crafted set with a dropped (dungeon/trial/overland/etc) set and have the jewelry be from the dropped set. Or in other words, basically the same as before jewelry crafting dropped, except now you can retrait.

Iselin · June 2018

kringled_1 wrote: »

erliesc wrote: »

Facefister wrote: »

Jewelry crafting misses its purpose : Crafting and upgrading jewelry like you do with armor or weapon pieces. Right now the resource requirements are unnecessarily high which makes jewelry crafting in that regard not feasible. For example:
You will need much less time and money farming crafted purple hunding's armor + purple sunderflame jewelry than other way around.

Another character has many skill points and is doing the jewelry crafting...finding very few rings, etc...and am at level 4 or so...I TRY not to end load the game...that is...to not have some specific goal that forces me to run around like many of the maniacs I see in the game. I generally intend to advance my characters where I can...but I realize that at any point I need to play and enjoy the game to keep on with it.

Leveling up jewelry crafting will take a LONG TIME. I've accepted that....

It's the game as a whole that counts...be IN IT...ENJOY IT.

It's not leveling the skill that's an issue. I haven't really done anything special (no dolment farms, no spending money/AP on rings to decon, etc) and my crafter is at jewelry level 32.
It's the sheer effort or expense required to get the upgrade (and to a lesser extent trait) materials. Even when you've fully leveled the skill line, that amount of gathering/buying will be required for each and every piece of jewelry that is crafted from scratch. As such, in almost all cases, it's far more efficient to mix a crafted set with a dropped (dungeon/trial/overland/etc) set and have the jewelry be from the dropped set. Or in other words, basically the same as before jewelry crafting dropped, except now you can retrait.

Leveling it is actually pretty trivial if you play any CP160+ character and get platinum jewelry drops which still drop like candy from any and all activities. With Dolmen grinding for guaranteed jewelry drops you can get it to 50 in 2 weeks or a lot less if you can stomach long periods of grind. Without it, I doubt it'd take anyone more than a month.

It might take a bit longer for new low level players because deconstructing CP160 jewelry gives you much more inspiration than lower level stuff. But still, leveling it is a non-issue.

acampbell · June 2018

Hey everyone,

I’m glad that people are engaged with this topic passionately, and a lot of you have some strong opinions.

What I’m wondering now is how we can effectively raise concerns that we have about the Jewelry Crafting skill tree with the game developers in a positive and helpful/constructive way.

Is there an official forum where these suggestions can be posted? Should a support ticket be raised?

Iselin · June 2018

acampbell wrote: »

Hey everyone,

I’m glad that people are engaged with this topic passionately, and a lot of you have some strong opinions.

What I’m wondering now is how we can effectively raise concerns that we have about the Jewelry Crafting skill tree with the game developers in a positive and helpful/constructive way.

Is there an official forum where these suggestions can be posted? Should a support ticket be raised?

It's a fair question. There is no official suggestion forum.

All new content goes to the Public Test Server before it goes "live." Summerset and jewelry crafting was released in that test server on April 16th and concerns about the material requirement for upgrading jewelry from white to green to blue to purple and to gold were raised there immediately.

There has to date been no official response to those concerns. Draw your own conclusions.

Banana · June 2018

I think you get a nice dye at the end of it.

Iselin · June 2018

Banana wrote: »

I think you get a nice dye at the end of it.

I don't know if you're saying that sarcastically but the Ancient Silver (I think that's the name) you get from the jc level 50 achievement is in fact a very nice silver. It goes quite well with the Psijic order level 10 hat too.

I only saw the gold one you get by crafting something and improving it to legendary on the PTS and it looked OK but very similar to other gold dyes.

ADarklore · June 2018

Initially I was excited about this... until I actually took time to look at the stats of combining two crafted sets would offer... and found that no matter what combination I tried, they came out to be less than combining a crafted and dropped set.

Plus, I don't think the devs wanted to give us Jewelry Crafting in the first place... they seem to believe that players grinding for gold jewelry is what keeps players playing the game... thus they made JC extremely difficult and tedious because they don't want players to easily upgrade purple jewelry to gold.

What I typically do is get the characters I actively play up to JC level 9, so I have access to the second level of Keen Eye and leave it at that. Once I get a decent amount of jewelry in my bank, which I've acquired from dolmens or questing, I'll pop over to my crafter and decon them. So far I've researched all the easily available traits- healthy, arcade, robust... and will wait for availability of other traits so I can research them... but I'm in no hurry.