Linaleah wrote: »

right now, I'm getting culanda laquer about every third bag. you need 2 per furnishing. nuts. I was so happy that we got all these walls and floors and staircases. but with rarety of the laquers.. I'm not sure if I'll be able to build that custom house AND furnish it

Wreuntzylla wrote: »

There are tons of threads in these forums about how making achievement related items rare, when there are so many achievements nowadays, is a bad idea.

As between scarce item plans that count towards an achievement and a scarce resource used to make the items, I think ZoS chose the right path this time.

Linaleah wrote: »

the thing is though - you cannot use mimic stones to craft furniture - only gear, so rather it's to push people to just buy furnishings outright on crown store.

or something. i don't know.

Carbonised wrote: »

First of all, let me start up on a positive note, the droprate for Summerset furnishing plans is actually quite decent, already there are plenty of plans for sale, including lots of purples. People still try and take up to 1M for these at sellers, but I imagine that price will soon drop a lot, when more and more plans are put up for sale and no one buys them for that price. That was a nice decision, ZOS, instead of leaving them as rare unicorns like Vvardenfell plans at release.

Now for the main point of this post, the lack of the style mat, Culanda Lacquer, will negatively impact the Summerset housing and funiture market in the forseeable future. A point I already brought up on the PTS, but which didn't get that much attention, and none from the devs.
Vvardenfell plans required Obsidian as style mat, Alinor plans require 2 of these Culandas for each and every item. Why is this a bad idea? The source of Culanda is extremely restricted, only dropping from the 3 daily quests in Alinor and from no other place whatsoever. Even now when these dailies are heavily farmed, the Culanda price on PC-EU is already around 2k per item, and even increasing currently. There was a drop in price from release until today, but now they are again increasing somewhat. Why? Because people are finally catching up on the fact that these items are very limited, plus we are finally beginning to know a number of the new furnishing plans, and want to craft the items for ourselves or to sell.

Vvardenfell furnishings were kept in dark elf style mat, Obsidian, which also served as a great gold sink. Most furniture crafters bought Obsidian by the thousands at NPCs in order to craft, which was gold out of the economy. It also meant you could always craft these items, when you had the recipe and the other mats. Obsidian wasn't the bottleneck.
Clockwork City was different, now it was 1 style mat, Tempered Brass, per item. Tempered Brass dropped from 2 dailies, plus a lot of gear you found was in the Apostle style, which also dropped Brass. The recent anniversary event also poured a lot of Brass into the megaservers. Even with all these channels for Brass, the price was well over 500 per item before the anniversary event, and around 300 now. Brass is reasonably available, while still worth something.

What about Summerset/Alinor? It's now 2 Culandas per item, and no sets drop in this motif whatsoever, and you cannot get Culandas anywhere else than by doing the dailies. Right now there's a frenzy in dailies as people try and collect the Sapiarch motifs, what happens when that becomes old, the flow of Culanda into the playerbase will be little more than a trickle, while every recipe will require double the amount of style mats than CWC did. Prices of 5k per mat wouldn't be unthinkable. That's 10k just to craft a tiny cup, not even mentioning the cost of the other mats.
Who is going to pay 10k plus fee for a cup? No one. The furniture market for these items will be extremely limited, and the items will be heavily overpriced, so only the very rich players will buy them. This is bad for furniture sellers, it is also bad for the casual players who want to decorate their houses, but don't have the crafting skill or plans for it, and who now have to pay tens of thousands for every cup, chair or plate. It is even bad for the housing people who don't intend to sell furniture. With a 700 item limit of a large house, and every item costing 2 Culandas, that's 1400 Culandas just to decorate 1 house, assuming you want to keep it in that racial style. With a few thousand gold per Culanda, that's easily a handful of million gold - only for the style mats! Few people have that kind of money to throw away. Or you could do 1400 dailies. I don't know which is worse.

The solution is rather simple. The recipes should have been changed from Culanda to Adamantite, like Vvardenfell plans require Obsidian. The use of Culanda is inappropriate even from a lore perspective. Culanda is for Sapiarch motif, a specific faction of scholars on Summerset. Why would all the Altmer recipes call for Sapiarch related items? What do Sapiarchs have to do with household cups and plates? If ZOS insists on keeping the Culanda, they should at least be decreased to 1 per item, like the CWC recipes.
However, ZOS rarely goes back and changes mat requirements in plans, even when they are way out of balance or reason.
So what could they do instead? Make the Gryphon zone set in Summerset drop in Sapiarch motif, so you can decon it for a chance for Culanda. Right now, the 3 zone sets in Summerset drop in Ebonshadow, Psijic and Ancient Elf motif. Why on earth did you make the final set Ancient Elf instead of Sapiarch? Again look at Vvardenfell, or even CWC. Vvardenfell has 3 overland sets that drop in the 3 House motifs, Hlaalu, Telvanni and Redoran. CWC has 3 sets, 1 in Ebonshadow and 2 in Apostle, which you can decon for Brass. The Vanus set from Summerset is in Psijic which you can decon for mat, but it makes no sense from any perspective to have the Gryphon set in Ancient Elf. Following the logic that Sapiarch style mats are needed for cups and pots, this set should drop in Sapiarch motif as well, as this apparently is ZOS' "default" Alinor/Altmer mat. Ancient Elf is also another word of Ayleid, which is why the Palladium is used in Ayleid furniture crafting, it has nothing to do with Summerset or Alinor. At least making the Gryphon set drop in Sapiarch instead of Ancient Elf would release a few more Culanda into the economy.
Ideally, Culanda mat parts would also be found on the overland map, from node harvesting and killing mobs. Make it 1/10th of a mat, just like you can find Viridian Dust all over Vvardenfell, and combine 10 of them into a Volcanic Viridian style mat. This would again at least make people able to farm a bit of these mats without sourcing the entire mat behind daily quests, which currently aren't enough to feed the demand, even when the dailies are farmed like crazy, and which will be only a trickle of mats later on, when farming slows down and people already have the Sapiarch motif.

Long post, but I wanted to give a detailed explanation about this, so as to not get dismissed as "just yet another whine post". This isn't mere complaining, I'm trying to put down some suggestions as to how to make Summerset furniture crafting more viable and sustainable, both for the personal houseowner, as well as the furniture seller, and by extension, the playerbase at large.
I foresaw this on the PTS, and already, a week into the update, with dailies being farmed heavily, we see a large demand for Culandas, driving up the prices which are already increasing. Anyone who does trade or knows the server economy will know that this trend will only increase as more and more people get to know the recipes and want to craft or sell. The problem is only going to increase, unless more sources of Culandas are made available, or the recipes possibly changed.