I do not really get the point, but it's probably me

bazanar wrote: »

Hi

I notice while leveling new charachters that after I take the Alchemy Writ and deliver it. Then I got to the shrine to change my skills remove the points from alchemy to use it on another crafting skill. The daily writ for alchemy is available again. In hence i could do Alchemy writ twice a day on each charachter.
Is not much, but I thougth mention in it.
Regards J

I’d be very curious to know if this is considered a bug. You are meant to be able to do a unique daily once per day. You usually get one of each type assigned to you depending on certain factors, but in some cases you can get additional ones by sharing (like world boss quests, Bolgrul’s dailies, Dragonhold sanctum dailies, etc.). So it’s not necessarily a bug that we can do two alchemy writs of different tiers in the same day, as those are two unique dailies, like doing both the Imperfect and the Crows boss in CWC in the same day. I’ve seen the alchemy writ situation you mentioned, but what surprised me is that we couldn’t actually pick up different tier writs for the other crafts like that as well.

As to whether this can be exploited: if we go by the strict definition that an exploit is taking advantage of a bug, and if we get confirmation that this is a bug in ZOS’ view, then I suppose this would count.

But you made me wonder if this is actually exploitable in the sense of deriving some reasonable profit from it. So here’s my thinking:

You pay full skill reset price for removing crafting points, since they’re not morphs, so if you started at tier 1 and hit every tier up to 8 in alchemy writs in a day, you would have to spend 50 gold per skill point you have invested (not just in alchemy) to reset those alchemy points to do it all over it again the next day. That’s the big hurdle I see here. At level 50 you make 664 gold per writ (670 on an Imperial). If you could use this to do 8 alchemy writs in a day, 7 more than normal, that would be an extra 4650-4700 gold. (Lower level toons make less and less the lower their level, so it would not be as profitable on them.) You would have no chance at pulling a master writ from any coffer except tier 8, and then it’s still just a chance, so I wouldn’t count on any extra profit from that. (It also wouldn’t be “extra” if you normally do tier 8 alchemy writs for those master writ drops in the first place.) Assuming you could run through the gamut of 8 tiers, getting one writ per tier per day, you would break roughly even on a toon with 93-94 skill points invested (including the 7 points necessary to reach alchemy tier 8). You would see a net loss on any toon above that (before you consider cost of mats versus return on mats from the alchemy writ reward coffers). At 52 skill points invested, which is enough to max every tier of all seven crafts if you take no other skills whatsoever, you would see a profit of about 2050-2100 per day. Every further skill point invested would take 50 gold from that daily profit to account for the reset cost. At 67 skill points, which accounts for an extra 15 to cover level 3 hirelings (a real missed opportunity to pass over if you’re aiming to maximize profit), you would make only about 1300 extra gold per day, not accounting for mats lost or gained.

In my view, those numbers are at best a fair trade off for having literally no other skills (except Soul Trap) and for investing the time to micromanage your skill points every day. Why not instead use those few minutes to mow down some mobs or steal a handful of things to make that gold and still have a fully functional toon? I would venture to guess most characters — even dedicated crafting alts — would get much closer to the break-even point than the examples above, making it less worthwhile to try to take advantage of this. And if you can only get 2 different writs rather than all 8, that’s definitely not exploitable in the realistic profit sense: you would only be able to invest 13 skill points total on that character just to break even.