are furnishing plans drop rates just too bad?

Playboy_Shrek · July 2020

am just gonna ask everyones opinion. I checked today first time using an addon how many plans I know so far, and I learned about 700 out of 2400 or so. I bought personally, about 650 of those in the past few weeks. and probably found 50 or so and am cp 400.

the drop rate seems to be very high for specific ones, obviously, common ones, a lot of blues and lower, drop way too frequently. tho that makes sense right. I mean besides that. the purple and some blues, have absurdly low drop rate.like, VERY low. a player could literally go out farming for them specifically and end up with 100 of them by the time they are cp 810

it seems to be vastly more time saving to farm gold, then buy them instead of farming for them because again, the drop rates are absurdly low. and you'd literally get 50-10 out of the 2400 or so , SO often, it doesn't make too much sense for only a few dozen of them to be this common so that you literally don't get much else. but idk. am not saying i know how it should work or shouldn't

I will keep buying them I guess.

Playboy_Shrek · July 2020

for example. spent 20 hours in ayleid ruins. ended up with 0 ayleid plans, and like 3 common furnishing plans. meanwhile I literally just went to a guild store and bought 3 ayleid blue plans for 40k each. the drop rate does not match the price. and again thats mostly because most people don't use furnishing plans they just sell them. so its complicated, maybe i shouldn't have posted about this

I guess the point am trying to make is that. way too few plans are "common". like 100-200 (am guesstimating) out of 2400 or so.

Saucy_Jack · July 2020

Pre-Greymoor, I knew all the furnishing plans. Since Greymoor dropped, the new plans I've gotten are about 95% bought when I see them for what I consider cheap in the traders, 5% found.

Let me address two different issues: the drop rate, and the rarity-to-value ratio.

First, it SEEMS to me that in a previous patch notes post (and if someone could verify this for me, that'd be great) I read that they made it so that you were much more likely to find certain styles of plans in zones that match the style (i.e. more likely to find nord plans in Eastmarch, more likely to find Argonian plans in Murkmire or Shadowfen, etc.) With that said, the ONLY zones you can currently find Solitude/Vampiric plans in are Western Skyrim and Blackreach, but I'm 100% sure those styles don't show up for me NEARLY as much as base game plans. Not by a long shot. So I'm not sure if they just didn't apply the new droprate rules in the new zone, or if they specifically lowered the solitude/vampiric plan drop rates because it's new content and they don't want people rushing through everything as fast as possible.

Secondly, I got out of the plan-selling game, because I found the rarity-to-value for plans to be completely terrible. Solitude plans are high-priced because they're new, vampirics are slightly cheaper because of people farming harrowstorms. But in any case, even the highest priced plans out of those don't go for more than 1mil, which most of them being around 100-400k. Purple ayleids - again, despite the revamped droprate rules (and again, someone PLEASE factcheck me on that) are super rare, so I've seen ayleid purples go for more than 15mil, simply because a collector needed it to finish out their collection. It IS telling that most collectors are missing the ayleid purples, even though the places where you can farm for them are fairly plentiful.

Other than the solitudes/vampirics/ayleids though, the main reason why plan-selling doesn't make much gold is because most of the plan-selling gold is made from people who are trying to collect them all, and those people are few and far between. New players, despite the general hoarder/collector tendencies of Elder Scrolls players in general, find the learn-all-plans goal WAY too daunting (and it is) so they don't buy them unless they're super cheap. Middle-class players generally only want the actual furnishings to decorate, so it's cheaper for them to buy 8 whatevers for 10k each than to buy a 250k plan and then use up their mats on top of that to craft the 8 whatevers, so THEY generally won't buy them unless they're super cheap. Lastly, there are the top-tier collectors, who are generally flush with gold. You CAN make good gold if you find a rare/new purple plan, AND there's a rich collector looking at your trader close to the time you've listed it, AND it's a plan they don't know. Smart people were the ones farming solitude/vamp purples right after Greymoor dropped and selling them instead of learning them, because for the most part, the top-tier collectors value their time more than they value their gold, so a lot of those plans went for 500k+ early on.

I'm a bit of an anomaly; I've got maybe 2.5mil to my name, but I'm only roughly 100 plans away from being back to knowing every plan again. However, I either have to farm them myself, or trawl the traders in hopes of finding a plan I don't know listed with a missing zero or something. Other people I know who know all the plans regularly do 20mil+ in sales per WEEK, so throwing down 300-400k for a single plan for them, while still a big purchase, isn't a big deal, even though that absolutely would not be sustainable for me.

TL;DR: Droprates for new plans are terrible, even though they shouldn't be. When new plans come out though, instead of learning them, sell all plans you find immediately for a ton of gold. Best case scenario, a rich collector will buy them. Other than that, if you're trying to make money from plan selling, it's not a particularly lucrative market because it's more or less a significantly small niche market. Also, don't try to collect all the plans if you don't make a ton of gold every week, because then you turn into an empty shell of a man like me, cursed to check the traders for one-off deals for all eternity.

volkeswagon · July 2020

i don't have much luck farming blueprints. It's easier just to farm gold and buy prints.

spartaxoxo · July 2020

The blueprint effort to reward ratio is completely out of whack. Even a housing enthusiast like me won't deal with it. It I want a furnishing, i won't farm or buy the plan. I will just simply ask someone else to make it for me and give them the materials

I really don't get why every aspect of housing has to be such a pain, and why nothing is reasonable to farm.

Mats are rare. Plans are ultra rare. The houses themselves are not only expensive but many of those homes that cost real life money only are also limited time. It's a total racket.

CaffeinatedMayhem · July 2020

Pre-Graymoor, I knew every plan in game (minus the purple Ayleids). I've been farming plans since Homestead, and here are my observations: The drop rates are awful, except Elsweyr. Elsweyr was the only zone where I knew every plan before the Furnisher's Documents were released.

For Graymoor I've been making daily runs of Nchthunkarst and Labrynthian, sometimes multiple runs per day. I have found only 2 purple plans, and not even half of the blues. Greens are as rare as purples.

Greymoor is setting up to be another Murkmire once the Furnishers Documents come out. The green plans drop much less frequently and once the blue and purple are common, the greens will skyrocket in price.

Homestead had a decent drop rate, went to abysmal with Morrowind, CWC was a joke, even worse than abysmal with Summerset after the Traitors Vault nerf, Murkmire was an exercise in futility, Elsweyr was a nice surprise followed by "what do you mean that's all there is??"

Graymoor has low drop rates. Granted, it's offset by having a non-stealing farm location with a lot of rng hits, but that doesn't mean I'll be able to farm all the plans in one year before the next chapter. Not to mention I only have 75 Vile Coagulant, which is not nearly enough for furnishing Bastion Sanguinaris.