Most efficient way to farm motifs?

chiftie · July 2020

I'm starting to stack up a lot of writs, but I don't have the motifs to make them. Is there an efficient way to farm motifs?

idk · July 2020

Do the activities to farm them. If it is via dungeons get a regular group to run them regularly to the point you have them on farm. If it is via dailies do the dailies on multiple characters, and so on. It all depends on the activity they are tied to.

katanagirl1 · July 2020

I don’t think “efficient” is a word I would use in this case. Just do all the dailies you can that give a motif page drop, learn the ones you get, sell the duplicates to buy the ones you need.

Delve dailies are easiest to do on your own, world boss dailies require other players to help.

It takes time, but you can do it this way and hopefully break even on costs and maybe even make some gold.

Rowjoh · July 2020

best way is to make gold then buy them. Its much quicker by far than farming for them!

And you can bulk buy too - and many motifs that were once expensive are much cheaper now.

To farm the equivalent motifs will take you weeks and months.

For example, farm the Platinum Seam nodes to make 1 Chromium gold plating (takes about 7 hours).
You can then sell it easily for approx 70k gold and this will buy you a lot of motifs, especially from the cheaper end.

And of course there are many ways to make a ton of gold

Edit:
I remember reading somewhere that the more Motif sets you get the better the drop rate for writs. Can anyone confirm this is the case ?

VaranisArano · July 2020

If you buy motifs, wait until after their DLC/ Chapter event or the Anniversary Event. Not only do you have a chance of getting the motif pages yourself, but prices will be at their lowest.

And yes, the amount of motifs completed increases your chance of master writs. This is very noticeable if you have a master crafter vs a non-motif learning crafter.

Dusk_Coven · July 2020

Jubilee event. Be on PC and use Lazy Writ Crafter to get 18 x 7 event bags per day just from daily writs.
The current Summerset event seems to be dropping motif pages quite nicely too. If you don't want to grind, prices should be depressed due to overstock in the guild stores.

Zer0_CooL · July 2020

Buy crown pack, sell crowns for gold, buy motif.

volkeswagon · August 2020

best way to get motifs is to do the dailies that give them and farm gold by selling in a trader then buy motifs from traders you need and sell multiples you have.

wolfie1.0. · August 2020

The most time efficient way is to simply buy the ones you need with gold from other players, that is assuming that you have a reliable source of necessary gold income. The cheapest way to get motifs is simply to go farm said motif yourself. how to farm them varies depending on the motif. I use this site as a guide:

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Crafting_Motifs

but you can google others if you like. Also people have mentioned the Jubliee event or as I like to call it Motif-geddon this is the regular ESO Anniversary event where motifs drop everywhere and they are cheap to find. But this event is an annual one and the next one won't happen until April of next year. So its a long wait for it.

FlopsyPrince · August 2020

Finding the right guild trader to buy from is the biggest pain (on the PS4) here.

"Farming" gold by doing crafting dailies is fairly easy, if tedious.

Knowing who has the motif is impossible ahead of time. And some still argue strongly against the ability to search for things like this.

MonkLoHan · August 2020

chiftie wrote: »

I'm starting to stack up a lot of writs, but I don't have the motifs to make them. Is there an efficient way to farm motifs?

Buy them from the guild stores. Farming so many different motifs can take longer than completing learning all traits.

What has worked for me is this:

1. Do daily crafting on 10-12 characters - this earns me avg. of $4500 -$5000 per day per toon.
2. Saturday mornings I go shopping in guild stores for motif pages I have yet to learn. I buy all those that are being sold cheaper than the asking Master Merchant price. I go through the search results and buy it no matter what motif it is. If I havent learned it, I buy it.
3. I then focus on buying motif pages for Master Writs that I have in my inventory. Usually, if you do #2 above for a few weeks you'll notice that you have learned a LOT of motifs for your existing MWs.
4. After few weeks of doing this, I check the Lore Library to see how many pages of each I have learned. I then go on a specific motif shopping spree for all motifs where I have learned at least 10 pages. This way I complete the motif book.

Took me a while to figure this out, but I seem to now complete at least 1-2 motifs a week doing this and almost always am now able to complete whatever Master Writ I get because Ive already learned the motif. Works for me, it may work for you as well.

I usually limit my spending to between $150k - $200k per week on buying the motif pages. I'll do more if I had a really good week in guild store sales.

volkeswagon · August 2020

Dailies

LadySinflower · August 2020

The only problem with the strategy of earning gold to buy motifs from guild traders is that sometimes nobody has the motif you need for sale. Recently I got a batch of master writs that I couldn't do. I needed four motifs. I went to every town with a bunch of traders and after that to as many single traders that I could remember the locations of. I could not find any of the specific pages I needed. I then asked in all of my guilds if anyone had these motifs for sale or trade. Nobody did. So I'm sitting here wondering if I should keep these writs or donate them to one of my guilds.

tmbrinks · August 2020

LadySinflower wrote: »

The only problem with the strategy of earning gold to buy motifs from guild traders is that sometimes nobody has the motif you need for sale. Recently I got a batch of master writs that I couldn't do. I needed four motifs. I went to every town with a bunch of traders and after that to as many single traders that I could remember the locations of. I could not find any of the specific pages I needed. I then asked in all of my guilds if anyone had these motifs for sale or trade. Nobody did. So I'm sitting here wondering if I should keep these writs or donate them to one of my guilds.

motifs are difficult to get once the initial rush of people farming them is over when they are new... or a long time after the anniversary event (which is in April/May) and motifs are dropping like candy.

Anfieldkris · August 2020

For bargain hunting, I’d suggest being on when the trader switch over happens if you possibly can as well and do a quick run around traders then. You can generally assume the regular traders in the main towns won’t have much listed super cheap as people snap them up quickly. However, if you can find the guilds who don’t always have a regular trader in places like Marbruuk, Sentinel, Skywatch etc (basically second or third tier traders) there are often things listed really low over the previous week or two when that guild didn’t have a trader. Even if it is stuff you have, if it is very cheap, buy it, list on main city trader at correct price and use the profit to buy what you actually needed. This definitely works on PS4 anyway.

FlopsyPrince · August 2020

LadySinflower wrote: »

The only problem with the strategy of earning gold to buy motifs from guild traders is that sometimes nobody has the motif you need for sale. Recently I got a batch of master writs that I couldn't do. I needed four motifs. I went to every town with a bunch of traders and after that to as many single traders that I could remember the locations of. I could not find any of the specific pages I needed. I then asked in all of my guilds if anyone had these motifs for sale or trade. Nobody did. So I'm sitting here wondering if I should keep these writs or donate them to one of my guilds.

Only 4 of them? I probably have 20-40 in my bank I can't do now. I keep expanding my motifs, but these still add up.

Remember that so many insist the current trader system is so wonderful when you are trying to find that motif!

katanagirl1 · August 2020

Anfieldkris wrote: »

For bargain hunting, I’d suggest being on when the trader switch over happens if you possibly can as well and do a quick run around traders then. You can generally assume the regular traders in the main towns won’t have much listed super cheap as people snap them up quickly. However, if you can find the guilds who don’t always have a regular trader in places like Marbruuk, Sentinel, Skywatch etc (basically second or third tier traders) there are often things listed really low over the previous week or two when that guild didn’t have a trader. Even if it is stuff you have, if it is very cheap, buy it, list on main city trader at correct price and use the profit to buy what you actually needed. This definitely works on PS4 anyway.

Yes, hit the traders every couple of days and you can find some outstanding deals even in the capital cities. Like you said, the good deals sell fast!

I only run dungeons now once when they come out and I have been able to keep up with all of the motifs up through Stags of Z’en, just missing the chest page now.

jlb1705 · August 2020

LadySinflower wrote: »

The only problem with the strategy of earning gold to buy motifs from guild traders is that sometimes nobody has the motif you need for sale. Recently I got a batch of master writs that I couldn't do. I needed four motifs. I went to every town with a bunch of traders and after that to as many single traders that I could remember the locations of. I could not find any of the specific pages I needed. I then asked in all of my guilds if anyone had these motifs for sale or trade. Nobody did. So I'm sitting here wondering if I should keep these writs or donate them to one of my guilds.

If you can't find it at a trader, just imagine how much more of a PITA it would be to farm it yourself.

katanagirl1 · August 2020

jlb1705 wrote: »

LadySinflower wrote: »

The only problem with the strategy of earning gold to buy motifs from guild traders is that sometimes nobody has the motif you need for sale. Recently I got a batch of master writs that I couldn't do. I needed four motifs. I went to every town with a bunch of traders and after that to as many single traders that I could remember the locations of. I could not find any of the specific pages I needed. I then asked in all of my guilds if anyone had these motifs for sale or trade. Nobody did. So I'm sitting here wondering if I should keep these writs or donate them to one of my guilds.

If you can't find it at a trader, just imagine how much more of a PITA it would be to farm it yourself.

I think you said you are on PS4. Usually Elden Root, Wayrest, and Mournhold are the best places to look because that is where the big guilds are located.

Bigger guilds have a larger selection of items and generally the more recent ones as well.