Especially Provisioning. It seems you start off knowing no recipes whatsoever, so you can't make anything until you find some. And of course any writs will be for things you don't know. Presumably you make food and drink to use as "potions" until you have a decent portfolio. I haven't really got my head around using food/drink that way, so snacks during battle isn't part of my game.

I'd guess that designating a provisioner among your characters and having that one learn any recipes you find is the way to go. Maybe others know better.

Alchemy is very different from other ES games, in that you can't fail, and waste materials. It also appears that there are fewer materials to collect and know. The fact that poisons negate all but base weapon damage has put me off using them. I'm sure there are special cases where they're an advantage, but you don't have time in this game to consider the options. So I'm just making restorative potions to supplement the supply I find (so far).

The equipment crafting has easily understood gameplay consequences, Enchanting is similar, but Alchemy and Provisioning are harder to figure. You don't have the Archer/Poisoner thing in ESO.

Provisioning: I am a big fan of Provisioning, as having a food buff active makes such a difference in my gameplay. I keep a food buff active at all times and use hotkeyed potions for emergencies during combat. When a food buff wears off you get a glowing flash of stat bars, and they shrink. That’s my cue for a snack.

To level Provisioning, empty every crate, sack, and barrel for ingredients, loot every furniture piece and backpack for recipes, and do the writ every day. You will find all of the recipes you need for the writs at your Provisioning level (and I think the one below) for sale in taverns. The Brewer sells drink recipes and the other guy sells food recipes. Writ reward boxes will occasionally contain recipes in addition to the other supplies, but never a recipe that you will need for the actual writs. This is because those recipes are for sale from the NPC vendors.

Another good source of Provisioning ingredients is theft. If memory serves, you can use stolen ingredients without laundering them on the character that did the stealing. For the honest characters, find a delve (like Ilessan Tower in Glenumbra) that is loaded with containers. They are instanced to you, so clean them out with a clear conscience. Reloading will refill them again. There’s a warehouse in Vulkhel Guard that’s a grey area. You can steal everything from the barrels without crouching because there is no guard, then head down to the Outlaws Refuge to pay for your groceries by laundering them with the fence. Every time you leave the Outlaws Refuge, the barrels will have respawned. You can launder 50 items per day without using any perks in Legerdemain.

I suggest having one main Provisioner keep up with your highest level character and plan out your levels for the rest. Crafting higher level food and drink rewards more xp per ingredient used, but increasing the skill tier by spending skill points changes the level of recipes you will find. Keeping a few characters at lower levels is helpful if you want to find all of the recipes. It takes a lot of writs to get the blue and purple recipes as rewards. Your main Provisioner will want to speed through levels and will probably miss a lot of them. Your backup lower level characters can gradually fill in the gaps. Also check the Guild Bank and take whatever recipes you need – that’s why they’re there!

Alchemy: again, do your writs for the inspiration (crafting xp) and reward boxes. Alchemy surveys are great if you are short on reagents. I use the poison solvent if I’m trying to discover effects or when just making a bunch to sell back when my first Alchemist needed to move up a tier, since they drop from critters and such and are pretty much limitless. Others can help out with routes for gathering plants, I just get the first level Keen Eye passive in Alchemy on every character and have them pick plants as they quest and adventure.

Kill those mudcrabs for their chitin and zombies for fleshfly larvae. Er… and assassin beetles for beetle scuttle. I know I am forgetting some. Oh, the pretty bugs! Rivenspire abounds with torchbugs and butterflies, but there are more common reagents to practice with if you are not an insect murderer.

Thanks for the suggestions G! Looks like we just need to start crafting stuff!

This post has been edited by TheCheshireKhajiit: Jan 16 2018, 08:21 PM

If you're planning on straight up grinding the skills (which will mean missing out on a decent amount of recipes for provisioning), you can buy a stack of provisioning ingredients from guild stores for about 1.5-2k gold. Might even go the extra mile and get progressively stronger recipes that use the same ingredients (normally they're dirt cheap, too, if they aren't used for writs) Blue and Purple recipes give more EXP for creating them, too.

If you're hunting for recipes, it pays to look through stuff. Honestly. There are so many recipes out there at so many levels and qualities, chances are you won't have the "Perfect" recipe for your level or desired quality, but you can try to avoid that by looting as much as possible. I'd suggest doing what Grits says and keeping a backup Provisioner for getting any recipes you might have missed from a certain tier. (IIRC, First Tier drops recipes Levels 1-15; 2nd is Levels 20-25, and this is when Purple recipes begin to drop; 3rd is Levels 30-35; 4th is 40-45, and this is where the recipes required for writs are the same across all alliances; 5th is CP10; 6th is CP15-CP150, good luck getting the cp150 purple recipes, I've only gotten one (1) to drop since One Tamriel went live) Edit: Here's a list of all the recipes used for the writs.

It also pays to know what recipes drop in what zones, since they still drop the original leveled recipes half the time (and if you're after the CP level ones, keep in mind which zones are Silver and Gold). It took Hates and Jo'zira doing writs for missing recipes to finally get them all for the Crafting Monkey (I don't even know how Eolan got them all, since all he was missing was the 2nd Tier of Blue recipes). Slow Simmered Rabbit Goulash... It's honestly hard to tell what you'll find since, again, the drops follow the old leveled world and it can change from one end of the zone to the other. Usually it matches up to the tier of recipes you get from writs, though, so 1-10 is the starter islands, 10-15(?) is the first zones, etc. After the five main zones of your alliance, the next tier drops in Coldharbour, then your Cadwell Silver's zones (iirc, the same ones throughout all zones), then Gold, then Craglorn, then Wrothgar (and the other DLC?).

For Alchemy, there will be certain cheap reagents you can also buy in bulk (Spider Eggs, apparently?). Also remember that you won't get more EXP from three reagents, so don't waste em.

This post has been edited by monkeyemoness: Jan 16 2018, 09:50 PM

Is that strategy, or just Jerric being Jerric?

That is strategy. A good one. Most of us design that into the character's build. For example, I want Buffy to fight at 18.5k hp. Therefore, she is built with a few thousand less than that and food brings her up to target. Keeping a food buff active all the time when adventuring is not a hard habit to develop. Note, if the using character takes the appropriate provisioning perks they can extend the duration of any food by 20 minutes.

Triple attribute food (purple recipe) gives a small boost to all three attributes, lasts 2 hours but is challenging to keep stockpiled due to the need for somewhat rare ingredients.

Single attribute food (green recipe) gives a large boost to one attribute and is cheap/easy to get but only lasts 35 min.

Double attribute food (blue recipe) gives a decent boost to two attributes, lasts one hour, is easy to keep stocked and most of us consider it to be the 'sweet spot' for food.


Short answer: If you are a magicka character, learn to love blue 'Savoury' recipes/food; if you are a stamina character, learn to love blue 'Ragout' recipes/food. If you are a hybrid or tank then learn/decide what your best food option is.

As far as alchemy goes, I found this very helpful - http://tamrieljournal.com/list-of-useful-p...eagents-in-eso/

Since the food lasts for between 35 minutes to 2 hours; most Players eat a snack between dungeon crawls or before leaving town to go adventuring; never during fights or even during dungeon crawls (eat before going into the dungeon).

To check if your snack is about to run out = click on "C" and scroll down through your "Active Effects" to see how much longer you have on any food or drink.

If you keep Alchemical potions in your Quickslots: you can hit "Q" in the middle of combat and get that potion boost if needed; but you should never have to actually eat food or drink drinks while in combat or even while dungeon crawling unless you just stay in the dungeon a long time to farm the boss spawns. (like during Festivals when the bosses drop gift boxes, lol).

To add anything to your Quickslots, click on "I" for inventory; then click on the last tab at the top of that Inventory window to get to your Quickslots window. Add whatever you want quick-slotted (including costumes, emotes, etc if you want to be able to change them on the fly).


This post has been edited by mALX: Jan 17 2018, 04:02 PM

If you eat something and then drink something does it nullify the thing you ate?

I think it does nullify, and you only get the benefits of the last thing ingested = except when you drink specialty drinks like the Festival drinks.

But IIRC, I don't think potions effect your food buffs; and can be stacked on top of the food/drink when needed.





This post has been edited by mALX: Jan 17 2018, 04:16 PM

Ew

Khajiit really thought those were stackable because they do two different things. Food for max attribute and drink for recovery.

That is what I thought too, but someone told me it didn't work that way. You can check = eat a loaf of bread (raises health for 1 hour or something), then drink something for regen mag or stam = then check your Active effects to see whether both are showing.

I'm getting a bit confused by some of the miscellaneous stuff that gets picked up. I tracked the "Left Hand of the Construct" down to the Clockwork City Precursor quest (after I found the Right Hand), so they were undeclared/optional quest items. However, things like the "Multifaceted Eye" and "Imp Effigy" don't appear to be quest-related, or even things I can put on a shelf in my home as a souvenir. I gather the game tracks them for Achievements, but other than that, are they of any use whatsoever? I need to check the valuations, as they may just be "gold tokens" like the Foul Hides, Ectoplasm etc. that have no use but to sell. Taking up an inventory slot with a unique item means they have a high nuisance factor.

You are correct, the game tracks them under Journal-Achievements-Character-Trophies for achievements. If memory serves the items are bound to character, so you can't even move them through the bank to another character as an RP gift. (Jerric tried to give a polished shell he found to Steams, but couldn't.) Sell them with no worries, or if you're worried, first check your journal to make sure what you've found is on that trophy list.

The problem I had was I couldn't believe how pointless they were. I kept thinking "there has to be something more". They don't even seem to be valuable when you sell them, despite being unique. The items marked "sell to merchant" aren't so bad, as you can collect a bunch of them in one slot before cashing in. These take a slot each.

Yeah those things are pretty stupid. Don’t worry your head about them and just sell them.

Since the writs return shipments of the mats at the level below the items crafted, I'm trying the experiment of trying to arrange my crew to use each others' "rewards". So Unna, who is the highest overall level, and just crafting to equip herself, will keep advancing her blacksmithing, as she goes. Laurie will do Woodworking as she'll need that for furnishings more than the other skills, and Blossom will be the clothier. The other three will stay at the base level and use the lowest level stuff. Once we need four levels at a time, we'll bring in one of the other three and so on.

Hopefully, that will get us past the issue of foraging all the time for the higher mats, to keep multiple crafters supplied.

I'm still having issues with Crafting. My main character Unna is advancing her level faster than the others, so she finds 50% materials at her playing level, and 50% at her crafting level. This means that the half she gathers at her playing level won't get used unless:
1. She raises her own crafting level to use them, or
2. One of the crafters keeps up their crafting level in line with Unna's playing level.
Either way means Unna can have appropriate level equipment. The crafter who raises crafting level ahead of playing level will find 50% of mats at that level, when they do their own foraging. So they can fill in if Unna doesn't find enough, except that it will be the exception, rather than the rule, because they don't explore as much.

Currently I'm doing both at the same time. Unna does her own Blacksmithing, but leaves Clothier to Blossom, and Woodworking to Laurie Craft. So she's now finding Spidersilk and Flax, but no Cotton. She gets Hickory and Oak, but no Beech. (Hide and Leather levels confuse me). Writ supplies keep the other characters supplied with iron, Jute, Rawhide and Maple, so they don't need to be gathered. Blossom and Laurie gather levels 2 and 3 materials. Level 3 from crafting, level 2 from playing level. Each finds what the other uses half the time, and Unna also supplies the lower level. They're close to raising their crafting levels to catch Unna's playing level of 4.

But now I'm about to get a gap. Once Blossom and Laurie get to level 4 on their main crafting skill, nobody will be doing level 3. If they each raise the "opposite" skill to 3, then the gap is at level 2. I suppose I could raise up another minor crafter to fill in at 2, but I'm rapidly getting to the point where I don't know who should go foraging for what. Should Unna raise her secondary crafting skills to playing level minus one? Or is she the gap filler at level 2 for using up the supplies? Should I have stuck to just one character instead of confusing myself? Do bears turn brown in the woods...?

This post has been edited by ghastley: Feb 5 2018, 11:35 PM

It really isn't a very good idea to divide up the equipment crafting amongst different characters; because that will mean each character will have to learn a motif separately before they can craft it. Some motifs can be very expensive or nearly impossible to obtain. It really works out better if you use a hierarchy; where the person who will be your ultimate crafter gets everything first; and anyone else gets it after the main crafter has learned it in whatever order you deem.

My own game, I just have one character do the farming for everyone who is doing Writs. Since I don't raise anyone's skill level up until their experience level is 50 (so they can go right to the top level crafting) - I only have to craft with two levels of materials = the highest and the lowest. Everything else I get ends up being sold for income. It is much less complex than trying to keep up with 8 different skill and materials levels and who has which skills. (all my characters do all 6 crafting disciplines when called on to work).

Gonna second what mALX said. It used to be more feasible back when the only motif split in chapters was Dwemer and there weren't many motifs to learn to begin with (which is why my Squad do crafting the way the way you described) but now, especially with the changes to crafting, it's probably better to have one universal crafter that you sink most of your resources into while the rest are more supplementary crafters, assuming you want to deal with all this management.

Speaking of my Squad, I also kept them all at similar character levels (never more than a 3 level difference among them) even as their crafts leveled past that point. I can see this being a useful strategy even in the current system, but it's probably more micromanagement. I still have horrible flashbacks of the Veteran Levels and keeping up with Enlightenment