I am sure many of my fellow furniture crafting enthusiasts have experienced first-hand the frustration of obtaining Vvardenfell-only furnishing plans, especially the purple ones.
I have been recording data from my many Hleran Tomb clears. There are about 70 filled urns per clear. From June 5th to July 2nd I cleared Hleran Tomb 455 times, which is about 31,850 urns opened.
As of Update 14 we have several furniture plan loot tables:
Global: all the common, Breton, Redguard, Orc, Dark Elf, Nord, Argonian, High Elf, Wood Elf, and Khajiit plans
Vvardenfell: Ashlander, Dres, Hlaalu, Indoril, Redoran and Telvanni plans.
Dwarven: all the Dwarven plans
Daedric: all the Daedric plans
Special: plans that are obtainable from only one source. For example: the Wood Elf Throne, Vine plan from nobles in Grahtwood.
There aren't any problems with the Dwarven, Daedric and Special plan loot tables as they all have specific sources.
There is a problem with the Global and Vvardenfell plan tables. More specifically, the fact that Global plans are found in Vvardenfell way way too often.
In the 4 weeks of data I have collected so far I have looted the following plans:
45 White Global Plans
382 Green Global and 75 Green Vvard Plans (about 5 Global: 1 Vvard)
134 Blue Global and 22 Blue Vvard Plans (about 6 Global: 1 Vvard)
18 Purple Global and 4 Purple Vvard Plans (about 4.5 Global: 1 Vvard)
So, I loot
ONE purple Vvardenfell-only plan once a week. There are 116 Vvardenfell-only purple plans (not sure if any fall into the Special source category or not). So, at my current loot rate it will take 116 weeks to loot them all (assuming you trade duplicates for unknown).
That is ridiculous!
I think there might be purple Vvardenfell plans that no one on the server has found yet!
What I think should be done to make this MUCH less frustrating for furniture crafters:
- Remove the white global plans from the loot tables completely! These are available on npcs vendors and there is no need for them to also drop!
- Remove the Breton, Redguard, Orc, Dark Elf, Nord, Argonian, High Elf, Wood Elf and Khajiit plans from the Vvardenfell loot table. This leaves the common and Vvardenfell only plans in the overall plan loot table OR give the Vvardenfell plans a very large bias. As is for every 1 global plan I should loot 1 Vvardenfell plan.
- Add random furniture envelopes with Vvardenfell-only plans to the Master Writ vendor to give us an alternative to opening 1000's of urns to get our Vvardenfell plans.
I know that ZoS needs to make money from players buying the Crown Store furniture and having the plans exceptionally rare will technically increase the revenue from Crown Furniture. There needs to be a balance though. Furniture mats are already rare and needed in large quantities for EACH piece of furniture. This means lots of time or gold needs to be invested. People will still buy Crown Furniture because they don't have the time or gold to craft it. You are only frustrating and angering furniture crafters and housing enthusiasts with the difficulty of looting Vvardenfell plans. I ask and my guildmates ask "Can anyone craft _____?" on a daily basis and the answer is almost always "No". It gets rather depressing.
There are Crown Exclusive furniture items already which people will buy. Perhaps to compliment their crafted furnishings...but what is the point of buying some Amber Jellyfish Lights if you have no furniture in your house and if you spend crowns on the craftable furniture then you don't have enough for the awesome Amber Jellyfish Lights:( Since nearly all players do not have unlimited money to spend on Crowns.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please seriously consider changing the current loot tables for Vvardenfell furniture plans.
Mix
