Essence of Blight shortage

[theurgist]

Well, it seems as if I won't be able to maintain a regular supply of Amb for the Unity community as one of the essential ingredients looks to be very scarce now.

Yep, Essence of Blight. It's only available as bonus drops from Blighted resources, which are now incredibly rare. I know of one site, Tazoon crater, that has blighted sandstone, and hear there's another site around.

Admittedly, I haven't gotten my miner alt quite high enough to try and mine this blighted stuff yet, but, going on pre-merge drop rates, it's going to be painful to get any decent quantities of this stuff, to say the least.

Does anyone know if there are still miner tasks that require blighted materials? At least that way I know to contact lower levels and hope they have some lying around.

[Ikfel]

I'd like to see a good source of the Essence of Blight too. I headed out to the Tazoon crater just this weekend to quarry sandstone until I had a reasonable amount of it. I think I got about a dozen an hour, but I didn't keep close track of the time. I even had two alts working simultaneously quarrying the blighted sandstone. For a while there the younger one that could barely quarry it seemed to be getting twice as much of the essence. But in the end they both ended up with about the same amount of it (even though the senior alt was getting five or ten times as much sandstone to discard).

[theurgist]

Oddly enough I've been leveling an alt to do mining over this weekend. I've already got one that can mine blighted sandstone well, but I've always been under the impression that the closer to your skill level the mining is, the greater your chance of bonus resources.

*sigh* I remember the days of salt rock bonus resources. Everyone (99%) hated it and deleted it on sight. Now, I'm aiming on spending a few hours hacking rocks to get anti-salt rock (eob)

[Tzael]

Thus far I have had no problems obtaining essence of blight. In Tazoon crater, I can mine and on average I am getting one essence of blight every 3 minutes, as in every hour I spend mining there I end up walking away with 20 essence of blight. Sure, I might go 20 minutes without nothing, and then all of a sudden the things are appearing in my backpack in large quantities, which is where my averaging of one every 3 minutes is derived from after running an analysis of the logfiles.

I would like to see more blighted resources so that there is more chance of other players finding the stuff and selling it, but for now I am more than content with the current situation where I must go and mine it for myself from Tazoon crater [:)]

[theurgist]

For interests sakes, what level is your mining skill? I'm trying to figure out if higher skill would result in more drops. So far I've tried with that new alt; L10 miner, 30 mins mining, 0 drops.

[Tzael]

Mining skill is 407 base, but since we're talking about blighted sandstone it's quarrying that is relevant, my quarrying skill is 184.

This however is irrelevant, my statistical analysis of 20 per hour is based upon the logfiles and observations of an entire guild, who have wildly differing quarrying skills. What better way to get essence of blight than through a team effort ? !! [;)] Five people get to work, bringing in 100 EoB per hour, life is sweet for the confectioner we did this for, we started confectioner wars on Ice shard, and now everyone gets to reap the benefit of cheap, readily available ambrosia [:)]

[theurgist]

Well, I *was* the guy who was listing T1-4 amb cheap on Wind pre-merge.. Now I can't list anything at all because I can't get resources to make the stuff. I was going to mine it myself, but it bores me to tears to stand there hacking a stone for ages to get.. pfft, 2 or 3 of these. And might I add no xp.

For reference to non-confectioners: 1 soulfrag + 1 essence of blight = 1 Spirit oil
For T1 Amb- 1 Spirit oil + extra ingredients = 3 T1 Amb
T5 Amb (I think it's L60 stuff) needs 5 Spirit oil at optimum, for 3 Amb

It's sad since this was one of the things keeping me in this game; having a craft that was in demand, and being able to meet it. If even just a few other confs manage to get their essence through their guilds, and sell cheap on cons I'll be out of business. I used to buy all my soulfrags and essence of consigners. Soulfrags are still around, but essence just doesn't get sold anymore.

I'm going to try to offer 1s per tonight and hope someone responds. Hell, I may have to up my Amb prices, but at least there will be *something* listed.

[Tzael]

Yesterday VanSeeD was the recipient of 42 ambrosia III, in exchange for 35 essence of blight. Took a couple of hours for the essence of blight to be mined, but the same pattern of not finding any for 10 minutes then a load coming at once was experienced.

I don't normally make ambrosia for free, but the poor guy had a *lot* of death points to be cleared, and I took pity on him [:)] I have a tonne of soul frags needing used up anyhow !

Maybe it's worth confectioners striking some sort of deal with their customers ? Essence of Blight for bulk orders... Afterall, 35 essence of blight + 70 soul frags = 70 spirit oil, in the case of Ambrosia III that's1 spirit oil for each ambrosia at max efficiency. In other words, I was left with roughly 30 spirit oil after helping VanSeeD. Not many, granted, but for the small favour of helping him out, I got a few more spirit oil to chuck onto the pile for future ambrosia requests.

Just some ideas to help the current situation, for me the best option is still to get a team together and mine the crater, half a dozen people can easily bring in 100 essence of blight per hour, normally a fair chunk more [:)]

[Ikfel]

For interests sakes, what level is your mining skill? I'm trying to figure out if higher skill would result in more drops. So far I've tried with that new alt; L10 miner, 30 mins mining, 0 drops.

When I did it at the crater, I was quarrying with a level 100 miner beside a level 20 scholar. That's a base quarrying skill of 1100 vs. 140. Initialy the low scholar was well ahead in EoB collection, but by the end of a couple hours they were both about equal in what they had collected, with a slight advantage to the scholar, as I recall. I came away with 40 some units total. So I don't think quarrying skill makes much difference. Though the scholar had an easier time because he didn't have to empty his pack of sandstone nearly as often, because he was barely collecting any.

Tzael, as to collecting with a team: anything is easier if you can manage to get a team together to do it. However, that doesn't mean it's easy to collect Essence of Blight. The necessity of a team argues that it's a rather tough job, and ambrosia isn't going to be cheap because of that.

[Tzael]

I appreciate your point with reference to teamwork Ikfel.

I personally do not think essence of blight is any harder to obtain than it was before. The only difference is that before the mergers, there were blighted resources in more places, and thus more people mining them under a false premise (started by confectioners on Ice, I don't know about other shards) that clearing blighted resources made normal resources spawn back faster. So in effect, pre-merger, there was one huge teamwork operation going on, and confectioners rewarded those who found essence of blight with 100 copper per unit.

Nowadays the only difference is that most people don't really want to quarry away in a dusty crater getting covered in smelly green blighted stuff, with no machines nearby to process the blighted sandstone slabs [:)]

Maybe once these blight anchors we hear about are fully fleshed we'll see regular resource fields turn blighted, and part of the effort of keeping the blight at bay will involve clearing the blighted resources. This would provide a large team-based operation which would undoubtedly yield plenty of essence of blight, so keep your fingers crossed folks, blighted resources may become more common soon enough [;)]

[theurgist]

I do hope so Tzael. I made the offer on market last night for 1s per essence. Had only 1 response of any sort; someone saying "You'll be lucky Theur"

Sad times [:(]

[Jazmyn]

I went to the taz crater with an L8 scholar, (I'm an L36 scholar ) to quarry the sandstone for it. We had 30 mins before the maint shut down to quarry.. In that amount of time I got ONE EoB and the L8 (who could barely quarry it and was not getting much ss at all)got FIVE EoB. I definitely think the advantage is to low levels for getting it.

Jaz

PS - I've also offered 1 silver per EoB, and got no responses.

[Senkeleron Fell]

Is anyone getting essence of blight from the new blighted resources being
created by the Blight Anchors?

[Tzael]

Is anyone getting essence of blight from the new blighted resources being
created by the Blight Anchors?

Seems so, a few folk handed me essence of blight after helping clear some spots that turned up thanks to anchors [:)]

[refuse]

Figured I would bump this.

My offers to buy Essence of blight have turned up nothing.

My guild offered me a bunch (all they had about 5), as they didn't know any use for it many of them delete it.

I mined for about 3 hours and got about 10 an hour, but staggered in frequency. So I would get some, then nothing, then some more.

[Tzael]

I offer 500c per EoB, 11 or more and I up it to 1 silver each, 101 or more and I pay 2s each. I get about 20 EoB on a typical day, every couple of weeks someone will cash in100 or more EoB. Newcomers especially love the offer, it's good money for them, but the older players who work to clear the tier V resource fields appreciate the bonus I offer for large quantities.

My latest offer is a swarm tyrant shield for 400 EoB. Still waiting for someone to take me up on that, but seeing as I've only been running the offer for a couple of days, I daresay it'll be a week or three before someone claims the grand prize !