fewer greater essences than usual ?

[Halifex]

Hi I wondered if others were experiencing what I am. I have participated in Cannith Crafting pretty much since it came out. I am not uber and I don't like to grind, so I am still only about level 130 in the three schools of crafting.

What I do is try to decon all my loot that yields level 4 and above, then level up my crafting every few weeks or so, since I will have enough greater essences to fill a 15 minute crafting experience elixir.

So here is the issue. In the last two weeks or so, I have been running out of greater essences. So I checked out my log and I noticed that I am creating a very small number of greater essences. Tons of lesser essences .. sometimes 100+ from a single decon (level 7+), but 90-95% of the time with zero greater essences or maybe 5-10% of the time, with less than 10 greater essences. I have screen shots. So I now have stacks of 2500 lesser essences in more than one ingredients bag - and I need more bags.

Are other people getting a lot fewer greater essences than usual in the last few weeks?

One potential fix is ... can we get an option to trade in lesser essences for greater?

[EllisDee37]

I am not having the same experience; my greater rates from decon appear unchanged.

It is highly unlikely they will give us conversion from lesser to greater. There used to be a (tedious but effective) way to do that, by creating and deconning a bajillion 0/4 recipes. You'd get a greater back like 20% of the time, so by the time you'd generated all the greaters you needed you'd be roughly break-even in terms of essences. This feature was removed, though, by the fix that now deconning low level shards is guaranteed to never return a greater. (This never worked for law essences, which have no 0/4 recipes.)

At the same time they implemented this change they drastically reduced the drop rate of greaters in chests. This was subsequently restored to about 75% of the droprate we got initially.

The sum of the changes seem to point to the conclusion that they want us to buy greater essences in the store. Cynical, but plausible.