In order to craft imbued gems or jewels, you already need to obtain recipes, either from supply bundles or various bosses or other high level content. In order to craft imbued artifact gems, you already need to have an artifact and succeed at salvaging a gem or jewel from it. It seems completely unnecessary to also require farming a high tier zone for a bunch of different socketing recipes in order to craft any of the new items. If it was anything else, it wouldn't be a big deal, but there was just a giant overhaul of equipment, and these recipes are a gate to all of the new gear that is meant to balance things out. I mostly like the overhaul itself, but it's extremely lame to have all of your stuff get nerfed and then have to spend a week farming elves to be able to make the new stuff.
We want better loot, we want more co-dependency between the adventurer and the crafter, now we got some. I disagree with this, let the crafters buy them off the adventurers, or go hunt them by themselves. These are technically high level crafting recipes, it makes sense that they drop in high level scenes or off high level mobs.
...though, a tiny chance to drop from salvaging an artifact wouldn't hurt. As though you learned how to gem socket something by popping the old ones off...
I don't think it's necessarily an issue that these drop in a high level scene. It's not like panopticon is a super challenging scene. I am not very high level and can kill everything in there by myself pretty easily. The issue is that the drop rate is low enough that it's a huge time sink to kill the zillions of big booty mobs that you're probably going to have to kill to collect these. Like I said in the OP, it wouldn't be a big deal if it was anything else, but it's super annoying to bottleneck simple socketing recipes at a time when pretty much everyone is looking to replace gear with new things and none of it can be made without these. It's just old school super snooze hoarding, and I'd much rather be actually trying out some of the new things than kicking around some stupid elves for who knows how long.
Not a large enough sample to know for sure, but fwiw, it seems it might be much faster to collect these by just cherry picking the commanders and resetting. I spent about 8 hours just killing everything with no luck, and then got back to back recipes off of warrior commanders. I know that the notes said that the commanders had a higher drop rate, but maybe it is way way way higher. The commanders themselves are fairly rare, so it's not so easy to tell.
I killed quite a few commanders over release weekend without getting a drop. Just the usual SotA RNG, probably. When shrines went in, I spent hours and hours trying to get the Theurgy shrine recipe. While trying more recently to get the gem recipe, I got three shrine recipes in three consecutive kills.
With my new build that I was forced into doing since the tamer arties were severely nerfed. I went in there and over a week got all of the new 4 recipes. It sucked killing elves endlessly like it sucks killing razorback boars, high level wolves, and high level bears just to get one tamer artifact for every 12 boar/bear/wolf. So the new SotA is 1-15% drop rate it seems. I stopped farming tamer artifacts now due to this. I had a fun purpose and now I don't anymore.
Hm, I'm wondering how long your stretch of bad luck was on the destroyers before you respec'd? I go do the Panopticon wolves/bears almost daily and the drop rate is very good indeed. Others I talk with all seem to have similar results.
Hi. Hehe, my bad luck stretch started about a month ago. I would get one taming arty every six boars. My good luck streak was one month before that and I was getting a taming arty out of every two. I got so many that that first month it was amazing. Ringmaster vests were dropping so often I made a epic ringmaster vest.