Update 10Feb2020
I put in this chart today which is sheet two of my open office spreadsheet that I use to track characters. I use this for doing master writs. Rows 1-8 and columns A-F is a crude map of the crafting stations in Tess’s private residence. To go there, open up the guild menu, go to roster, search for ‘Tess’, right click her name even if she is offline, and click visit primary residence. You come out at a canoe. Turn around from the water. To the left are the crafting stations in the spreadsheet. Row 1 is furthest away from the water, and 8 is closest to the water. Column A is the first station you encounter in that row as you walk from the canoe. Tess also has 3 special stations to the right from the canoe (Armor Master, Redistributor, and Noble Conquest).
Tess does not have all crafting stations. Column G and H are my alphabetic listing of her stations. So if the master writ calls for Eternal Hunt, you look it up in the list, and in column G it says 5,2 meaning it is on row 5, 2nd one in from the canoe. When you want to leave Tess’s residence, go to the canoe and it puts you at the Torug’s Pact crafting station in Grahtwood (southeast section of the zone on the ocean).
If it is not in Tess’s hideout, you can find it on the wiki which I went to the Julianos set. If you scroll to the bottom there is a box with all of the names of the crafted sets, and you can click on that to go quickly to the page for that set, and check the map to see where it is.
In the middle part of the sheet I chunked in a calculator (rows 10-12, columns D-F). Column D I enter in a price, and ticket list of the item on the vendor, and it calculates the price per ticket. Master Merchant gives me a tooltip when I look at the items on the vendor to see how much they are worth. Column F I put in a tickets and desired price per ticket and it tells me the price. From the lower half of the sheet I find I can pretty much sell stuff at 600g/ticket or higher, since most of the master writs are less than that. I forget what addon I use, but it has a tooltip for writs that says how much the material cost is, how many tickets that writ will yield if you do it, and gives you a material cost per ticket. If it is 600g/ticket on the writ or higher, I usually do not bother doing it. All the JC writs are very expensive to make, and so too any nirnhoned weapon. I will sell those master writs in the guild store or destroy them. The JC writs I typically destroy.
So my characters are starting to generate more writs than I can sell with 4 guild stores. I have 120 slots full of items and I still have more writs. So my new strategy is to post only the master writs that I lack the trait knowledge to do (red script on the writ), and do the rest.
The lower half was an initial survey of stuff that sells. Note this stuff changes, so I added the calculator. A lot of those recipies seem to yield 600+g/writ, and I bought one, and put it on the store, but it did not move. I do not know what sold last night, but I logged on this morning and had 600,000g in sales in my mailbox, so I will track down what I listed. I suspect the research timer shorteners are a good solid 600g/writ thing to sell, and you can stack them and sell a whole stack. I also think the stations that you can use to mimic other crafting stations in the world and then add to your private residence as Tess did sell. I tried some of the recipes for armor and weapon styles too. The really big ticket furniture stuff I do not think sells that well. Anyway you will have to determine what is in demand now, buy it, and list it.
So we come back to it. Selling the writs directly via the store can yield you steady cash. Typically most of the ones I sell are around 1000g each, but I have seen them go up to around 20,000g for yellow quality ones. Since crafting dailies at lvl 50 yield around 4,500g per character, you can add a bit more gold by selling writs.
However if you can tap into the market of selling stuff that you buy with the ticket currency you get upon completion of a master writ, you can get orders of magnitude higher cash. I think I spent about an hour or two doing these writs on Sunday with my crafting main, clearing out every writ I could complete. I got around 2500 tickets doing this, and put up around 1500 tickets worth of merchandise on the guild store, and I suspect most of it sold that same Sunday. I kept around 1000 tickets and will restock with the things that moved fast.
So I thought this table is sort of useful from the standpoint of streamlining writs. Accept the quest for the master writ if you know the style, look up if it is in Tess’s place, if so go there, else find out where it is and travel to that spot and do it there. Then return to Grahtwood and turn in and repeat.
My alt army-
Most everyone has 6-9 traits researched on the 4 main professions, with Jewelcrafting and Woodworking close to done on a good 9 of my alts. I am seeing a lot more writs in those categories too. Blacksmithing and Clothing take longer. I am tempted to just invest a bunch of tickets into accelerating trait research just to see more alts with 9 traits on everything done, but the Nirnhoned items to research are expensive and perhaps it is best to just let it organically happen to minimize the gold drain in producing nirnhoned items. Rows 14-18, columns A-C are my notes on upgrade mats for JC, and the materials for traits, and that kind of stuff gets expensive. I think the weapon version of nirnhoned is around 30K per single item, so I am in no hurry to have a lot of characters maturing on that as is. Woodworking is draining me out a bit as is.
I spent the weekend doing story on Eggsplain, my magicka Templar. Smithfire did Craglorn bosses in the Coffee Run on Sunday, so that completed that zone except for the group quest areas (not group delves, I did those already). I was able to respect out of much of thieving, and I use force locks on random chests. I did wind up putting points back in though, since if I am in a house I will do one pick pocket, then blade of woe them and get double loot from them. Then I force locks on any chest in the house. Eggsplain basically has the quest hubs in Vvardenfall left to do, then the story and quest hubs and delves for Wrothgar, and I am pretty much done outside of the PVP zones for the game.
She has completed all of the other zones. I did manage to finally train to level 4 all of the skills she has and now am loaded up with a decent set of 2 bars. Bar 1 is dps, and bar 2 is healing, and she can take on most content without issue now.
Because it is so very useful to have 70% force locks on a character that you run all over the place, I have bothered to get Dark Brotherhood to 8 and legerdemain to 19 on my crafting main. So far I am at 4 in Dark Brotherhood, and 16 on legerdemain. I loot every assassination mission I get and get the bulk of my progress from vendoring stolen goods at the fence. My aim next weekend is to have an inventory full of stolen stuff that I can fence over the next workweek and move legerdemain to 19.
I bothered to look into alchemy for invisibility potions. Yes I made a nice 80-stack of potions that grant around 15s of invisiblity, around 6s or more of immunity to crowd control, and I think a heal. These work much better than the stealth pots you get as rewards from missions since it combines the invis and immunity. If they can not stun you or root you, you can get away faster. I looked and I had enough mats to make around 1500 of those pots, which gets multiplied by 4 since I have the advanced alchemy perks. I will likely have to make a Night’s Silence set for my crafting main (he is a werewolf, so no vampire bonus on armor in stealth). Since my crafter now is doing writs, and that involves a bit of routine overland travel, I am going to bother getting force locks so I can pop those chests as I run all over the place. Once I get him set, I will likely go back to Eggsplain and do a bunch of dungeons and PVP with her to see how that works out. I need to figure out a few gear/spec addons to make switching specs faster. My aim is to just get a flavor for how she plays rather than optimize her for raiding. She will be then my healer/magical DPS Templar. The other toon I want to do pretty quickly is my Dragonknight tank/stamina DPS guy. If I get those 3 toons, that is a basis set (the third is my Nighblade sniper) to fill in group roles as needed.
The rest of the alt army is proceeding nicely on skilling up to morph level all of the skills. The 7 crafting dailies per toon adds up to a lot of progress on skill ups, and most of them have their main weapons and class skills done, and are in the process of doing the other weapons and rounding out all of the guild skills. It is very satisfying seeing their riding and crafting and skill training progress daily with so very little effort. It will be nice to be able to roll them out for a tour later.