.......Maybe I'm crazy here, or am having terrible luck, but I swear I haven't found a single essence in about 10k (or more) worth of scales. Is anyone else having issues? Was the essence drop rate from nurturing reduced?
I've always found a decent amount, and it seems like within the past month suddenly there's none at all. If it's just a matter of bad luck, sorry for the thread. I figured it was worth saying something though.

You are not the only one. I noticed that the rate dropped off after the 3 day shut down following the Spring Festival. Prior to that I usually found one ever 2-4K worth of scale nurtures. I've been trying to keep track since I recently upped the amount of nurturing I do; the amount between the last two essences I found was 11,127 Scales. I've now earned a further 7,712 scales and have not found another essence. :(

So it could be that we're both having really bad luck, or that the probability of finding essence has been reduced, or this may be a bug. :/

The drop rate was reduced as Zzzzz stated. We felt there were way too many essences in the game.

Seems like it was a rather large reduction. I never was so lucky as some that would get an essence within a hundred clicks, but usually I'd get one in 2,000 (which I thought was fair for the amount of time it takes to nurture that many lol). but with it taking over 10k clicks.......... I wonder if I will ever get an essence from nurturing again lol! Ah well, I'm doing it to buy dyes anyway, so we'll see.

Oh wow, that's really too bad. I agree there were maybe too many regular essences being dropped, but it was hard enough already getting the enhanced. Now it seems about impossible. Well thanks for the info, now I know not to waste my time trying to get essences through nurturing anymore =/.

This lower drop rate will probably become an issue later on.

Right now, I need lots of pet dyes, but once I have enough scales for what I need, with such a bad drop rate as what I've been seeing, I may not even bother to nurture anything but my own pets. I have a feeling a lot of players are going to feel this way as well, especially once the NPC that will exchange pets for scales gets implemented.

I'm fine with reducing the drop rate, but depending on the method currently used (don't have enough data yet, to figure it out), a different method might make it so that it's less discouraging for players nurturing. I'd like to know how the drop rate works. Is it the same for each nurture? Is the probability cumulative? Is there a quota of nurtures needed to trigger a drop?