I still feel that crafters and gatherers are missing out on a lot and that Yoshi doesn't respect them as much as the combat classes. Until DoH and/or DoL based FATE's and/or quests (outside of the run errands quest that any discipline can do and outside the the one every 5 levels guild quests) get implemented, I really won't be able to consider us to have fully fledged classes.
There are so many things we as crafters and gatherers can do to help the world around us (actually helping as crafters and gatherers, not as runners), yet we're only called upon incidentally or every 5 levels to fetch something we probably already have? I don't think that's quite right when the other classes get called upon for their speciality (combat based quests and FATE's) for almost the entirety of their levelling progression. Crafters and gatherers have to grind hard to get anywhere, whereas combatants get interesting storylines the whole way and Yoshi's already indicated he thinks the traditional repetitive grind is inferior to the quest grind.
Even if we only get one or two quests/FATE's per level with storylines where we have to make/gather things (and not just hand in second hand goods or things bought off the market), that would be a huge improvement. I love the stories and characters that the FF world is famous for and do not appreciate the fact that we're excluded from 99% of them because we don't want to pick up a weapon and pursue battle, when we can help in other ways.
I'm not saying let us save the world. I'm not saying to even give us as many quests as the combat classes get. I'm saying let us repair a boiler or roof at that outpost, let us help an NPC restock their wears, let us clear a massive fallen tree in the road, let us excavate a collapsed mine to rescue the NPC's within, and possibly open up new areas or services or other benefits for our troubles. Little things that only we can do but that have a positive impact on the NPC's and greater world around us.
Final Fantasy XIV: Crafting and Gathering
With all of the systems getting rebuilt in A Realm Reborn, what do crafters and gatherers have to look forward to?
Targeted Gathering: Because Waiting For Lucky Drops Sucks
The first thing I noticed as a Miner was my initial ability, your standard “show me veins on the minimap” button from other MMOs. I turned it on and proceeded to go right-click the first vein I could find. What greeted me was remarkably different than what I remember cursing at in the original FFXIV.
Life as a Miner or any other gatherer in v1.0 was a series of hot & cold mini-games. Once you opened up a vein, you’d do a test hit and get flavor text to tell you if you were close or not. You’d make an adjustment and try again until either you found the right spot and got some ore or you ran out of time/energy/whatever and lost that hit. Even if you found the right spot on the bar for a vein, there was no guarantee that would be the right spot for every hit, so you needed to do this mini-game for every single item you got from a vein. This was the case for all of the other gathering professions as well. As much as I wanted a bit more interaction from gathering in other MMOs, this was absolutely the wrong way to do it. Gathering in ARR on the other hand? Significant improvement.
When you open up a vein or other gathering node in ARR, a list of different materials is brought up, each with percentages near the name. These correspond to all of the various materials you can gather from this node and your odds of successfully getting one with each attempt. If the gods of mining favor you this day, you’ll get your item as well as some XP toward leveling your gathering class (higher level items = more XP). If not, then you just click again and hope for better luck. Each node gives you six attempts and they seem to respawn fairly regularly. This means that if you really want to focus on just copper ore to level your Armorer class or you just want gems because those are selling really well right now, then you can focus on just getting those. You’ll also see some unknown items with a 10% or so success rate – those are materials you haven’t gathered yet. Gather them once and that entry will update to the new item with a much more pleasant gathering rate.
So far this seems fairly simple, but things get more interesting once you spend more time gathering and gain a few levels. To start with there’s a chain bonus for gathering. Every time you manage to get an item with a hit on a vein, you’ll get a percentage bonus to the XP gained from that item. Come up empty on a hit, however, the chain will break and you’ll be back to base XP on the next hit. This means that if you’re just trying to eke out some levels in gathering rather than focusing on a specific material, you need to think things through. Is it better to go for the big ticket items that reward more XP each, or do I go for the lower level stuff that has a better chance of combo bonuses? This gets a bit more complex after a few levels because you’ll start getting more abilities.
Some of the abilities you get are what you’d expect from a gathering profession: track nearest node, find a higher level node, etc. One that’s quite nice, once you start getting to higher levels, is the ability to stealth; unlike other games with gathering classes, here you won’t require other players to take you into dangerous territory assuming you’re paying attention. The big abilities though are the ones that spend your Gathering Points (think MP but for gathering). With these abilities you can boost your chances of getting items with each hit, squeeze out a seventh hit from a node, or even bump up your chances of getting a high quality item. Those will give you more XP when you get them, but I’ll cover high quality materials in more detail later when I start talking crafting. Your GP will regenerate slowly over time as well as with each hit on a node, so here’s another spot where you need to make choices. Do I spend all of my GP on this next node to boost success rate and the chance for high quality drops, or do I spread it out over multiple nodes and hope Lady Luck’s on my side today?
This may all seem to some like it’s just adding layers in between you and the materials you want. To someone like me who likes the idea of his character doing all of this crafting and gathering, I like making it more involved. I want control over what I’m trying to gather and not just hoping that the 37th node is the charm for the rare materials I need for a recipe. The idea that as an expert Miner I should be better at finding the materials I want in an ore vein than someone who’s just starting makes sense to me, so the system used in ARR for gathering really appeals to me. These concepts also carry over into the realm of crafting, perhaps even to a higher degree.
