Questions about gathering stats and formulaeFollow

Ok, so I've really gotten into gathering lately. I unlocked fishing last Thursday morning and dinged 50 on it last night. I already had botany at 21 and mining at 21, and this morning I started working on botany. I plan on levelling botany and mining each up 5 at a time and alternating them. So boany to 26, mining to 26, botany to 31, etc, etc. I have a questiong about the stats on gathering gear. So I understand that Gathering affects your % chance to succeed at a gather action and Perception affects your % chance for a gathered item to be high quality. so I have 2 questions:

1. Do you compare your stats to the level of item you're attempting to gather, or your class level, to determine your chances? If I get to level 50 and have top of the line botany gear, can I go back to level 5 mature trees, can I crank out HQ maple logs like they're going out of style, or will my HQ chance still only be around 15%?

2. Is it a single calculation for the miss/normal/HQ chance, or 2 calculations? Let me explain that a little more. Say I have an 80% chance to suceed at a gather, and a 25% chance to receive an HQ item. Does that get lumped into a single random number generator where it's 20% miss chance, 25% HQ, and the remaining 55% chance is normal quality items? Or does it do 2 calculations. The first being an 80% chance to succeed, and then 25% of those successes will be HQs? If it's the 2nd way, Leaf Turn and Unearth just lost some of their luster because you're not getting a full 10% HQ chance out of them unless you have a 100% chance to succeed at the gather.

Thanks. I got to 25 or so pretty much straight grinding, and then used levelquests for most of my experience the rest of the way. It really wasn't that difficult. Probably took me about 22 hours total over the 4.5 days. Fishing is easy to level because you only have to move around if you a) run out of bait, b) spook the fish, or c) need go to a higher level fishing area. Botany and mining are going to take much more time to level, although I'm not to worried about it because I plan on grinding them all the way to 50 for materials to level my DoH classes anyway.

Thanks Viertel, that's good information to know. It kind of sucks that I can gear myself out with the best botanist gear there is and go try to gether maple logs, and I'll only have a 15% HQ chance without spending GP. However, I do like hearing that you think gathering chances are determined on a single roll.

In this case I think it's a matter of taking a step back and looking at it objectively.

Yes, it's somewhat disappointing that you can't naturally go higher than 15% but it's offset by the fact that you *can* raise the chances sometimes as well as the fact that you are never in competition for nodes. If it were a hard cap on 15% and you had to compete to get those nodes? Yes, I'd be upset, but considering absolutely nothing prevents you from getting a full stack outside of a bit more time it really isn't that big of a deal.



iLVL doesn't have anything to do with it. Gathering/HQ rates are determined purely by character level (up to a point, I think it's 3-5 levels at most above or below) and the gathering stat. Nothing else influences it. Character level's also fairly minor in terms of changes since it's at most 1% a level difference.

Edited, Jan 15th 2014 4:42pm by Viertel

I think he meant the level of the item you're gathering affects success chance, not your gear iLevel.



I've already hit some nodes that give you an extra whack if you have a certain stat high enough. A mining node in E. Thanalan was Int over a certain level, and a botany node near Quarrymill had one requiring Dex to be something ridiculous, like 78. I could meld Dex I materia into every slot and not reach that. I'm not even thinking about unspoiled nodes yet, and I'm not even sure how they work.


Edited, Jan 15th 2014 5:23pm by Bigdaddyjug

Yeah, your level vs the level of the item you are digging. It's more than 1% success rate per level though, it's at least 3 from what I remember. I don't think HQ is determined by your level though, just the level of the item you are digging and your perception.

I remember being capped for HQ rate every 5 levels, but success rate got down near 80% for the level 49-50 digs at 46.

I'm guessing that difficulty with successfully gathering items scales up with level then. You don't always upgrade gear with every level. It may be set up so that the increasing difficulty gets offset by increasing your Gathering skill through gear upgrades.

Crafting is quite a bit different from Gathering, but it's probably similar in this aspect. There are penalties and bonuses for progress from Synthesis actions that are based on the difference between your level and the recipe's level, but your Craftsmanship stat has a big impact on progress. If you never upgrade your gear and maintain the same amount of Craftsmanship skill and only do recipes that are the same as your level, you'll get the same amount of progress from synthesis every time. However, higher level recipes require more total progress to complete than lower level recipes. So in a sense, higher level recipes are more difficult than lower level ones, even if you stick to recipes that are the same level as your class.

Take off all your gathering gear except for your main hand, and then check it again after you level up. I'm pretty sure your native stats do not increase level to level. If they do, it's minimal.

I'm level 50 with capped gathering (340) and the level 3 carbonized matter on level 50 nodes is still 95%...

I doubt it. Craftmanship, Control and CP don't increase on their own as you level a DoH class. So I wouldn't expect Gathering, Perception or GP to increase on their own as you level either.