Some love for our Gatherers. Follow

Hello,

This is a long post, and it is divided into three sections. Leve quest, Endgame Content ideas, and general changes.

Leve Quest

I play Disciple of Land classes mainly, and to put it simply; we get the short end of the stick when it comes to Leves. First off, for those of you who do not play or have never played any of the Land classes, we have it very rough when it comes to Leves.

We get two leve per tier, per city. That is a maximum of 6 leves that is at our designated rank. In these leves, we have only have two varieties. Mine/Log/Fish x3 nodes until they run out, and Mine/Log/Fish until you find 3 rare-ish items. The first leve, you can gather at the node at a maximum of 5-6 times, depending on rank. At optimal rank (Rank's ending with 5; Example: 5, 15, 25, ect) we gain ~170 Skill Points per successful strike, assuming Guardian's Favor is up. Leading up to a maximum of ~2550 for one leve. The other leve, which is Gather 3 rare items, allows you to gain ~700 skill points per successful harvest of the targeted item, again assuming optimal rank. And that is it. This trend continues on for two more times, but in different cities.

While my complaint is not only in the lack of variety in the leves, it also comes from the fact that we must traverse to the other two cities in order to gain full benefits from the leves. This is not only time consuming, it is very dull as it takes about a little below three hours to complete a full leve cycle. While one could just teleport to each city, and walk to the individual camps, this is very taxing on our anima supply. Not only that, we don't even get to complete all 8 available leve slots for our recommended rank, we must dip below one tier and gain only 1-2k SP per leve on the lower tiered leves. So for three hours of walking, we gain roughly 16,000 SP.

So my suggestions are these:
1) Create a third leve to be at each city for every tier. I was thinking along the line of; Claim 50 points by mining/harvesting/fishing at the designated areas. Each item is worth X amount of points. You have a half hour to get 50 points.

2) Have 1 additional, "Mine X location until it runs out," leve at each city. This will bring our total count of Leve per city to 4, and only requiring us to travel to one other city, which is very reasonable in my opinion.

3) Place "Star Rating" on our leves. Increasing difficulty would make it tougher for us to harvest our goods, but also provide us with more nodes that need to be cleaned out, and more rare items we need to find, before we claim victory to our leve quest. Thus increasing our overall SP gain per leve.

Endgame Suggestions

We have zero endgame options, other than harvesting for rare items to sell in the market wards. While this is the entire point of our disciple, I feel that we should have just a bit more to offer, or offered to us. While the War and Magic classes already have their endgame, and Hand classes will have their chance to make wedding cakes soon, were is the Land classes endgame?

So some suggestions I recommend are:

1) Mining/Fishing/Logging Expeditions. This could be the "DoL Behest." The battlewarden needs fresh materials for their camp and you must go out to secure these items. Happens the same time as a regular Behest, but available for Land classes. Could even offer the same option for Hand classes but with crafting items, so they don't feel left out.

2) Fishing/Mining/Logging competitions. A NPC at X camp offers a reward to who can bring back the most quality/quantity items in X amount of time. This would basically be the same as Fish ranking system of old FFXI, and have some nice competition between players.

3) Certain Notorious Monsters must be Mined/Fished/Logged in order to spawn. A Notorious Antlion for Mining, Angler for Fishing, and Gnat for Botany.

4) An "Ebisu Fishing Rod" quest where one must obtain rare materials from dangerous locations. Reward would be a very unique looking fishing rod/pickaxe/hatchet. Very nice stats to go along with them, and would be optimal rank 50.

General Changes

-Please remove the Daily Fatigue you have on gathering classes. Ridiculous that you have a system to limit me on how much limited skill points I can gain. You want to limit how much SP I gain weekly, fine. But don't limit how much I get daily. Same goes for Hand classes, as I hear they have the same thing.

-Offer some Rank 50 tool options.

-Make Triangulate/Prospect/Douse last 1 minute.

Thanks for your constructive criticism and I'll try to respond appropriately.

While I completely understand that DoH are even less fortunate than us when it comes to Leves, this issue is not a debate on who gets the worse Leve choice, (Obviously DoH do, I forgot how painful it can be since I haven't crafted in months) but some ideas to fix my Disciple of choice. Now, not to say that your problem with crafting are any less important than my own on my class, it is just to say that this is not the topic on hand.

About the 2nd option I suggested for my Leve suggestions, it is merely an added leve not so we can just mine/log/fish, it is there so we don't have to run to the third city in order to complete a full Leve cycle. It is taxing on time and anima to run to all three cities. Having an option to run to two cities instead of three is a very fair choice.

The reason I wanted star ratings on my Leves was to help Land classes gain decent skill gain on a lower tiered leve. Currently, War and Magic classes can solo rank 5 leves on a tier below them, and they gain a decent amount of skill in return. Land classes have to suffer through lower skill gain once they rank up past the recommended rank.

I am sure they will come up with something to satisfy us, but everyone seems to forget that the Land classes are full fledged classes. We have the same grind as everyone else, we suffer through the same penalties of fatigue as everyone else, but yet we lack endgame enticement that other classes get. At least with the new roaming Notorious Monsters, the Hand classes have challenging items to craft. While that is not to say Hand classes have a vast variety of endgame options, it is at least -something-.

A lot of problems exist for both disciples and I do hope they will come up with fixes for both. And a lot of fixes that I suggest for Land classes, could be potentially mirrored onto the Hand classes. More Leve variety and choice, better endgame tools, easier skill gain for leves, ect. And the reason I have a problem with Daily Fatigue and not Weekly Fatigue is that it limits me from completely a weekly goal I set out for my self. For example, if I have 4 hours available on Tuesday, and only 1 hour on Wednesday, I'll want to grind out all I can on Tuesday. But the current system limits me to grinding 2 hours instead of the four I wanted. I just believe it's ridiculous to have fatigue on top of fatigue.

There is abundant example in other MMOs that you can allow people to gather all day long if you want and it doesn't hurt the economy. FFXIV is full of pointless barriers to progression. We can come up with all kinds of speculation as to why that might be and it doesn't really matter. No other MMO caps your weekly xp gains. No other MMO makes gathering after two hours a nearly fruitless endeavor.

The point is that SE created classes and in calling them classes they created the expectation (implicitly and explicitly) that you would be able to play these classes as classes and not just side jobs, and then when it comes to DoL they strap on all kinds of limits and restrictions. Prior to the November patch, rank 20+ DoL classes only got 2 rank 20 leves every reset. That was it.

FFXIV is a game that stinks of a developer paranoid about RMT influence and all they really had to do was take a look around at what other companies have done to deal with it. Instead, in typical fashion, they went off on their own tangents. They got some things right: abundant access to materials and a ready supply of gil makes for an environment where people are going to be much less likely to feel that buying gil is the only way to bypass a hideous grind. By putting a substantial amount of resources in each node before they collapse and respawn elsewhere in addition to allowing several people to gather from the same node simultaneously, they've dramatically reduced the potential impact of gather bots.

SE hasn't the foggiest clue how to shape an economy and they've never demonstrated the creativity and mindset necessary to inhibit RMT in ways that don't piss off their players. Hopefully the new team can overcome this shortsighted approach to MMO development and management, but as it stands I think the first solution will be to start adding an abundant, real content for all classes and then start stripping away the ridiculous restrictions. Until they manage both things, people are going to complain.

I agree that it probably the reason it works as it does. If the devs think it's best for game balance I won't argue. However I believe the severe penalty to skill point gain is an unintended consequence. They need to either implement worthless items that give full SP while fatigued or give you full SP when fatigue causes the harvest to become damaged. I can't tell you how many times I have wasted anima going across the world only to fatigue shortly in.

Edit: I just wanted to reinforce the "unintended consequence" statement I made. Given the uproar that followed the announcement of the surplus system I find it highly unlikely that they intended to hit DoL with a 2nd surplus type system that makes SP gain far worse than regular surplus is. The game is designed so that when stamina runs out and a harvest is unsuccessful the SP is cut by about half. It's much more plausible that they made the decision that fatigue should damage harvests without seriously considering its impact to SP gain.

Touching a bit more on surplus vs. fatigue, the regular surplus system is rather tame and from what I understand very few DoW/DoM/DoL players hit an SP reduction as severe as DoL fatigue. I can't speak for DoH fatigue because I haven't read about or felt its impact.

Edited, Dec 31st 2010 3:50pm by landael

No

Gold Ore/Sand > Cluster

Gold Ore/Sand can climb up to 40k a piece and still have people buying. Cluster down to 28k a piece and still abundant. Cluster > Crystal > Shards.

And you know what can I make with one single Gold Sand/Ore? Nothing! I need 3 Gold Ore 1 Silver Ore or 4 Gold Sand 2 Silver Sand.

Edited, Jan 1st 2011 3:55am by Khornette

Edit: As much as you don't believe it, Gold Sand and Ore can not go under a certain price. Simple reason is 3 Gold Ore 1 Silver Ore = 12 Electrum Nugget = 6 Electrum Ring = 3,126 * 6 = 18,756 gil. It can not go under the break even point even if somehow Gold Ore and Sand supply become unlimited. Shard, Crystal and Cluster unfortunately will go down and down. Wind Shard for 150 gil, Crystal for 2k and Cluster for 25k and still going down.

Edited, Jan 1st 2011 3:58am by Khornette

Edited, Jan 1st 2011 3:58am by Khornette

I meant the Notorious Monster spawning as something that would intertwine with the combat classes. I saw it as an option to directly help the War and Magic classes, much like we directly help the Hand classes. Unless the group in question has a 48 gatherer or higher, they would need to seek out a Miner/Fisher/Botanist in order to spawn the notorious monster for them. I know it's a bad situation for some people, but it was one of the few ideas I could come up with.

There are a few other ideas I have, but I haven't completely thought them through or finalized them. I want to really have good feedback suggestions rather than make the, "MORE CONTENT FOR MY CLASS NOW!," threads.