Damaging harvests!Follow

It seems after a long session of Botanist, about 2 hours, I start to go on damage streak and break everything. Even cock feathers and gil buns, I'm currently R21 and it's still happening to me in Grade 2 trees. This never happened to me when I did short 1 hour sessions from R1-R17 in the past. Is it just me or this is part of the design?

Yes, its called Fatigue.. different than the SP system thats in place...

IMHO, I don't buy this as fatigue related. I don't play botanist enough to be fatigued. Yet post update, I damage way way more harvest than I ever did before. I believe this was ninja nerfed, which is sad because logs are hard enough to get vs. the 10 gil iron acorn nuts, +1/2/3 and feathers, etc. that most often drop.

I really hope SE does something to spice up harvesting, otherwise, death by boredom.

Regards.

All SE did was remove the "you are getting close" messages. (as MJV noted, some item durabilities have changed)
This seems to have caused some people to fail at harvesting, while I personally think it was a good change.

Honestly, if you are damaging items more now, and failing to harvest, then you are likely harvesting nodes that are to high for your skill/gear, or you do not adapt your swing meter technique depending on the node that you are hitting.

1 - Gear, if you are harvesting grade 4 nodes with a rank 12 tool, and crap gear, then YES, you should have a hard time, regardless of even your skill. Keep your gear updated.

2 - Learn your sweat spots, but also where a target item usually lands on the swing meter. Through trial and error you should be able to issolate the item result to 50% of the swing bar, based solely on the node type, and the information provided by the remainder bar, before you even hit the node.

Example, Rank 40 mining, grade 5, with the MJV's lists you know your node has gold ore as the possible reward.
Target sweat spot of 1 above the very bottom.
The remainder bar comes up, and before you even swing, you will have an idea of the item you have.
-Less then 50% remainder bar, this is a gem. The area on the swing bar is usually pretty random, but 1/2 the time it will fall roughly in the middle of the smaller half of the bar. I always swing here, then on the opposite side. Gems only give me two swings at my level now, after nov patch.
-Just over 50% remainder bar, this is gold sand/ore or mythril, depending on your loot lists. I will ALWAYS swing @ less then 25% for this result. The result is possitive a good % of the time, and since I only get 2 swings on gold ore, if its a miss, the harvest is lost anyways.
-Well over 50% is the other junk loot, silver, iron, zinc. You will have many swings, so lots of attempts to hit whatever item came up.

IMO the current changes to DoL are good. It provides a challenge to players who would otherwise just mindlessly whack at nodes. If you are not targeting specific sweat spots, and use the same swing bar routine regardless of what the feedback you recieve from the node during the harvest, then you SHOULD fail more.

Another example:
Rank 22 fishing, Grade 4 node fishing in Cedarwood. Targeting blue/red coral, use lugworm, because I'm lazy.
Sweat spot is up two from the very bottom.
Uppon getting a bite, and evaluating the remainder bar, I have a very good idea what has nibbled, before I land my first jig.
Note - Since its node specific loot, I would reset the triangle on the two spear nodes in the immediate area.

-@ 75% remainder bar, its coral, red or blue. With this result, I know I have 2 jigs, and it takes 2 jigs to real in the coral. After trial and error, I have learnt that 90% of the time the coral swing bar target is the very far right. I will swing to that side, twice, and boom, Coral is mine. Got 13 Coral in an hour last night, for a test.
-remainder bar over 75%, this is most likely Tuna. Swing bar target is ~25% on the left. Swing there and cross my fingers, but only care to make the catch for the full SP.
As a rank 22 fisherman, a player without the ability to respond to the node as it provides information, would likely have a hard time catching half as many coral in the same period of time, if any at all.


To avoid damaging items, a DoL player now, either needs to play more intelligently, or needs to harvest nodes that are not at the limits of their rank/gear.

Edited, Dec 10th 2010 10:12am by Purplenv

If you don't provide any information on where/what you are harvesting, as well as gear and rank, how would I advise you if you are missing something?

While your post did have a lot of good information and I did say these things about them changing some things. Fatigue is very real when it comes to deciples of land, fatigue is completely seperate from surplus. I've had to deal with fatigue for months, they had it even in beta/alpha for those that did exessive gathering testing like me.

Once you gain around 20K SP you will hit fatigue which does increase your failure rate, the fatigue builds faster the more attempts you do at harvesting. At higher ranks when a node gives less SP but more hits, hen I tend to personally only be able to rack up about 15K before fatigue kicks me in the teeth. It's not too bad for me since I do all three deciples of land, but for those only doing a single one I could see it as frustrating.

Fatigue generally resets withing about 6-8 hours, since that is the amount of time I sleep on average and fatigue seems to completely be reset when I wake up. So once you hit fatigue, unless you are really close to ranking up, or you want a rank badly enough, I suggest switching to another class and playing around with it.

If by nodes fatigue you mean that they exhaust by themselves over time then yes. It takes roughly 40-60 minutes for a node to get to a nearly exhausted point if players don't do it. Once it's nearly exhausted it will stay that way until someone gathers from it, then it respawns into a new area. As for the node making it harder to mine from? that as far as I understand is false, I've never seen or heard of that before, but there is a anti bot method in place as I tried to explain before.

To re-iterate, if you spam gather on deciples of land for roughly 15-20K SP, then you hit fatigue, fatigue slaps on a extra failure chance when you hit the item in the minigame. It checks it through a random roll, and if it rolls on certain numbers, then you just auto break the item. Each time you hit the item it does a roll, so if you have to hit an item 2 times to harvest it, expect high chances for breaks. I believe the longer time you Harvest materials in, the larger the % chance on the number generator will increase on chances to just auto break items. Each individual person has their own sorta number or meter bar that is hidden on how much more you can gather before hitting fatigue.

Roughly as I have said to many, it resets around... oh... 6-8 hours about? Anyway, I'm just repeating myself again, I just thought I'd explain in a little more detail.

This I agree with and hate. It would be nice if SE gave us full SP for a item broken via fatigue, that way we could chose to harvest materials requested or needed first, then go SP grinding. Luckilly it's kinder for those that chose to go 100% deciple of land and pick em all up since you can switch. But those only picking up one deciple of land get pretty screwed.