In this week's column, Ragar talks about gathering in Eorzea and what he would do to improve it

Why Don't I Ever Write Down Where These Nodes Are?

One of the great features for gatherers in FFXIV is the Gathering Log, an in-game tracker that tells you what materials are available in each level range of nodes, the areas of each zone where you can find those items and even checkmarks for those you've gathered already with bonus XP for the first time you get that item. It's a great system that cuts out some of the route memorization and wiki lookups that usually come with gathering. Of course that all gets thrown out the window once you get to endgame gathering.

When you get to level 46 as a Disciple of the Land class, you'll unlock a new ability similar to Prospect and Lay of the Land. This ability (Truth of Mountains for Miners and Truth of Forests for Botanists) lets you see previously unreachable nodes, holding in them the greatest materials available to players outside of an instanced dungeon or raid. Now because these are indeed the greatest of gatherable materials, you can't make matters simple for players - where's the fun in that? To begin with, these nodes are extremely rare and beyond your control when or where they'll come up. This isn't like a World of Warcraft scenario where I can just keep clearing through normal 50 nodes until one comes up with awesome mats - these nodes are in separate locations with their own internal timing system. When you combine this with the fact that these gathering nodes have less defined locations (you get the main zone name and that's it), you've got a system that makes those rare materials feel more valuable and places an emphasis on having it feel exciting when your Truth of X ability pops up with that tracker message for a node full of treasure.

So if I like the way they control their rare nodes, what's the problem I was alluding to? Technically there are two, one minor quibble and one major one. The minor one's just a matter of bookkeeping annoyance - why is it that after I find one of these high-level materials on my combat log, I never write down where I found it? The vague description of just a zone is fine as a starting point, but after you get that first gathering hit, leaving it written as unknown just feels lazy. The big offender with these nodes, however, is tied to the final skills Miner and Botanist get, Toil of the Mountaineer/Pioneer. Remember when I said those extra rare nodes had all of the best materials in them? Finding the nodes is just the first step in getting your loot. When you reach one of these nodes, every single item slot is blocked out with an Out of Reach bar. You get six total hits for these nodes instead of the normal four, but now you're forced to spend some of those hits clearing the OoR meter for an item slot and hoping it's something you want. Once that's out of the way, if it's a new material, now you have that base 25% gather rate to find out what it is unless you spend GP to bump that up. Your Toil abilities do provide a way around those OoR bars - for 300 GP, you can clear those bars for all item slots on a node, leaving you what little GP you have left to spend on actually getting material.

A level 50 ability for a class should feel like a bonus to my character or like it somehow influenced the way I play that class. The Toil abilities instead feel like a toll road fee for gathering; give us 300 GP instead of spending hits to uncover everything. The OoR meters add nothing to the gameplay of a gatherer other than a nuisance. Their existence even gets in the way of your other level 50 bonus, Ward of the Twelve II, which lets your elemental award abilities give you bonus clusters on those rare nodes. My issue here isn't so much that the Out of Reach bars and Toil skills exist - it's that they're on top of a rare node system that's already in place to control the flow of high-level materials into the market. Either of these systems would be fine on their own, but combining them is going overboard and serves merely to annoy your gatherers who are probably already impatient from waiting for nodes to pop up. What's the solution?

There's an obvious way to handle this system (just remove the Out of Reach bars and Toil abilities), but then you would have to come up with a new active 50 skill, mechanics to make that interesting, etc. For the sake of simplicity, let's focus on making Toil feel like a bonus or a choice rather than a mode tax. Looking at all of the other nodes, they all have less than the maximum number of materials available. My idea is to take one of those empty slots on nodes and make it the Out of Reach slot for all nodes. Have that slot start showing up on all nodes at 46 with the rare node unlock - that way you'll feel like you're gaining something for all of those times when there are no rare nodes up. As for what's in that slot? That's where the interesting part comes in. You could use that node for more common items like 2x or 3x of an elemental shard/crystal or new dye materials. For the more rare bonuses, you could have items like the Coblyn/elemental pets or the greatest prize of them: rare materials from normal 50 nodes. With that kind of system, you've changed a boring ability into a slot machine roll of sorts. While gatherers wait for rare nodes to show up, they can take their chances on getting some extra from regular nodes. Off farming crystals? Use Toil and see if you can get some free bonus shards to speed things up. This not only gives players trying for high-level mats a chance to gamble for more, but also gives leveling gatherings something to spend GP on for those slow stretches while waiting for a new tier of nodes to unlock.

Time to Turn This Ore Into Awesome

There's still room for further improvement with gathering in Final Fantasy XIV. I'd personally like to see some additional interaction with the nodes and more ways to control what I'm getting out of a vein, but the core of what's here is better than any gathering I've done in other MMOs. I'm looking forward to seeing how they expand upon the gathering classes, especially if we can start getting some specialty Jobs for the non-combat classes, but that's a topic for another column.

Column #3 will likely be where I flip over to the crafting side of non-combat leveling, but that may be delayed a couple weeks because of the recent Lightning Strikes event. I just finished the final chapter of the event last night, so there's a bit to talk about there. In the meantime though, I'd like to hear from you guys and gals - well, those that didn't run off as soon as I said today's topic was gathering classes. How are my fellow Disciples of the Land enjoying the game? Do you agree with some of my fixes to their system or do you have an even better idea that I've missed? Let us know in the comments below.

Michael "Ragar" Branham