Atherial Reduction and Collectable Gathering

Two things for this post, as they kind of go together.

1. Atherial reduction items:
I admit to having only done the most casual of exploration of it, but it looks like if an item can be reduced it is not used in any crafting in the entire game. This means that there is no reason for any of them to be able to be harvested with the collector glove off. This also means they shouldn't be on the market place as you can't reduce the regular or HQ ones. A number of them items are marketplace banned, but shouldn't there be a cleanup of the rest?

2. Collectible Gathering:
I admit it, I have never figured this out. I can't make heads or tails of it. I can't find any guides that make any sense to me at all. I can't even follow along with step by step directions I've been given and have it work. On the other hand if I poke things randomly, I eventually get collectibles good enough to hand over to Zhloe, without ever understanding why or how. Anybody willing to try to explain it to me? Maybe "collectible gathering for absolute morons" guide somewhere?

3. Overlap of 1 and 2:
None of the items that you can collectible gather for "Custom Deliveries" can be used as crafting ingredients anywhere. Perhaps since these are only useful in collectible mode, we can get auto collectible while gathering, the same way Ishguard has given it to us on crafting? Perhaps this can also happen to the Etherial Reduction only items?

some of the aetherial reduction items are normal materials used for crafting.

which collectable skills you use depends on what you wan't to do, but if you are for example trying to get gathering scripts you should focus on skill rotation which allows you to get 4 medium collectable level items instead of 2 high if a medium gives you 100 scripts and high gives 150.

the basic skill you use to increase the collectability is appraisal, it has 2 luck based skills which may increase collectability more or less than the basic apparaisal which always does the same amount and then you have buffs, 1 increases your collectability for the next appraisal,1 saves you a gathering attempt and 1 reduces item wear, depending on your stats you might have to waste more gathering points on increasing collectability instead of getting more items with the power of your gear alone.

You should have at least 600GP for 3 buffs if you wan't to make maximum collectability items and then whatever you need to increase your gathering if it's not 100%.

Ok, beginners guide to collectible gathering.

For starters, all this advice presumes you have a minimum of 600 gp. More is better and it doesnt matter how you get there(for a few level ranges i used +gp food to get to the number i wanted), just that you have at least that much. If following the advice given you still cant hit the collectability number required then you need to up your perception skill. So the idea is that youre using appraisal skills to raise the rarity of the item you want to collect, then gathering it to turn in(or reduce). So you need to watch 3 things. You need to see how much rarity is needed to get to your target number(and how much youre getting per appraisal), you need to make sure you dont wear out the item before you collect it, and you need to make sure you dont run out of gathering attempts before you pick anything up. Ok, lets look at your abilities.

First, you have 3 buffs you can use while collecting. Discerning eye(DE for short) gives 50% extra rarity on your next appraisal. Utmost caution(UC) lowers your next appraisal's cost by 10 wear - this basically means the next appraisal wont increase wear so you can get an extra one in. Then theres Single mind(SM) which makes your next appraisal not use up one of your gathering attempts. Each buff costs 200gp to use. Finally, there are 3 kinds of appraisals. Methodical is your basic appraisal(1 gathering attempt, 10 wear, increases rarity by "1"). Instinctual is the gamblers appraisal(1 attempt, wear by 10, increases rarity by ".8-1.5"), and not recommended for beginners(you could get the lowest possible boost, or the highest). And Impulsive is your luck appraisal(1 attempt, 10 wear, increases rarity by ".9", chance for a free DE proc). Impulsive also gets an upgrade at level 61 to Impulsive 2(same stats, higher percentage chance for free proc), and at that point you should never use regular Impulsive again. And finally, you have the skill Stickler(lvl 71) - only usable once per node, costs a gathering attempt but doesnt change item wear, increases rarity by ".5".

So how do we put this together? The most basic rotation would be DE Meth DE Meth DE Meth gather. That gets you 1 item at 450% appraised. A good one to try is DE Imp DE Imp DE Meth gather. Thats 1 item at 420%, but if either Imp procs you a free DE you do SM instead and get an extra item at the same collectability to turn in. If these arent giving you a high enough score, respawn your node(if you can) until you get one with more then 4 swings. UC Meth DE Meth DE Meth Meth gather is 1 item at 500% on a 5 swing node(2 items on a 6 swing). UC Imp DE Imp Imp DE Meth gather(procs allow for SM usage again) is 1 item(plus an extra for each proc) at between 465% and 555% with 5 swings(plus another if 6). Theres an old guide floating around somewhere with an If/Then chart using Impulsive, where you only spend GP on attempts where you get at least 1 free proc, but for now these 4 are a decent beginning. Once youve done it a few times with the understanding of what the buttons do it should be pretty easy to see where you can tweak it to meet your needs. And Ryu made an excellent point - 2 items for 100 each is a better payout then 1 for 150 so you dont necessarily need to hit the highest number(this might mean swapping a DE for a SM in one of the above rotations for instance).