Petition: Increase Shard/Crystal/Cluster yield while gathering.

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Originally Posted by Thaliss

Not the most efficient method but retainers not 50 yet :)

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I see. Somehow I doubt that, even at Lv.50, retainer ventures will be worth the time. Especially when there might be better items to obtain at that point.

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Originally Posted by Tanthalas

used in the region of 10000 fire shards in the last week and 8 thousand ice shards. so definatly bump this thread

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I'm not sure how you blew through that many shards in a week by yourself. I'm actually impressed, exaggeration or not. I get your point though. An FC can definitely go through that many given the right circumstances.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Clusters should stay limited (You can get 90 / cycle if you have both Miner and Botanist, and shorter supply benefits gatherers which encourages more gathering). Shards need the help more than crystals, as crystals have very limited use at the moment.

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I won't argue that clusters should stay the way they are. At the moment, they aren't as intensive as shards, but I will say however, that crystals are used more often than you think. Not as frequently as shards, but supplying an FC with crystals that mainly focuses on Lv.45-50 recipes seems to be a problem with the limitations that are currently in place.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Personally, I'd say use the Carbonized Matter in a recipe that lets you break down clusters into crystals, and crystals into shards.

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This is something I miss about 1.0. Alchemy had a method of breaking down catalysts into lesser tiers. I was shocked to find that it was removed, especially for how common it was to utilize.

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Originally Posted by Melinia

It's even worse than this for crystals. While harvestable resources typically have a cluster of four harvesting nodes for a "tier", crystals are only available from two of the four nodes. So if you've decided that you want to harvest a bunch of one particular crystal, every third node that you use up needs to be a node that doesn't even have crystals.

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This is also very true. We can't even harvest crystals continually from node to node, making them that much more limited and problematic.

spiritbinding gets you through a lot of crystals

Something definitely needs done about this, yes it know they are dirt cheap on the market board but I loathe to buy them since most are from obvious bots
Either a blanket all across the board reduction in amount needed to craft, or a major hike in the amount you can gather that increases as you level

I've pretty much been saying this since the beta. It's just mind boggling how something that's needed for EVERY synth is so hard to obtain.

Hell if they made shards easier to gather, it would destroy RMT. It's definitely not players out there putting thousands upon thousands of shards for sale.

Prices on Leviathan went from about 30-40 gil per shard to 13-17 gil when patch 2.1 hit and then rocketed back up to the old prices now 2.2 is out so I don't really believe that RMT Bots were doing anything to keep the prices down because it's not like anything's changed with them. What was probably keeping the prices down was the influx of shards people were getting from their Beast Tribe Dailies since that provided everyone with a few hundred shards a week that weren't of interest to anyone but crafters and so got off-loaded cheaply and when you multiply that by several thousand players it adds up. We really need another small but steady trickle like that to lower prices again.

I'm thinking at least one of the reasons for the price increase for shards is that 2.2 introduced a bunch of new crafting options (vanity, for one), which increased demand. If anything, RMT is making more off of shards, now that people are buying more of them.

It takes 1100 shards to make a stack of deviled eggs, which takes me about an hour, so I don't doubt for a minute that you could go through 20,000 shards in a week. The reason for the recent jump in price is because to make any of the new recipes, never the less HQ them, you have to have a fully melded AF set for each class, materia prices have gone way up, so spiritbonding has increased, it takes, for example, about 2000 wind shards to SB a crafter gear set.