Leather farming is horrible

Just wondering, is leather farming "good" for gil-making? Are there specific mobs that drop decently priced leather? If so, I'd like to know so I can warm up while waiting on PFs or queues and make money.

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

As I said earlier, the issue is how out of whack with the rest of the crafting it is. Even if you used retainers, unless you hire extra and pay more (which I also think should not be a thing in a subscription game), the gathering rate is massively different from the rest of crafting.

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The gathering rate caps at 15 per 40 minutes per retainer. Depending on what your crafting goal is you generally need about 2 hours with 2 retainers to get skins you want for a quick session. Which is on average faster than if you'd do that manually.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Honestly, the only way I stay sane in terms of collecting leather is just to send my combat retainers out to gather the skins for me. :/

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Stuff like leather is the reason I'm glad they added the skins to the bi-color gemstone vendors.

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Originally Posted by Petite

Just wondering, is leather farming "good" for gil-making? Are there specific mobs that drop decently priced leather? If so, I'd like to know so I can warm up while waiting on PFs or queues and make money.

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Farming leather from kills just isn't realistic or profitable for the effort invested. You CAN make gil selling leather, but typically that's by sending your combat retainer out to get the types that currently selling. The best time to do this is early in an expansion since everyone is leveling their crafters and the new leather is in short supply. But even later in an expacs life leather still ends up having value since it's still needed in some cases and late comers still need leather for leveling their crafters.

But just farming mobs for leather... yea that's a waste of time IMO. You'd be better off doing fates while waiting for PFs or queues to get bi color gems to buy things to sell or unlock stuff.

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Originally Posted by Nicodemus_Mercy

Farming leather from kills just isn't realistic or profitable for the effort invested. You CAN make gil selling leather, but typically that's by sending your combat retainer out to get the types that currently selling. The best time to do this is early in an expansion since everyone is leveling their crafters and the new leather is in short supply. But even later in an expacs life leather still ends up having value since it's still needed in some cases and late comers still need leather for leveling their crafters.

But just farming mobs for leather... yea that's a waste of time IMO. You'd be better off doing fates while waiting for PFs or queues to get bi color gems to buy things to sell or unlock stuff.

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Gotcha. I asked in case some mob out there might drop 5K gil leather with a good drop chance.

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Originally Posted by Limecat

Monster material farming in general has always been pretty miserable due to spotty drop rates. They put in the bicolor gemstone thing as a bandaid, which works after a fashion, but like most new systems or adjustments they never back-ported it to previous zones.

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The thing they're bandaiding is their own kludgy pacing hacks that they introduced in HW onwards. ARR didn't need any bicolor gemstones because not only are ARR droprates higher, 1 ARR skin drop also made 1 ARR leather so it's perfectly viable to just kill mobs for a little bit.

They could simply choose to not have bad drop rates and grindy recipes.

I don't think the materials for gems were a bandaid fix, just a way to deal with excess gems, as they made FATEs more worthwhile with the progression and rewards.

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Originally Posted by Momo_Kozuki

SE won't implement a gathering profession to deal with monster-drop because the following:


1) It will hurt their profits from players hiring extra retainers to make combat retainers to gather such items.


2) Players who are stingy will play another alt to get combat retainers, which mean they will spend more time playing the game, which requires more sub times. They may even be able to sell boosters!


3) They already try to band-aid this scarcity of monster-drop income via the use of bi-colored gems, which are used to goad players doing FATEs, which playing the game, thus subscription payment.

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I mean adding a leather gathering class would ALSO make players play the game, thus add subscription time, so I'm not really sure what your point is there. And the bicolor gems work just fine to serve as an alternate source to using retainers, so I don't think it's about that either.

The real root of a lot of these problems is that they have pay to win (to some degree) in a subscription based game. Extra retainers should not be a thing for extra cash, and because it is we have systems tied to it as the most efficient method for profit. It is free to play game issues bleeding into mmo's with full subscriptions to mess things up. All retainers should be given as part of the $15 a month, with fewer given for $12 a month (as that is sub standard rate for a AAA MMO). Get rid of the idea of extra retainers for a price and suddenly we would have a leather/monster item gathering class and the game would be better, but profits would likely go down. Whales, and those willing to pay to win are ruining a lot of games, and this is just a small tip of that iceberg.

I hope ffxiv leans into their culture and idea of people being on a level playing field regardless of wealth instead of what we currently have. I really can't come up with any reason but profit margins for the current weirdness of drop rates and difficulty of gathering these crafting items.

SE basically already said no that why they added bi colored gems

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

The real root of a lot of these problems is that they have pay to win (to some degree) in a subscription based game. Extra retainers should not be a thing for extra cash, and because it is we have systems tied to it as the most efficient method for profit. It is free to play game issues bleeding into mmo's with full subscriptions to mess things up. All retainers should be given as part of the $15 a month, with fewer given for $12 a month (as that is sub standard rate for a AAA MMO). Get rid of the idea of extra retainers for a price and suddenly we would have a leather/monster item gathering class and the game would be better, but profits would likely go down. Whales, and those willing to pay to win are ruining a lot of games, and this is just a small tip of that iceberg.

I hope ffxiv leans into their culture and idea of people being on a level playing field regardless of wealth instead of what we currently have. I really can't come up with any reason but profit margins for the current weirdness of drop rates and difficulty of gathering these crafting items.

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It's not paying to win. It's investing in luxuries. Anything a retainer can get, you can get more of it in the same timeframe. I've been playing with the base number of retainers for 3 years now. I had an extra when I was doing some catching up on crafting. I thought to make an alt to round out my roster, but I don't even use those, outside of rolling the dice for minions.

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Originally Posted by Petite

Just wondering, is leather farming "good" for gil-making? Are there specific mobs that drop decently priced leather? If so, I'd like to know so I can warm up while waiting on PFs or queues and make money.

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It's generally extremely good for making gil at the start of an expansion when there's zero supply and players are still trying to level their retainers on top of leveling their crafting. For several weeks at the start of the expansion, the new leathers were consistently selling for 8-10k each while the price of the other intermediate crafting materials dropped to sub 2k by the end of the month (at least on my server).

Once the expansion has been out for a while, it can vary but generally it's not that good. Retainers start bringing back 15 instead of the 5 while they were being leveled. For Shadowbringers and Endwalker materials, players will start using their bi-color gemstones to buy them if they don't have their Shared FATEs rank to 3 in all zones. Desynthesis of excess gear starts flooding the MB with the finished leather to the point it can be cheaper to buy a piece of leather than a single skin/hide (let alone the 4 needed to create a piece of leather).

Bots tend to flood the MB with the lower level skins/hides killing their value despite few actual players farming for them through whatever method. Some may still end up at good prices but they're still a pain to farm and farming other items is likely to yield more profit for the same time investment.

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

The real root of a lot of these problems is that they have pay to win (to some degree) in a subscription based game. Extra retainers should not be a thing for extra cash, and because it is we have systems tied to it as the most efficient method for profit.

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Having more gil is not winning the game though. All gil does is get you more convenient luxuries. Crafted gear isn't P2W - better tomestone/EX trial/Savage raid gear get released at the same time.

To be honest, I don't think there is a way to win a theme-park MMO because there's a lot of different content designed to appeal to various types of players. There is no single goal that represents a "win condition" outside of maybe completing the MSQ since that gates access to most of the rest of the content.

Things like paying for extra retainers is deterrent, not pay to win. Inventory is a big drain on server communication resources when inventory is being accessed. More items listed on the marketboard is a big drain on server communication resources when players are looking for items on the marketboard. The more server communication that occurs, the more player latency gets impacted as that information is sent back and forth. Add that to all the things the server has to communication at the same time (such as what players are present where they are, what they're wearing, what they're doing) and it's little wonder that Limsa is such a laggy mess most of the time with so many players hanging around the Aetheryte not to mention all the players using the marketboards and summoning bells located right there. Gridania and Ul'dah aren't as bad because their marketboards and summoning bells are in different subzones than the Aetheryte.

So we end up with X amount of inventory space (really pretty generous regardless of what those who want to keep everything say) and MB listings for free, and we're forced to make a choice on whether we're willing to pay extra to increase those limits. Most of my characters would be just fine with the default 2 retainers because I get rid of what they don't need instead of keeping it. They have their little market niches for crafting and they store their own materials. If they overflow on anything, it's the housing items I like to keep for redecorating their apartments and FC rooms.