Possible Gathering Exploit - Infinite 100% HQ

Apologies if I shouldn't be posting this here, but my brother raised an in-game ticket and has had no response on whether or not this is an exploit.

When gathering from a standard node that has no static bonus marked, it can sometimes trigger the random effect of 100% High Quality chance.

If you stop interacting with the node when it has 1+ attempts left and wait for your GP to recharge, it will still have the 100% High Quality chance and you can use Solid Reason to add extra attempts to the node. This can be repeated as often as you like, meaning infinite guaranteed HQ gathers.

This may not be considered an exploit due to the time/cordial consumption requirement, but we don't want to get in trouble if it is.

That just seems like normal mining with extra steps

Around two and a half minutes (with enhanced recovery) to regather the 300GP for a single extra HQ mine. Considering you can do a full loop or even more in that time, and will get more HQs in that loop, on a time/gil basis it's not really game-breaking.

Sounds interesting until you reach the point where HQ mats generally aren't worth this hassle, considering the mats you'd want this to work tend to be from timed nodes, but by their nature that doesn't work.

TL;DR: Works only on nodes that aren't worth the effort, time and / or GP.

Thanks for the replies all! I'll stop worrying :D

If you have enough stats to proc 100% HQ as node modifier, you can also get a substantial quality boost with the best buff skill. Maybe they even use the same formula, I'm not sure. That buff also costs 300 GP, so using it on a new node with 4+ attempts left will certainly be better than getting a single extra attempt out of the 100% HQ node.

Also, as noted, at a certain point HQ ceases to be meaningful. I'll rather use pick clean which gives me extra items but sets HQ chance to 0%, because I can craft 100% HQ items from all NQ materials.