HQ Gathering

In short, I would like to request a return of HQ gathering materials.


I'm a returning player who took a fair amount of time off. I'm not even close to done with the MSQ yet. But that said, leveling is an important part of the game; the only long-term end-game players you have are the ones who enjoy the leveling process enough to get through it.

After my group of friends became bored with New World I tried to work to convince them to give FFXIV a try. One of the most compelling arguments I offered was the intricate and involved crafting and gathering mini-games. They all loved New World for its focus on professions, and this was one of the most compelling reasons many of them considered the switch.

Having been away and not at end-game (and not one for spoilers) I hadn't kept up on patch notes. Coming back and finding that one of the more interesting and complicated dynamics of the gathering mini-game (and by extension the crafting minigame) completely removed was embarrassing. The way that gathering decisions (in the form of HQ materials) could affect the entire crafting process through to the final piece made everything feel so smoothly intertwined.

Now gathering seems so much simpler...and more boring. It's taken a huge step towards the simple pointless point-and-click of other MMOs. Instead of two dynamic variables to balance you have one simple variable to solve for...without real variation. How is it any different and better than WoW or New World now?


Games (good games anyways) can be best defined as "a series of interesting decisions". Modern games have already departed to far from this. Please make the gathering minigame have more interesting decisions again instead of less.

If you want to solve the inventory management problem, then please solve *that* problem. GW2 did it with their 'collection'. Other games increase bag space. You could even let every item take one slot with separate counters for HQ and regular. All of these are solutions that leave the rest of the game intact.

Thank you.

The "minigame", is still there, it just gives you more items instead of HQ items and crafting has always been so easy ppl just macro it. If anything, the changes aren't much more than a bit of a sideways move.

Also in NW, the crafting system is very basic, as is the gathering. They just make you keep rep up to use stations and make you farm a bunch of really annoying items. Otherwise, its 1 button push and a whole lot of grind.

HQ wasn't a compelling gathering decision because most crafters didn't need HQ gathered materials to craft HQ items. If you were going out of your way to get HQ materials instead of focusing on yield, you were wasting your time. There's a reason most HQ gathered materials would end up selling at the same as normal materials - they were equally useful. It was to the point that HQ materials would only sell for noticeably more if they were needed for a class quest (and sometimes not even then).

I don't see you mentioning collectables or spearfishing, though. Have you tried either of those since your return?

Spearfishing has become a mini-game in every sense of the word - try to catch as many as possible or try to catch only the large fish or try to catch only specific fish. I've got a few friends who only leveled FSH as "completionists" and not because they enjoyed it but they're now enjoying spearfishing.

With collectables, you have a lot of choices to make before you collect. Scour, Brazen or Meticulous? Should you use Scrutiny or save GP for Solid Reason/Ageless Words? Did Collector's Intuition proc? That might influence what you do on the next step.

No lol, Pick clean was better in every case except right after a patch with new recipes, and even then, the current stepstone crafts give 50% anyways with less of them requiring HQ