Dishing the Dirt on Droprates

I love alliteration. Ahem.

So, what's with 3.0's drop rates for seemingly mundane items? We crafters go through a lot to get our materials. Whether it's rare allagan silks or more common snurble tufts, sometimes we have to get our hands dirty to obtain them.

Leatherworkers will often have to farm mobs for skins, alchemist will farm mobs for various items like landtrap leaves or pudding flesh. Almost regardless of your profession, there's probably at least one monster you need to slay for your goods. So, why is it that the 3.0 drop rates are so low for items which are so widely used?

First up, let's talk about leatherworker. Until level 50, it's not so bad. 1 skin means 1 leather, so it's fairly easy to rustle up a few skins and get to work. Now, level 51 rolls up and suddenly we need three times that number for one leather. It's a sad day when I need to skin two Roegadyn-length dragons just to make enough leather for a pair of Lalafellin booties.

This wouldn't be so bad, however, if the drop rates didn't horrendously suck. I spent hours farming wyvern leather and didn't even walk away with a single stack. Oh, but I have plenty of wyvern wings at least.

Now we turn our heads to Gelato flesh. While it's true they can sometimes drop 3 at a go, they do it so infrequently that you could be excused for thinking you were attacking the wrong pudding mob.

Now I point these two out as examples because they're so widely used. The wyvern leather is obvious, and Gelato flesh is used to make void glue which is used in countless recipes from blacksmithing to carpentry. And do I dare mention the other items needed for dissolvents for many other recipes?

I think you get the point. There's really no need to make the drop rates so low. They're widely used items, so they should be considerably more common than they currently are, if only to ease the competition when farming them. We had this issue with Fleece long ago, and they graciously fixed it. So, let's hope for a similar change to make crafting that little bit more painless.

One word.

Retainers.

I quite like it. I send my retainer out to grab a specific item and then I make a nifty profit after an hour. Meanwhile most of the 2.0 items are worth an abysmal 1 gil each - since even now the market is absolutely flooded with them.

If it's for grinding xp with some stackable end craft so you can quick synth and leave for a bit and come back to a bit of xp, the intent is clearly that you're supposed to do collectables for xp instead.
So you don't need that many base materials...

If it's to make gil out of crafting, use the market board if you don't want to farm the mats. You'll make a profit either way.

One DoM/DoW retainer is enough otherwise, unless you're in a hurry to craft/level your crafter.

As for more skins needed to make a leather, it's quite probable that the dragon skins are just that low quality to begin with, that you go through three on average to make a single leather.
Or damaged as is more likely... Dragons are after all harder to kill than a goat in thanalan. It's just reasonable to assume that the skins are more damaged, therefore needing more of them...

Looking at the huge stock of mats on MB here on Balmung, think there's no problem with the supply of raw materials.

Any increase in drop rate will decrease the value and make everything worthless.

Looking back at 2.x, in order to compete with botters, they increased the drop rate and number of mobs for diremite webs, fleece, various skins for leathers etc, effectively cutting the price down to almost nothing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chihaya

Looking back at 2.x, in order to compete with botters, they increased the drop rate and number of mobs for diremite webs, fleece, various skins for leathers etc, effectively cutting the price down to almost nothing.

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At the time we also didn't have retainer ventures yet.

There's no reason to farm drops when you can have your retainer get around 10 of them in less than an hour for one measly venture.

Typical bumbling responses of "ho ho ho, I make so much money from my retainer, *adjusts monocle, why these paupers are filling my coffers with their bank notes, money is wonderful, *rich person snorting sound".

I mostly support the OP's complaint about drop rates, because as it stands, there is almost no reason to ever fight a mob in the open world. Bad experience and bad drop rates. Unless you have a mob listed as daily hunt, there is no reason to fight it.

Placing all of your farming game on the backs of retainers is a HORRIBLE design choice, though. Sure, there are people selling retainer mats on the market board, and it makes them feel like Uncle Moneybags. These players aren't engaging in the world, though, which raises the question of why developers should spend time creating that world. The end result is the current situation in World of Warcraft, where "retainers" being sent on 30 minute-8 hours passive missions is the core content outside of raids. If any of you were playing WoW right now, you'd know just how horrible a road we are starting on.

And furthermore, extra retainers are available for real life money. Real life money = more reliable gathering = the only reasonable way to level crafts. Literally pay to win. With all the complaining about extra paid services, I can't believe I have to be the one throwing this out there.

BUT...
Once you have a gathering profession to level 56-60, you will begin experimenting with aetherial reduction. This system allows you to break specific items down into hundreds of crystals per minute. Crystals and Clusters appear in your inventory as if you were standing under a waterfall. People are seriously capping on crystals without even trying.

I was furious about the new gathering rates, until I realized that mindless crystal farming was no longer a thing. You don't need to spend 4 hours smacking rocks to get enough shards just to make a stack of ingots. I leveled both weaver and leatherworker to 60, and only ONCE ran low on crystals. 5 minutes later, I had another 1000 crystals in my pocket, and was back to making crawler thread.

The new emphasis is the time it takes to gather the materials, NOT the time it takes to gather the magic crafting RMT skittles we spend for each synthesis. And seeing it under that light, I'm ok with it.

I would fully support the low drop rates if you couldn't just pay to win with retainers.

It's awefully anoying to know that without extra retainers I'm at a massive disadvantage as a crafter.

Having actually farmed mobs for crafting mats when I deemed my single DoM/DoW retainer was not bringing enough, you get far more drops in one hour than what the retainer will bring you.
The only thing that is actually low drop rate of in my experience is hq materials.

In particular I've farmed Deepeye Tears and various skins.

If I had Ninja at 60, I'd be able to use Mug for higher drop rate.

Grand Company Supply missions combined with collectables is the most efficient way of levelling both crafters and gatherers, which will also reduce by a lot the amount of materials you actually need to level these classes.

This was slowing down my ability to craft so much that I finally bought another retainer so that I can send him out for drops. They knew what they were doing that's why we can buy more now.

Retainers are fine, but they're limited to only 10 drops per hour or so, 7 in some cases. That's 2-3 leathers per hour, per retainer. Just to put that into perspective, that's barely enough for a single mid-tier craft. You're also limited to gathering only one type of material at a time, per retainer. So if you need both wyvern leather and void glue, you're back to having to farm the old fashioned way or send two retainers out to do the job and wait an hour for them to return for each craft.

It's not very efficient unless you have a large number of retainers.

As I mentioned before though, my main concern is the sheer volume of materials you need to consume to craft many of these items. 3 skins per leather, 3 leather per craft in some cases. That's 9 skins for one item alone. If you were to rely solely on the market-boards, you could expect to pay around 100k at the going rates on my server alone. So, I don't. I choose to farm, and send what retainers I have out.

Someone mentioned collectables as a good way of earning experience. Sadly, it isn't. It's awful for XP. You're actually better off doing leves for the most part. Each hand in earns me around 150k experience, whereas a single HQ craft for a leve can double that to 300k. The returns for 'HQ' on collectables don't scale quite as nicely. Grand Company hand-ins are even better than leves, sometimes earning as much as 800k in a single craft. That relies on that lovely little star though, so it's not a reliable source of XP and it's limited to one per day.

At any rate, it's not about the experience. Sometimes you actually want the items. I just feel that if they're going to make so many recipes reliant on these materials, they should at least make them a little bit more common than they are currently.

i will go with the op on this, some say that retainer can get 7-10 skin per hours, let's say you have 8 retainer that go get skin for you, at best you will get 80 skin (about 26 leather worth).
meanwhile, the botanist can get more of 200 Rainbow Cotton Boll/Stalk of Ramie (if not far more), the miner can easily get this much for the Mythrite Sand....

the drop rate for the skin are too low and the recipe are far to expensive for be really good.