General Quality of Life problems with Aetherial and Collectible Gathering

I wanted to drop a post in about a few quick and crazy complaints about the current aetheral reduction and collectability systems.

So with these two new systems a handful of idiotic problems have popped up that IMO are impossible to overlook as flawed, not fun and just insulting to players.

1) GP regen is so low you can't properly farm Aetherial Reduction nodes.
HOW does this make sense? I understand and feel GP is balanced with regular node farming. But while farming Aetherial Reduction nodes and Collectability nodes I'm spending a good chunk of my time flying, running around and waiting for GP to regen. Very little time is spent interacting with nodes?! This is idiotic. Upgrade GP regen to compensate or something SE!

2) Upgrading your gear beyond the min breakpoint doesn't increase your success in Aetherial or Collectable gathering!? I pushed my gear up very nicely because I have the extra money. But apparently even when you massively upgrade your gear behind X breakpoint it DOESN'T HELP! That's right even after getting all your shiney red scrip gear upgrades you won't be any better at Aetherial or Collectable gathering! Right now someone with the min 646 perception will gather Aetherial and Collectable nodes as effectively as someone with over 750+. Why? Because they are capping perception for the skills. Again this is completely illogical. SE's fear of market flooding and of people ACTUALLY getting something better from progression is insane right now.

3) Three minute windows. Why on earth do we have three minute gathering windows? You're telling me that as a player I cannot gather without having a second application, sitting beside me tracking all my nodes dinging a few mins AHEAD of the node pop so I don't miss this tiny window? I'm sorry, gameplay should NEVER be this severely impacted because they can't keep gold farmers in check. This is completely bizzare, in-organic, hassling behavior.

4) Minimum collectability numbers are listed only at the venders? Are you serious SE? You couldn't list this at the node?

5) Last ditch is still broken... Skill clearly says can only be executed when item wear is at its maximum. Skill can only be used when item wear is beyond its maximum. How long exactly is this skill going to stay broken lol?

6) Out of Reach. You're telling me my character can't see what they are hitting or remember where its at? REALLY?

7) Bullion Cubes on script venders. You give us all of these gathering skills and yet you lock away decent food behind a vender? I'm not even sure how to respond to this decision.

8) Overlapping useful food ingredients with scrip hand ins. It certainly raises the value of the ingredients.

9) Putting nearly every single interesting gathered item on some time based node. I am literally spending 95% of my time flying around or waiting for GP. Only 5-10% is spent gathering on a NODE. Clearly this is FUN game design.

10) Mining/Bot Gathering blue/red scrips and folklore materials takes WAY too long. And too much of that time is spent flying. They literally take too long by a factor of x3 too much time IMO.

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Anyway that is my rant about the terrible quality of life problems with the new aetherial and collectable gathering systems. Anyone else have others to add or thoughts?

1. Agree, and it's only going to keep getting worse. Current BiS lets you hit 700 GP with food. Are we going to have to wait around for 2+ Eorzean hours again for GP regen when we're at 800+ GP?

2. Not really any different from capping HQ at 15%. You're kind of late on complaining about this.

3. On the bright side, you can collect twice as many items if you keep up? I don't know.

4. Open up your timers (Ctrl + U is default for PC, I think), it's on there.

5. The miner one actually says beyond maximum wear. Looks like BTN's version has a tooltip error.

6. Again, late.

7. I heard they were making these available elsewhere, don't have the source though.

8. What?

9. You can blame career gatherers for that, since they always complained about how fast mats devalued due to being overgathered.

10. They already said they have adjustments planned. What more do you want from them?

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Originally Posted by Lyrinn

4. Open up your timers (Ctrl + U is default for PC, I think), it's on there.

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Thanks I did not know that... terrible UI choice but good to know.

But yeah I know half of these are "Old" complaints. I just can't believe some of the decisions in the system. Its so bad. I just want to see fixes sooner than later.

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Originally Posted by Katlyna

Thanks I did not know that... terrible UI choice but good to know.

But yeah I know half of these are "Old" complaints. I just can't believe some of the decisions in the system. Its so bad. I just want to see fixes sooner than later.

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7.) cul leve give these as rewards.

1. Gathering could be made much more fun and interesting if GP reset to max for each node, like CP does for crafting.

3. This is my biggest complaint. Limited windows just lead to waiting. Instead of a window, there should be a respawn time - mine it whenever you want, but it only respawns at 11:00.

9. If they fixed this to be a respawn time instead of a window, it would maintain the same scarcity while being much less aggravating. imo, it's making common mats like hardsilver ore 'hidden' that needs to go, because that's just blatant padding.

10. Agreed, 30 tokens per folklore tome seems more in line with the cost of master books.

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Originally Posted by Lyrinn

3. On the bright side, you can collect twice as many items if you keep up? I don't know.

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Actually, you get less even if you go twice as often, because similar 2.x unspoiled nodes gave 3+ materials a hit instead of 1.

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Originally Posted by seorin

Actually, you get less even if you go twice as often, because similar 2.x unspoiled nodes gave 3+ materials a hit instead of 1.

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If you're using +2 yield, you get 15 + 15 = 30 per hour as opposed to the 25/hour of 2.X nodes. And I was assuming 3h nodes would've still given 1/hit, since HW seems to be all about reducing supply.

Either way its really silly for the Red scrips to be gathered so bloody slowly... when there is a weekly cap. Honestly they should just speed them all up and put in caps if that is what they are so concerned with.

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Originally Posted by Lyrinn

If you're using +2 yield, you get 15 + 15 = 30 per hour as opposed to the 25/hour of 2.X nodes. And I was assuming 3h nodes would've still given 1/hit, since HW seems to be all about reducing supply.

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You are correct. I was comparing them without the +2 yield (which I always use anyway, so it wasn't a good comparison). I guess it just feels stingy because it's 5:1 (adamantite) vs. 3:1 (darksteel), meaning you only get 6 adamantite to 8+ darksteel over the same time frame.

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Originally Posted by Rath

7.) cul leve give these as rewards.

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Culinarian leve 56 and most of 58
You get around 2 per leve (HQ or not)

I did get 10 Bullion Cube from a Big Leve 58
Where I had to give 3 Clam chowder (NQ)

So it's super easy to get them without scrip

Have you never heard of Cordial? Would solve about 3/4's of your complaints.....

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Originally Posted by Katlyna

Either way its really silly for the Red scrips to be gathered so bloody slowly... when there is a weekly cap. Honestly they should just speed them all up and put in caps if that is what they are so concerned with.

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I get up on Thursdays, go about my daily before-work routine, but I add in something : I log in to FF14 and cap my Red Gathering Scrips.

How do I cap the RGS the morning the cap gets reset? I pre-gather the Chysahl that I hand in. I keep 50 (which is actually more than necessary) in a retainer. I go and get a few at the start of a gathering cycle (Chysahl collectible, Adamantite Ore, Morel collectible, Cuprite collectible, Darksteel Ore if applicable).

Yes, it takes time.. but incorporating the RGS collectible into the gathering rotation means you don't spend a lot on it per cycle.

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Originally Posted by Sartori

Have you never heard of Cordial? Would solve about 3/4's of your complaints.....

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I have a stack of 80. Have you ever heard of combat jobs which don't have to use potions to manage their resource costs in order to play the game?

80 Cordial will be gone in a matter of a day or two of serious, hard Gathering.

GP use can be extremely heavy when going for Collectibles/Reducibles. Heavy enough that spending time working on GC hand ins just to maintain a healthy supply of Cordials is a requirement. I suspect that if they were ever to add a recipe to craft Cordial with, the mats for it would be incredibly high priced on the MB due to how much the stuff gets drank.

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Originally Posted by Katlyna

I have a stack of 80. Have you ever heard of combat jobs which don't have to use potions to manage their resource costs in order to play the game?

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lol, thats pretty funny

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Originally Posted by Sartori

lol, thats pretty funny

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See you understand my problem and my crazy humor! Krazy Kat girls have some sense... not much but some!

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Originally Posted by seorin

1. Gathering could be made much more fun and interesting if GP reset to max for each node, like CP does for crafting.

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This would have to be limited to unspoiled nodes and similar or it would break the gathering system for normal nodes in half. If you recovered all your GP with every node there would be no reason not to mine with +yield and +HQ buffs on at all times. It would also make things like evaluation-based gathering levequests really trivial since you could go in with +50% gather rate all the time.

I agree with there being a need to adjust GP regen though. It really should at least scale with max GP (which would work out to an extra 1 GP per tick for every 80 GP on your gear, but it's still something.) If they don't want to trivialize low level gathering they could also put in something like a level 60 passive ability that doubled the GP regen rate.

I don't really have a problem with the windows on unspoiled nodes either, since the idea is to force you to pay attention to the time and choose between being prepared to go gather something at the right time and doing something else. There are three quality of life things I'd really like to see for this though:

1. Don't let unspoiled nodes disappear while we're in the middle of interacting with them. The fact that I can be just a tiny bit late to heading out to the node, get all the way through my collectable rotation, and actually swing a pickaxe and hit the node, only to not get anything because the node just vanished, really sucks.

2. Don't make unspoiled nodes disappear immediately if someone leaves the node window. You know what's a kick in the teeth? Flying to a node, pulling up the window, realizing that you forgot to wait for some of your GP, and losing the node entirely. If they're really concerned that people are going to abuse this by hitting Toil, backing out, chugging a cordial and coming back in, then at least make it so the node doesn't disappear if you haven't actually done anything with it.

3. Give us a way to see the node spawn times in-game. Adding this to the gathering log automatically once we've been to a node would be ideal, but if they don't want to spoil all of the details of the mechanic as soon as someone happens to be somewhere at the right time then at least give us the ability to annotate the log manually. I've memorized a bunch of the core spawn times but there are things one doesn't need to gather very often, and it's annoying to have to keep referring to external resources.

I agree with ephemeral nodes being terrible, you spend 90% of the time resetting them and waiting for your GP to regen xD. This is why I get my duskbornes and dawnbornes from fishing (pteranodon is a godsend). The only time I do ephemeral nodes is when I'm in some serious need of fire crystals, but even then, I just treat them like unspoiled nodes, I go, do my own thing (triple single mind, triple methodical) and once I'm done with the first gather I gtfo, can't be bothered to wander around until my GP resets, it's boring to insulting levels.

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

This would have to be limited to unspoiled nodes and similar or it would break the gathering system for normal nodes in half. If you recovered all your GP with every node there would be no reason not to mine with +yield and +HQ buffs on at all times. It would also make things like evaluation-based gathering levequests really trivial since you could go in with +50% gather rate all the time.

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That's why I said 'could be made' more fun and interesting. You couldn't just bolt a change like that on top of the existing system and have it work. A halfway solution would be to make cordials fill GP to max and drop the cooldown, making them worthwhile for expensive materials but not so much for a low level gathering binge.

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Originally Posted by Gallus

I agree with ephemeral nodes being terrible, you spend 90% of the time resetting them and waiting for your GP to regen xD. This is why I get my duskbornes and dawnbornes from fishing (pteranodon is a godsend). The only time I do ephemeral nodes is when I'm in some serious need of fire crystals, but even then, I just treat them like unspoiled nodes, I go, do my own thing (triple single mind, triple methodical) and once I'm done with the first gather I gtfo, can't be bothered to wander around until my GP resets, it's boring to insulting levels.

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Any without a hidden should be getting a 0 gp crystal/cluster gather really. It takes a couple seconds and gives you 30-150 of each. I do agree the regen could be slightly higher, but overall I usually use 1 cordial each ephemeral spawn and get 2-5 8/8 purity cllectibles and about 500~ crystals/clusters

The timing of GP regeneration seems to be pacing the timing of collectable nodes. Two game hours = 120 ticks at 5 per tick = 600 GP. Perfect, right?

Actually, no. It takes a minimum of 15 ticks to sprint to the node when it pops and then suffer through the extremely clunky, slow collection mini game. As a result, when you go to the next node that pops 2 game hours later, you are waiting for your GP to fill. If you have more than 600, you get a head start on regen for the second node but will still wait to hit 600.

My normal gathering rotation is to hit up the two red scrips for Chysal and Adamantite at 9 and 11, then pop a cordial and grab the two blues in Dravanian Hinterlands (morel and cuprite). I can usually fill all of these without using a second cordial but it's always tight to finish before the last node disappears.

QOL would be greatly improved if GP regen were increased. I would suggest that it be 5 per tick when you have a base of 500-599, 6 per tick at 600-699, etc.

I'd rather it be a pair of traits. One at level 50 (adds 5 to the GP regen) and a second at 60 (adds another 5 to the GP regen).

That,, or finally give us a crafting recipe to let us make our Cordial ourselves.

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Originally Posted by Roth_Trailfinder

That,, or finally give us a crafting recipe to let us make our Cordial ourselves.

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Remember that you can get cordials through GC turn ins. It would be nice, though, to be able to craft them.

Good idea to have the GP regen increase with level. Even +1 regen trait at 50 and another +1 at 60 would help a lot (and would likely be a lot easier to implement than my previous suggestion).

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Originally Posted by Roth_Trailfinder

I'd rather it be a pair of traits. One at level 50 (adds 5 to the GP regen) and a second at 60 (adds another 5 to the GP regen).

That,, or finally give us a crafting recipe to let us make our Cordial ourselves.

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I started hitting antumbral rocks and redolent logs with a king's yield II / blessed harvest II to supplement my cordial usage. I end up with +2 cordials every hour and 10 minutes (after using them when needed).

I know that you can get them by GC hand ins. That is how I have been getting them; every day making the GC hand ins, HQ, and spending the GC Seals either on Cordial or Ventures, whichever I deem closer to running out.

I'd like to skip that middle step, and just craft the dang things. If there's any use for Alchemy, that should be it!

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Originally Posted by Roth_Trailfinder

I know that you can get them by GC hand ins. That is how I have been getting them; every day making the GC hand ins, HQ, and spending the GC Seals either on Cordial or Ventures, whichever I deem closer to running out.

I'd like to skip that middle step, and just craft the dang things. If there's any use for Alchemy, that should be it!

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They're dirt cheap on the MB. I bet the stuff you hand in costs a lot more.

To me, "dirt cheap" means they're under 100 gil apiece ...

Checking the MB on my server, they're 1200 apiece, or more. That's not bad for occasional use, but I prefer to pay in time and Ventures than to pay that much in Gil.

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Originally Posted by Roth_Trailfinder

To me, "dirt cheap" means they're under 100 gil apiece ...

Checking the MB on my server, they're 1200 apiece, or more. That's not bad for occasional use, but I prefer to pay in time and Ventures than to pay that much in Gil.

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Ventures aren't free either, but it was just a tip :).