Farming Leather is miserable.

Can we have a moment of thought about how bad it is to farm leather? The droprate of skins is way too low, often you kill 4 or 5 mobs and don't get a single skin. And you need 4 skins just for one leather.

Please make farming leather less frustrating and increase the drop rate of skins.

I rather agree. Yes, you can buy them with gemstones but doing fate trains in order to get leather feels counterintuitive vs hunting the actual beast you get the leather from. It'd be nice to make the drops even just a little bit more reliable for those of us who want to get some mats without dropping gil or gemstones on it. Ditto for other animal parts. There's combat retainers too but that's also a slow acquisition rate...

On the flip side I guess it's nice not needing to compete with others over the highly limited number of spawns there are?

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Originally Posted by Hezzlocks

I rather agree. Yes, you can buy them with gemstones but doing fate trains in order to get leather feels counterintuitive vs hunting the actual beast you get the leather from. It'd be nice to make the drops even just a little bit more reliable for those of us who want to get some mats without dropping gil or gemstones on it. Ditto for other animal parts. There's combat retainers too but that's also a slow acquisition rate...

On the flip side I guess it's nice not needing to compete with others over the highly limited number of spawns there are?

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I just cleared the entire river in Thavnair (15+) Crocodiles, and only got 4 skins.

Hezzlocks' right... You can buy a stack of them by doing just a few FATEs. At this point, because everyone's grinding Shared Fate rewards, FATEs are done sooo quickly. It takes a very short time to earn enough gems for 1 or 2 stacks of 99 skins.

This is even more effective than sending out multiple max level retainers for 10 skins each venture run.

Do you have a retainer with a battle class? You can send them on hunts and they bring back leathers at a rate of 10 per hour. If you have several, that can be upwards of 90 per hour. You can make a lot of money this way too. Let them hunt for you while you do other things. If I need them in bulk for something immediate, I just buy the skins of the mb. They are going for about a 1000 a pop on Adamantoise atm. Not too bad.

While it's not an issue that needs to be fixed since Fates and retainers are a great source, I do agree the droprate from mobs is unnecessarily low.

This is something that comes up every expansion. The drop rates for skins are abysmal and its worse if you consider that other crafting professions like BSM don't have to rely on any RNG as leatherers etc have to.
Yes, you can send retainers to gather skin but at the same time if you don't pay for extra retainers you get at most 30 skins per roughly an hour which translates to not even 10 leather...

ALC suffers the same problem if not even worse.
For some reason there is still nothing done about this issue after all this time. Even Ninjas MUG proc chance is so low they might just remove it alltogether.

I agree. It's upsetting that an entire class, and a number of tiers of collectibles in other classes, depend on horrid collection rates for leather. While I appreciate they've mades FATEs viable content, it hurts my heart that doing early EW FATEs for gemstones and leveling an alt DoW class is the best way to get leather. I've got 4 DoW retainers out hunting every hour I'm online and can't come close to the gathering rate of FATEs. On top of that, the gathering rate is an order of magnitude lower than BTN or MIN. An hour of mining/logging will net me enough ore to make a couple hundred ingots or logs.

Integrated economies are fun and all, but I intentionally omnigather/omnicraft to be self sufficient and gather everything I need to make what I want. In principle, the idea of making things to sell in order to buy things I need because I can't gather them myself at a practical rate is very bothersome. This is compounding by the likelihood that the people selling multiple stacks of 99 skins and leather (yeah 99 leather) are botting in some fashion is salt on the wound. I had to drop at least 150K on leather to make my ilvl 560 DoL/DoH gear. That should never be the case for someone with all DoL/DoH classes at 90 and multiple retainers out hunting every hour I'm playing.

Not to mention that sometimes in addition to drop rates being horrid the amount of mobs spawning in the zone is too. E.g. Saiga Skin. There are like 6 mobs in the whole area (at least I could only find those). If there is even one player there farming who is good at pulling forget about even getting skin until they are gone.

This reminds me of the East Thanalan Aldgoat Skin situation back in 2.0; two players were enough to tag everything as they spawn and there were people farming it almost 24/7. I actually like how it is done now; you farm FATEs instead of trying to tag spawns.

But I can see how someone who just don't care for FATEs could absolutely hate this arrangement. I was able to complete my 560 set (both DoH and DoL and all tools) just from the gems I got doing FATEs during my MSQ leveling, but it can be very frustrating when nobody wants to do FATEs anymore, later on in the expansion.

But then again, later on in the expansion, we're likely going to be able to get more from retainer ventures, so there should be less need to do FATEs.

As it stands now, I feel it's fine for people who are churning out products to sell to have to choose between less quantity for more profit (farm FATEs for the skins) or more quantity for less profit (buy skins off the market board).

I feel bad for all the animals without skin/hide/horns/claws that are supposed to have them.

But as others have said, unfortunately buying with gemstones is by far the least frustrating way to deal with it.

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Originally Posted by Conundrum

I feel bad for all the animals without skin/hide/horns/claws that are supposed to have them.

But as others have said, unfortunately buying with gemstones is by far the least frustrating way to deal with it.

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You reminded me of this comic about subligar I made awhile ago:
https://s10.gifyu.com/images/Caimie-Comic_001.png

EQII had trap nodes and I've always thought they should try to implement that in this game to provide leather and meat.

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Originally Posted by Caimie_Tsukino

You reminded me of this comic about subligar I made awhile ago:
https://s10.gifyu.com/images/Caimie-Comic_001.png

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LOL! I love the *puke*

The current drop system was or seems to be designed exclusively for bots. If you slaughter 40 or 50 of a mob you will start to see stacks of hide drop. If you slog through 200 you will actually see a yield of around 240 for your trouble but you see nothing in the first 40 or 50 kills. So if you want to farm hide, you better be ready to make it a long haul venture.

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Originally Posted by Ksenia

The current drop system was or seems to be designed exclusively for bots. If you slaughter 40 or 50 of a mob you will start to see stacks of hide drop. If you slog through 200 you will actually see a yield of around 240 for your trouble but you see nothing in the first 40 or 50 kills. So if you want to farm hide, you better be ready to make it a long haul venture.

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X to doubt


Like seriously its actually better for bots that way since they with stay there doing it for hours while most players won't. Kindof shows why a 4th gather like a hunter, trapper, ect is needed with a minigame similarly to fisher to make it difficult for bots.

This is actually why I usually level my LTW with beast tribes over gathering the mats because of the drop rates for skins. Now I have been using gemstones, but still. Beating up 30 mobs for two skins isn’t fun.

What are you talking about? Hearing "LAHEE" while farming for Antrociraptor skins and only receiving 8 in an hour's work is fun

even with farming gemstones and retainers there's no reason why the drop rate should be as low as it is. Having patience to even farm 20+ leathers is a virtue

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Originally Posted by Padudu

Hearing "LAHEE" while farming for Antrociraptor skins and only receiving 8 in an hour's work is fun

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LAHEE is the forest laughing at you for thinking you'll be able to get leather from the mobs.

I wish I knew about farming FATEs for mob drops when I was leveling my crafters to 80 in ShB. Gathering 100+ leather for collectables and gear while getting like 20 an hour was not an experience I ever want to repeat.

I would really enjoy a DoL like fishing for those drops, like trapper or hunter. Could give it trapping nodes like node based hook and reel fishing, and a little minigame like spear fishing.

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Originally Posted by Illmaeran

LAHEE is the forest laughing at you for thinking you'll be able to get leather from the mobs.

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you listen here, it may be hard work but it's honest work. :( maybe some of us take pleasure in culling an entire species in the name of leather

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Originally Posted by Padudu

you listen here, it may be hard work but it's honest work. :( maybe some of us take pleasure in culling an entire species in the name of leather

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What would Geva say?

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

What would Geva say?

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Geva wouldn't say anything if she doesn't know in the first place

I clear my crafting logs instead of doing leves to level my crafters, and LTW is the class I dread the most. Simply put the amount of time it takes to gather all the skins you need in comparison to easily access gatherables such as ore, sand, or flax is exponentially more costly whether the currency you use is time or Gil. It does not matter. Boasting about FATE trains for gemstones is not a viable counter argument as your acquisition is dependent on other players. Gathering and crafting for the most part, are solo activities.

With a job like WVR, mats like fleece that are needed also drop from mobs, but not only is the demand for the intermediary goods much less than leather, the drop rates on these items are phenomenally better than skins.

In short, acquisition of skins and hides is abysmal at best, and not a great incentive to mindlessly grind FATEs. Also bear in mind that each of the two tiers of crafting logs will usually have around 5 different leathers that are needed for crafts bringing the grand total of skins to just get through your logs to be well over 1k. At 2 gemstones a pop I really hope you like doing FATEs, otherwise prepare for a very expensive time crafting through the LTW phase.

My suggestion is beastmaster. Make it a gatherer with limited combat potential, and far more efficient means to gather from live resources.

I've spent alot of fate gems on leather. I Also plan ahead, and have my retainer do alot of 1hr leather gathering missions.
If you plan ahead a few days, its not a problem with a retainer

Leather worker is the one crafting class that I truly despise and it is all because of having to farm skins. I dislike so much.

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Originally Posted by Skor

Leather worker is the one crafting class that I truly despise and it is all because of having to farm skins. I dislike so much.

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Except you don't need to farm skins for the most part?

You can buy them off the MB.

You can buy the leather itself off the MB (not uncommon for the leather to be cheaper than a single skin).

You can send DoW/DoM retainers after the skins.

For ShB and EW, you can buy the skins using Bicolor Gemstones.

I think the only skin I've had to farm in the last 2 years is Archaeornis Skin because both it and the leather can be scarce on the local marketboards. Even then it only takes me about 10 minutes to farm the 30 skins I tend to target.

Self-sufficiency is nice but there's a point it makes a lot more sense to simply buy some materials off the marketboard instead of spending your time trying to farm yourself. The time saved can be invested in earning gil to pay for what you purchased (and have more leftover).

Farming isn't even that bad. You have a nice little circle to run which is generally uninterrupted.

Complaining about farming skins when there are other ways to do it is like saying "it takes so long to level up" if all you did was kill random world-spawn enemies for experience. While I do agree it might "feel weird" to farm skins using other methods... take advantage of maybe earning some exp FATE grinding for gemstones. Or do some other activity to earn gil and buy them off the MB.