Leather farming is horrible

Please give us another gathering class that increases leather and fur farming. It's just so out of whack with the rest of the crafting game.

Totally agree! Perhaps something like "trapper" would work. "Hunter" would seem to be too close to archers, etc.
Also, the current gatherer interface is pretty much "go to location A, click, get item" which would also work well with traps.
We can assume traps are already laid out all over the place and the player just goes to these "trap points" to get whatever animal that has been trapped.

Similar situation exists with getting stuff like spider silk and other monster-derived raw materials.
As long as you have a high level combat job you may be able to get a few raw materials / enemy, but this requires luck and limited competition.
When going after those scorpion webs there's often other people hunting those.

Even a new type of gathering that is similar to WoW ( I know, eww), where you can skin animals after taking them down. Just something. Hell even lower the amount per item to 1 to 1 rather than 4 to 1 to make leather would go a long long way.

Honestly, the only way I stay sane in terms of collecting leather is just to send my combat retainers out to gather the skins for me. :/

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Honestly, the only way I stay sane in terms of collecting leather is just to send my combat retainers out to gather the skins for me. :/

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That's really the best way tbh outside of finding out of the way NPCs that sell more exotic hides/leather.
Protip: check the leather/hide item description. If you see "Shop Selling Price: _____" then there is a shop in the game where you can buy it from!

With the way the forum is, I legit thought this was going to be an anti animal abuse thread..

I I agree with the posters above. Best way I found is just send my combat retainers out for them and let them stress about getting hides/skins.

With EW at least (dunno about ShB, I kinda lvled leatherworker through dwarves) you have an alternate source for monster drops with bicolor gemstones. You run fates then you trade gems in for leather, fur, etc.

There was going to be a class for fur/leather farming. Yoshida canned it when working on ARR.
1.0 was originally going to have 4 DoLs...

You know, it almost sounds like Beastmaster would fit this bill.

It is horrible.

It's also a good way for new players to grind a bit of gil should they be short.

So, while I would certainly welcome an improvement, until that happens I do call on newer players to takeup this gil-making opportunity at all levels in the meantime.

Yeah, I miss skinning from WoW. The sound was soooo satisfying and I didn't have to bring a species to the brink of extinction to get a handful of hides.

I think this aspect of gathering does need an overhaul. The only really efficient way is standing at your retainers and sending them out all day.

Dont really need a discussion on this just the title alone says enough. Lol Its flat out awful :(

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

It's just so out of whack with the rest of the crafting game.

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Fishing is also very RNG related, and has equaly bad indications for where you can farm specific fish (until you finaly found one). For leather (and a lot more items), it would already be helpful if you could get an indication on where the creatures are that drop the resource. I think the issue is realy that unlike the other classes, leatherworker has this as a main source of materials. And i agree with some others that EW did solve a big part here with the bicolor gems.

But to me the 2 main issues are:
- There is no 'gathering log' for skin/fur sources. Or basicly any matieral from creatures.
- Items only say it when they are sold with gil, yet alternative selling sources (bicolor stones, GC seals) would be very helpful to be displayed if there is no gil source.

When both are resolved,it doesnt matter that the leatherworker depends on it, since getting these resources then becomes more reliable and easier to figure out.

A new class to gather these sources from animals to me sounds like a bad idea since it effectively doesnt add anything here. Sure, farming animals might be tedious, but at least its still reliable enough and easier to get into compared to fishing (and therefor fair enough to exist as mechanic).

+1 to this. Please make a trapper DoL. need this desperately.

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Originally Posted by Shibi

It is horrible.

It's also a good way for new players to grind a bit of gil should they be short.

So, while I would certainly welcome an improvement, until that happens I do call on newer players to takeup this gil-making opportunity at all levels in the meantime.

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"let the newbs do all the horrible grinds, surely this will not have knock-on effects re: new player engagement."

Just go back to ARR drop rates and recipe reqs. 1 skin and 1 tanning material for 1 leather and skins drop multiples every other kill, none of this 'need 3 skins with a 20% droprate' that they introduced in Heavensward to slow everyone down.

Honestly while it would be nice the fact that retainers exist and unlike DoL ones they don't require you to get the material first I kinda don't really care? Both of my Retainers are of Combat Classes (Summoner and Scholar to be precise) and they bring me more than enough skins in the acceptable amount of time.

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

Even a new type of gathering that is similar to WoW ( I know, eww), where you can skin animals after taking them down. Just something. Hell even lower the amount per item to 1 to 1 rather than 4 to 1 to make leather would go a long long way.

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A great thing about WoW is that you could skin other players' kills if they had been fully looted (a separate action there) Dead thing lay around for a couple minutes, giving you plenty of time to skin them. When there were daily quests that required killing X number of beasts, with many players slaughtering them, it was a skinner's paradise.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Honestly, the only way I stay sane in terms of collecting leather is just to send my combat retainers out to gather the skins for me. :/

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Yep. The drop rates for monster drops become waaaay too low once you go over-level to keep the rate of receiving them reliable, so retainers are the way to go with monster drops on the lower level stuff.

I have 4 combat retainers for this very reason.

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

Please give us another gathering class that increases leather and fur farming. It's just so out of whack with the rest of the crafting game.

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This hurt a lot when I started EW crafting, I completely agree that there should be another, easier, method of gathering skins that's comparable to botanist/miner. The best we have right now are FATEs to get the bicolor gemstones that you can use to purchase leather. Given that you need FATE rank for other things like orchestrions, mounts, etc, they're actually a good way of farming leather since you're double dipping into something useful as well. It also has the benefit of not having to worry about mob spawn, skin/hide drop rates, or other people trying to farm them too.

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Originally Posted by JTWrenn

Please give us another gathering class that increases leather and fur farming. It's just so out of whack with the rest of the crafting game.

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Use your retainers.

Not sure what levels you might be looking at but if you havent done so already if you unlock retainer ventures and make on a combat class it can basically go out and gather you anything thats a monster drop, leather, meats, other ingrediants. But in the shadowbringers endwalker gem vendors will sell you basically any of those drops from that expasion for just a couple gems.

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

Use your retainers.

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That's what I do. I don't bother killing things for leather any more. If I need a few pieces quickly, I buy it with gemstones.
Key thing to remember: Join FATE farming groups early in an expansion to get your Shared FATE book filled in while everyone is doing the same. This will open up the gemstone vendors for all their items, and if you complete them all, you can buy everything from the city gemstone vendor.

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Originally Posted by Neoyoshi

Yep. The drop rates for monster drops become waaaay too low once you go over-level to keep the rate of receiving them reliable, so retainers are the way to go with monster drops on the lower level stuff.
I have 4 combat retainers for this very reason.

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I have ... around a score of combat retainers, and maybe a dozen gatherer retainers.
A benefit of having 12 alts. :)

But only about half of them are leveled to 90 and Classical/Pactmaker geared, at the moment.

NB: my spouse and I have concluded that Fisher retainers are the least useful.
All the really good fish are not obtainable through ventures.

Its why you have a combat retainer. >__>'

EQII had a trap node where you could get skins/hides and meat and that would be a great DoL class addition here. This could be a class that has the ability to gather a variety of mob-related items from their nodes.

Barring that, they could look at retroactively applying the bicolor gemstone system to previous tier FATEs since that has made getting at least skins and hides a lot more accessible.

I would take simply adding the skins to the Grand Company vendors for GC seals like future expansion do with Bi-color gemstones (as both are acquired via FATES) so there is a reason to do fates in pre-Shadowbringer's zones and it helps smooth out that aspect for new players and may give them more incentive to level their GC rank.

It would be neat to have a gatherer who specializes in getting drops from mobs. Every time I see a crafting recipe needs one I just run to the MB.

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

Use your retainers.

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As I said earlier, the issue is how out of whack with the rest of the crafting it is. Even if you used retainers, unless you hire extra and pay more (which I also think should not be a thing in a subscription game), the gathering rate is massively different from the rest of crafting.

Not sure if it's been said or not but I get so much leather and fur from my retainers. I can easily get 500+ over a few days which will last me most of the expansion.

SE won't implement a gathering profession to deal with monster-drop because the following:


1) It will hurt their profits from players hiring extra retainers to make combat retainers to gather such items.


2) Players who are stingy will play another alt to get combat retainers, which mean they will spend more time playing the game, which requires more sub times. They may even be able to sell boosters!


3) They already try to band-aid this scarcity of monster-drop income via the use of bi-colored gems, which are used to goad players doing FATEs, which playing the game, thus subscription payment.

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Originally Posted by Momo_Kozuki

2) Players who are stingy will play another alt to get combat retainers, which mean they will spend more time playing the game, which requires more sub times. They may even be able to sell boosters!


3) They already try to band-aid this scarcity of monster-drop income via the use of bi-colored gems, which are used to goad players doing FATEs, which playing the game, thus subscription payment.

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This line of reasoning always amuses me because neither generates more income for SE (the retainer convenience point was valid, though). More time playing doesn't generate more income when it's all still covered under a monthly subscription fee whether you're playing 40 hours a month or 100 hours. More often than not, people don't even spend more time playing just for the sake of gathering. They change what they had planned to do with the time they had available instead.

If this was back in the early days of online gaming (anyone else remember when we were charged by the hour?) then those points might make sense. These days, they don't.

Hmm cool to see most people in agreement to add something. Will the devs take up the challenge of designing a shepherd class?

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Originally Posted by Momo_Kozuki

3) They already try to band-aid this scarcity of monster-drop income via the use of bi-colored gems, which are used to goad players doing FATEs, which playing the game, thus subscription payment.

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And its a proper working bandaid on that. It makes obtaining those materials easier in case you need some. In the end, work has to be involved. A new class or a combat class barely matters on this.

Its just the rate of obtaining them being the issue here. But even then i see it as an advantage as it prevents oversupply. Many materials are having such significant oversupply they essentialy just arent worth it. Bicolor gemstones only set an upper cap on value (if the value exceeds this, then players will farm more for those).

But most important. A lot of players dont care about gathering, yet combat basicly cant be avoided. This on its own also generates a constant supply (not every player drops the materials away instantly. many will still look at sell value, and in some cases just massively undercut for a quick sell).

The only thing it doesnt allow is obtaining a large bulk quickly. Which i see as a positive effect since these bulks of materials are often just disruptive on the market.

We have 3 sources for skins, including hunting the actual mobs and we need a whole new class? I'm confused.

I see that you are trying to level up a lvl 80+ leatherworker. If you have battle retainers level them up as mentioned above but and gear them in iLvl 573+ gear to get more mats while you level up crafting. Combine sending retainers on ventures while you do fates for bi-color gemstones that you can exchange for skins is the fastest way to fet skins (beside the MB). Killing fauna around is ro gwt skins is not worth it given the drop rate.

Consider using party finder to run fates more efficiently.

Monster material farming in general has always been pretty miserable due to spotty drop rates. They put in the bicolor gemstone thing as a bandaid, which works after a fashion, but like most new systems or adjustments they never back-ported it to previous zones.

I see that you are trying to level up a lvl 80+ leatherworker. If you have battle retainers level them up as mentioned above and gear them in iLvl 573+ gear to get more mats while you level up crafting. Combine sending retainers on ventures with doing fates in EW areas for bi-color gemstones that you can exchange for skins is the fastest way to get skins (fates are the fastest beside the MB). Killing random fauna around to get skins is not worth it given the low drop rate.

Consider using party finder to run fates more efficiently.

Wouldn't mind a new gatherer for collecting monster based materials either. I don't care too much for the gemstone or retainer option.

didnt they think about implementig such a gatherer a long time ago? dont really remember the details though