Please Fix Gathering.

As it stands right now, Gathering is extremely boring in terms of gameplay. You just do the same thing over and over again, use the same abilities again and again. Something should change so that gathering doesn't feel like a mindless brainmelting activity.

My proposed fixes:
1. GP should recharge after every node.
2. Make Cordials able to be used while in the node UI. (Could be changed to an ability that consumes the cordial upon use if spaghetti code is a concern)
3. Rebalance of skills to feel like their GP cost makes more sense.
4. New skills with new effects, such as a skill that reduces how much integrity is lowered by each gathering attempt.
5. Overhaul of nodes in general. Location Effects should be more plentiful and encourage on-the-fly thinking, encouraging you to use different skills depending on the scenario.
6. A new Skill which unlocks Unspoiled and Legendary Nodes 10 or more levels below you at any time, without having to wait.

I don't like to do gathering either, so I never do it, but I know there are fans of it, so I don't want to take that away from them nowadays.

1 and 2 alone would be a huge boon. I don't agree with 6, you should be on level or higher with Unspoiled and Legendary nodes and have enough stats to be able to see/gather them, these are "endgame" nodes and should be treated as such. 3 and 5 sound interesting. We technically have something similar to 4 already but an improvement could be nice.

Old unspoiled and legendary should just be made regular after the expansion is over. It is just a weird time sink. Or just move it to nodes in the new expansion. They reuse gear designs they might as well reuse materials and not make it inconvenient for no reason. And yes when the new expansion comes out and we are all 10 lvls over it there is no reason.

I actually mostly like gathering as-is. Though that doesn't mean I wouldn't tweak and expand it if I had a chance, of course. And it needs to be done in conjunction with reworking crafting, and be mindful of the lore.

The lore part is particular dear to my heart. For example: It's downright silly that copper, iron and gold can be only found in Thanalan. Not Garlemand, which is famous for its rich ore veins, and not in any other place across multiple planets. So my change would be for the common resources to be found everywhere, just at different quantities, in different quality grades, and might be easier or harder to gather depending on the place. This would in turn require that crafting, even for level 100 gear and items, would still require those basic materials somewhere down the crafting chain, just refined and enriched by much rarer ones, possibly multiple times.

In terms of the in-game activity itself, I'd like us to take on more of an explorer or prospector role. There are already levequests which make you do prospecting tasks, they just don't lead anywhere. Here, I'd prefer if you had some kind of hot/cold minigame trying to find a best spot to gather a specific material, with different "fuzzy" areas offering different combinations of quality, total quantity, and ease of exploitation. Once you picked a spot, claim it (ideally, in the overworld so everyone can see your little flag!), hire a few characters (or put your retainers to work) to work it, and passively gather the resource you found. The pay of the characters would depend on how easy or hard it is to gather the materials, if you paid them more you'd have a small chance of gathering even rarer materials, and after the total amount was gathered after a few hours to days, the node would disappear.

The economy for gathered materials is already a mess.
Point 1 and 2 would only make this worse. With how easy this makes it to gather massive quantities in a fraction of the time the entire market would be flooded, more than it already has been.

I'm not sure how many of these actually make it feel less like a mindless brain-melting activity, versus simplification bundled with general QoL.

1. I disagree -- I don't really think it adds any substantive as you'd just be repeating the same rotation over and over -- It might make it quicker, but generally disagree to it making it more enjoyable.

2. Here is where I agree, but I think this is a Quality of Life thing more than anything.

3. They need to fundamentally re-look at the skills and abilities, rather than just rebalancing GP-cost of existing abilities to try and 'make sense'.

4. Fundamentally I am still just mindlessly clicking a node. Again, they need to fundamentally re-look at all the abilities and skills.

5. I agree with this, more on-the-fly thinking would be good... Especially if the location effects were more than integrity and yield.


I liked the concealed nodes fundamentally... But I didn't like that on-content they were tied to a capped currency.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

The economy for gathered materials is already a mess.
Point 1 and 2 would only make this worse. With how easy this makes it to gather massive quantities in a fraction of the time the entire market would be flooded, more than it already has been.

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The issue is that it just feels boring. You barely have enough GP to use abilities as is, and the best Cordial we have is a Hi-Cordial. We haven't gotten a new one in ages. Not to mention the balance of abilities is terrible in terms of GP cost, the best option is almost always to spam the Gatherer's Boon Up I and II abilities along with the ability that gives you 1 more item per gatherer's boon. It costs way less GP than any other skill which has the same effect but is so expensive it's just worse.

The spearfishing thing they did was quite nice, but I still ain't going spearfishing for the gameplay. Gathering for me is something for building and participating in the player-driven economy. Whether that takes 4 clicks or a skill of chance is largely irrelevant. If I'm going to be doing something for 10 hours it will be repetitive no matter what.

I forget I even have gathering skills most of the time because it feels like they make little difference and I don't really get when you're supposed to use one or another based on the node type or whatever.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

I forget I even have gathering skills most of the time because it feels like they make little difference and I don't really get when you're supposed to use one or another based on the node type or whatever.

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Exactly. They feel kind of meaningless imo

I just send all my retainers out to gather materials. GP should fill up faster than it does.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

The spearfishing thing they did was quite nice, but I still ain't going spearfishing for the gameplay. Gathering for me is something for building and participating in the player-driven economy. Whether that takes 4 clicks or a skill of chance is largely irrelevant. If I'm going to be doing something for 10 hours it will be repetitive no matter what.

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And this is why it's never going to be anything more than a chore. I don't mind the current repetition level because I can just put on a podcast and zone out, or put on some good music and zen out and not have to THINK.

But the main purpose of gathering is for a player to make money by acquiring raw materials and selling them, or acquiring raw materials and then crafting them. They managed to distract a lot of the "I gather for fun" people like me ith Cosmic Exploration, leaving only the hardcore money maker types doing it in Dawntrail.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

But the main purpose of gathering is for a player to make money by acquiring raw materials and selling them, or acquiring raw materials and then crafting them.

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Really just the latter nowadays, the amount of gil per time invested that the average player can make from gathering alone has been laughable for years.

Gathering is now mostly just for botting, including players who use 3rd party tools. Almost everyone does it now and 24/7 run for profit.