Gather 1000 shards per hour, possible?

As the title says.. or asks.

Is it possible, to gather 1000 shards in 1 hour, at any level? Most interested about the level 50's, as I am yet to reach that.

The reason I'm asking is because I've run rather low, or completely empty on shards lately, due to crafting like mad... I like to keep all my crafts roughly at same level, to support eachother.

So I looked to shard farming... and oooh boy.. to farm 1000 shards or more. Yeah, that looked like a very time consuming nightmare.

So I tried something else... I made an alt character. Leveled that to 15, and during the envoy mission, I took the time to unlock all crafting classes, and leveled them to 5, did the class quests for each.

All this, took me about 6-6½ hours.
It brought me:

Fire - 1176
Ice - 713
Wind - 1486
Earth - 1041
Lightning - 756
Water - 757

Total: 5929 shards. (And about 11500 gil from quests).

I did use a few shards ofcourse, getting the classes to level 5, so total amount is just a tad over 6000.
Reaching level 5, only took about 10-15 mins per class.


So is gathering the shards with mining/botanist faster at 40+?

You can get 1000 in about 1 hour and 10-15 minutes. I currently do so, but I have the skills that grant me x2 of a shard when used, so I pull 3 shards at a gather spot with +1 attempt, netting 15. I can do this every so often when my GP fills. I would surmise that with out that skill it would take a bit longer.

Hmm how much GP is it actually possible to have, at level 50?

If its 800+ GP, would it then be possible to use both Ward and King's Yield/Blessed Harvest on the same node?

Without the +2 shard per swing buff I'm averaging about 100 shards per 10 minutes which would be 600 per hour. I did some rough calculations and figured that the shard buff should be about an extra 25 per 10 minutes, so about 750 per hour. If I mapped out an optimum route between nodes and burned sprint at every chance, I might be able to get that up to 1000 an hour with the buff, but doing it at a leisurely pace nets me the aforementioned amounts.

This of course is at 25 miner, but I haven't seen any buffs on the list of skills gained that would improve this. The one nice thing about shards though is that since every node I've seen so far gives 1 per swing, you can just go to the lower level nodes that have no aggro mobs and farm away while watching Netflix.

Now this is more efficient for me as I'm only do two crafting classes at the moment, so I only really need ice and wind shards. However since you're using all shards leveling all classes what you've done might just be the most efficient way to do it.

They should allow to break down clusters an crystals.

Best places to farm shards is in the areas where you have a Quarry/Harvesting point that gives extra yield(not a extra hit). In those particular areas, youll always have one point that will give you double the shards. And if your in the lv 30s, you can even add to that by using a ward, and getting +2 on top of that. You could easily hit 1k shards with that. Anytime I'm going out to harvest shards, if I have to determine the area Im going to farm them, I'll go to each location on my log, and if they don't have a increased yield, then I move on to the next area. I believe these types of points start appearing in the 20s. I'm currently in the 40s so Im not 100%. I like to farm the shards that are going to give me the best money. Even if I'm looking for shards to craft, because if i can sell shards for more then what I'd buy my own, i make a profit, and get what I need to craft. It's more efficient to farm the shards that are worth more then the ones you craft with, then it is to farm the shards you actually use.

Spineless Basin level 30 nodes in Botany gives me an extra yield attempt.

I can get over 1200 per hour at certain places. Sometimes you only need to farm 3 out of the four nodes to make this possible because of the way they respawn. I totally depends on the area you farm and it must have +1 Gathering Yield. I did do a hardcore run when my botany was 30 and I got 1041(exact 1 hour time +-5 seconds)...

Those skills that up the shard rate are active skills which must be activated with GP, right? I think I'll have to skill up the miner and botanist prior to leveling the trades.

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Originally Posted by Kanash

If its 800+ GP, would it then be possible to use both Ward and King's Yield/Blessed Harvest on the same node?

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Even if it's possible, that would be a waste of GP if you're farming shards. King's Yield/Blessed Harvest gives you one extra item for 400 GP or two extra items for 500 GP. The various Ward skills will give you eight or ten extra shards for 400 GP (two per gathering attempt * four or sometimes 5 attempts per node). If you have 800 GP, it means you get to use the Ward skill on two nodes in a row.

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Originally Posted by Wodin

Those skills that up the shard rate are active skills which must be activated with GP, right?

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Some are.
At Miner level 20, you get Byregot's Ward, Nald'thal's Ward, and Thalik's Ward, which increase lightning, fire, and water shards respectively at a cost of 400 GP.
At Botanist level 20, you get Nophica's Ward, Menphina's Ward, and Llymlaen's Ward, which increase earth, ice, and wind shards respectively at a cost of 400 GP.
(All six of those are cross-class skills, usable on both BTN and MIN once earned.)
At level 41, a trait makes those skills work for crystals as well as shards. Then at level 50, another trait makes them work for clusters, too.

At level 42, you also get a trait, Nymeia's Ward, that randomly boosts the yield of shards as well as any other item that doesn't have HQ versions. This effect just happens sometimes as you're gathering and doesn't require the use of any GP skills. It most often gives one extra item, but I've seen the bonus go as high as ten extra items. (This stacks with the extras received from the GP Ward skills above, so you could get 13 shards with a single swing of your axe if Nymeia gave you a +10 while you had the +2 active from the element's relevant skill.)

I measured the effects of Nymeia's Ward over the course of gathering from 100 nodes. I got bonuses a total of 39 times, from 32 of the 100 nodes. (The difference is because 7 of the nodes gave bonuses twice.)

It was a +1 bonus twenty-six times, +3 five times, +4 three times, +6 twice, +8 once, +9 once, and +10 once, for a grand total of 92 extra shards/crystals over the 100 nodes where I was tracking it.

100 nodes isn't really a very big sample size, so the results don't give a very exact prediction, but if you figure you'll get an average of around one extra shard per node once you reach level 42 and earn that trait, you'll probably be in the right general ballpark. Not bad for a free trait.

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Originally Posted by Wodin

I think I'll have to skill up the miner and botanist prior to leveling the trades.

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This is a good idea in general, as miner and botanist provide most of the crafting materials used by most of the crafting classes. But shards were a secondary(or less) concern to me for a long time. The class quests just bury you in shards when youre starting out, and unless you craft a ton those will last a good while.