gathering needs an exp. boost

[RyuujinZERO]

I call bs.

He probably had like 99 leves and a bazillion seals lying about (to buy xp manuals), plus gathering food and guild xp buff.

But still point as posted by other people does stand, disciple of the land classes can be levelled at a reasonable pace provided you use all the options at your disposal - books, leves, food, etc. and make sensible use of the resources (ie. don't waste time trying to farm stuff that is so far above your gear and class level that you fail a large portion of harvesting attempts). I've heard people saying before "man I had to grind trees for hours just to gain 2 levels, SOOO mind numbing", but then insist they want to save their leves and seals.

[MagusVandel]

He probably had like 99 leves and a bazillion seals lying about (to buy xp manuals), plus gathering food and guild xp buff.

snip.

I tried to do 12 levels on botanist from 19-31. That alone took about 5 hours, and I'm very fast even with the joke percentage system.

I'm more pissed about the percentage system. I don't care that it takes a lot of time for gathering (although, I'd rather they didn't have to inflate content by making monotonous things like gathering and crafting[which I actually like now] take forever). What I do care about is that, statistically, if you have a 70% chance of getting an item, you shouldn't miss 88% of the time.

Not only that, but the number system is arbitrary. I've had far more luck at 67% success than 90%, where I receive about the same rate of 45% success, overall. In multiple cases, I have missed as many as 8/9 times on 90%. I'm sure someone will say, "you just have bad luck", but that's a stupid excuse for the numbers simply not matching up. I'm betting on a long enough time line, the end result would not be 90%. It would probably raise from the 11% success rate I saw to something closer to 73%, but not 90% (I was in school for 20 years, I wish you could jump up to 90% from 11%, I really do).

I've had to use the Lay of Hand techniques far more than necessary. And I understand, they want you to use those skills, but the only one worth using for leves is III, which costs 250 GP. And increasing GP? Not with materia, that's for sure. +1 GP? Seriously? Even if I had an entire set decked out with nothing but GP + materia, I would still not have enough extra GP to use even the lowest skill again.

Let's fix the real problem: Bad Stats and a broken Skill system. I think gatherer has had the least amount of time to be fleshed out. I don't mind that it takes forever (although I burned through 60 leves to get what I needed), but it needs to be a fun system if it's going to be the most boring task in the game. Personally, if I could have gotten the flax any way else, I would have. And by any, I mean any way that isn't ridiculously expensive like the market board. 5k for a stack? Come on, son.