Mining Blues: Help with my favorite DoL

[Chained_Icarus]

I like mining. I find it relaxing and fun. I like the flavor of my hero spending his downtime covered in dirt digging for the materials that keep Eorzea moving. But I'm stuck.

I have my Mammon, and a full set of HQ "Miner's" gear. I need HQ Umbral Rocks to upgrade I believe but I can only seemingly get them if my FC has the buffs up (which is rare). I'm ridiculously poor, so just outright melding isn't ideal, but if I must, what and where?

Also, are DoL worth progressing? I keep hearing that they aren't from my crafter friends...

[Eye_Gore]

Your gathering needs to be 370 or more with 332 perception (if I remember correctly). Then in order for a better chance at HQ you need a ton of GP. With my setup (bare minimum) After all is said and done I can only use unearth 1 for an 11% chance at HQ. I would need 28 more GP to get unearth 2 to work, ton of money or spirit bonding for materia required.

[stuscott]

It's expensive but you can get a Forager's Sledgehammer made as well for a nice boost. The Forager's left side gear will provide a small boost as well.

[Squintina]

Your gathering needs to be 370 or more with 332 perception (if I remember correctly). Then in order for a better chance at HQ you need a ton of GP. With my setup (bare minimum) After all is said and done I can only use unearth 1 for an 11% chance at HQ. I would need 28 more GP to get unearth 2 to work, ton of money or spirit bonding for materia required.

353 gathering as of patch 2.4

I like mining. I find it relaxing and fun. I like the flavor of my hero spending his downtime covered in dirt digging for the materials that keep Eorzea moving. But I'm stuck.

I have my Mammon, and a full set of HQ "Miner's" gear. I need HQ Umbral Rocks to upgrade I believe but I can only seemingly get them if my FC has the buffs up (which is rare). I'm ridiculously poor, so just outright melding isn't ideal, but if I must, what and where?

Also, are DoL worth progressing? I keep hearing that they aren't from my crafter friends...

I have 576 GP and I believe it was the around 560 when I did it.

My husband and I took 2 separate approaches to this.

He did Unearth II->Sharp Vision III on Node 7

While I did Toil->Unearth->Sharp Vision II, then Deep Vigor when it proc'd for a guaranteed HQ.

The difference being that his rotation gives a higher HQ %, but we all know that RNG is still just RNG so it's not a guarantee.
My rotation gave me a lower HQ %, but because Deep Vigor guarantees 1, even if RNG hated me, I still had one! (Often I still ended up with 2-3 HQ Umbrals).

We both started around the same time and finished around the same time, so I wouldn't be able to say which was more effective.

We both only did melds for the 100% affix success slots, no overmelds, using materia we had gathered over time.

And if you need extra stats but don't want to meld, there's always food! If you need an easy way to browse through foods, http://ffxivcrafting.com/food is pretty nice. Just go to gathering, click on the food category that fits the stat(s) you care about.

When you're about to meld, it tells you how much stats you're going to get so you can make sure you're getting the full amount the materia says.

But if you're unsure, there's a guide:
http://www.ffxivguild.com/ff14-arr-d...materia-melds/

Where you are should be the section "Relevant Pre-BiS Gear:" (the 2 sections before that are the 2.4 and pre-2.4 BIS)

[Nutz]

You're basically at the point where you can mine for profit about as well as anyone else. Melding/ gathering for i70/ i75 tools, and buying Forager's gear will allow you to mine some new things, but it's not actually going to make your mining any more profitable. There are several things I've mined only once because it took me a week or so to sell those items at a low price. Some items, like platinum, have a bit of demand, but gold sells faster and for roughly the same price (even though platinum requires full melds, i70+ tool and food or forager's offhand).

Personally I like mining and since it makes money itself anyway, I'd just try to progress slowly. If not broke, the Forager's offhand is a huge boost, otherwise start melding your Miner's gear with gathering and perception. You should be able to meld up past the need for FC buffs easily enough, and then just slowly work toward your i70 tool. Use some very cheap +gathering food if you need to (you'll also need enough perception to get at least 1% HQ rate).

Alternatively, check the MB and mine for money wherever you can fill demand. Work on getting your pick of the luminary simultaneously if you like. Then just buy better gear, starting with the Forager's offhand and/or fully melded pieces that people sometimes sell (I'm assuming you don't craft to meld these yourselves).

[Garlyle]

Some items, like platinum, have a bit of demand, but gold sells faster and for roughly the same price (even though platinum requires full melds, i70+ tool and food or forager's offhand).

Yup. The rarer/more difficult to obtain it is, the less crafters are actually capable of using it (especially materials centrally used for 3* or 4* difficulty). Gold and Darksteel Ore, by comparison, has a very persistent market, because Rose Gold Nuggets/Darksteel Nuggets are both relatively easy to craft (at only 1*, crafters can make them without any melds) and used pretty constantly in high level crafting.

That said, if you're interested in going for your Forager's Dolabra, you don't actually need a lot of melding to get your HQ stuff. If you've got a full set of HQ class gear on the left, your HQ militia offhand, and the second-best belts/accessories (~i48-50 instead of i55), you will actually be really close to the 1* node requirements already. A light amount of melding - nowhere near maximum (and never needing to step into IVs) - and you can easily hit the requirements for those.

Like, you can easily slap a Gathering +4 and Perception +4 into your class headgear for maybe about 5-10k total (and that piece will eventually get replaced with the Forager's Hat, so there's no point max melding it). Those rings you have? Slap a Gathering +3 or Perception +3 into each of them, which may run you about 1-2k per materia. Your hands? Two Gathering +4, and you can worry about the rest later.

GP-wise, it's up to you. You can ignore it entirely if you want - the key cutoffs are 600 (At which point you can get the extra attempt per unspoiled node, which will also allow you to potentially activate the +100% gathering/perception buff on the final strike), and the far more expensive to reach 650 (Which enables you to activate the +5% gathering success rate buff, and unspoiled nodes have a hard gathering success cap of 95%, or seem to). You can easily just stop at 600, or "600 with a small food"; 650 is drastically more expensive and mostly a luxury.

Partial melds can actually be really really cheap, if you look into the numbers, and it can get really easy to meet the minimums even without having to rely on food every time.

[StouterTaru]

The top level items are only highly profitable the first week or so after being introduced. Platinum is sort of an exception, because it's in over 50 of the 2.4 recipes. The real money is in the one shot items (soil and seeds) and the highly consumed 1 star items (darksteel/crawler coons/gold/spruce). You can mass gather all of them in 2.0 gear with 550 GP.

[Gallus]

Grade 3 thanalan topsoil and clusters are what sells best at the moment and you can gather them with your mammon, so I'd say don't bother upgrading. But if you really are entitled to mining, know that even if you get your supra and manage 420 gather and 420 perception, the only thing useful you'll be able to mine are hq pumices.

[Shadygrove]

A good GP target to aim for is 631.

Mutton stew, sold by vendors in the markets, gives 19 GPs and will bring you to the magic 650.

But for the older nodes you only need 630 anyway.

Swing to uncover, Sharp Vision 1 for 100%, Unearth II for +30% HQ chance, 4 swings and you are at 300 GPs and can then pop Solid reason for the extra swing followed by Deep Vigor for the guaranteed HQ.

[shintashi]

you can take rose gold earrings used for combat, and if you don't really care about GP (i've never needed more than 550, and usually 450/500 covers most things) then you can eek out +1/+1 more on the max gather and perception over most other items, even if the earrings are normal quality.

trapper Quiche was really helpful for me. Right now I use Haddock I think to get HQ Platinum.