Beginner's Guide to Mining?

[Roth_Trailfinder]

Those cross class level 20 skills are valuable. As a fledgling crafter/gatherer, you really do want to make use of them.

400 GP for +2 Yield? That's a savings compared to King's Yield 2, which means that you can use it again sooner. You regain 5 GP every 3 seconds, or basically every swing. That's one minute's worth of GP, or 20 swings, sooner that you can use the elemental ability.

If you are actively trying to build up a stash of shards, crystals, or even clusters, and are not able to do the Aetherial Reduction (which does not work for shards anyway) those elemental cross class abilities are your best friends.

[nyttyn]

S N I P

For Crystals and Clusters, Aetheral Reduction is leagues faster than mining for them raw, and you can't really use the elemental skills. And it's extremely easy to do aetheral reduction. Just get to 60 (takes like a week or less of even super casual play) and use a trailbalzer set if you're poverty tier.

And while it's true fire/electric clusters are the only you can get from it as a miner, it's still w a a a y faster to mine those and sell them for the other four elements. I mean you can get like 15 clusters per unearthed node - oooor hundreds of clusters from a single 4x aetheral reduction (literally hundreds, I average 300-320) which takes like two-five minutes at the very most if RNG hates you.

it's not a contest.