MIN BOT AND THE REST

[Waeksyn]

Drop rates for mob hunting are ridiculous. In 2.0, they made adjustments to several key mobs, including adding extra spawn points and drop rate for fleece for example.

3.0 seems to be designed specifically to create huge UN-FUN, SOUL-DESTROYING, grinds.

Just now I needed Yak milk to do some collectable turn-ins to level up my CUL. Here are the results:

Time taken: 37 minutes
Mobs killed: 78
Mobs that dropped 1 or more items: 23
Average kills to get a drop: 3.4
Yak Milk dropped: 37
Average items per drop: 1.6
Average items per kill: 0.47
Number of HQ drops: 0

There are 2 problems. The drop rate is way too low (it should be at least average of 1 per kill) and the number of HQ is stupid. This should be ~20%.

I've found that the ONLY way to get HQ hunt drops is to use retainers. They usually return at least 20% HQ (perhaps higher).

The way it is now seems to be deliberately designed to create a market for gil sellers who will gladly provide you an option to avoid the grind and get on with, you know, actually doing fun content.

[Velo_Vandore]

The way it is now seems to be deliberately designed to create a market for gil sellers who will gladly provide you an option to avoid the grind and get on with, you know, actually doing fun content.

Or perhaps as an incentive to pay for additional retainers to do this work.

Or maybe that's just me being skeptical. It could be that they want to avoid the mats being too easily available for new items, leading to the crafted items being easily and cheaply made by anyone, and thereby it's value on the MB would drop.

[Illmaeran]

After leveling my MIN, BTN, and CRP to 60 and slowly...ever so slowly getting my DoH leveled I have to agree with the OP. The drop rate of basic materials from mobs, which are needed in large quantity, in addition to the timed-node gating for other basic materials is too much. We're talking about basic leveling here, not crafting items to turn in for scrips or that are in any way end-game. Leveling should not be this way. I can understand challenge and needing rare/timed items for end-game gathering and crafting scrips and actually making valuable things, but not during leveling. The sheer quantity of items required to make even basic items is in itself enough of a time sink.

Going along with what the above poster mentioned, I can see their rationale being one or more of a couple things.

1. To try to "encourage", aka force, players to purchase more retainers to gather these items reliably and in somewhat large quantity.

2. As a heavy-handed response to what they may have viewed as unbalanced/too-strong retainer gathering in 2.X

3. As a heavy-handed means to slow crafting/gathering leveling as a delaying tactic to give them more time to come up with more content.


It's a sad case when it's more effective to make money to buy vendor items to spam leves to level than it is to actually, you know, make things to level crafting.

Personally, I think it's all three. Given the way gathering and crafting has been designed, I get the strong impression that they didn't have time to really polish it and make considered decisions. Now they're having to find ways to delay us so that they can make the refinements the game needs. At least that's my hope. It would be awful if all of these problems were intentionally designed this way thinking it would be a good thing/conceptually sound.