Offhand Gathering Grade 5

[Kiote]

This is not restricted specifically to Grade 5s. Nearly every grade is fairly imbalanced.

Since dye does not need to be crafted in any way, it should probably be the rarest or second rarest drop.

[Sophia]

ATTN MODS

Add another grade 5 spear fishing node for Iron Lake already there are only 2 every other location for all grades has 3

[Conradus]

ATTN MODS

Add another grade 5 spear fishing node for Iron Lake already there are only 2 every other location for all grades has 3

Nope, there's only two grade 5 spear fishing nodes in Coerthas, and two grade 4s in Black Shroud. The trick is to do some main-hand fishing. My understanding is you can reset the spear fishing nodes by main-fishing the pool, even though there isn't a school there.

[Raldo]

Ok, now that this thread has some mod attention, I'd like to firmly stick my foot in my mouth and retract my earlier opinion of "leave it like it is". The chance of getting dye is indeed too high.

I went back and re-read the OP and calculated it out. I apparently misread it the first time and looked at the wrong column of data (I was looking at items, not gathers). He got dye approximately 70% the time. That's way too much even by my standards.

I would decrease the frequency of dyes in grade 5 to at most 50% chance. If I was making the changes, I would probably make it around 25% in Grade 5, and scale the other grades back accordingly. Grade 1 currently has about a 5% chance of getting dye, so I would leave that one as it is.

I disagree with those that say dye should be rare. It serves no purpose in the game other than vanity, so there's no reason for it to be rare. Plus, once 2.0 hits, we'll be able to dye and re-dye, as well as dye more colors, so there will be more demand for dyes. Please don't reduce it to the point where it's like gathering dark matter with DoL. I have no qualms with a 'Fingerprints of the Gods'-esque ability for it, but... that seems kinda weird to me.

The one question I have though... if dye is so abundant, why are some of the colors so bloody expensive? On Selbina, black was 5k last I checked, purple was 7k, and blue was a more reasonable 1~2k. Grey, on the other hand, is down to 250g, but grey is boring, so no surprise there.

[Geesus]

I have to agree a bit with Raldo as far as rarity. It's for cosmetic purposes so maybe another way of gathering it or some other method. But since it lost it's luster after the update and Dye no longer "gives" stats, it really is just for cosmetics as was also previously mentioned. So fun to gather for the XP but the loss of space in inventory and the apparent over abundance to success for gathering is just a bit high. lol

[Estellios]

I think balancing out dyes with the other items would be nice. With the gathering changes requiring you to go to specific camps in order to get specific items, it's not a good idea to make it so that 90% of the time you will get dye if the item you are looking for only comes from one specific camp. As was suggested, an ability to "activate" searching for dye or some way to influence what items you get for offhand gathering would be nice. Hell, I would just make "area exclusive" items the most prominent in those areas and have any that are in more abundance (dyes and the ever-annoying moko grass) be less common but be balanced by the fact that they are available from more sources.

[mbncd]

It seems really strange to be spear fishing a pot of dye... I think this is something that should really be handled by alchemists, though I have no problem with gathering the materials for dyes, just not a perfect pre-made bucket of the stuff. You wouldn't expect to harvest a shirt from grass, you wouldn't expect to harvest a shield from a tree, things that are so obviously man made should not be directly harvested from nature.

[Raldo]

stuff

That... that has nothing to do with the quantity of dyes obtained.

It seems really strange to be spear fishing a pot of dye...

Just pretend you're spearfishing bugs, squashing them, and putting them in a bucket. That's essentially all the Alchemists were doing back when they had to make the dyes from Lac Bugs. Though to be entirely honest, it doesn't make much sense to be spearfishing up "muddy water" either.

[Geesus]

That... that has nothing to do with the quantity of dyes obtained.

No BUT it does show that along WITH the abundance of dye drops, the WHOLE aspect of off hand minus at least Btn, could be looked at not just dyes. So if they say the drop rate for dye is too high and also go and seems like we could either keep or make some changes, I don't know, maybe add a new drop to offhand and bring it back nice new and balanced.

Does that make sense?

[Raldo]

Ah, gotcha. You're saying that offhand gathering is, for the most part, not very useful. I can get on board with that.