A 4th gather?

[Jojoya]

Who? How often do you see players doing that, how often do you see party finder for it?

You can get shards from mobs drops, and other certain gathering items. They dont depress the market that much and is it really that bad?

You can get free access to gather items but then the also have beast tribe vendors that sell them too and the shared fate system lets you buy them too.. Its like they need more access to them.

You can buy or sell all the other gathering items so I dont see your piont your making.

I'll throw this idea out. Do you think shard, crystals and clusters should be limited either gatherers or mob drops? With combat only you'd see crafting die out pretty fast and high MB values.

Why would anyone list a PF for mob grinding? There are only two situations I can think of where a PF would make sense: if XP earned over time would be relatively close to what you get from a level appropriate dungeon (it's not) or if loot dropped by a creature went to every member of the party (it doesn't). Since neither of those apply, it makes more sense to farm open world mobs solo to get loot (mob grinding in dungeons isn't any more interesting than open world but it's sure a lot more rewarding when it comes to XP).

My general point? There are already 17 jobs in the game capable of gathering those items and every player is guaranteed to have at least one of those jobs already. There is no need for another job to gather them. The same is not true for the vast majority of items obtained through mining. botany and fishing outside of the tiny number of exceptions like shards and crystals.

Better go take another look at what the beast tribe vendors sell. Very few of those items overlap what comes from the current gathering classes. My guess about the gemstone vendor items is that it's more part of SE's attempt to make FATEs feel more rewarding than a belief that those items don't drop enough (drop rates can easily be adjusted if that was the problem) but they didn't have enough vanity items to put on the vendors to make them feel full. Materia didn't even get added to them until 5.1.

As for shards and crystals, I doubt creature drops were intended as a primary source for shards and crystals with the 2.0 revamp. I have no clue what things were like in 1.0 but that they still drop from the creatures seems like it might be a holdover from the old system.