Farming Leather is miserable.

[Arohk]

Can we have a moment of thought about how bad it is to farm leather? The droprate of skins is way too low, often you kill 4 or 5 mobs and don't get a single skin. And you need 4 skins just for one leather.

Please make farming leather less frustrating and increase the drop rate of skins.

[Hezzlocks]

I rather agree. Yes, you can buy them with gemstones but doing fate trains in order to get leather feels counterintuitive vs hunting the actual beast you get the leather from. It'd be nice to make the drops even just a little bit more reliable for those of us who want to get some mats without dropping gil or gemstones on it. Ditto for other animal parts. There's combat retainers too but that's also a slow acquisition rate...

On the flip side I guess it's nice not needing to compete with others over the highly limited number of spawns there are?

[Arohk]

I rather agree. Yes, you can buy them with gemstones but doing fate trains in order to get leather feels counterintuitive vs hunting the actual beast you get the leather from. It'd be nice to make the drops even just a little bit more reliable for those of us who want to get some mats without dropping gil or gemstones on it. Ditto for other animal parts. There's combat retainers too but that's also a slow acquisition rate...

On the flip side I guess it's nice not needing to compete with others over the highly limited number of spawns there are?

I just cleared the entire river in Thavnair (15+) Crocodiles, and only got 4 skins.

[Caimie_Tsukino]

Hezzlocks' right... You can buy a stack of them by doing just a few FATEs. At this point, because everyone's grinding Shared Fate rewards, FATEs are done sooo quickly. It takes a very short time to earn enough gems for 1 or 2 stacks of 99 skins.

This is even more effective than sending out multiple max level retainers for 10 skins each venture run.

[GarretStrongstaf]

Do you have a retainer with a battle class? You can send them on hunts and they bring back leathers at a rate of 10 per hour. If you have several, that can be upwards of 90 per hour. You can make a lot of money this way too. Let them hunt for you while you do other things. If I need them in bulk for something immediate, I just buy the skins of the mb. They are going for about a 1000 a pop on Adamantoise atm. Not too bad.

[Liam_Harper]

While it's not an issue that needs to be fixed since Fates and retainers are a great source, I do agree the droprate from mobs is unnecessarily low.

[Assax]

This is something that comes up every expansion. The drop rates for skins are abysmal and its worse if you consider that other crafting professions like BSM don't have to rely on any RNG as leatherers etc have to.
Yes, you can send retainers to gather skin but at the same time if you don't pay for extra retainers you get at most 30 skins per roughly an hour which translates to not even 10 leather...

ALC suffers the same problem if not even worse.
For some reason there is still nothing done about this issue after all this time. Even Ninjas MUG proc chance is so low they might just remove it alltogether.

[Illmaeran]

I agree. It's upsetting that an entire class, and a number of tiers of collectibles in other classes, depend on horrid collection rates for leather. While I appreciate they've mades FATEs viable content, it hurts my heart that doing early EW FATEs for gemstones and leveling an alt DoW class is the best way to get leather. I've got 4 DoW retainers out hunting every hour I'm online and can't come close to the gathering rate of FATEs. On top of that, the gathering rate is an order of magnitude lower than BTN or MIN. An hour of mining/logging will net me enough ore to make a couple hundred ingots or logs.

Integrated economies are fun and all, but I intentionally omnigather/omnicraft to be self sufficient and gather everything I need to make what I want. In principle, the idea of making things to sell in order to buy things I need because I can't gather them myself at a practical rate is very bothersome. This is compounding by the likelihood that the people selling multiple stacks of 99 skins and leather (yeah 99 leather) are botting in some fashion is salt on the wound. I had to drop at least 150K on leather to make my ilvl 560 DoL/DoH gear. That should never be the case for someone with all DoL/DoH classes at 90 and multiple retainers out hunting every hour I'm playing.

[Assax]

Not to mention that sometimes in addition to drop rates being horrid the amount of mobs spawning in the zone is too. E.g. Saiga Skin. There are like 6 mobs in the whole area (at least I could only find those). If there is even one player there farming who is good at pulling forget about even getting skin until they are gone.

[Zfz]

This reminds me of the East Thanalan Aldgoat Skin situation back in 2.0; two players were enough to tag everything as they spawn and there were people farming it almost 24/7. I actually like how it is done now; you farm FATEs instead of trying to tag spawns.

But I can see how someone who just don't care for FATEs could absolutely hate this arrangement. I was able to complete my 560 set (both DoH and DoL and all tools) just from the gems I got doing FATEs during my MSQ leveling, but it can be very frustrating when nobody wants to do FATEs anymore, later on in the expansion.

But then again, later on in the expansion, we're likely going to be able to get more from retainer ventures, so there should be less need to do FATEs.

As it stands now, I feel it's fine for people who are churning out products to sell to have to choose between less quantity for more profit (farm FATEs for the skins) or more quantity for less profit (buy skins off the market board).