Leather farming is horrible

[Anura]

Yeah, I miss skinning from WoW. The sound was soooo satisfying and I didn't have to bring a species to the brink of extinction to get a handful of hides.

[Tigerlilley]

I think this aspect of gathering does need an overhaul. The only really efficient way is standing at your retainers and sending them out all day.

[NanaWiloh]

Dont really need a discussion on this just the title alone says enough. Lol Its flat out awful

[UkcsAlias]

It's just so out of whack with the rest of the crafting game.

Fishing is also very RNG related, and has equaly bad indications for where you can farm specific fish (until you finaly found one). For leather (and a lot more items), it would already be helpful if you could get an indication on where the creatures are that drop the resource. I think the issue is realy that unlike the other classes, leatherworker has this as a main source of materials. And i agree with some others that EW did solve a big part here with the bicolor gems.

But to me the 2 main issues are:
- There is no 'gathering log' for skin/fur sources. Or basicly any matieral from creatures.
- Items only say it when they are sold with gil, yet alternative selling sources (bicolor stones, GC seals) would be very helpful to be displayed if there is no gil source.

When both are resolved,it doesnt matter that the leatherworker depends on it, since getting these resources then becomes more reliable and easier to figure out.

A new class to gather these sources from animals to me sounds like a bad idea since it effectively doesnt add anything here. Sure, farming animals might be tedious, but at least its still reliable enough and easier to get into compared to fishing (and therefor fair enough to exist as mechanic).

[Nyxs]

+1 to this. Please make a trapper DoL. need this desperately.

[vetch]

It is horrible.

It's also a good way for new players to grind a bit of gil should they be short.

So, while I would certainly welcome an improvement, until that happens I do call on newer players to takeup this gil-making opportunity at all levels in the meantime.

"let the newbs do all the horrible grinds, surely this will not have knock-on effects re: new player engagement."

Just go back to ARR drop rates and recipe reqs. 1 skin and 1 tanning material for 1 leather and skins drop multiples every other kill, none of this 'need 3 skins with a 20% droprate' that they introduced in Heavensward to slow everyone down.

[Jaquan]

Honestly while it would be nice the fact that retainers exist and unlike DoL ones they don't require you to get the material first I kinda don't really care? Both of my Retainers are of Combat Classes (Summoner and Scholar to be precise) and they bring me more than enough skins in the acceptable amount of time.

[SamSmoot]

Even a new type of gathering that is similar to WoW ( I know, eww), where you can skin animals after taking them down. Just something. Hell even lower the amount per item to 1 to 1 rather than 4 to 1 to make leather would go a long long way.

A great thing about WoW is that you could skin other players' kills if they had been fully looted (a separate action there) Dead thing lay around for a couple minutes, giving you plenty of time to skin them. When there were daily quests that required killing X number of beasts, with many players slaughtering them, it was a skinner's paradise.

[Neoyoshi]

Honestly, the only way I stay sane in terms of collecting leather is just to send my combat retainers out to gather the skins for me. :/

Yep. The drop rates for monster drops become waaaay too low once you go over-level to keep the rate of receiving them reliable, so retainers are the way to go with monster drops on the lower level stuff.

I have 4 combat retainers for this very reason.

[Illmaeran]

Please give us another gathering class that increases leather and fur farming. It's just so out of whack with the rest of the crafting game.

This hurt a lot when I started EW crafting, I completely agree that there should be another, easier, method of gathering skins that's comparable to botanist/miner. The best we have right now are FATEs to get the bicolor gemstones that you can use to purchase leather. Given that you need FATE rank for other things like orchestrions, mounts, etc, they're actually a good way of farming leather since you're double dipping into something useful as well. It also has the benefit of not having to worry about mob spawn, skin/hide drop rates, or other people trying to farm them too.