Botanist general thread - All your trees and flowers are belong to us

[Adera]

Hi fellow Botanists!

Been starting out botanism and so far I've loved it and especially the fact that it is not that easy to level (if you do not know what you're doing). Couldn't find a general thread for us flowerheads so here we go, let's share some tips, tricks and general discusssion.

Personally I've mostly been harvesting logs just to supply my carpentry. Just got most of my lvl10 gearset so I'm hoping to grab some HQ stuff as well soon. Btw, I just love going through the early areas with my Magitek armor mount just to log trees. Feels so overkill.

[Memimi]

My biggest tips...

1. Always upgrade your gear. It helps a lot.

2. Use gathering food. Use stuff that gives +gathering if you need to raise your success rate or +perception if you need to raise your HQ rate. You can even just use rabbit pies from the NPC, but the stats and exp boost is worth it.

3. Using grand company seals for exp boosts is a good idea.

4. Save leves for crafting rather than gathering unless you already have a level 50 craft or don't plan on crafting.

5. As you get higher, the best thing to do is either harvest things for your own craft or look up the price of everything you can gather on the marketboard so you know what you can make profit on.

6. Make friends with other crafters! I was lucky enough during my sun lemon levels to find someone willing to pay market price for everything I gathered which ended up being 20 stacks.

I love botany! I can't wait to get that awesome AF outfit. I'm in love with it.

[Mikai]

Very Helpful i just started it and am at 7 right now glad i lvl'd carpenter already

[Adera]

My biggest tips...
3. Using grand company seals for exp boosts is a good idea.

Thank you! I had totally missed these.

[Squince670]

Nice helpful tips.

[McWinning]

great title n info

[pwndsteve]

I don't know if I agree on the leves... my crafts are all 30 now and gathering is at 27-28. I'd been doing level 25 leves just to use my harvested mats, but it seems the mats you gather greatly outnumber the mats needed to level. Now my recipes at 30 require some mats from level 40 nodes. I've used gc boosts but 40k xp isn't much for 2k seals. The gc delivery missions are great for xp... but I'd like more ways than hitting 150 nodes for some 600+ mats for 200-600xp a swing at this point. I'm running out of tv to watch while gathering... trying to ignore the rmt for 1000 crystals... makes me want to cry.

[BaconNarwhal]

My biggest tips...

1. Yes, that helps a lot. Primary and secondary tool is the most important.
2. I found perception is be more important than gathering, however the difference is minor.
3. My GC seal caps at 50000, even at max I can only get about 20 of them, which is worth 800,000 exp. That's about 1/2 an hour worth of experience. Since you can only hold 1 at a time, you have to go back everytime you use up the 40,000 exp bonus. The bonus you get isn't that significant compare to the time/money you spend teleporting back and forth.
4. Also check the AH for price, high price usually means it's a good leveling item for some craft.
5. Word.


I also made a quick AutoHotKey script to calculate the average exp per hour I'll get for a certain item:

http://pastebin.com/AftyMijY

It help me identify the best item to gather for leveling.

[Maku]

My best tip for gathering is once at the location of the four gathering nods (so far there has always been four close to each other and that is it) find the two that have the gathering%+ and the extra gathering traits and then pic one of the other two. There is no need to go to all four as after you harvest two the first one you did pops back up. Doing that rotation will grant you the best results.

The traited gathering nods always pop up in the same general area.

[Troggy]

Gathering is better for leveling as missing a node destroys your experience where as an extra HQ wont make up for said miss.