Make a living...

I would like to make a living out of harvesting mage reagents. Unfortunately there is an unending source on the NPC vendors unfortunately...

Will this source of prosperity ever end?

Would even be good if the vendors would buy my harvest on a supply/demand basis, including the pricing of them. Right now, the unending sourcce that the vendor is, destorys that :/

 

It's still subjected to evaluation for the changes. Right now harvesting for reagents in the wild isn't quite profitable when you factored in the time it takes to find the plants. Growing them on the planter is still costly and time consuming compare to the price from NPC vendors. However, the price of the regs is currently set this way, so that the mages who use them for adventurer can still make money. Right now for every 3k-4k GP I made from killing mobs, I have to spend about 600-700 GP to restock my reagents.

The mob loots will changes, the spell effectiveness will be adjusted, so there is a spectrum of re-balancing works need to be done.

 

Even if Portalarium raised pricing for Reagents or removed them from the vendors, there aren't enough havestable nodes to support the needs of the playerbase, so the vast majority will need to come from agriculture which is not yet implemented.

Without agriculture in full swing, and the balancing Royce mentioned, Portalarium will have to triple or quadruple the number of nodes per scene in addition to increasing the rate of reagent drops off mobs in order to make this a viably profitable profession.

 

Even if you gathered for weeks you could barely supply one customer. Last time I bought regs I bought a thousand of each of them, when one runs low I'll buy another thousand.

Without gardening I don't see you being able to supply enough regs to supply anyone with a constant supply of any gathered reg.

Maybe I'm just weird but I hate waiting for daylight to buy regs and repair kits, so when I buy I buy in bulk. 500 repair kits, 1000 regs, 1000 crafting fuels, etc

 

I would not be surprised if the vendor sales changed. Otherwise there really is not point to gathering them at all.

 

As a gatherer for myself just to make some scrolls it is difficult to make a living from self accumulated reagents.
In four hours playing on Sunday I could find in total only four plants with reagents, which where not already harvested in areas where I would survive the guard mob.

 

We still gain some skill on gathering them. And save some gold when restocking reagents, that should be OK.

 

Tell me your camping scenes!! I must know how to build my wallet like you to be able to afford that! lol

 

Sure we save a penance, and the foraging skill does not have value unless what you forage is worth something. I am not complaining. I am what is called a gatheroholic, I go out can grab every tree, ore, plant and skin I can. I just think they will be tuning this one a bit.

 

I sold ore cheap and a handful of people bought it all. Day after day of Hours and hours in the mines followed by one lucky day on the vendor selling to reseller's.

 

Nice. So you selling ore hmmm....

 

yup, I was selling 100 gold ore at 5k, and 100 iron ore at 6k, and beetle carapices at 700g, but I'm currently sold out and haven't had a chance to gather much yet.
Even though when I sold at those prices on paper I was selling at a loss, selling 2k+ ore or 30 beetles to a single customer , felt really good in the old pocketbook.

 

Wow, that is great! I don't sell any materials nor vendor any weapon drops. Everything gets dumped straight into crafting or stored for a rainy day. Hence, I am poor. Although people do buy my furniture, so I can still eat. The loop is pretty basic, "i need to make a wardrobe" -> "gather for an hour" -> "make wardrobe" -> "sell wardrobe" -> rinse and repeat. I decided to just do carpentry and just enough of the others to complete the carpentry recipes. I am sure I would make whole lot more gold if I just sold the weapons and the ore. I cannot buy the wood because it would raise the cost to make things and nobody would buy my furniture. Right now I am probably making 700g per hour at best.

 

To be profitable it seems like it needs to be something that can be sold in bulk and the seller to be able to move large quantities (and perhaps something that cannot be always gathered as was mentioned in 2013 if I recall correctly)

However alchemists will probably be the ones harvesting reagents not to sell the reagents but to make a profit on the production skills. (This may be the only way to tryly make a profit as a reagent vendor, since anyone can harvest reagents and the demand might not make being a reagent vendor profitable unless you can turn these reagents into something not everyone has the time or skill to make).

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I'm no expert but it seems like the way a player can truly be a reagent vendor is to have a rare reagent that only spawns in a particular place at a specific time.... which if I recall is what Lord British said he wanted to do with one of the reagents.

But how does one do this without making it unprofitable for mages to go adventuring, and for alchemists to turn a profit on their goods (which implies they have clients to begin with... so potions and scrolls etc cannot be extremely expensive since they are one time consumables).

 

Ya, I know about it... nice word you coined.

 

I think it would add a lot to the game if the reagent supply wasnt static. It worked really well in UO, sure it can do that here too.
The amount that you get as loot can be adjusted, so that even customers that buy 1000 of each (which i also do), will not have a problem doing so.
True Supply and Demand really rules a game like this

 

There's zones where you can get mass Mandrake and Nightshade. Both are used a lot in Alchemy / enchants and scrolls.


High skill, engraved sickle and optionally a meticulous pot help.

Pearls and garlic seem to be a PITA to find in quantity.

Get lots of silk and wax from mobbing

 

Right now with foraging the only money is in the beetle carapices. Basically farming 5 skull and PvP zones to have the best chance per cotton.
You want open zones where you can see the cotton at a distance, and a big enough zone so that you can loop it over and over and never run out of cotton, (I used verdantis shardfall for thise)
Or you want to go the other way, go someplace like Deep ravenswoods and kill all the mobs, and pick the cotton as you go.
your cotton picking will slow down you killing enough to keep the mobs spawning wihtout reseting, and your killing will slow down your gathering enough to keep the cotton spawning.

Black pearls from oysters, and nightshade have better chances at night of dropping more regs but it still such trivial amounts.
There needs to be zones with fields of mandrake, garlic , or nightshade to make foraging regs worth the trouble, right now you just can't get enough per hour to be worth fooling with besides just raising your skill.

 

Nabbed 125 nightshade and 400 mandrake in 2 hours or so. The pass/canyon zones (with control points) have lots. Also pulled over 100 copper, 25 tin and pine/cotton.

Different map variants will have different trees and ore but the rest is pretty static.

Brightbone, superstition are my favs

 

For other gathering skills, you get resources that you can't buy from NPC vendors. And those resources are in demand. Getting reagents that aren't worth much, and are in infinite supply from NPC vendors means gathering isn't as important.

And I don't think you can remove reagents from NPC vendors, especially because of the single player offline game.

I'd like to see them add a few new reagents or gathering items used for high end alchemy. What if those high end enchantments created better enchantments that were less likely to destroy your crafted items?

Suddenly gathering would be very worthwhile. Put that new reagent in Shardfalls and you'll see PvP in those zones again.