One of my characters chops wood - lots of wood. But now that her Forestry meticulous skill has reached 163, I'm getting more and more frustrated, because her efficiency seems only to go down the higher her skill gets. The main problems are the RNG-system and the scarcity of good zones for woodchopping. I've commented on the RNG-system earlier, and I think I'm pretty much aware of its quirks right now. When we enter a scene, we are dealt a hand of session parameters that determine our success in RNG-rolls. A little tweaking can be done by making changes to skills, like eating some skill-enhancing food or switching in or out of skill-enhancing gear, but basically one keeps those parameters throughout the session. So, whenever I feel my lumberjacking meticulous results are below par, I relog or rezone to get a fresh hand of session parameters. With higher skill one would suspect that the parameters for that skill are overall better, however this is not the case. Instead, the variety of the parameters is increased. And that means that it is possible to get better RNG-rolls in a session than at lower skill, but also that the chance that this happens gets lower and lower. And there is also the chance that one gets parameters that are even worse than at lower skill levels. In todays 2-hour woodchopping session I rezoned/relogged 9 times before I had an acceptable mediocre parameter set. At the end of 2 hours I had gathered the same amount of wood that I would have gotten at GM meticulous collecting level. Not really an incentive to increase my skill further.... Of course it doesn't help that there are so few zones that have a good number of trees. If one wants a good number of trees and good xp, there is only 1 available zone (Twins Foothills). It's far from perfect: there are on average 2 mobs per tree and they respawn rather fast. In order to chop trees efficiently there I already had to turn my character around. She is originally a healer/water mage but had to learn Air magic to deal with groups of 4+ mobs and had to learn Taming to get a pet that has a chance to aggro a respawning mob to avoid being interrupted. But ok, that is done now. But the fact remains that she goes to this same zone almost daily, and then the anti-farming routines kick in which makes the RNG-outcome even worse. Please don't tell me there are no anti-farming routines! The first time one visits a zone things are always better, whether it is drops, catches or success in skills. The second time one visits a zone is still ok, but after that the number drops for instance gets lower and lower. It seems memory is cleared at a new release, so the first days after a new release are often very much fun to play. I feel this effect on lumberjacking meticulous success too, of course, and it would be ok if there were a choices of zones I could go to to chop wood. But it seems my only other possible choices are lower tier scenes, that hardly give any XP, or scenes like Ulfheim, where I'd need to spend the majority of my time fighting off mobs instead of chopping wood. - Please fix the RNG - Please remove the anti-farming effects - Please add more zones that have a good number of choppable trees and give decent xp and aren't drowned in mobs. Please give us our Elysium Woods. Airmid.
No RNG can be determindd to be right or wrong by one, two or even a dozen woodchopping adventures in a zone. Anything concluded from a few personal experiences would be mainly anecdotal evidence but had no value about the hypothesis that the RNG is broken or getting worse with higher skill. RNG should average out over a large number of attempts around the hundreds and thousands. If you left and entered a zone 9 times during 2 hours, and have to actually run around a bit to get to the trees, how much time did you actually use for chopping down trees? On my PC it takes sometimes a full minute to leave and another to enter a zone...
Do you think I'd get frustrated after a single bad run? Take into account the amount of XP that went into getting Forestry Meticulous to 163; Airmid has no other means of getting production XP. So that might give an indication of the amount of wood she chops. This is no single incident. With the spider pet, Airmid normally can do 3 1/2 rounds in Twins Foothills per hour. When she has a very good run (yes, they happen too, like once a month....) she gets 350 wood per hour, but can do only 3 full rounds per hour because of the extra time all the meticulous collecting takes up. When on a bad run she gets 200 wood per hour, and could theoretically do more than 3 1/2 round, but that isn't very useful because then the trees haven't respawned fully yet. So plenty of time left for rezones/relogs when she is on a bad run. Between forestry meticulous 140-150, Airmid regulary got 300 wood per hour, sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less. Average wood yields have been dropping after skill level 150, and more sharply after 160. Her average is now 250 wood per hour. Sorry I didn't keep data on spreadsheets.
I had 1 good wood chopping session (right after the new release) and 3 mediocre ones (even after rezoning and/or relogging multiple times). Todays' session was abysmal again: It took me 50 minutes of chopping, rezoning and relogging to reach an acceptable meticulous rate. But still ended up with only 240 wood after an hour. The second hour of the session promised well, but then I lost connection and of course I lost my nice session stats that way..... Chopped and rezoned a bit more and finally gave up. Frustration reached an all time high. Imagine someone telling you the following: "Congrats, you reached 130 skill level! Guess what, you can invest a few billion skill points extra and you'll have a 5% chance of doing better than you do now!" You must be thinking the speaker is out of his mind. And yet, this is the reality of what I'm facing with lumberjacking. Yes I know I'm being dramatic, but the frustration really gets at me. Please fix the RNG!
Better yet, get rid of that stupid RNG thing altogether ! I mean, why give us skill levels that show us % chance and then have RNG over-ride that (now-meaningless) % rate ? Been stupid since day-1
Great chunk of skills were designed for lvl 80, maybe 100, never for 160. They simply did not design some of these skills. They just put em there and hoped for the best. 0% chance that some actually spreadsheeted these numbers before implementing. Its been quite a many years and still some skills are just there, without any thought of usefullness.
I had to write a simulation in python to try and convince Jemma to keep dumping XP into mining metic, but they did and sure enough they get consistent (and very good) results from it. I know this is a controversial topic, though admittedly for reasons I don't understand, but all the numbers I've seen, and the numbers that have been demonstrated by "best of the best" gatherers such as Jemma point towards metic working fine.
When I'm harvesting wood or mining ore, whilst it's satisfying to see meticulous ding high numbers I mostly ignore the fluctuations as the end result for the same amount of time spent (I harvest for the whiskey/squirrel stew buff duration) is consistent with in a percentage except when I've chosen to engage mobs for other loot reasons.
There's a few things to take into consideration when comparing a simulation with the "real" thing. First, the supply of trees in a zone isn't endless. The 3 best zones for lumberjacking have 25 spawn spots with around 15-20 trees active at a time. When the meticulous results are low, I run out of choppable trees fast and have to stand idle for a time to wait for new spawn, or spend time relogging/rezoning. I see widely fluctuating results: A bad session gives me 200-230 wood per hour, a good session 320-350. Another thing that comes into play is what I call "session parameters". I think it works like this: when you enter a zone you're dealt a hand of parameters. One of those parameters is for meticulous success. When I'm having a bad chopping session, I'm seeing results like 0-4 meticulous hits per tree, with one 6 or 7 per round. When I don't relog/rezone, this stays consistent for the hour. A very good session looks very different. I'd get about 4 10+ hits per round and a 20+ once in the hour, with mostly hits between 5 and 8 (and of course some lower hits). This also stays consistent during the hour. I see this reflected in time it takes to do a round: about 12 minutes for a bad session to around 20 minutes for a very good one. Trees respawn after 17 minutes. Another thing that probably won't be reflected in a simulation is the limited number of zones with a good number of trees and the anti-farming code. The more often you visit a zone, the less likely it is to get good session parameters. I try to vary a bit between the 3 zones, but since I chop wood about every other day it's getting harder and harder to get good parameters.
Need to keep in mind as well that when you first go into a zone you need to kinda 'jump start' the zone. So i base nothing on the first circulation of gathering. I start paying attention on the second run and those afterwards. There are quite a few zones that are good for lumberjacking. I have about 5 zones i do. And the time it takes to kill off , avoid mobs in the zones allows for the nodes to come back. So it can be a bit wonky. I use squirrel buff as a timer most times . I will look at my yield at the end of that food session and assess if things are working. I am sure the same holds for mining as well. I actually stopped gaining skills at 120 ib harvesting. I saw no real jump or slide in meticulous above that. But of course that could just be me. 200-300 wood an hour has always been good for me.
Welcome to the crafting realm. Trust me, I know the frustrations of spending billions on crafting skills (Producer lvl 143, 10+Bill xp) and the end results are barely better than someone at GM-120 skill. I seriously wish 5% better were true, its more along the lines of .3 to .5% better...maybe
Disclaimer: Yeah, we're off topic now Bear in mind it's not as simple as the numbers seem in the window. Take for instance the case of Rend Length on a sword. The number of rend ticks is calculated using skill level of rend with the modifier applied pre-stacking/charging. With no length modifiers rend receives its additional tick at levels of 20n+1 (101, 121, 141, etc), but with the modifier a skill level of 85 might get you as many ticks as a skill level of 101 with no modification. In crafting a "giant slayer" sword I needed to achieve something along the lines of a 38.7% rend length in order to receive two bonus ticks from a 6-stack lvl 177ish rend as I recall, but the numbers might have been slightly different. For this I had to level swordsmithing from 160 to 163 since even 38.2% wasn't cutting it, and was still required to get the rend length on the 4th or 5th masterwork, which makes the sword much more difficult to complete. This situation, along with the value of the Coup de Grace modifier, led me to take swordsmithing to 180, at a cost of nearly 2b additional XP, and I find it very worthwhile. If I'd had so high a level before I wouldn't have worried about the masterwork order (or could have put rend power on last, to bolster that number instead), and I would have been able to use one of the first two 4+ masterwork swords I'd made instead of needing to spend resources (hundreds and hundreds of ingots) on a 3rd sword. The other alternative would have been dumping another 1b+ adventuring XP into rend. Steering it back to metic, I've always found that skill incredibly worthwhile, and all the hard numbers I've seen/collected point to that being the case. Honestly, for a gatherer it can just never be too high. Ask Jemma.
There is also the situation where the obsidian potions were stackable for a while. When the regular obsidian potion and the no-trade were stackable the meticulous chance was insane. I bet with a high enough skill it was just an endless loop. Which proves that a higher skill does help meticulous chance very much.
