Harvesting Skills Review - Thoughts of a GM Mining Machine

Disclaimer: I am fairly new to SotA (August 8, 2016), these forums, and upcoming development plans, but I am not new to gaming or discussing design. These are my thoughts based strictly on my experiences playing the game and no other readings.

From the perspective of a 4x GM miner and his gf's half-baked mining skills (75 mining 40 survey GM swift).
I also have all other harvesting skils at or approaching 4x 60's.

I'll begin.. at the beginning!

Primary harvest skills: (Mining, Skinning/FD, Foraging, Forestry, Fishing)


Fishing aside (operates on a totally different system and is incomplete from what I understand), raising the level of a primary harvest skill offers little benefit with respect to how much time and xp is invested.

Mining in a tier 5 zone (or performing any harvest, 'tier 5' zone indicated by the 500 xp given per harvest event, 100 per tier, max 500). I can only assume that our % chance to succeed is a decimal number, much like other stats, that is rounded to whole numbers when displayed to our UI. At a humble and easy to achieve lvl 60 in a harvest skill, a player has ~90% chance to harvest (Using True Bronze tool with +5 prof.) Raising that skill to GM for significantly more xp only improves that chance to harvest by a few % (I am at ~94% when mining as a GM).

Currently, there are no (to the best of my knowledge) skill/lvl requirements to harvest anything in the game, simply keep trying, failing, and leveling up on even the most difficult target and you will eventually get it.

I think it is reasonable to expect more types of materials and difficulties to come in the future, perhaps some rare materials requiring a certain base proficiency in order to harvest. At the moment, there is little benefit to raising any harvest skill above 60, which gives great effect for minimal investment.

Section Summary: I believe there is a problem with harvest skills because they provide little benefit relative to the xp invested. These skills could be made worth training if there were new materials (or existing) that required a certain minimum level to harvest so that not just anyone can get anything when untrained, with only a lower % chance to succeed. Additionally, training primary harvest skills would be of great benefit should a resource be DESTROYED on failure (must wait for respawn cycle), and not simply 'try again'.


Secondary harvest skill 'Survey':


I believe this skill was already discussed on live stream as being mostly undesirable in its current state. There is no benefit to the skill for skinning, forestry, or mining (once you learn where everything is). The same can be said for foraging, though those nodes can be difficult learn the locations of without spotting them in the first place.

There is no reason to raise survey above 40 except to unlock meticulous (and no reason to get it at all in some cases..).

There are several ideas that I and others I've talked with (guild and discord) have come up with, big and small, that would be logical to pair with the existing node-highlighting/sparkles that survey provides. Saving my favorite for last, some possibilities would be to make critical harvest chance known (along with everything that affects it) and have survey improve critical harvest rate, have survey improve quantity gathered (bordering on meticulous) per succesful harvest/multiplier or some variation thereof, have survey improve rare resource collection chances, and my personal favorite... fine tuning survey to benefit respective skills in a way that would promote multiplayer/group effort so that we aren't all in our own little holes while harvesting in a multiplayer online game.

One example of this fine tuning would be to 'fix' (debateable, there are issues with spawning when more than 1 person is in a mine instance, and the spawn rate can fluctuate while a single person is mining, suspect the spawn changes of R33 and this possibly unintended result may have something to do with multiplayer/public mining instances being disabled) spawn rates of resource nodes, such as ore veins, and then have the survey skill provide a bonus to respawn/regeneration rate of respective resource nodes.

Regardless of how it is done, I would really like to see some incentives/benefits to operating as a group when it comes to resource collection, and mining has a lot of room to do this. Additionally, making such changes would allow for the GM-apprentice benefit to actually be used if multiple people could operate in a single mine... although this benefit is mostly worthless in most cases as it does not provide additional xp to a skill, but rather increases the transfer rate and thus reducing the number of events or triggers required to level a skill, still consuming the exact same amount of xp to train to a given level (ultimately, xp pool is the limiting factor). GM-apprentice buffs are only particularly useful when a large pool of xp is already stored and someone wants to train a skill that is rather costly in as few triggers as possible (Enchanting/Masterworking for the most part). Even so, this would set the stage on the harvesting front for modifying the GM-A buff to be useful fore more/all skills in some other way.

Section Summary: Survey is already admittedly weak by development and needs improvement. It would be nice to see survey add a respawn rate benefit to the zone to promote teamplay. Other possibilities are increased harvest quantity, crit harvest chance, or rare harvest chance.


Secondary harvest skill 'Swift':


Nothing much to say here. This skill and its benefits are straightfoward and effective. This is the only must-have secondary harvest skill.


Secondary harvest skill 'Meticulous':


Ugh!!! is all I could think of when comparing a 1-hour timed trial using my character and my gf's character concurrently. By operating both characters at the same time and in the same mine and mining the same nodes... wow...

The 2% less chance to succeed had little to no effect, but her saving 700k xp and leveling up swift to GM that much sooner was HUGE! I had her not even unlock meticulous.

To help readers understand, here's a skill level breakdown:
Me - GM Mining, GM Survey, GM Swift, GM Meticulous
Gf - 75 Mining, 40 Survey (waste, but cheap), Near GM Swift, Meticulous unlearned (0)

The results of the 1 hour run?

With my gf's character having only swift and a moderate amount of mining, her character was able to collect just as much ore in the hour as my character was. If that's not a red flag to anyone who is reading, wait, there's more! Because of the nature of resource nodes only giving chances at rare resources (or at least veins) from the FIRST success only (metics do not give rares), she was able to collect more of the valuable rare resources in the 1 hour run where I was getting more of the less valuable basic ores. Not bad enough for you? There's more! Because my gf's character was relying on swift mining and NOT meticulous to gather all of her resources in the trial, she was burning through more ore veins thatn I was, which means... MORE XP! much more... In fact if you just take my metic chance at 30%, I'm wasting that much more time multi-harvesting a single node where she is banging down singles left and right for more rare resources AND a greater xp/hour rate by what I can only assume is around +25% (did not actually write down the numbers).

Now I must point out that swift mining will win out under the condition of ore veins being abundant, so you must be in the right mine. Meticulous does better for quantity harvested when veins are scarce, but swift mining ALWAYS wins out in the xp/hour department.

On to some suggested remedies! I think it's pretty clear that meticulous collection needs to provide additional xp AND chances at rare ores (or in the case of gold and silver that do not give rares, additional basic ore) in order to make it worth having. As it stands, having meticulous collection is a PENALTY, not a bonus, for mining and even skinning.

Again, this is from the perspective of a miner and operating in places with constantly available nodes to harvest (so long as you run a big enough route). Skinning falls much into the same category with survey being useless and meticulous slowing down xp rate/not yielding rares and preventing you from clearing corpses sooner to move on to the next fight (skinning targets are abundant). However, forestry and foraging targets tend to be less abundant, so meticulous is useful for those.... in some cases. There is still the problem with getting less xp/hour for running metic AND less rares/hour. Additionally, if you want the base resource from harvesting cotton, well its very very cheap now and easy to get if you own land and grow it yourself.

Section Summary: The 'Meticulous' skill is a penalty to have under most conditions and for most harvesting purposes. It results in reduced xp/hour and rare material/hour rates under all conditions, but under the right conditions, it may provide extra basic material per hour. To fix it, we should investigate to what degree a multiplied harvest should increase xp yield of the node and give additional chance to collect rare resources beyond 'first harvest'. This may be limited down to +25% xp or so per multiplier (metics do collect faster than normal harvest) and similar for rare ore chances with a 25% of the base rare chance with each multiplier (so if you reached an 8x metic harvest, you would expect to harvest only ~3 times the rare resources and xp from the node to make it worthwhile and in-line with time spent).


Ok... get your flamethrowers out, as per the usual of forums across the internets. Lemme know what you think. Are polls obligatory here?

 

I forgot to note that Meticulous is a 2x xp skill in that it costs twice the base of appx. 1.4M xp (so 2.8M) where the other 3 are all 1x xp skills. Such huge investment all to penalize yourself.

 

I agree that meticulous is only really good with Forestry and perhaps Gathering. It slows xp gain and base mats are not always your target.

From tests in low areas to high, I see a trend that the higher base skill lv/target skill lv seems to be a factor for frequency of crits (which is by far the best efficiency)

Swift increases becomes almost unnoticeable when you are at a high level and factor in TB engraves and Obsidian pots. Think its % of % and not additive

 

My proposals for Survey is (and has been) that it could give a chance to drag you into random encounters specialised tailored for that profession.

mining - survey: chance you find a scene with a small abandonend mine (with monsters or hazards to deal with to)

 

The way swiftness worked PREVIOUSLY (release unknown) according to veteran sources from guild chat is that you had a base speed and then you had a harvest time reduction % or speed modifier. I did not experience this.

With the old formula, you got something like BaseSpeed-(BaseSpeed * SpeedReduction%) and it was possible to get 100% increased speed for permanent instant harvests with TB Tool (30%) + Pot (40%) + 150 Swift (30%).

Now, it operates like BaseSpeed/(1*SpeedModifier) So, speed gains have diminishing returns.

If you have a True Bronze tool (30%) and GM Swift (20%), you are currently at a 150% speed rating (they add, not multiply) and adding in an obsidian pot adds another 40% harvest speed for a total of 190%. That 40% speed buff on top of a current 150% is relatively only 40/150% gain or 26.67% increase. Overall at 190% harvest speed, you are about cutting your harvest time in half. BaseSpeed/(1*1.9) roughly equal to BaseSpeed/2. If you had a whopping 300% increased harvest speed, you would only cut that base speed into 1/3 of normal and so on. Not much more gain for how much you invest to get it. Currently 300% speed is imposssible. All we have is 30% from a tool 40% from obs pot and a max of 40% for 200 lvl swiftness (good luck) for a total of 210% speed.

While it is true that raising any one skill to a profound level may only have a linear benefit or even diminishing returns (most likely case), that is entire expected and acceptable, especially when you account for exponential increase in xp cost. The best way to maximize your effectiveness for your 'level' (or current xp allocation) should always be finding that sweet spot efficiency curve and training up a broad range of skills that all synergy, not 'one skill trumps all, forget the rest', short of training everything to max of course, but even still....

My biggest argument is against the current workings of meticulous (not only being ineffective, but being a penalty to have, instead of a boon) and survey (talked about by devs, mostly useless as is).

 

An interesting idea, but I'm not so sure I'd like to be zoned-about constantly, especially on my weak laptop and with how leaving your current zone affects respawn rates of ores and will cause all the [undead] monsters to reset too. [You can leave them 'undead' on the ground and they don't respawn, leaving you free to mine in peace.]

It's an idea though, and it could work if other things were also adjusted.

 

I agree with your assessment.
Swift seems the only worthwhile skill in the tree once proficiency is at an acceptable level to mitigate a high failure rate. 80 or so seems fine. Going higher isn't worth the XP investment. The actual XP increase has been toned way down from previous releases. I'd really like to see spending millions of producer xp do something more than a 4% bump (100>120?). But the 20% bonus you get at lvl 100 is decent, though you can get 40% from a CotO ...I'd like to think grandmastering a skill gave you at least as much benefit as buying the cash-shop item, but that may just be me.

Survey - useful only because you have to get it to 40 to unlock meticulous, if you want meticulous. Completely pointless otherwise in its current state. Even more pointless in a tree like skinning where you know where the critter is, seeing as you just killed it! Suggest it be removed and replaced with something better, like crit chance or increased chance of special drops (special ores, beetles, suet, etc.)

Meticulous - should give additional exp, even at a reduced rate, for each x2 x3 x4 - otherwise it is just wasting time. You can move on to the next node and get xp again. Not useful for mines where ore is plentiful, somewhat more useful for the other skills where cottonbushes/trees are further apart and you can get more out of a single node.

 

Please for the love of god don't "fix" this by reducing the spawns in mines.

 

All I know is that Meticulous gives more stuff. And the rest are useless because they don't.

 

That's not entirely accurate

Looking at mining:

Mining primary gives more ore because it reduces overall fails (although very little investment into the skill is required to achieve significant, efficient results and little benefit comes after)
Swift speaks for itself, you mine that much faster. Even if you are adding 20% onto 170, it's still more than a 10% gain relative to what you had before. It's worth the investment more so than the primary skill.
Survey, yeah useless.
Meticulous doesn't actually give you more ore than swift mining alone *in the right place with many nodes*. In fact, it can give you less ore because of the 'first harvest' and rare ore bonuses, and it always results in less xp/hour vs not having meticulous.

As I said before, skinning is much the same.

Meticulous is useful for forestry, as there is no other way to obtain additional primary materials, but still reduces rare collection and xp/hour.

Metic isn't that good for cotton. Cotton is very cheap because it is so abundant through player housing gardens. Same penalties apply.

Overall, not only does meticulous not 'break even' when it comes to xp and collection, it can even cause you to collect less for having the skill. One would expect having a skill (vs not having it) to be universally beneficial, and that's the problem we have here.

 

Meticulous only gives more stuff if the stuff your after is the base material though. Considering the number of animals you have to skin for suet or cotton bushes you have to pick for beetles the base material being increased doesn't really help except for mining where the special materials seem to be a lot less rare.

 

For mining:
MC plus:
1) You can abandon meticulous any time you want.
2) Ore respawn rate is not so fast, even in 100 in meticulous, i need to mine in 2 rooms, in Verdantis for example I was in situations when I finished mining on third floor and zero nodes respawned on second one. It is faster to mine when you see 3-4 node around you, not 2 in the different side of a floor.
3) Location reenter is bad style of gaming for me.
4) Gold and silver node havent got any rare resourses.
MC minus:
1)Exp rate.
Imho conclusion: Meticulous work great, I will push it as much as I can

 

Yes, If your goal is to get the rare resource and/or get more xp, interrupt your meticulous extra harvest and just move to the next node. My experience with mining is somewhat similar to @Spinok. I tend to mine in the 2nd and 3rd rooms of the mines. I have GM mining and rank 90+ in meticulous.

Even with the meticulous ticking the ores do not always spawn fast enough for me and I'll occasionally have to run down to the first room just give the 2nd and 3rd room time to respawn.

That being said, getting more xp for the multiple mines and/or more rare resources would be pleasant even if it'll be strange to get 2 or 3 heads from a single animal

 

Gold and Silver do not have rare resources, true, but they can give up to 3 of the gold or silver ore on the first pull like how a copper or iron can give the basic ore + maybe 1 or 2 of the rare ores depending on which type it is.

I understand that there is a way to bypass the use of the skill, and that just screams "This skill needs to be fixed" if its what people tend to do. We shouldn't be penalized or have to do extra work because we have a skill, it should be a benefit to us

 

This is a great idea! Although, field dressing would be a little less interesting (since a lot of scenes are already useful for field dressing).

Survey

I really like the idea of having survey affect spawn rates. I.e., It would be great if a high survey skill meant nodes became available that weren't available to everyone (just to those with high survey skill). This means a high survey skill would effectively increase the number of nodes in an area.

For field dressing, survey needs to be dropped in favor of a different skill. Since it's possible to get hides for tanners as well as carcasses for butchers, a high survey skill could improve how well you pull something off the carcass. This would effectively give you more of one or the other resource.

For forestry, a high survey skill could open up additional nodes that would give you wood. These don't even have to be stand trees, they could be the occasional fallen tree, that you could pull a single wood from (again, just slightly increasing output as the skill goes higher).

Speed

The speed skill should really speed you up more. If higher tier nodes take longer to gather, then the speed skill should drop that. Someone with GM speed should gather tier 5 nodes in under 10 seconds, preferably closer to 6 seconds.

Meticulous

First off, a hit on meticulous should not force you to wait another x seconds to finish harvesting. This should be implemented like a critical, where it simply increases the output you get.

Summary

- Your base skill should determine critical chance for rare resources (a crit).
- Your survey skill should increase node availability (either through spawning, or additional nodes)
- Your speed skill should determine how long it takes to harvest.
- Your meticulous skill should determine a multiplier for all resources.


EDIT: should call out @Xeen Dread for the great post, especially the numbers comparison looking at meticulous vs speed ... well done!

 

@Berek
Wow what a great post.
Great job (imo) to all of you.

Sad to see no Devs are chiming in on this topic, sense crafting is the base of the economy.

 

More stats concerning meticulous:

From Xeens original post you can clearly see the advantages / disadvantages of each of the mining skills when ore is plentiful (i.e. Etceter, possibly Spectral) so I wanted to run some figures in Elysium to see how, specifically, meticulous measured up in places where the ore is more widespread.

Disclaimer: I'm GM in mining, swift and meticulous so the only real way to see how meticulous would measure up would be by using a potion of Precision. In both cases below I used the same mining pick, was in the same mine running the same route and recording the results in 30 minute intervals. Nodes Mined was calculated based on gained xp at 500 per node (no crystals) and ONLY mining silver. Top table is with the potion, bottom is without.



Looking at these its clear that with less meticulous you can mine faster, just hit a node and move on resulting in more xp per 30 minute run but the average ores mined per run drops by about 12. Looking at the totals across the whole 2 hours in both cases there is very little difference. Having the Precision potion essentially gained me 47 more ore at the cost of 23,500 xp.

Considering the amount of xp which has gone into getting Grand Master meticulous it is very underwhelming overall. I think it essentially comes down if you are wanting to mine for producer xp or for "stuff".

There has already been some good suggestions for changes to how these work in the comments above but I think a few of my favourites are: Gain additional xp per meticulous, even if it is only 1/5th for the tier of node you are mining it will make the wait time worth bothering with (i.e. first node hit = 500, each meticulous proc +100 xp). Alternatively increase the chance of Meticulous from 20% at GM up to a higher rate to take better advantage of it.

 

Thanks, nice work and data.

How did you get 33% (i know this one is GM + pot + prosp pick) and 22% (typo?)? Shouldnt that second metic rate be 23% with the pot being a difference of 10% (GM + prosp pick and no pot?

It looks like you did manage to get right on 10% more basic ore in the second run because of increased metic, but speaking in percentages for frame of reference (not your hard number of 23500), you got 77% of the experience when running a higher metic vs the lower metic or 23% less. 23% less xp to gain 10% more ore sounds like a bum deal to me.... And what the hell are we losing for having that initial ~20% metic before even potting?! Holy crap... I think we can all agree that one would expect overall productivity to increase as a result of having a skill, or at the very least, maintain the same xp rate while increasing ore gather rates.

I can repeat your study using my gf's character that has ZERO metic (before and after using a 10% pot, all other variables locked) and then post xp and ores gained from that per unit time, but I think it would be best to run these mining trials in a controlled setting that does not involve monsters/combat detracting from gathering with how varied combat and mob spawns can be in a relatively short amount of time.

IMO, Spectral Mines is the best of both worlds when it comes to having no monsters and a 'normal' amount of ore with distances between the nodes. Etceter tends to be heavily populated with ore nodes and have a higher (and varying...) respawn rate compared to other places. Etceter, or any location really, could still be used in trials so long as we are looking at % changes in xp and ore collection rates with response to have one variable modified, meticuluous collection rate, not exact quantities.

Just want to point out one more time that 24k xp can sound like nothing when you make a Million in a day, but showing it as 25% more or less xp really shows the weight of the skill's effects. We need to keep all comparisons relative by showing % gain or loss. Hell, If I've been making 1M craft xp a day as is, and I'm missing out on 33% or so of the xp I could have been getting because I have metic while getting almost the same basic ore and more rare ores.... ugh That's millions of xp I didn't get because of this.

I find it interesting that run 4 on either trial had a markedly higher yield AND run 1 was lower than the average with runs 2 and 3 being somewhere near average. I'd wager that you must have began your trials on a fresh mine and had to battle the earth elementals more during the initial run and then they were mostly stabilized and/or rarely respawning by the 4th 30 minute block, allowing you to harvest more in those runs. This ties back in to the whole 'should run trials in environment with no combat' thing, but still useful information.

 

22 was a typo on the sheet, should have been 23 as the only thing that changed was the pot.

In both cases I spent exactly 30 minutes before hand deliberately not marking data so i could clear out the initial spawns and give them time to stabilise but essentially they both trend upwards indicating that the longer you stay in the mines the closer the ore spawns.

I'm actually curious now how long I can sustain it for and see how it curves over an extended period of time without resetting a mine. This weekend maybe spent marking the ores mined in 30 minute intervals over the course of 8 hours to see if it peaks....

 

Lmao again?! 22?

Where did this all-new and mysterious 32 come from

That's an interesting second point. We know that the spawn rate in mines can vary, but not exactly the cause. Time seems to be a factor, but not always... not a guarantee. I've been in a mine for hours and did not observe the increased rate, and I've had the opposite happen too. I've also seen spawn rates ramp up to sky high and then back down after awhile when all I was doing was mining at my maximum speed. I have done 8-hour mining occupations before on weekends