A quick update on harvesting skills!

I saw a few posts on this so I wanted to go ahead and give a small brain dump on some of the new harvesting stuff.

So players will probably quickly find that harvesting takes longer and has a failure chance. If you’re low level, with no skill and no special item to harvest, you are pretty much stuck with hitting tier 1 and 2 stuff. For a level 5 with no skill or special tool, your odds are around 80% for a tier 1 and 25% for a tier 2. It falls after fast after that to 4% and <1% for levels up to 10. Failing an attempt can result in tool damage so it might not be wise to sit and try that <1% node 100 times in a row. Critical success can result in a much faster harvest.

The difficulty calculation is based on your crafter level + your skillful harvest skill + any tool bonus + any other buffs or bonuses. So a level 5 with nothing else has a total skill of 5. A level 20 with 5 skill levels has 45. A high level with everything might approach a number of 150-200. I won’t share the exact math for calculating the odds but here is a shot of resource nodes 1-5 (they go to 10!) and total skill.



So our level 20 example above would have a 71% chance of getting a tier 3 on his first try vs a 4% for the level 5 with no skills. The target was to make it so players will mostly be isolated to tier 1 and 2 stuff for their first few levels unless it was something they specialized in. As they level up, more tiers will move into the trivial category. Also, we will be adding a small bonus for each time you fail a node to reward the persistent types.

Also, you’ll find that harvesting takes a bit more time than it used to. It will get down to about the same times you’re used to once you invest in a few levels of harvesting speedup skills. For higher level nodes though, this is intentional so it adds some risk to the harvesting. Time allows for patrols or spawns or other player to find you and interrupt you.

I don’t think we got any in for this release but in future releases there will be ways to get a buff or blessing to boost your harvesting skill. There will be different quality harvesting tools that give bonuses of up to 25 or 30 points. We will even have foods that can add to your harvest skill. For this release though, players will probably be stuck with their base stats.

 

Ooh, I don't like the sound of the BagID error! I'll see if this is a known issue. I think there might be an issue right now if the corpse times out and poofs while you're on it but that is the only issue I was aware of.

 

We will diversify more and more each release. We obviously want to keep the median tree at a tier comparable to the zone but in my opinion there should be diversity. Think a bell curve with the tier of the zone and tier of the resource lining up. A fair number of nodes will fall into the +/- 1 tier category and then 1 or 2 nodes in the +/-2 range.

 

As for the prosperity tools, the plan is that they are a small bonus (+10-ish) but indestructible. I'm not sure they got switched over or not to reflect that though as much of this just came online in the last few days. We'll get that in for live or in an early patch if it isn't that way already.

 

There isn't a simple answer to this. With how the numbers are setup currently, you could max out all the gathering skills. That pool of skill points is shared with crafting so maxing out gathering skills might mean you're crippling your crafting skills. So if the question is can I max out all crafting, refining, and harvesting, the answer is no. There will have to be some amount of specialization.

We're trying to design the skills such that you aren't required to max out everyone to succeed so just because you can't max everything out, doesn't mean you can't be effective. For instance, with harvesting, speed of collection is convenience element and not required. It will make harvesting in dangerous areas much easier but not mandatory. Meticulous collection gives a small bonus to the amount you'll collect over time but again, not required. Players will have to make some choices though but they aren't going to cripple your ability to harvest or craft.

Also, while players will be able to level up their crafter level purely by harvesting, that process will become a very slow slog after the first 10 or 20 levels. Crafting items will generating higher exps. We got the start of that system but it will get much larger for R16. The idea behind the harvesting generating exps that don't scale as much as crafting is that you'll be able to do some leveling up in crafting through just being an adventurer/PVP who harvests but to really get to level 30+, you'll probably have to do some other crafting stuff.