Crafting Pooled Experience - Some, probably, dumb questions ...

I've been monitoring the growth, or not, of my crafting pooled experience and I have a couple of questions / observations.

Why does harvesting magical reagents reduce my pooled experience when harvesting other resources increases it? I can harvest a cotton bush and gain between 112 and 120 XP, but when I harvest the garlic plant right next to it I loose around 130 XP. This doesn't seem very logical to me.

Secondly, why does a failure to harvest a resource penalise me? If I fail to craft an item I still get a skills levels/proficiency boost. If I fail to harvest, say, Iron Ore or Raw Cotton then I suffer a Crafting Pooled Experience loss. Moreover, this loss is much greater that the XP boost I would have received if I'd successfully harvested/gathered the resource. Again, this doesn't seem logical.

I'd welcome any enlightenment on these points.

 

@JohnL You're not losing the XP, it's getting moved into the skill. When you fail, the skill associated with the resource advances a bit, consuming XP from the pool into the skill. However, because you didn't gain any XP, you only see the loss.

When you succeed, XP still moves to the skill, but you also gain XP. When you see the pool gain, it's XP granted from that success - XP consumed into the skill. Not all reagents and zones give the same XP gain, though XP consumed would be the same if you gathered cotton vs garlic. That's why the garlic appears to make you lose XP. The gather skill consumes more than the success gives you while the cotton gives more than is consumed.

 

Thanks for the explanations. The "failure penalty" that I perceived now makes good logical sense.

However, with regard to the difference between cotton and garlic, perhaps I should rephrase my question. Why is it that the XP granted for gathering garlic is so much less that the XP granted for gathering cotton? While I accept that both actions progress my harvesting skills, there is still a serious disparity in the overall result?

 

@JohnL, there seems to have been a recent change with regards to Harvesting Exp. It seems as if the amount of Exp you get now is based on your Success Chance(%) to harvest a particular node. Failure to harvest a node now gives no Exp, but this should rarely happen. If it does happen often, try going to an area where you have a higher chance of success. For instance, if I mine Ore with a 100% chance of success it gives me 100exp, whereas if I have a 93% chance it gives me 500exp. As far as the difference between garlic and cotton, I guess some items just give more exp than others(not unlike how some monsters give more exp for killing them). If you want to make sure that you are raising your Production Pool you can limit the amount of harvesting skills you have actively training. At the top of the Icons for each Harvest Type you can click to change it from Training to Not Training, Maintain, Rapid Decay(I think this is the name). Also, the more Exp you have in your pool means that more exp will be applied to a skill each time you use it. I believe that I read there is a cap of like 5k exp applied per use, but I'm not positive about that. Hope this helps a bit.

 

Your use of the skill moves X% of your pool into the skill. A cotton bush can give you I think 100-500 XP on success depending on Scene Tier. The Garlic plants are closer to 20-40. Once your pool reaches a certain size, your skill use begins consuming more XP per harvest than you get new XP. This leads to a lot of locked gathering skills, as gathering is still the best source of steady production XP after the initial "First Craft" boosts in refining/crafting are consumed.

 

Thanks for the explanations. My harvesting percentage chance is normally higher than 95%, often 99% or 100%. However, I'm not sure that this is accurate as I seem to be getting too many failures for that level of percentage chance. I'll do some more research here before I start making any claims.

However, I am a bit disappointed that the rewards for harvesting a Garlic plant are so much lower that for a Cotton Bush. After all, Garlic plants are so much more difficult to spot.

 

The XP reward per node is dependent upon the tier of the node. The tier of most nodes are dependent on the scene difficulty. Like Ore nodes, more skulls of the scene = higher tier Ore node = more XP.

However some nodes, notably reagents, don't scale with the scene. So they are both much easier to harvest but also gives much less XP.

Which is a bit bonkers as you point out that the difficulty of reagents usually is in finding them not harvesting them.

My advice would be to bug report it. I've seen similar reports but those were long ago and I haven't seen any of them responded to nor any Jira.

 

But harvesting cotton is MUCH more difficult than digging up some garlic...