I used to wonder what harvesting skills were good for. I never bothered actually putting ON any of the gear that would raise the stats, unless I was in a zone where my skill wasn’t high enough to even reach the nodes.
Until Sentinel’s Fate, and I required rares to make expert spells that I simply didn’t want to fork out the cash for. To the left is what my current harvesting skills are at. This is with Ellithia (wood elf mystic) using the Grandmaster crafter earring, the reinforced dwarven work boots (drop from the final named in unrest), the harvesters cloak, tinkering tools that raise the stats, the harvest mount sold in Mara (10 tokens and 40k faction later), and the artisan tool set that raises harvesting statistics by a little amount.
For those who don’t know, the chances of you getting a rare are based on your skill vs. the skill required by the zone. The higher your skill is OVER that level, the higher your chances of getting a rare are.
To test this theory I set out on Ellithia for three hours, running around Sentinel’s Fate zones. Most of my time was spent actually looking for places to harvest that wouldn’t require too much killing, or having to fight off other players. By the time all was said and done I walked away with 15 rares, although for some odd reason not a single rare pelt was found despite the fact that I harvested more pelts then anything else (I mean significantly more). Pleased? Yes, I really was. I’ve stashed all of these rares along with Hamal’s rares in my guild bank for the time being. Set aside to make pretty furniture for the guild hall that should be coming up VERY soon. Dragon’s Flight managed to clench on to level 29 yesterday, which I am very excited about.
Brisbane day starts tomorrow, which is always great for a laugh. Happy gaming, and I’ll see you in Norrath!
I, also, harvest decked out in every stat raising piece of gear I can get my hands on and like many have said before me, I don’t know if it’s really the gear or what but with the gear I DO average more rares than without it. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it…..
There’s a reason my main char on LDL is in the top 200 on the server for rares harvested. :D Actually there are several reasons and you list them all — that and time spent, of course. You’re not going to get em if you don’t go out there and harvest, but those items sure help.
I’ve read various arguments for and against those +skill items making a difference. All I can say is Fairuza is decked out and gets more rares than the others… then again, she also does a butt ton more harvesting. TBH I don’t much care as long as they keep rolling in, and that unicorn has a nice clippety clop canter sound anyway.
@akely Which is exactly what I said in my post, hehe. there is also an artisan jewelery set that gives +harvesting, as well as the reinforced dwarven workboots, the mount from mara, the cloak, and the earring. :)
Hmm. I should have pointed this out back when you did your “Did You Know” blog post. (Blog posts like that you could very well revisit, repeat or add to, in my opinion.) I have no doubt that higher skill gives more rares. This is through experimenting and having a friend that doubles as a human calculator and a stat-min-max nerd.
And for us who believes in that higher skill means more rares I would like to point out that the unicorn one can by from the Far Seas Trading people (in Mara) gives a harvesting skill boost. So does certain quest rewards. I’m nut sure but I think both the crafting epic earring does as well as the “Gathering Obsession” quest reward.
It’s hard to believe that what we’re seeing is just RNG artifacts… after adjusting my gear to wear harvesting cloak, earring and unicorn I have been averaging 5 rares an hour or better. It isn’t all in my head, perhaps there is a bonus to the roll for extreme high skill that Domino didn’t mention in that thread.
Welp, all I know is before I moved my stats up, I was getting maybe 1-2 rares in that amount of time, as were 2 guild mates. We all up’d our harvest stats, and got 10-15 easily within the same time period. That’s all the proof I really need. :)
Oh .. “the difference between the standard and bonus tables ” is for T9 .. In the lower tiers it is much more significant.
The harvesting skill actually has very little impact of the number of rares you receive. It will however significantly increase your chance of pulling more than 1 normal material. Domino (tradeskill dev) has come out and said the difference between the standard and bonus tables is very low. So much that the RNG’s artifacts would mask it. Now some people will claim this is false and some will support it. The fact is that we can only take Domino’s word for it since the RNG can be mean sometimes.
How harvesting works – http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/A_Harvester%27s_Guide#The_Technical_Bit
There is also rumor of some anti-farming code that will drop your rares rate to almost zero if you are doing nothing but harvesting for many hours. It would not surprise me if there was one.