Harvesting - Let's move forwards....

[ecclest]

This is my first big post so please go easy on me as I'm going out on a limb here! I know I'll have made some erroneous assumptions through inexperience.



Anyway, instead of complaining about harvesting, I thought that as a low-level player I'd try and take a look at what the changes will mean and how I will change my style to play with them.



Now I'm only a level 50 harvester, so you out there who got to 250 before the patch could say "shut the hell up" or you could give us all the benefit of your experience and help us all to modify our play-style...

Please add constructive comments, not complaints, about what you will be doing in future.


Taken from the notes:



[ F o r a g i n g & P r o s p e c t i o n ]



Here is a non exhaustive list of changes regarding foraging in Chapter 1: 'Changing times'.



**What's new in prospection

. Added new stanzas in order to refine your search of sources to a specific raw material quality. e.g.: "Find Up To Choice Materials" can now be upgraded with "Find Only Choice Materials".



Okay, for me this means is that I can choose to look for lower quality materials when I want to just gain xp and use less focus or if I want to look for a specific type I can use more focus and not waste my time harvesting lower quality stuff. I think this is best used with material specialisation to get mats for crafting specific things.



**What's new in foraging

. You can now reduce the explosion damages. In order to do that, you need to activate, before the source explodes, the stanzas "Reduce Explosion Damage".



Not sure here as reducing the damage sounds rather like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Surely a care plan is better?



**What changed in prospection

. Messages about specialized prospection failures are now more specific: hints about wrong saison, wrong time of the day, wrong meteo (instead of the generic "at the moment").



Sounds useful. But as I'm only low-level I tend to not go prospecting in the wilds....



. The delay before not exploited sources vanishes is not function of the player's level anymore but function of the number of sources prospected at once ("Multiple spots" stanza).



No comment as I only ever look for a single source...





. The XP gain for players performing only suring up/ stabilization actions on forage sources is now related to the effectiveness of the players in preventing explosions and other such problems.



Sounds right and logical.



. The "Multiple spots" stanza does not reveal a random number of sources between 1 and the indicated number anymore, but the very indicated figure on the stanza.



Sounds right and logical.



. Ecosystem oriented prospection activated with a "normal" prospection (without Deposit Tracking), won't boost the number of available sources anymore but the harvested quantity (Rate stanza is then boosted).



Not a clue here



. "Prospecting Plan" and "Deposit Tracking" descriptions have been revamped in order to make their subtleties clearer for a better game play experience. Reading them is highly recommended to any harvester.



Okay



**What changed in foraging



. Extraction quality stanzas are now upgraded 10 by 10 at the trainer (you will then find 25 aggressive and 25 gentle). The higher the quality, the more important the difference of danger between gentle and aggressive is.



[color=white]I believe the gentle vs harmful issue is being patched next time and for now I'm sticking to a mixed set of extraction stanzas. [/color]



. Extraction time is now function of the quality extraction stanza. The prospection stanza "source time" is now a time bonus. When you just have that time left (the time based on the quality is gone) the time bar becomes red.

. During foraging, quality can now grow faster or slower.

1°) The better the quality is expected, the slower the quality grows .

2°) When the quality expected is 10 below the player's level : higher the difference between the expected quality and the player's level, slower the quality grows. E.g.: I have a 200 level in Desert specialty and it's my first time in the forest (50 is then my level in Forest specialty) I can forage for a quality of 200 with a very slowly growing quality or forage for a quality of 50 growing faster. It is more crucial then ever to take care of the source if a high quality is expected. Furthermore, if you decide to use another stanza regarding the quality during foraging, the quality will change after a while. Note : in order to maximize the use of the available time, you would better carely prepare your actions, keep in mind that your focus does not lasts forever ! E.g.: instead of trying to have both high quality and quantity, focus more on one of them.

. Bars shown on top of a source are now all full at start, and show the remaining proportion. For instance the quantity bar half empty shows that the available quantity has been half extracted; you can however still see the exact amount of extracted quantity the same way than before. The remaining time bar gets empty faster if the initial amount of available time is lower.





So, if I understand this right, instead of hitting ql50 half-way through harvesting and then the quantity maybe reaching 2 by the end like it used to when I had



source time 30s

Harmful speed 2

Harmful rate 2

Gentle ql 50



It's now more sensible to aim to just get 1 mat of QL50 and use the spare time on, potentially, a care plan? Using (at least at level 50)



source time 30s

speed 1

rate 1

Gentle ql 50



In fact, thinking about it, doesn't this mean that the rate stanza is redundant? I thought that used to be how quickly to ql got up to max? Now, if I read it right above, you will only reach the max at some point near the end of the harvest unless you are above the level of the ql of your mat... I prolly mis-understood something.



. The risks bars (life and stability) do not stop anymore when the player end foraging : they still get slowly lower.



Never meant much to me at my level as I'd just go and find another source if the life ran out and depleted the area. Though I guess higher level foragers are going to have to spend the rest of the forage time on a care plan every time now...



. The max distance between the source and the harvester has been decreased. It's now more difficult to get far from a toxic cloud.



Exploit fixed...



- The source mode, which is a hint about the more simulated dangers, is not changed by a new action anymore but by events such as explosion / toxic clouds or if you reach the source max quality. Furthermore, the difficulty is based on the first harvester on the source, so a beginner player being helped by a higher level healer won't see the danger bars lower as quickly as if the harvester was the healer, as it was before.



Exploit fixed...



- Heal stanzas are more efficient than before.



No knowledge of what this was before...



- The raw material specialized extraction won't boost the quality over the quality extraction stanza value anymore, but boosts the growth of the quality (but the quality remains maximized by the extraction stanza's one), decreases the risks implied by the more aggressive speed stanzas (the most powerful). On the other hand the ecosystem specializations decrease the risks implied by the most aggressive (powerful) quantity and quality stanzas. Regarding the healing actions, specializations increase, respectively, preservation and stability.



Sounds right.



. Armor penalty is now part of the system regarding focus consumption. The armor is now taken into account when calculating raw materials sources explosions damages.



So we all forage nekid?



. Foraging XP now takes into account the extracted raw material quality.



Fair enough



. Removed the 'too far' message when you start an extraction and your character starts to move towards it.



Never had this



. A specialized extraction per material gave a quality higher than the one of the stanza's quality. From now on, the extraction specialization per material increases the speed of rise of the quality, reduces the risk from the most aggressive brick, while specialization by ecosystem decreases the risk of bricks from the quantity and quality the most aggressive. For care plans, the specialization increases depending on the efficiency of the preservation and stability.



Sounds right.




Okay, so, please use your experience of this game and comment on what the changes mean you'll have to do. Bearing in mind you had a skill reset, so if you went back and bought all the same skills without testing how they worked now then that was a tad silly.....

<Sits back and waits for the flames>

[rugster]

If this is really your first post and not an alt account, i'll eat my hat.

[bgrifter]

. Armor penalty is now part of the system regarding focus consumption. The armor is now taken into account when calculating raw materials sources explosions damages.



So we all forage nekid?

First off I want to say great post, i've been moping about the changes all afternoon but it seems time to suck it up and find a way to deal at least on the short term.

The armour thing is actually a pleasant surprise, you can now soak explosion damage similar to how armour soaks mob damage. This now gives some incentive to wear heavy armour even at the cost of an increased focus penalty, haven't tested as to whether this is worthwhile but it's worth considering if nothing else. At very least don't forage naked, forage in light armour.

Consensus seems to be the best way to forage is in teams, not a huge fan of this approach but limited testing earlier today seemed to bear this out. As a 162 Jungle Forager I was getting anywhere from 9xp to 600xp on average for digs depending on quality and number of fails. With a duo partner (Jungle Forage 110ish if i'm not mistaken) adding care plans, XP was up to around 950 per pull, and if i'm not mistaken she was getting 750xp per care plan. Not the XP from before, but certainly a huge improvement over the numbers I was getting solo.

Care plans are definitely essential now even if you are going solo. Right now i've been using a Ground Stability 4/Resource Preservation 1 stanza mostly because Stability 4 doesn't take up the entire focus credit, and finding it to be very effective. Plan on trying Resource 3/Stability 1or2 to see if it's equally useful, as it seems most source modes drain one bar primarily with a tiny drain on the second. (even 1 and 4)

Whether the materials are Basic, Fine, Choice etc also seems to have a major impact on how the pulls go. I did a quick pull before logging out of basic wood and ended up pulling four mats with two pauses for care plans. Haven't done enough testing to give solid numbers, but I suspect it's worth the time to seek out a basic or fine source if you're prospecting for Crafting XP mats rather than something of value.

So far the XP thing seems to be a mystery to me, I can currently pull a maximum of q170 mats, five of them in a solo pull gave the aformentioned 600xp. Perhaps there's an XP modifier applied now when multiple people tap into your source with care plans? Is it possible that a group of four or five people tossing in a single tick of care plan could generate a major XP increase for the group?

Anyways, all of this is speculation and with upcoming patches may become obsolete rather quickly, but for now maybe we can crack this nut. I'm not sure we can get XP gains up all that much, but i'd be happy to find a way to at least raise the quantity of mats per pull. Any ideas?

[ecclest]

If this is really your first post and not an alt account, i'll eat my hat.

Need salt for that?

[shrike]

*lights a matchstick* Here, your flame

Correction: Rate.
Rate means how many mats you get per foraging step. With rate 1 you get 0.2 - 0.4 - 0.7 - 1.0. With rate 5 you get 0.3 - 0.8 - 1.3 - 1.9. Speed decreases the time between those steps.

generally it's better to use high rate instead of high speed. Since high speed = more mats/time, but also more focus/time. High rate, on the other hand, is only more mats/time, without an increased focus use.

[ecclest]

*lights a matchstick* Here, your flame

Flames like that I'll happily take. I for one am learning things already.