One of the other reasons is that I travel to the NPC vendor at the camp quite a bit to empty out my inventory of stuff I don't need to use immediately. The rest gets stacked up for eventual disposition when I head into town. I usually wait until my gear needs repairs, then I head into town, process craft, sell stuff I don't store on my retainer, grab some leves and craft some more, then repair everything and head out to camp.
I've made some changes to the way I select local guildleves. These days, I pick a specific destination and simply grab all the leves I can for that specific destination, regardless of their level. Due to the fact that unlike most of the rest of the players, I'm not in any gigantic hurry to get to level cap on "something". Not to mention the fact that I'm recording a lot of gathering data (which is great for my gathering professions, but lousy for my combat jobs progression). So the convenience of delivering all leves to a single location outweighs the extra progress of doing leves as close to the level of my craft as possible.
This has allowed me to prety much nail down all logging site patterns for the zone. I still need a bit of mining patterns though. I still need to find (I think) two spearfishing sites and one harvesting and one quarrying site. This is based on the theory that there are three sites for each secondary profession in each zone. Just need to locate them all. All this gathering activity has had a good effect on my Mining and Botany skills. Both are now 18. The leves and the post gathering processing have allowed my alchemy to hit 18 as well.
This however did not provide a lot of progress for my fishing skill. So the last part of the weekend was spent concentrating on fishing (it's going to be the slowest of the gathering skills to progress, I can tell). Since I was concentrating very hard on fishing, I decided to try and nail down some data in support of some theories I have regarding fishing in FFXIV. Basically what I'm noticing is that there seems to be a pattern for the material drops from everything. Namely that there are 5 types of drops from any particular type of site. I suspect this extends to mobs as well. So I wondered how this played into the fishing system.
So far I've been able to establish that at least on a single non pool site in the Bearded Rock zone, if you use a freshwater bait or lure you will only ever get one of the possible drops. The same if you use no bait or lure - although the number of "nothing bites" results between the few catches is soul destroying if you only use a rod. For Bearded Rock this is Malm Kelp. The reverse for freshwater sites was also true. Saltwater bait or lures in freshwater sites also results in a single type of drop. For Black Brush it was Crayfish. Now in the "free" drop pattern for a zone (basically if you plop your cast down in a non-school area) has 5 drops if you're using site appropriate bait/lure. So far one of them is always the one that shows up for non-appropriate bait/lure. So for example Bearded Rock (so long as you're not on a school of fish) seems to yeild: Malm Kelp, Merlthor Goby, Ocean Cloud, Tiger Cod and Vongola Clam. I need to see if this is zone wide incidentally. If you use non-appropriate bait/lure you get Malm Kelp. There are 2 schools of fish up at any one time.
Stuff I still need to work on for fishing:
- I need to establish the pattern at schools and determine if they spawn and despawn (aka move).
- I need to see the results with general bait (supposed to be good for both saltwater and for freshwater).
- I need to see if the "default" result is present in school sites.
- I need to the results of using non-appropriate bait/lures at school sites.
I also exported all my current raw data documents to PDF formats and uploaded them to the linkshell's site so others could work on some maps of these zones. The drop patterns I'm talking about really pop out when you look at the raw data.
All this gathering resulted in some further processing crafting and managed to get my alchemy up to 18 as well. I also how have about 60 iron nuggets stored away to progress Blacksmithing. As a rule I try to store very little in the way of base raw materials, I try to store the intermediary materials so for example, I noted that I was low on animal glue. So I simply didn't vendor a stack of Bone Chips. Then when I was in town for repairs, I got some Sheep Leather Spetchs from my retainer and some Muddy Water from a vendor, then I crafted up sufficient animal glue to have a stack of 99 and vendor the rest. So for example I have 99 Animal Glues, 99 Quicksilvers, and so on. Also since the branches are used for various repairs, I've got 99 Maple Branches and 99 Ash branches and so on (still building up willow branches - only 72 of those). I will be seriously glad when the inventory situation becomes manageable.
The other thing I have observed is the consolidation of linkshells that has been happening of late. Although SE has been much more open and much more proactive about indicating that changes are coming, there have been a bunch of impatient players who have lost hope and either told us they are stopping playing or have simply stopped playing. This happens at the linkshell leader level as well (not mine but others). The end result is that we're seeing a round of linkshell mergers lately, as entire leaderless shells merge wholesale into other shells.
Hopefully with the update happening overnight, this will be the end of the bleed, as the wow tourists finally peter out and the server populations stabilize. We'll see. Note that the company system and the ability to build (or buy - we're unsure yet) company assets (like ships) is not coming until the first update of the new year. But we're got November and December's updates to get through first.
Physical: 38, Hand to hand: 11, Sword: 17, Axe: 11, Archery: 7, Polearm: 11: , Shield: 9, Thaumaturgy: 11, Conjury: 12, Woodworking:15 , Smithing: 15, Armorcraft: 15, Goldsmithing: 15, Leatherworking: 16, Clothcraft: 17, Alchemy: 18, Cooking15 , Mining: 18, Botany: 18: , Fishing: 15.
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