GameAmp: Harvesting

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Phedre_D

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Joined: 05/09/2005
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Harvesting

I went on a harvesting spree last night and except for silver (and the rare silver one of course) I completed all quests. But I can't learn anything new till I am level 50. Does that mean there is not much use to harvest materials anymore or is it a viable source of income to sell the materials at vendors and/or higher level players?

07/10/08 05:30

lani

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Joined: 09/08/2005
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RE: Harvesting

At 40, you can start in on the Crafting Professions.
You can only pick two of those and some (Alchemist) are still borked so choose wisely.
If memory serves, you get follow up quests for the Rare materials. Those are more or less pointless btw as they're not used in recipes, just as a grind for these quests. "Luckily" you'll be able to get started on these straight away at Level 30, and clutter up your Quest Journal with them in the process.

Rares drop about once in 200 harvests, if you found a rare mat before you got the quest, (or if you dropped it temporarily on account of needing the space in your flimsy journal) it will not count as it's a useless tradeskill resource now and not a quest item.

The good thing about the crappy Rare resource quests is that on average you'll get stacks of 150-200 resources each by the time you got all your rares, unless you immediately stop harvesting a type of node when you got its rare. THat would not be smart though. Your Crafting profession needs materials, and lots of them.

Your Trainer requires you to make one of each recipe before you can advance to another tier until at some point you get into a tier where it becomes interesting to try and make more than one, to sell. For now, that's only the latter tiers for commerce and for the bigger Guilds some internal production.

Armor smith first tier recipes requires about 200 Rough Leather, 250 Cotton as well as Stacks of Copper and Silver.
You go through those in about 10 minutes of boring click-work on recipes while standing in front of a Merchant where you need to buy additional "creation" resources in stacks of 20 maximum and wondering which of your way-to-small-for-the-crafting-game inventories will run out first.

Ideally this is your regular inventory and not your Crafting inventory as A) you can dump your finished goods on your trainer to clear up some space and B) Regular Inventory has fail-safes for when it's full.

In either case, it's a small blessing that Poitain now sports a Guild Village with a publicly accessible Trader in the same instance as ours. It's on the East side.

When you've got the hang of creating your first tier gear, you'll notice it's L20 stuff. As a new-fangled L40 Crafter you'll need to sink money and time into at least one more tier (30s) before you can start making something you could possibly use. Unless you're manic-compulsive, you'll not hit the 40's stuff till you yourself are in your 50's.
If at some point you somehow catch up to your own level, you'll need cut Gems to turn your plain white gear into something decent. The nr of Gem Slots on a given item determines how many Gems can go in. At some point Rares would mean more slots, but that's not in yet or broken.

Armorsmith and Weaponsmith are relatively straightforward as is Architect which is only useful if you're in a Guild.
Alchemist & Gemcutter are a pain in the butt as (especially Alchemist) needs about 10 times as much resource stacks (and thereby slots) as other professions. Same with gem Cutter They're supposed to be high volume of transfer professions, but with Alchemy out of the game for now...

In addition, about 1 in 3 resources you need drop of mobs.
As you're on average 3 to 4 tiers ahead of your crafting profession, you'll see a further hit on your inventory coming from getting T5 drops at 60 that you have no way of distinguishing from T1 drops except by consulting an out-of-game website. Oh, did I mention a L62 mob will occasionally drop something that a L23 mob can?

Almost makes me wish for Vanguard's Crafting system, though I must admit that AoC's Gathering system's better.

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07/10/08 06:36

Phedre_D

GameAmp Staff
Posts: 464
Joined: 05/09/2005
Credibility: 26 pts

RE: Harvesting

Nice write up, Lani! Looks like I will pass on crafting all together, unless I get really bored after level 40.

I actually did most of the rare quests. I don't know if I was lucky, but with harvesting less then two full nodes I got the rares on cotton, ash, sandstone and copper. I only need the rare hide (which is going to be quite a pain since hides already drop rather slow) and silver.

edit: I actually thought that Vanguard's crafting system was really fun. But I know you disliked it, so maybe I should try the AOC crafting when I get to 40 and see for myself.

***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***

07/10/08 07:18

lani

GameAmp Staff
Posts: 595
Joined: 09/08/2005
Credibility: 28 pts

RE: Harvesting

Hides are a really big pain in the donkey's anatomy. I'm on second tier rares quest now. Got about half of them. Still no Brindled Leather though. Even found the T2 rare Leather drop.
Did I mention that T1 animals (20-35) don't drop leather as often for higher-up players as they do for those who's adventuring level is in the correct tier?

And no, trading Rare resources doesn't change them from Tradeskill to Quest resource.

QUOTE

edit: I actually thought that Vanguard's crafting system was really fun. But I know you disliked it, so maybe I should try the AOC crafting when I get to 40 and see for myself.

I loved the Vanguard Crafting system. Best sleep-medication supplement I ever saw :-)
Nah, it was a good system, just not for me. Same with EverQuest II's system. Both made Crafting into a mini-game but I just can't abide being stuck at a workbench for longer than 10 minutes.

AoC's system is like WOW's system only less polished (surprise!). If you got everything you need, click one button and wait for the 20 second animation of your avatar washing his/her hands to complete.

I haven't checked yet if females take longer to craft stuff :-P

Edit: I do like Gathering resources btw. And to tome back to your original question, I'm adding Rocks and wood to our Guild Bank so we can get some Guild buildings going someday when we got an Architect going.

***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***

07/10/08 07:27

Evil Geek

Posts: 15
Joined: 10/18/2005
Credibility: 0 pts

RE: Harvesting

Just a quick note for anyone involved in Gem crafting - when you get the quest to cut three gems it's bugged (ooooh what a surprise) if you make more than one gem the second wont register for the quest in fact the only way to get the second cut gem to register for the quest is to ensure its the very first thing you do when you login to the game, same is true for the third. In short create your first gem, logout of the game, create your second, logout of the game, log back in and create your third, took me a while to hunt that info down and I wasted a few gems in the process.

• Guild Wars: Mutants [MU] • Age of Conan: Ampian Forerunners •

07/10/08 09:59

Dani Le

Posts: 0
Joined: 04/23/2007
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RE: Harvesting

also in addition to evil geeks post, if you zone you get the quest to update when creating new gems.

So zone make gem and then zone again to make the next gem :)

Hope this helps.

edit - nice write up lani, learnt alot from your post tyvm :)

***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***

07/10/08 17:48

Phedre_D

GameAmp Staff
Posts: 464
Joined: 05/09/2005
Credibility: 26 pts

RE: Harvesting

Something completely off topic, but do we have a secret 'butts' joker running behind the scenes? First long gone Dru all of a sudden got that weird 'butts' avatar (without ever having logged in) and now lani got it too! Spooky...

Edit: Oops, and where are my manners? Welcome to AOC@GA Dani Le!

***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***

07/11/08 02:13

Evil Geek

Posts: 15
Joined: 10/18/2005
Credibility: 0 pts

RE: Harvesting

QUOTE

Welcome to the site! and thankyou for adding that info, that's alot quicker than logging in and out, means us gem crafters can spend our days lurking at zone points :)

QUOTE

I noticed while checking the GW forums that BP has the same thing too.....

• Guild Wars: Mutants [MU] • Age of Conan: Ampian Forerunners •

07/11/08 04:21

mriswith

Posts: 121
Joined: 03/09/2006
Credibility: 0 pts

RE: Harvesting

QUOTE

Indeed... and also the html em*bed code has been removed from the site... so no more flash signatures in the future :(

And welcome to this side of GA dani =)

necromancer all the way

07/11/08 05:13

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