Guild Wars 2

Are Black Lion gathering tools the same as orichalcum gathering tools? Or does the Black Lion give some other benefit? (like more likely to find gems in ore or hidden stashes in trees?)

This is the description for the Black Lion stuff.
“Extremely efficient at gathering resources and uncovering rare components.”

I don’t know, but the Master Mining Pick/Logging axe gained from story quest completion can’t actually gather anything better than platinum/hard wood logs, so I don’t think people are gonna risk an entire orichalcum vein to see if the BL picks can mine them. But based on my experience with them you sometimes do a bit of both, gather more and and a higher chance for gems, maybe.

No they don’t harvest them. I found out the hard way….

I’m not sure if it’s a bug or the tools themselves are just misleading, but they don’t seem to have a very high chance of gathering successfully. It’s best to rely on the orichalcum tools as far as I’m concerned.

Correction: Master Mining tools gained from the story now harvest all types of nodes. This is a recent change.

I really hope they did change the master tools, what a crappy reward if they didn’t!

i guess the black lion are just something else to clog my bank!

I think what the black lion/master tools could gather depended on the level of the personal story quest you got it from. So early level ones could gather lower level stuff to stop you from just being able to rush to higher level zones and gather stuff from there, and to stop people form just hoarding their quest rewards.

just mined a orichalcum ore node with master mining pick they DO NOT give you ore just ruined ore chucks, Black Lion Picks do give ore, I don’t see them giving me gems EVER.

I think it depends on what level quest you got them as a reward. I had 2 separate stacks of Black Lion picks. I have no idea which stack was from what quest, but one set successfully mined Orichalcum, the other did not. I received numerous Ori ores over a few days before switching to the other set of picks and having them fail. Those did work on Mithril and I did receive a number of gems from both types of ores.

I used a black lion on what I thought was a rich ori node. I was only able to mine it 3 times (which AFAIK is an unrelated bug)

it gave me 5 ori ore.
Whether this is abnormal and thus makes the BL pick better (as in, the node should have only given me 3, but the BL pick upped it to 5)
or normal with a bug in that the node shut off too soon (rich ori usually gives me ~5 per 3 mines with my ori pick)

I dont know.

But I do know that I was able to mine ori with the black lion pickaxe.