Guild Wars 2

I just wish they would sell tools with tons of uses for the appropriate cost.

100 use mithril pick for 1s 60c? Let me buy a 1000 use one for 16s so I don’t have to fiddle with it for a while.

Bag space, is a commodity.

As stated before by a random poster on the forum

“It’s this way because it’s based on systems built by business types, who know a lot about managing and making money, but not one iota about creating fun and engaging content.”

You didn’t really state why you don’t like the system, you just said that is “so bad, overly complicated, bad”. That my friend, is kinda rude in my book. You even ignored my suggestion, and while the system can certainly be improved, spending 1.20s for a 100 uses mining pick will easily fix your problem at the sacrifice of what, 5% on gold gained?

To add to what I said earlier, I frankly doubt that ANet will change this system because it’s a small, but quite effective, gold sink when multiplied across tens of thousands of players. I, and many other players, basically just buy the higher end tools and use them on all nodes out of convenience. We’re willing to pay the extra cost for convenience and time-savings, and ANet is equally happy with that because it’s extra gold sucked out of the economy.

Raincrow.1840:

Well, a couple of reasons,

1. I already have them and don’t like throwing money away. Since you can’t sell them I tend to hold onto them until I use them up.

Just put them in your bank and use them on a fresh alt.

There is nothing wrong with gathering in this game. It’s great! Buy Orichalcum tools, equip a set, keep a set in spare, couple salvage kits and you’re all set.

It’s not complicated. Even if you pick up the occasional copper ore or green wood with Orichalcum Tools, it evens itself out in the end.

The few copper you may lose far outweighs the convenience of just carrying and using the highest level tools.

Just put them in your bank and use them on a fresh alt.

There is nothing wrong with gathering in this game. It’s great! Buy Orichalcum tools, equip a set, keep a set in spare, couple salvage kits and you’re all set.

It’s not complicated. Even if you pick up the occasional copper ore or green wood with Orichalcum Tools, it evens itself out in the end.

The few copper you may lose far outweighs the convenience of just carrying and using the highest level tools.

Not quite. If you’re gathering Silver with an Ori pick, you’re breaking even at best. Granted, Silver Ore is the worst-case scenario, but it does prove that just buying an Orichalcum Pick for everything doesn’t work. You’d only barely make money on Hard Wood Logs, though at least the other ores and logs are relatively safe. This is doubly true for sickles, though, where the material you’re gathering has to be worth 10c on the TP before you can even break even using an Orichalcum Sickle, never mind making any sort of profit.

goldi.3129:

Whenever you switch to a new zone hit the first vendor and buy the appropriate tools for your level? Buy two packs of each and check every login if you have a reserve pack.

Not really hard to do. Gathering in GW2 is the most enjoyable I have encountered in many MMOs so far.
Not forcing you to gather everything to level your skill and no race/camping of ressource nodes so noone else can have them.

Agreed. I’m new to GW2, but the thing that really brought me into this game was that crafting wasn’t an after-thought. It’s built into the game, it flows naturally with the game, and it’s just as important as NPC loot drops. This is the first time I really feel an MMO got crafting right (meaning it feels like it fits with the game; I’m aware that there are other games that have deeper crafting).

Khisanth.2948:

RapidSausage.4620:

a nice way to go about this is remove the different tiered gathering tools, and just replace them by normal tools that have charges, and instead of depending on the quality of the gathering tool to decide whether or not you will get materials from the node, make it depend on your crafting level that requires/uses this type of raw material.

That is far from nice. That would force anyone who wants to gather to be a crafter. The effect would be driving down the value of crafted items even further(more supply). The cost of the raw materials would also increase since some people will refuse to craft regardless, this means fewer people gathering and fewer supplies.

Every character will now have to be a lv400 Chef as well otherwise they won’t be able to harvest plants for the potential Unidentified Dyes.

Edit: Oh and you’ve also just replaced one problem with another with similar issues. “Do I have the right tool?” becomes “Do I have the right professions on this character?”. Even worse is that while you can buy gathering tools from many merchants, master crafters are relatively rare.

^this is what I thought of that post. That’s a horrible idea! So instead of “wasting” a measly amount of silver to get better nodes, you completely inhibit a character’s gathering ability, and limit gathering to those who can do something with the materials.

No thank you. :V

Is 4s really too high of a price to pay?

There are so many things you can do within this game to offset this cost at least tenfold.

Raincrow.1840:

Sithaco.4673:

Have any other alternative solutions?

Well I’d much rather see a gathering skill in the game, like most other MMO’s use. So for example there is only one type of logging axe in the game, but I can’t harvest from higher level nodes unless I’ve raised my gathering skill.

Some easier fixes would also help…. for example instead of listing every type of node you can harvest on every tool, you just give each node a level. So when you check a node on the map you not only see the name but the level, which you can easily compare to your tool. Master tools can say “Master Mining Pick level 50” etc.

Also, they don’t need the garbage loot like ruined wood if you accidentally use the wrong tool. Just a message that says “You need a level 50 tool or higher for this” so if you happen to use the wrong item you don’t waste the node on more junk.

I would still prefer the existing gathering system over the ones you have proposed.

I believe that a gathering skill will be much more annoying and time consuming. If I don’t want to gather all those coppers and silvers but now I want to start gather gold ores, your system will make me go around to all the low level areas and gather everything before I can do what I want. On the other hand, the current system let me gather gold ores just by buying a steel pick. A gathering skill is theoretically imposing a big barrier to entry to gathering (if you’re ‘late’ to gathering, you either start from the beginning or we won’t let you do it at all).

Regarding levels on gather nodes, I actually prefer reading their names instead of seeing “tree level 1 or rock level 5” etc. Why? Mainly due to personal preference. It makes the game less about efficiency and numbers and more about aesthetics . What would you prefer:

- I want to use sickle level x to harvest from bush level x to get ingredient level x, then use it to make y food,
or:
- I’m using iron sickle to harvest apple bush to get apples to make apple jelly pie.

Given the option, I’m going for the latter one. It’s might be a extra work reading the tooltips, but I’m not looking for absolute efficiency when I play a game.

As per your third suggestion, it’s again personal taste. When I first started playing, I was chopping higher level trees with copper axe, and I had no idea why I was getting all these junk items. I see it as a lesson teaching me I need to chop better trees with better tools. And again for me, its much more about the experience, figuring something out for myself instead of a red toolbox telling me everything.

Overall, I can see where you’re coming from. You want to be efficient, you don’t want to lose any silvers to buying higher tier tools if you can help it, you want to free up inventory space etc. But for players like me, who isn’t looking for efficiency, I prefer the existing system.

Raincrow.1840:

Overkillengine.6084:

The time some people spent agonizing over trying to get every single use out of a tool would often have been better spent just buying the max possible tool they can equip and getting jiggy with it. Time = money.

And I say that as the kind of skinflint that will pay attention to material costs and calculate out if it is cheaper to buy gear from the AH to salvage for mats instead.

So doesn’t this sort of show how annoying the system really is?

I mean if you’re willing to pay six times the price for a tool, whether you need that level or not, because you don’t want to bother with the system in place, what does that tell you about the system itself?

I would not be surprised if the tradeoff between time and maximum non time-input resource efficiency happened to be a deliberate part of the current design.

Either you get to maximize your time potential by just buying the best tool you can use, or you spend time instead obtaining swapping out the lowest usable tools for a node tier.

Either way, a gold sink.

Edit: and before someone starts getting upset about a gold sink, these can be good things, as they help curb inflation, since there is no actual practical limit on production sources other than time spent.

Raincrow.1840:

I already buy new tools for each zone I’m in, which is why I end up with 12 or so tools cluttering my bag.

Frankly, you’re just being cheap. You can harvest everything you want with Orichalcum tools but the drawback is that it’s costly. You actually have a made a choice of saving some gold vs. convenience. If that choice bothers you, them you should rethink what your values are and buy the tools accordingly. You decide what your balance is. It’s actually something I like about the current system. I swap between mithril and ori tools all the time. It’s not that much extra work because their isn’t that much stuff that needs ori tools to farm.

Buy a O Axe for 4s. then cut green wood. you will get 100 at lease manybe more. green wood sells for 10c each last i checked so 100×10c=10s 10s-4s=6s you still make out at the end and how hard is it to many 12s for a set of tools? do shatt or sunless and your done for the day for tool cost

I just keep mithril tools equipped as my default gathering stuff and keep a set of the ori ones in my inventory for if I come across something I need them out to harvest with.

Wow, lots of anger and sarcasm in this thread. Kind of scary.

Now, I think you are being a bit nitpicky but then again, it’s an MMO. It’s what you make of it. If you’re not enjoying a certain aspect, you’re not enjoying it, and if you have suggestions on how to make it better sure, announce it. No problems there. I can see where it is a bit annoying to want to farm copper and all you have are mithril picks. It kind of makes one feel like they are squishing an ant hill with a car. But I personally don’t think the prices are that bad on them, and it is true that when you zone in and pick a place for farming you can go to a vendor and buy the appropriate tools then and there. It’s not a fix or anything but it might help you in the short term at least. I mean who knows maybe ANET has some changes in mind in the future?

As for your suggestion about making it like other MMOs. Eh, I see no difference. I mean, you may find it more convenient and that’s great, but to everyone who is complaining I dunno it’s all just the same time sink just disguised in different ways. I really see no actual difference between having a leveling system verses what exists now. But I will say I like getting SOMETHING from a node even if I don’t have the right tools, at least I get some coin for vendor trash.

Honestly I’d complain more about the fine crafting materials, but that’s a whole other can of beans.

God, I’ll send you like 25s, then you can throw away the old tools without losing profit and buy one ori of each. This thread is just ridiculous, do you never wp aswell?

Buy a O Axe for 4s. then cut green wood. you will get 100 at lease manybe more. green wood sells for 10c each last i checked so 100×10c=10s 10s-4s=6s you still make out at the end and how hard is it to many 12s for a set of tools? do shatt or sunless and your done for the day for tool cost

By your own math, though:

Buy a Copper Logging axe for 24c and cut green wood. 100×10c=10s, minus the 24c investment is 9s76c. Why would I not want to make 150% of your profits for the same effort. Of course, you’re ignoring the TP cut, which makes your 10s return actually 8s50c return. 8.5s-4s=4.5s versus 8.5s-.24s=8.26s. That’s, what, nearly double your profits?

But, that’s hardly the worst case scenario. . .

Take Silver Ore. It’s only worth 7c each on the TP right now, after the TP’s cut, that’s only 5.65s if you sell 100 of them. That’s 1.65s profit if you’re using Orichalcum, but 5.09s profit if you use Iron. That’s just over triple your profits. And even this isn’t the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is using the Orichalcum Sickle on anything that doesn’t sell for at least 10c each. Note that even at 10c, you’re making only 50c in profits over 100 harvests. Oddly, that includes Saffron Thread, which is actually on-level for Orichalcum. . .

I tend to agree the system isn’t great. Like a lot of things in this game, they try to let anybody do anything and therefore there’s no specialization or rarity for people to capitalize on, so the items gained from it are extremely commonplace and not worth a lot.

There’s two primary things they could do about this. One— super rare mats from gathering that have a very rare chance to drop. They already have a system where some times you can get gems or sacks or even dyes and the like, but what they need to do is add some extra rare mats. For instance, they could make it so gold is not a common node, which makes it worth copper, but a rather rare drop from iron nodes so people are getting a bit more roulette feel and the scarity makes it enjoyable when you do get that pop you know you can sell for a little profit.

The second would in deed be some sort of gathering skill. What they could do is combine these. Make it so anybody can gather from any node but if you have the skill you get higher % for the rare drops. Maybe even a 0% for no skill and raising to something like 5% at max skill. Give it a few other bonuses too, like a chance for not losing gathering tool charges or double gains, etc.

This also would take a little burden off crafting skills as there’d be more skills to choose from and slightly less competition at each crafting skill.

why can’t i just AOE the nodes, so they drop stuff? maybe i don’t mind the tools as much, but if i run out of tools (at 2/3 gathers), i always try to AOE the node, anyways out of anger and despair, just to see if it works one day.