Guild Wars 2

Intro
I feel like Anet had a great idea with gathering. Look at herbs. They’re interesting. Certain herbs only grow in certain areas. You need to go to places you might not normally go in order to get certain things. This is neat. If a herb is rarely gathered, the price goes up and people go travel around. Furthermore certain herbs can only be got by killing veterans or going to remote areas. Nifty!

When it comes to logging and mining though, it feels like anet said “Forget it! We’re on a schedule. Aint nobody got time for that!” so they distributed them purely by level. At the start they made silver and gold less common alternative nodes, but then they even forgot about that with platinum and created a purely linear node progression. It smacks of deadline production compromise.

Furthermore forgetting that most of the community is going to end up at end-game. So those high level ores? price crash. It was inebitibble.

Solutions a’ plenty
So what needs to happen is they need to go back and fix that.

Overhaul crafting recipes
Crafting recipes need to change. They need to take more of a variety of ingredients. As it is now, if you’re crafting a mid-level item, all the ingredients are going to be from mid-level nodes. What would be much better is make them all have common ingredients, then the higher level, need more rare ingredients.

So for instance, all heavy armor should take iron. At low levels, you might make the armor purely from iron. Mid levels, you might oxidize it with coal to make steel, and high levels, you might make an alloy with mithril. So at all levels, iron is needed. It has a demand.

Furthermore, crafts should have two types of recipes. One is recipes that are made purely with that craft. These will be blues so you can level up your craft, make some basic armor for yourself etc. The second kind should take ingredients from other crafts to make. In order to make a masterwork armor, it should include ingredients from clothcrafting and leathercrafting. If you’re making a rare cloak from clothcraft, it might take some silver clasps that are made with gemcutting.

This does two things: one- crafts now synergize. It becomes interesting not just what craft you pick, but what combination you pick. Will you be armor and leather for the sub ingredients for a certain type of armor, or instead wood and weaponcrafting for another combination? Or artificing and wood? or weapon and leather? etc.

Two: sub recipes become valuable and worth selling on the market so people who don’t have that craft can get the ingredients to make items. Right now, the only reason to buy sub ingredients is laziness. The mid-steps of making the cloth lining and then the metal sheet exist purely to extend the time taken to make the item, but since you intrinsically have the craft needed to make the components if you can make the done item, it’s just extra steps.

Gathering revamp
Then, you make all zone levels have iron nodes. These are the common nodes, but since all levels of crafting take it, there’s always some demand for it. But, it’s iron. It’s common. Its ok for it to be common. You give all people the ability to harvest the common nodes without expending mining picks or axes. They take no skill, anyone can make a bit of coin grabbing them.

Second, you take the sub-ingredients that vendors sell and you distribute them unevenly around the world. You might find coal in ascalon mainly, and primordium might be found in the maguuma jungle. Since you can’t just find it anywhere, there’s a demand on the market. The population of those areas is going to be enough there’s plenty of competition, but these things will move on the market in large supply.

Then, you make other ores be rare. Silver, Gold, platinum, should all be rare random nodes.

Implement gathering professions
Yes I know GW2 didn’t included them, I think because they feel kind of grindy, which is understandable. But gathering professions do some important things. One, it makes it so you have to make an interesting choice between a second crafting profession and a resource gathering profession. Two, it makes the people who can gather these things a bit more specialized, which creates market demand from people who don’t gather but instead craft. Third, it makes it an investment. You need to skill it up, so you’re not going to drop it to switch gathering professions when you need a different resource. You are invested in it.

You then can do things like have rare nodes like mithril actually exist in all areas, even low-level areas, but they’re only visible if you have high specialization in the specific gathering type. This incents people to gather all over.

So, to level mining for instance, you need to explore and gather silver, then gold, then platinum, then mithril, then orichalcum. Each of these are only visible with a certain level of gathering, and are less common than the previous, which means it does take effort (and feeling of accomplishment!) to level your mining.

summary
What happens right now is a double whammy to gathering. People go to end-game areas to complete those hearts, and those are the mobs they want to fight. Coincidentally this is where the “high tier” ores are, so since you have a lot of people in that area anyways, they’re gathering them anyways. Creating a huge supply. And, since every single person can gather them, the supply isn’t limited in any way.

By making these modifications you now have the correct restrictions on supply and create demand to make gathering an interesting thing to do, expanding the things to do in the game.

The only thign i want to see by ANet gettign implemented in regard for Gathering Jobs to improve the game is by implementing

FISHING & DIGGING, so by making finally more use of the in the game finadle FISHING ROD & SHOVELS

By adding Fishing,m Anet could implement a lot of new seafruit materials, from various kinds of fishes, to crabs and other crustaceans, to let us have for Cooking alot of new fishing based new cooking recipes.

Example “Shark Fin Soup”, or “Pollack Filet with xxx on YYY Sauce” and so on…
Fried Squid Rings, Calamari, Lobsters, steamed mussels.
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With Digging, we could get living baits (Worms, Insects) for Fishign to put them onto the Hooks of our Fishing Rod Lines.

Can’t understand whey we have no Fishing, when there even exists in the game Fishing Rods as environmental Items which basically exchanges your Weapon Skills (but currently has no skills…)

Whats so hard to give us also too Shovels, their models exiost also again already in the game as environmental items that give us also skills…
Didding could also lead us to Materials, like randomly found jewels and also too minerals, like for example Azurite (the game still needs a proper way of how we can gain Azurite, as currently all of the Azurite in the game is limited on that amount all palyers could gather, while Flames & Frost was active and we could gather Azurite in the dungeon. Azurite should be turned into a ground Mineral that you should gain through Digging…)

But also new minerals/jewels could get added, like various coals, diamonds, onyx’ moonstones, quartz, aquamarines ect. Not all jewels must come from mining nodes only, jewels/minerals exist and can be found also just in the ground if you dig at the right places.