In the abilities book, fishing, mining, gathering, foresting and, collecting have clickable buttons. The tooltip shows target: self/ cast: 3.0 seconds/ recovery: instant/ recast: instant. What do these buttons do if anything. TY in advance for the help.
The buttons are pretty much useless. The way you harvest is to just click on the harvestable resource.
there are times when these buttons come in handy - like sometimes the harvestable resource is not easily gotten to, but you can find it by hitting tab or typing /target (name). at those times, being able to click a button will help you harvest or collect the item. i have used them plenty of times. the only time you can't use them is when the item is totally out of the line of sight. sort of like the times when you have to target an invisible npc and hail them or have to target something that is there but seems to be hiding from you. also if you kill something and can't loot it because it fell in the rock, you can /target it and then /loot it. yeah buttons can come in handy. someone should try using them before writing them off.
I always used a macro to target nearest and then try each of the harvesting actions and the pickup shiny. Works very well and to me is quite a bit faster than clicking nodes.
The advantage of using a harvesting macro is that you won't accidentally attack an NPC or non-aggro mob that wanders by. To make a harvesting macro: Hit O to open up the macro page and click on <click to edit>, then in the first line of the macro put a command line and enter /target_nearest_npc Then drag over from the spell window all the harvesting abilities and the collecting ability. Name your macro, choose an icon for it and drag it to your hotbar.