Sorry that I haven't had time to notice that the pony only brings back stacks of one or two items at a time from frostfell. I know it wasn't like that in beta so it didn't occur to me I had watch that too lol. Well, I was very surprised when I was ready for an evening of straightening out my packs and getting mats from ponies. LoL at the rate the pony harvests now it would take a lifetime of frostfells to get a good supply of mats. This isn't even close to comparable to stack sizes of regular mats and there are no rares to be had. It is a shame the olden days left you with a legacy of way to many different ingredients, but don't ruin our neat new toy by making it a useless piece of fluff. We finally got machines to work and home and decorate year round. Come on cough up some mats.
You get 100 random Frostfell harvests each time you send a pony out to supplement what you can get by harvesting yourself or while you do other stuff like the Frostfell quests or even while you are logged off. It is not intended that the pony be more efficient than manual harvesting but it is a nice extra, especially if you have it on a few alts.
I think it's a great bonus, considering it saves a person about 30 present harvests per pony. That's 100 more holiday harvests than we were getting from the pony before. Let's not spoil the season with these kinds of demands.
I really do think most mats should come by harvesting them. The pony is just the icing on a lovely cake.
What this says to me is that there are really WAY too many individual harvests for Frostfell. 100 random harvests from any other holiday event would be great. With Frostfell, it really doesn't help much because there are so so many harvests. There are so many presents in Frostfell this year (thank you devs!) the pony saves all of about 2 minutes worth of harvest time. It does add up eventually and while you are actually getting a fair number of harvests, the fact that you get 1-2 of each one most times makes it seem much worse.
How many items do you get when you send it to a dangerous, search and hunt area for T10 mats? Some of these items are used in a dozen recipes or more. It is a long signature questline that brings us to this ability, This is the EPIC of harvesting and being trivialized by this.
I'd have to check by running a pony at T10 (currently mine are all busy with Frostfell), but I think it is something like 600 or so for regular harvests (at least it was on the goblins I happened to have ready before posting), plus a chance at getting a rare or two. This seems fair enough to me as the average pull on regular nodes will be higher and you typically need a lot more resources to make anything. This is a bonus that we never had before and I disagree that it is trivializing harvesting. It is not the only reward from the last stage of the questline either - it also unlocks a merc. Granted that merc has no harvest bonus and will not be useful to everyone (as well as requiring the merc ability), but it is there none the less. I certainly disagree with your assertion in the thread title that it is a bug, while I am not a dev it seems to be working as intended.
I think Cloud is not looking at the whole picture and to why the frostfell harvests are far less than normal harvests: Normal Harvesting without "bountiful harvesting": Normally when we harvest common nodes, we draw 1-5 items per attempt. There are three allowed attrmpts per node. This allows for a max of 15 items our ponies might harvest per "node". Frostfell harvesting: One item per draw Three attempts per present. That is max of 3 harvests I will say that currently exactly 100 harvests are coming back per 2 hours of the Holiday ingredients, which seems about HALF of what should be? I always thought the harvesting pony hit 100 nodes per two hours and not just 100 attempts. If that is the case, we should be getting 200 frost fell harvests per 2 hours. However I think its 100 attempts rather than 100 nodes.
Definately better off harvesting yourself since you can bountiful harvest FF nodes and with a max of one item per 'normal' pull, bountiful harvest is more noticable.
I just finshed a T10 run with a pony - it returned 798 harvests. So on my sample of 1 pony run vs 2 goblins on lower tiers (both returned 618), I'd say the pony has more pulls - but for a more accurate comparison more tests would be needed and all run at the same tier I still think the holiday harvest bonus is a good one though.
The fact that the pony brings back a pretty even split of items, when nobody likely wants to craft a randomly-assigned grouping of individual frostfell items, makes the return feel even worse than it is. If you want to make a full set of blue clothes, or 20 candles, or whatever... you'll have to run your pony a dozen+ times to get enough of the one bit you need most of (blue dye, lump of wax). Compare that to trying to make a full suit of armor or 20 of anything from normal harvests, where one pony trip will give you what you need and then some (exception for some provisioner recipes.) If the devs have time to crank it up, that'd be cool. (It's not like there's a balance issue in piling up fluff items.) If not, the serious crafters can serious-harvest too.
I would like to see it cranked up a little, if possible. Harvesting in Frostfell is not my most favorite thing to do. Besides, I am all grown up now and have the most awesome Harvest Pony in the whole wide world! There will be an extra apple and salt lick for my sweet little pack pony if they do. Really, the Team has done an awesome job on all of it. This is not a whine, just a wish.
Well, you're not alone. That's one of the biggest passtimes for me in this game, picking anything and everything up off the ground.
The original point was, that this is the culmination of a long harvesting Signature questline which is basically the Epic for harvesters and should be as powerful as a player if not better. In a 2 hour casual stint (chatting, using powder room and getting coffee while I was at it) of harvesting in frostfell I was harvested over 1200 items. My pony should be able to match that, pure and simple.
This hasn't been the case since the pony was introduced. You could make the same chart with regular harvests and come up with the same ratio, but there's been no "bug" there. The pony is meant to be a supplement, nothing more. It isn't remotely epic (or even heroic). The devs were kind enough to add some nice bonuses to it. Be happy with that. -- I know I am. I don't have as much playtime as I used to and having some of this harvesting taken care of by my 5 ponies frees me up to do other things in the game. -- There's no need to ask for more, claiming there's something wrong with it. It comes off as deceptive (though no one is really fooled here) and greedy. Simply saying you'd like some more would've been enough and we would probably have a nicer discussion, but you have to go and add your little rationales and make up comparisons.
See if you get a similar ratio while harvesting T10 harvests (or whatever tier your highest level adventurer character is at), then send the pony out for the same tier and compare those harvests. Even though you'll have to avoid mobs, you'll probably find that you still bring home more than the pony - by a considerable margin. (At least, that is how it works for me when I go out just to harvest - which, admittedly, is rarely, since I normally incorporate harvesting into whatever other activity I am performing.).
