I think I stumbled upon a harvesting bug. For the Templar level 80 epic weapon you need to harvest 2 Smoldering Materials from Kunark. You can't trade them or buy them from the broker, you have to harvest them yourself. You can harvest them from any kind of node, I chose to mine for mine. My character only had 200 mining when I started. I wen't to Jarsath wastes to mine, more precisely, I wen't to Venril's Crown. It's a small hole in the ground filled with skeletons... and mining nodes. I started hacking away at both (My merc took care of the skellies as they conned green and blue). The first 140 skill-ups where pretty boring but went fairly fast. I thought 2 Smoldering materials would take about 1.3 seconds as they are fairly common. I was wrong. It could be that I was unlucky, and I don't know how many nodes I actually harvested, but my skill kept increasing and I now have 410 mining, and mining nodes in Kunark are now trivial. Smoldering Materials? None. Rares? Two, got them from getting 10 common + 1 rare on a harvest combined with a bountiful harvest proc. I had 409 mining when this happened. In the middle of all of this I did however manage to find a Sacred Foundation for level 70 GM spells. I think there might be a bug where if you have less then required skill to get rares from a node you have to relog once you get the required skill before you can actually start to get rares. Either that or I just had a one in (over) 70 harvests without a rare or uncommon drop.
Update: After a relog I kept whacking those nodes. After 51 nodes (~150 harvests) I got a rare (20 common +2 rare) and at 60 nodes (180 harvests) after the relog I got my two Smoldering Materials from the same harvest. 0% Rare Harvest 15% Bountiful Harvest No skill mods Maybe I was just unlucky. Materials harvested - 804 Ferrite Cluster, 777 Mineral Salt Loam, 375 Deklium Cluster, 255 Rough Kunzite. 2 Tynnonium Cluster (Rare), 2 Incarnadine Cluster (Rare), 1 Sacred Foundation (Fabled)
The higher your base harvesting skill is vs. the "minimum" skill to harvest that zone, the more likely you are to roill on the bonus table that has semi-rare stuff like imbuing materials and really rare stuff, like primordial fragments. According to Niami's The Node Knows article, your minimum harvesting skill for T8 has to be 340 to get to roll on the rare table. There's a lot of stuff that can help: Visionary Gi of the Ashen Artisan (+11 harvesting -- by which I mean "all harvesting skills") Visionary Earring of the Solstice (+23 harvesting) Cloak of the Harvester (+25 harvesting) Reinforced Very Light Dwarven Work Boots (+20 harvesting) Mark of the Far Seas (+10 harvesting) Crafter's Earring (+5 harvesting) Crafter's Toolbelt (+5 harvesting) Far Seas Pack Pegasus (+80 harvesting) Compact Sumac Harvesting Kit (+12% second harvest) Overclocked Automated Pickaxe (+20 Mining) Overclocked Automated Shears (+10 Gathering/Foresting) Overclocked Automated Watersafe Net (+10 Trapping/Fishing) I have 5 points in the Tradeskill AA "Ample Harvest" with a +15% chance to harvest a second time, and 5 points in "Trim Reaver" (has to be a typo for "Reaper") which is +1% to rare harvest chance. In the Far Seas Tradeskill AA, I have "Far Seas Harvest Technique", which grants mythical harvesting, and "Experienced Reaping", which gives +50 harvesting. If you tradeskill, every so often after getting a new crafted item from you, your Tradeskill Apprentice will give you a Potion of Bountiful Harvests that boosts chance to harvest rares by 2%. Also, do the Shipwrecked questline, and you will learn how to make Harvester's Balm, which allows you an additional 3% chance for a bountiful harvest.
Thanks Sigrdrifa, I already knew all of that, this is one of the few of my toons that's not a maxed out crafter/harvester, I just never thought the difference would be so huge.
