Harvesting modifier gear utterly pointless - Official?

MrWolfie wrote:

No, Celena is a fae, no mining buff, innate or otherwise.
Here is her exact breakdown:
400 cap
cloak of harvester 25
boots from unrest 20 (this is a pattern drop you add to your dwarven work boots)
unicorn 48
earring from epic TS quest line 25
earring/belt set from TS crafting mission 10 (each piece in the set gives 5)
overclocked mining pick 20 (please note, this is the only overclocked tool that gives 20, the others give 10)
Total, 548 mining, 538 everything else. No offense, Meirril's numbers listed were not accurate for several of the pieces.
edit because I cant spell

feldon30 wrote:

Read the quote from Domino and read my post and you might understand why it is not "clearly broken" but is most likely working as intended. Current harvesting is 340 to 390 for the base table (based on gu37). With 540 skill you have an increase of 73.7% greater chance of using the bonus table than if you were at 400 (75% total). If the bonus table increase is .5% that means you will see a .369% inceased chance of getting a rare.
Just because you dont see the benefit you think you should see does not mean that the system is broken. It does mean that the +skill on the gear is of little use.

Sigrdrifa@Lucan DLere wrote:

Just remember that rares prices are based highly on demand as well and that demand is made much lower by increased in leveling speed and the heirloom tag on void shards. Low and Mid levels are so fast now that it is hard to justify buying new gear every ten levels. Things change a little in T8 but, why buy MC t8 when you can have your main feed your alt void shards?

There also seems to be a lower player population lately .. Which causes less rares to be harvested and less demand for gear.

thanks for the responses on how it effects my poor little low level crafters - at least its beneficial at that point..

Now I know just not to try and get the bonuses so much when I'm (finally) level 80...:/
Cuz I agree, that's sucky

Jesdyr@Unrest wrote:

Wow, that post is amazing. So you'll take any explanation no matter what? Read what you just wrote out loud and tell me you don't burst out laughing by the end.
If bringing your Harvesting from 400 to 540 through equipment upgrades only increases the chance of getting a rare by .369% isn't "broken", then what do you call it? Might as well change the +Harvesting skill to "+Does Nothing".

Sigrdrifa@Lucan DLere wrote:

If it was not intended for level 80 characters to be able to increase their Harvesting ability, then they should not have put +Harvesting on a bunch of items, allowing people to raise theirs to 500 and beyond. Adding a bunch of +Harvesting items and then saying "But we can't increase the actual chance of a rare by some REAL number like 15-30% (which is what one would expect being 140 points over the tier required to harvest a node!!!) because it will hurt the market" is trying to close the barn after the horses have all left.
When you are harvesting a level 400 node with 540 skill, it should be OBVIOUS that you are a better harvester. Less than 1% improvement is not statistically significant.

MrWolfie wrote:

If harvesting rates (commons vs rare) was flat across the level ranges, you might see this. But the common to rare rate is higher in the lower levels tapering up to the high levels.

I've parsed harvesting using the ACT plug-in, and there is absolutely no measurable effect on harvesting that I can see.
I've run multiple comparisons, and if you look at them and ask "Which one is with buffs and which one is without ?" you'd not be able to tell.
The RNG has such a large effect compared to the difference between the tables as to make it all completely random.
That's not to say that the harvest system is not buggy and/or has some features that Domino isn't telling us about. I'm convinced that sometimes it doesn't read your harvest skill in properly when you zone, so the effect is that you will never get a rare harvest. I've gone 2+ hours in a zone such as Ferrott without rares, even with all my skills 530+. Log out, come back and hey presto they start again. 30 mins with no rares is RNG. 2 Hours is a bug.
I'm not sure if there are bugs for certain classes, or just individual characters, but there's definately odd stuff still in this game. For similarity, what about the rare "Flawless" events when "legacy" crafting ? Not seen one in over 3 million arrows crafted on my Woodworker. Have had 1 a day for the past week on my Armorer. Once again, that's not RNG, that's a bug.
If somebody can show via ACT data that there is any sort of difference "with buffs" and "without buffs" then I'll gladly change my mind.
EDIT:
Just to mention, if you want to test then go harvest in a T1 zone with no harvest gear. Repeat with all your buffs. You're so far over cap even without any gear that the results should be near enough identical. Any difference you can see will be down to the RNG and not your gear. Once you can get both results nearly the same, then that's the number of harvests you need to use as a baseline before moving to run the same test at T8. It will be a lot.

feldon30 wrote:

It does something .. just not much. So little infact that it is obscured by the RNG. It is not broken since the system is working exactly as it was designed. And as I said the number is fake since we do not know the actual values of the list percentages. The greater the difference between the base and bonus tables the greater the effect of +skill gear. Do I think it is right that +skill gear has so little effect? No, I think it should be more usefull. However, this does not mean it is BROKEN.

With the introduction of TSO, there was a 2nd source of rares added to the game by way of TS instances. I would not put it past SoE to have reduced the rare rate slightly because of this. Only Domino know for sure and she doesnt seem to share as much info with us as she use to

Um... nobody's asked before?
No, nothing was changed about the rare rate with TSO.

/gives Domino cookies.

DominoDev wrote:

Ok .. How about this one .. Since you know the numbers, should there be a noticable difference bettwen the T8 base table and the T8 bonus table ? And have you actually tested the effect of +harvesting gear on T8 nodes (You have mentioned it is a simple command for you to simulate 1000s of pulls at once).

Oh and .. You're still our Fav dev !

DominoDev wrote:

Perhaps not but the prices for smoldering materials are through the roof because they are more difficult to find than they were in the past.

feldon30 wrote:

Well, as a monk who has done the math on the Thunderous Strike AA, I can tell you that adding 15% to a very small number is still a very small number, almost certainly less then 1%. Now if you mean that you should harvest rares an additional 15% of the time, I have to tell you that that's extremely crazy and would destroy the Tradeskill economy completely.
One the brightside, think of it in the opposite direction: all those times you harvested without super modifiers on, you weren't wasting your time. You had pretty much the same chance as always.

DominoDev wrote:

I agree with the OP. +harvesting is really useless in terms of how it affects what most of us would want it to affect. Despite other claims in this thread, other +skill bonuses do have a significant effect. But I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for a magic rare-giver-upper.

I've noticed the same thing with my harvesting setup as others in this thread: +harvesting skills do not significantly impact your harvesting results.
I have been using ACT to compare my results and this is the conclusion I reached.
It is very disheartening to have worked for so much +harvesting gear and have it do virtually nothing for me.
However, thank you for the clarification on drop rates, Domino.

Indeed only very large samples would show a difference between 0,02 and 0,01 percent. You may need 10 000 harvest trial to actually draw conclusions.

As I stated in my OP I'm not really looking for an increase in rare harvests per sé but I am glad to see that my theory, that it is a waste of time and energy to acquire +harvesting gear as it is effectively useless, appears to be the case.
The fact remains however that the RNG is at the root of many of the ills within EQ2. While I am prepared to to accept that SOE may well be able to prove that their generator is the best in the business (or not, whatever) the point is that RNGs are only going to be truly "random" over an infinite sample. Anything less and you will see bias. Unfortunately we won't be around long enough to see an infinite sample and as such I do believe that the RNG needs to "appear" random over a far shorter time frame, maybe an hour?

Holymoly@Runnyeye wrote:

I think a more evenly distrubted RNG over a typical play time sample is what people have been asking for since day #1 of the game. Yes keep it random, but have the randomness more or less distributed across the RNG range within a much smaller sample size.
We all know that the RNG isn't truely random (by that I mean you can predict the next number if you know the seed), but that doesn't mean it doesn't appear to be random and is unsuitable as far as game play is concerned.
Unfortunately creating an RNG that is "fair" over small samples isn't easily possible.
To do this you'd have to track the RNG for each person, and this would be a massive increase in processing requirements. You'd also then no longer have a true RNG, as you'd know that you would be guaranteed a certain number within the next number of rolls.
You'd then open up all sorts of weird exploits/strategies etc. whereby people would log off after getting "their share" of rares for that hour, knowing that there was no chance of getting any more. When would you reset the timer etc ?
I doubt there is anything that can be done to change the RNG in game, but certainly there are things that can be done to make the +harvest skill more useful.
I'd do this by applying an additional modifier based on your current skill level compared to the maximum skill level for the tier of your character (not the node). By using your tier rather than the node, this would stop any crazy mods being used if a T8 harvester hit a T1 zone. So you're base harvest is 400, your skill level is 480. You then have a "bonus" value of 80 to be applied in some way. Perhaps this bonus could simply be used when you harvest just 1 of an item, so give you a chance of making it 3 ?

It seems we are all pretty much in agreement that being over the level/skill cap for a lower tier will increase your chances of rares to a noticable degree.
We also seem to be agreeing that at level 80, with harvets skill capped, adding any extra +harvesting bonuses has no noticable effect to the amount of T8 rares you will pull. (There is much anecdotal evidence in this thread and others and my own parses show this)

So, we can see that +harvest gear will be usefull while leveling through.

It would be interesting to know what use the Devs intend from the +harvest skills on items such as the Earring of solstice, which you must be at cap (level 80 TS) to equip.