Has Harvesting Been Ninja Nerfed or Somehow Accidentally Broken?

Discussion in 'Tradeskills' started by Gregore, Aug 7, 2019.

  1. Gregore Active Member

    So I just spent a ridiculous amount of time effort, and plat upgrading my super harvester from 29% to 31% rare harvest and harvesting skills from the mid 1200's to a max of 1389 in mining. I'm getting way less rares now than I was before at 29% & like 1289 mining. Is anybody else noticing a lower rate of rares harvested? I even ran my ACT plug-in for harvesting for several hours today while going out to do about 124 harvest pulls at various harvesting skill increments to maybe see if I had broken something by getting my harvesting skills too high. The hours I put into this today failed to explain anything. What's going on with harvesting?
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  2. Mermut Well-Known Member

    I haven't noticed a decrease. The most important stat, for max rares per time, however. is bountiful harvest. Get that to 100 and you effectively double your rare chance.. because every harvest action becomes a double pull.
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  3. Gregore Active Member

    Yeah, bountiful harvest is at 104%, but I feel like I'm getting less rares, but don't have old harvesting parses to compare to my recent one.
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  4. Niami DenMother Well-Known Member

    Other folks have, in the past, claimed the same thing. However, none of them, to my knowledge, have provided substantial enough parses to compare the before and after.

    We don't know if there is some (accidental?) cap, after which your rares actually decrease, or if it just feels that way to several folks. There never was a formal response, though it sparked a lot of player comments on Discord several months ago.
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  5. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    Honestly, no matter what my Rare Harvest Chance SAYS it is, I end up with about a 10% actual rare harvest rate. I have no idea what the process flow is these days for how the back end computes harvest results. A looong time ago, Domino gave us an actual flowchart, but that was when you still had to have a certain numerical harvesting skill for a given zone, and before bountiful harvest and rare harvest chance gear was available.
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  6. Mermut Well-Known Member

    The %, when you calculate for yourself, should be on a per pull basis, not a quantity basis.
    Rares come as a single unit and the smallest non-rare pull is 2. If you calculate your rare % based on pure numbers, the results will never match your rare harvest chance 'stat' on your character sheet.
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  7. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    When you achieve enough pulls to be a reasonable statistical universe (say, 1,000+ pulls), the percentages for total rares received should increasingly approach the Rare Harvest Chance %. They don't do this. I needed 2,000 rares to make weapons for Greater Weapons Essences a couple of weeks ago, and I put in a lot of harvest time to get those rares. Comparing rares to pulls gave me about a 10% rare return rate. But no matter what I calculated against, I could not come up with a formula that matched my 24% Rare Harvest Chance on that toon.

    I do run the ACT harvesting plug in, so the numbers I'm seeing aren't anecdotal. I've posted them here in the past hoping some math genius would figure out how that RHC is really being applied. I asked the devs if they could explain how that RHC worked, and no one could explain.

    There's got to be some interaction with the harvesting skill for a given node and the RHC to determine which loot table you're rolling on. .. when it was still checking skill to determine if you could even harvest in a zone, once your skill became high enough, you had an increased chance of rolling on the bonus harvest loot table. I'm gonna say that it's unlikely that they'd completely redo the loot harvest mechanics, so the Rare Harvest Chance has to be an add on somewhere, and my guess is that it adds with harvest skill to determine which table you roll on. And inside that bonus loot table, the rare chance is probably 10%... that would explain why nothing I change moves my rare return rate from right around 10% of pulls.

    It would be REALLY NICE to know what the mechanic really is doing, because then you could determine whether it is actually worth it to add more levels to your harvesting familiar after you reach a skill level of X, or whatever.
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  8. Mermut Well-Known Member

    I'm not suggesting you're using anecdotal evidence, but the rare harvest chance is a chance, per pull, that you'll get a rare rather than a non-rare pull.
    A rare pull gives 1 rare.
    A non-rare pull gives 2, 7, 10, 13
    Going by straight rare/non-rare ratios, you will NEVER come up with the rare harvest chance on your character sheet. Even if all you got were '2' pulls, if you went strictly by the numbers of rares vs non-rares you'd get, at best, 1/2 the rare harvest chance on your character sheet. And that's also leaving out fish nodes, which have zero chance of rares. Also, a higher harvest skill increases the chances you'll get 10s and 13 non-rares from each pull.. further 'lowering' your rare rate if you go purely by number of rares vs number of non-rares.

    The rare chance is a per pull calculation. If you want to see how accurate the rare harvest chance is, you need to use the ACT plug-in and compare number of rares vs number of pulls, not number of non-rares.
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  9. Cyrrena Well-Known Member

    On Kaladim, I have noticed that I get better harvests if I do not use Sprocket's Blueprint Constructor. I will be getting pulls of 7 and 10. Then I notice that Sprocket's Blueprint Constructor has worn off and reuse it, and my pulls go down to mostly 1s, then the odd 7 here and there, and if I am going to pull a rare, I get a 10.

    After I noticed it the first time and thought I was imagining it. I tested it two more times and the pulls go down. I get the higher numbers when Sprocket's Blueprint Constructor is not being used.
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  10. Mermut Well-Known Member

    I got plenty of larger pulls (on Maj'dul) with the sprocket active just recently.
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  11. Gregore Active Member

    It's all more than a bit perplexing! LOL The conclusion that I came up with, from testing a range of harvesting skills in roughly 15 harvesting skill increments from 754 to 1011, doing an average of 124 pulls on nodes on 15 different test runs, is that there doesn't seem to be an increase or decrease of rares by being on the high, low, or middle of this harvesting skill spectrum. I ran out of time and energy to continue my testing any higher or lower on the harvesting skill spectrum, but remember my harvesting plug-in for ACT basically telling me the same thing at 1369 to 1389 as it did at these lower harvesting skills that I did test. I'm basically getting 37.5 rares every 124 pulls of nodes, and roughly 1 rare every 3 pulls. I was testing all this at 31% rare harvest, so the math confirms that I was getting the amount of rares that I should have for my rare harvesting percent. 124 pulls is a pretty small sample size though. I came up with 124 pulls because it's exactly half of my normal harvesting run I do in my favorite zone, and I didn't have time to put in the extra pulls of a full harvesting run, especially 15 different times.

    So what I did was just put on the gear I needed to get my bountiful harvest to 100% (had to go to 104 % to make the 100%). I then put all my regular adventure gear back on in all the other slots. I did put +15 harvesting skill white adorns on all of my bountiful harvest pieces of gear. I also have the KA TS mount with 80 harvesting skills, and specced for harvesting everywhere in AA's. This put me at 840 to 860 harvesting skills & 104% bountiful harvest, to go along with my 31% rare harvest (33% W/bountiful harvest POT). This set up was just as efficient at harvesting as my full harvesting skill set up, but also allows me to 1 or 2-shot any annoying trash mobs when FD is down. So if nothing else, I learned that higher skills don't mean more rares, and that I could put a lot of my adventure gear back on and be just as efficient at harvesting as I was in full TOV raid/harvesting gear set up W/max harvesting skill adornments.

    Lastly, I would like to say that I think harvesting may have been broken in a good way at times in the past, like when DBG raised the drop rate of planar energies (possibly breaking something else having to do with harvesting), because I had some amazing harvesting runs where it seemed like I was definitely getting way more than 1 rare every 3 pulls. I was getting 4 rares out of one node frequently, and even got 5 rares out of one node once. The last week or so the frequency of those awesome 4-rare pulls from a single node has seemed to drop significantly. I don't have anything to back this up other than the ridiculous amount of time I've spent harvesting this XPAC, and just having a feel for my norms. It is at least reassuring to confirm that I am at least getting the rares at roughly my rare harvest percent chance.

    A lot of time, & effort went into all this testing and posting it all here. I hope somebody else gets something out of this! LOL
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