I got a foundation almost immediately on a character that was behind on skills, with no added bonuses.
I'm honestly starting to feel like crying. I am one of those weird folk that can harvest for hours and enjoy it and I still haven't seen one in Tier 11. But my Miss No'Harvest, who is finally doing her cloak quest, has harvested one in each and every lower tier. Also a well known member spent just 15 minutes harvesting stuff as he went about his business and received 3 of these elusive rares. Pure RNG at its most wicked.
We're at less than a month after a new expansion hit. Most people are still in the middle of leveling characters. This is taking longer than expected because SoE has made leveling much more difficult. Normal rare harvests are still extraordinarily expensive and fluxuate a great deal in supply and price. Markets are still in a very high demand status with players with very deep pockets flooding the market with tons of plat. And your going to claim the market has stabilized? Hardly. I will say that the supply of Transcendental materials is very small. It is a double whammy. Very few people focused on harvesting due to the rush to do everything else. Also the chance of getting a transcendental is roughly estimated to be 1/3rd of the chance to get a prismatic. And of course prismatics are drying up. Like I said before when the new material comes out the harvesters are going to move to the new materials. With the price of Lumium who would go back to harvesting T10? I agree that Transcendental materials are too rare, but I don't agree with your argument.
Meirril SOE may have taken the easy DM leveling away but they jacked up XP in the contested zones. It's no more difficult leveling then any other Xpac and at this point most people are long done with leveling. Unless your counting leveling alts which will vary drastically between players. Your own statement states part of the problems with this system. Why would people go back and harvest last tier nodes outside of the ridiculously rare chance of getting a Prismatic. Previous tier rares are near worthless. This is the problem with making a system of required harvesting and then putting out and expansion that overlaps two tiers. As far as the market goes it will never be stabilized. It will always fluctuate as it always has. One thing I can near guarantee is a continued drop in the value of the new rares. And unless SOE makes changes it will be cheaper to buy SC for plat for grandmasters then buying these rares. And as long as that stays status quo I see this as nothing more then a cash grab by SOE to boost SC card sales.
It is harder now, though. Where there was decent xp while solo, it's been hit with the general nerf bat, and although I never once leveled in a group in SS I did sometimes run around there to cap up the last bit of xp on a level. No longer an option. I can't solo HKC, so that's out....suggestions?
I'm level 99 now and I still haven't done the sig quest, I never did a DM or HKC, or any groups. I've leveled from harvesting and farming tradeskill books. :/ I have done some solo instances. At least I'll be 100 by the time I finish the sig quest I guess.
I'm still not moving my AA slider off of 100% until I'm at 350...can only get worse at 96. Glad you're zooming right along.
I know in Beta you could solo the new Sig line and be close to 99 by the end. Most people would finish it in 2-3 days depending on play time. Should be a bit easier now because Wiki has walkthroughs for it. After that there are a decent amount of addition side quests in the overland zones. Those should get you to 100 no problem. I saw in a later post your not max AA already. That will slow you down depending how many more AA you need. I'd guess they did all the new quest with the expectation people would already be maxed on AA's. Going 100% solo will make it take longer. Grouping will make it go much quicker. Especially if you can find a grind group for the low end Pirate contested zone. They really jacked up the XP in there. Loot from the named is disappointing but there's a whole other thread about that.
Yeah, I've been reading about...ding 96 and xp in a lot of zones drops to ridiculous amounts like 8xp per mob, so there's no way I'm leveling until that last 10AA is done, and I've 8 level 95s who need that last 10, heh. Edit: I do want to know what my options are once I do hit 350, though. I usually have my toons AA capped before they hit 90, but SoE added that last 10 as a bit of a surprise earlier this year....and the xp required to grind through them was/is an unpleasant amount.
In that case most definitely do not even think of hitting 96 until you max out their AA's lol. Grinding SS would be your best place to finish off those AA's in my opinion. And with the 96+ nerf to XP in there you should have little to no competition for grinding. If there is to many people there and you've finished the access quest line. The one that opens up the SS instances for you. The next best way is to grind the instances. The trick is to go in and clear all the trash but kill none of the named. You can go from one zone to the next. By the time you finish the third zones trash the 30 minute temp lock should reset or be close to resetting on the first. It was a great way to grind it out with zero competition.
The 30 minute timer doesn't matter much. Used Chelsith to cap out AA on a couple of toons when the 280/90 cap was first introduced, and by the time you cycle through 2 or 3, no matter how fast you are, the zone reset time has expired for the first one. It's what to "look" forward to "enjoying" once I have the AA slider finally unlocked that worries me. I keep looking for the carrot, but it seems to be so far ahead of me that it's out of view.
I finished the signature quest line and almost every side quest (stuck on the Bloody Kithkor quest since the ghosts won't spawn), and a few extra instances. I was still 98. Leveling after finishing the quests is really, really slow too.
So, is this new Tier 11 supposed to be lot more difficult than tier 10? I lost count on 700 and some regular rares, i'm propably between 900 and 1000 new rares, and not a single spellshard or foundation.
If averages and probability were rules instead of measures you would be due for a T11 spellshard right about now. As the way probabilities and statistics really work, by the time you get to 3000 T11 rares harvested you should have about 3 spellshards. Even then it really isn't enough harvesting to take into account a variance of +/-1.
I think harvesting for those is just a matter of luck, got some guild mates which get 1-3 foundation a day, with around 3-5 hours harvesting... well, if i do 3-5 hours harvesting, i gain 0 of those... But true, the skill can be linked somehow, im around 600 the others a bit over this.
I don't quite agree with you here. Due repetative and statistic nature of this, it's actually highly unlikely that some get 1-3 ultrarares per 4 hours while some of use goes several dozens of hours untouched. More rolls it includes, more to gauss it should go. Now, I'm at 731 skills, so it shouldn't be the problem. However, I'm not buying that chance to get ultrarare is 1/1000 of the chance getting a rare. If this is true, those 1-3 per few hours would just not exist, it would start to be likelyhood of winning lottery.
I´m not that deep into it, but if everytime you harvest, a dice will be roled, its just a mater of luck if you get one or not. That means, if you are lucky, the dice could (not must) be rolled right 2 times in a row. Just a matter of RNG.... aka luck. (Yes, the harvestskills will come into count somehow)
My main harvester is over 700 skill and has been doing some heavy harvesting recently (trying to gather 25 Lumium, focused harvesting) and has been doing light harvesting since launch. At least 80% of the harvesting I've done has been with this character. He has harvested absolutely zero Spellshards. My jeweler which is a low adventure level alt and doesn't have max harvesting skills (but does have all the common double harvest gear) went on a harvesting binge one night to try and cap her harvesting skills. She got a Transcendental. Point is extremely low odds = luck, and high harvesting skill doesn't really seem to matter. I'm not saying that double harvest matters that much either. The difference between 60 and 70 double harvest should be linear.
That would be true if dice would be rolled once. But dice is rolled tens of thousands of times, which changes the deal. Now it's not luck, it's a bell curve. RNG isn't quite what its usually thought of. Now, if we consider the number of people harvesting in eq2, and stories about alts without maxed out skill or best gear harvesting and getting "lucky". That might happen, if it would be simple roll. It's highly unlikely that it will happen in any given server at all. Odds of that less skilled having one with 100 harvest compared to skilled with 25000 harvests are so miniscule that there are no numbers in the standard deviation that far from the mean.
