Mechanics of "Scarce" Resources Tested (or, why the beta economy is a mess)

In Development WoW: Forever Beta Discussion
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Against my better judgement I subjected myself to around 20 hours of testing related to gathering professions and scarce materials over the last few days, mainly to figure out why attempting to craft a set of Stormrider Leather for my shaman was going to cost over a hundred gold. I did an absolutely insane amount of skinning and a fairly large amount of herbing across a variety of characters leveled 1 to 30. I did not test mining at all and invite others to do the same.

My understanding of how Tier 1 scarce materials (Pristine Leather/Frilled Lichen/ probably Pyrite also) work is now the following:

Pristine Leather - Can only be produced by a level 1 to 25 character skinning a level 10 to 25 mob.
Edit: 10/15 additional testing suggests I was wrong about the “mob can’t be grey” part that was previously here.
Frilled Lichen - Can only be produced by a level 1 to 25 character picking the relevant herbs (Earthroot/Mageroyal/Briarthorn/Bruiseweed/a few others)

I am not 100% sure about the level 25 cutoff, I need to push a few more alts to 26-27 and maybe torture myself some more. I am 99-100% sure that level 30s can’t gather these items though.

In short, as they’re currently implemented, gathering these materials relies on lowbies, and after Forever has been out for a while, high level players will likely find it more practical to buy them from the black market vendor. Whether this is the intended economic gameplay loop for these items I have no idea.

For the most part these items are used in level 10-40 gear and enchants, although there are a handful of datamined level 250-300 crafting recipes that need cerulean dye or pristine leather (runecloth bag, mooncloth reagent bag, invulnerable mail to name a few).

Testing methods:
-A level 30 char killed and skinned ~300 sunscale scytheclaws at the stolen silver quest area without getting a pristine leather. The same character then went to High Perch and killed wyverns, yielding a Pristine Hide (tier 2 scarce leather) in under 20 kills
-A level 22 char killed and skinned about 30 sunscale scytheclaws (green, about to turn grey) and got a Pristine Leather. The same char then killed around 200 of a variety of grey barrens wildlife (savannah prowlers, tallstriders, etc) without getting another pristine leather.
-A level 1 skyborne was leveled through Zephras with herbalism and skinning. By level 13 it had a full stack of Frilled Lichen by picking literally every single earthroot and mageroyal it saw while otherwise questing fairly normally.
-After I was out of quests, the same skyborne grinded on level 10-12 zephras beasts to the tune of about 200 kills without getting a Pristine Leather. I believe zephras mobs cannot drop Pristine Leather. It then went to crossroads and got a pristine leather before it found four zhevra hooves.
-A level 25 character dropped a profession and learned Herbalism, then ran around Durotar leveling it. It had a frilled lichen in its bags from Earthroot within about 10 earthroot nodes gathered.

Still to do: Let the level 25 character hit 26 and then do enough flower picking to see if 25 really is the cutoff.

In closing I would like to say please buff Ele before release.

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[Bug] Pristine Leather won't drop
Bountiful harvest bug, possibly?
Frilled lichen rarity
Pristine Leather Prices are out of control- What is going on?
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Super interested in this test. Yes this bug needs to be fixed if it is indeed level capped.

Everybody else has been reporting that frilled lichen is not dropping.

according to wowhead it also drops from kingsblood

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I assure you that Frilled Lichen drops all the damn time as long as you’re not trying to farm it on a level 30, and that level 25 is still a “safe” level. Ghost wolf powers activate.

I’m intentionally being ambivalent about whether or not any of this behavior is a bug and simply trying to describe it as it is. It’s entirely possible that the intended way for most of these materials to be “gathered” is by giving that vendor in the riverlands 5 gold a pop. I have no idea, I just wanted to spread understanding about how it’s working right now.

I leveled one of my 25’s to 26 and then did multiple laps around southern barrens picking flowers, probably 150 or so nodes yielded zero lichen, I’m sufficiently satisfied for myself that level 25 is the cutoff for gathering this item, if others want to gather more data points knock yourself out.

TLDR of the entire thread gathering frilled lichen and pristine leather is actually super easy: just don’t be level 30 (or 26, 27, 28, 29). Being a shaman or hunter probably also helps.

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TLDR: Around 2,000 skins before I found a singular Pristine Leather.

I leveled a rogue to 20 and maxed out skinning. Never saw a single Pristine Leather while playing it. I did NOT have Bountiful Harvest on this character. I also don’t have any specific stats for this character because I didn’t have any reason to track it at the time.
I leveled up a hunter originally with engineering/LW and swapped into Skinning when I noticed basically everything requires Pristine Leather so I couldn’t craft most things.
I watched a couple movies and skinned roughly 1,100 mobs on my hunter starting at level 25. This character DOES have Bountiful Harvest I didn’t start recording drops/kills until around the 500 mark. (I finished my first movie and still hadn’t gotten a Pristine Leather) Almost exclusively Ghostpaws, Ashenvale Bears and Shadowhorn Stags (levels 23-26) until I hit 27 then I moved onto Ghostpaw Alphas and Elder Stags (26-28)
I got 4x Pristine Hide on my my 207th and 208th recorded kill off of 2 level 28 Ghostpaw Alphas (2x each)
After getting Pristine Hide I assumed that meant level 28+ mobs might be too high level to drop Pristine Leather. I then moved into Southern Barrens and skinned Hecklefangs Stalkers, Stormhide and Greater Thunderhawks. I killed 304 mobs between the 3 of them and did not get a single Pristine Leather. I also did not find any Pristine Leather while leveling up skinning on this character.
I then decided I wanted to try a shaman and was now committed to finding my FIRST pristine leather. Again without Bountiful Harvest. At level 19 I sat around farming in Redridge and bonked Boars and Whelps. (85 of them total) and hit 20 and went back to Barrens. A combined 204 Thunderheads, Stormsnouts, Sunscale Raptors, Zhevras and Giraffes later I obtained my FIRST Pristine Leather from a level 19 Stormsnout.
This genuinely can not be the intended drop rate. Account wide I’ve had to have skinned between 1,800 and 2,000 mobs to find a singular Pristine Leather.
I did have around 20 mobs overall that I skinned and had absolutely nothing when skinned.

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I can confirm this. I did a similar test on the Lichen. My only question was whether I was out skilling the drop or out leveling.

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This system sounds like it was designed with botting in mind, as in being beneficial to the bots. If a key resource has level or skill limits, they will work a bot until it’s hit the limit and just delete and start over. It is unlikely that a player will actually do that. There will not be an endless stream of new players or leveling alts to supply the needs of the market. I guess this is why they created the black market vendor to just drain cash out the of the economy.

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This weekend, without knowing about this thread or the issue, i spent over 12 hours farming flowers on my 30. Not a single Lichen drop, with 5/5 legacy points into the 100% talent. After reading the thread went on my level 15 druid, and within 30 flowers, I already had 2, with 5/5 pts again. Good enough for me to never try it again on a lvl 30.

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im going to have to disagree almost entirely with your post.
im not sure you read my OG post that started this thread or my updates as the journey moved along, so i will recount everything ive learned

1 prior to the 10/8 patch. i farmed skinning, w/o bountiful harvest leveling 2 characters i farmed enough pristine leather to craft 4 sets of the 5 piece sets for my toons.
and gained enough to sell a full stack of pristine leather to get some gold to buy the cerulean dye which was already 1g a piece.
this was before the patch and pristine leather was dropping enough that i wasnt paying attention to if they stopped dropping 25-30 as i had already crafted 4 full sets of the new crafters gear. so i cant speak to that honestly, but i cant say its wrong as it was all abundantly dropping at the time prior tot he 10/8 patch.
but after 25 was when i saw my first pristine hide, this was before the patch and wasnt paying attention if i was getting leathers adn hides at the same time.

after the patch,
i have 3 toons i lvled to 20 all 3 w/ bountiful harvest from lvl 1 up, specifically to test this.
1 skinning/lw 1 skinning/herbalism, and a third mining.
1 specifically decided to test this because i stopped getting pristine leather all together with 3 skinning toons at the time.

through that entire time,

with 2 skinners lvl 1 to 20-150 skill, lvl 1 to 26-225 skill,
i collected exactly 3 pristine leather
th lvl 26 i lvled from 20-26 exclusively skinning mobs for 9+ hours and got 1 drop. i have no clue how many mobs i killed in that time

the herbalist lvl 20-120 skill,
got 6 lichen

the miner lvl 21 mining 75( i focused less on mining skill than lvling)
received 17 pyrite and a crap load of uncommon gemstones

as these items being used to craft lvl 10-40 gear, having the items not drop or skinable from grey mobs or afte lvl 25 makes zero sense as youd still reasonable need them for crafting teh lvl 25+ gear from the crafters.
having no means to collect them you would have to resort to the auction house.

with the current drop rates, there is no belief that you wont still need to farm these to get the crafting. especially since cerulean is used in multiple different crafting professions…

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“Against my better judgement” made me chortle out loud.

Been there, asking myself “why? Why am I doing this?” :grin:

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My beta main is a hunter, but I’ve been planning to main AND LEVEL as Ele on live, which with the current state of the beta is essentially spending 30 days planning the best way to jump head first in to a dumpster fire.

Currently the Stormrider Leather set requires you to gather around a stack of both Dye and Leather. I believe it and the Pristine tailoring set for priests are by far the most expensive level 20 crafted sets. They’re just completely out of line with everything else, especially the comparatively dirt cheap Brawlers leather.

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yeah, between the price of lichen/ cerulean dye, and the equal price of pristine leather after the 10/8 patch…
something happened and changed the drop rate for both from herbalism and skinning and the price has skyrocketed, somehow pyrite has somehow not been effected?

i swapped to totemic, still gives the spell power stam, but boosts dtr instead of int. but with the prohibitive costs it was more efficient to be able to test it out.

im lucky i built and tested out the stormrider set week1 before it became rediculous

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More testing: The level 30 went to Stonetalon and focused on killing and skinning exclusively green mobs, primarily level 23-25 Pridewing Wyverns, which per WoWhead data are at the upper bound of the level range to drop PL. Another sample of ~200 skins yielded zero Pristine Leathers. On at least four occasions I skinned a mob and was greeted with an empty loot window, which immediately closed. The body on the ground would then say “skinnable” on its tooltip but not allow me to actually skin it again. Perhaps scarce drops disappearing in to the aether? I don’t know.

Meanwhile the level 25 shaman continues to get Lichens like crazy.

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On 10/14/26, my level 25 rogue when from 0 - 150 skinning on grey-level mobs and I’ve looted a total of 9 pristine leather. I have 5/5 bountiful harvest and received x2 on 3 different occasions.

On 10/15/26, I’m still getting pristine leather off grey-level mobs. Most recently, I got x3 which has me wondering how Bountiful Harvest actually works. If I’m supposed to “discover” 100% more scarce resources, then should I be getting x6 total of a base of x3?

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Wow, you got Pristine Leather from gray mobs? I had read gray would not produce scarce materials. I wonder now if it means gray to kill, or gray to skill up the gathering profession?

Also, yours (Grymbane) is by far the best drop rate I’ve heard of for pristine leather since that patch. (I’ve had it drop once between 2 toons, and it wasn’t until one was level 21 with 175 skinning and hundreds and hundreds of skins. The other, level 17, has seen zero and has skinned hundreds as well. I’ve never skinned mobs gray to my class level or profession level …going to go try that for the heck of it, lol)

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I can also confirm that my level 25 rogue with 150 skinning is getting pristine leather drops off hyper spawn mobs in the Barrens at the Raptor Grounds from Sunscale Scytheclaws level 16-18 mobs.

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I herbed for an hour and a half on a 30 druid trying to get frilled lichen so i could make dye so my warlock could craft a robe that requires a STUPID amount (6) of the dyes. Not a single lichen.

I did not realize that there was a max level after which the lichen cannot be found at all.

How brain dead stupid.

So if we want to use a more established character to help one of our alts overcome a ridiculous crafting requirement, we simply CANNOT do it? Seriously that is dumb.

If this is some sort of anti bot farming thing, at least make lichen gathered after the level cap account bound on pickup instead of simply impossible to find.

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Wait, Lichen only drops from herbing up to level 25?

Well there goes my plan to level my druid to feed alchemy mats to my paladin so that they can actually make the gear they need. While this may be intended to counter botting, it feels more like punishing players for playing alts.

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This feels like a bug, because it has some very negative second-order effects if intended.

Remember, everyone reading this thread who has experienced this in-game, use the in-game bug reporter to report it.

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i.imgurcom /5IQslIb.png

It took over 300 skins but I was able to replicate Grym’s result and get a pristine leather on a level 23 killing a grey in the barrens. I’ve dropped the experience portion of the description from the first post.

The drop rate on this leather is just unfathomably awful on the current build, I believe it’s definitely gone down.

Still standing by the level 25 cap portion for now unless more counterexamples are located.

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My understanding about this is, It’s to help new players to the economy through the whole life cycle of the game. It likely will need a lot of tuning around drops rates but I don’t think its inherently bad for low levels to be able to make some kind of economic impact. Now will it lead to say people keeping level 25 alts around to farm these mats and make money. It might, dunno.

I think this is going to be one of those they will test it out and see how it plays out longer to see if it does what they expect it to do. It does always then value low levels working on their professions while they are low level instead of waiting til an epic mount.

I don’t expect the system to work great at the start and I expect them to make changes to it over time but that is the cost of having live balancing.