You really focused it down right here. This is precisely the problem.
The variability we accept at launch should feel less variable after spending half a year filling up knowledge trees. The satisfaction of having filled up every available KP in the trees…should coincide with feeling we have much more control and much better return on time investment.
Farming an Arathor’s Spear node in the middle of Cinderbee country should not, at this point, give me a single and bronze-quality herb. Ever. It begins as a disappointment and ends as an annoyed resentment.
It ends badly, and it should end well.
The 3-star system of Legion and BfA worked much better. The stars were added to player skill, not to the gathering nodes. When picking anchorweed at 1-star, you got 1-3. At 2-star, you got 3-5. At 3-star, you got 5-7. Every time. It was reliable.
That reliability in return for time investment should be seen, felt, and apparent in the DF/TWW system, as well.
Sorry for the double-post. I just had one thought and then had a different one after.
This is fairly close to the comment I left in the beta forum back then. The way they have scaled things makes the difference too slow–it devalues skill.
For me, the stats make sense in terms of function, even if they are, imo, too wimpy. Blizz has this really cautious approach here that they need to rethink. In FFXIV, I can do things that have low chance. But I can use my abilities to make things have a higher chance. The chances aren’t like 1%, 2%… no, they are more like 80% 90%, so their effects are obvious and pronounced.
See, this is what I mean. The Razorstone is just 75 finesse. That’s 2.5% increase. Not even noticable. The enchant is 120 finesse, or a 4% increase. SO WIMPY. The blue tool is 329 finesse, or a 11% increase. (Ok, that’s fine). Each individually is incredibly small. You wouldn’t even notice the difference. You have to stack them to get their full effect (i.e. to notice the difference). But when you do stack them with herbalism, the effect is multiplied by procs.
You are missing out of over 50% of the yield by not using Truesight and overloads in mining.
https://imgur.com/a/gUDhssi
(Sorry can’t post pictures.) This is a pie chart breaking down the nodes I saw by type, for mining. The “chunks” are the mining nodes I get either from overloading the EZ-Mine or from Rich node procs (rare). The “camouflaged” are the hidden nodes that you can see with Truesight. You can see that those two represent 52% of all the nodes I see.
From a system design standpoint, the cumulative and multiplicative benefits from five buffs (even though none of them individually are larger than 11%) result in between a 50-100% increase in output for a given timer period is actually pretty decent.
From a human standpoint, the individual benefit of those buffs on each node leaves something to be desired because we like seeing a noticeable difference at each event (node mined or herbed) even if the long term benefit is more easily discerned.
We seem to be back to one of those Gordian human perspective issues. I can be satisfied seeing the gain over time, but I think a lot of people can’t because they don’t track the data in detailed enough fashion to really see the difference.
It would be interesting to see what the gathering system would look like if instead of small, multiplicative bonuses Blizzard changed it to bigger individual but smaller, probably more linear or logarithmic cumulative bonuses.
Interesting connection that I hadn’t thought about.
And true. When Season 2 hit, the first or second item I upgraded from 619 to 636 the difference was there without the meter but it wasn’t significant. By the fourth item upgraded, the difference was quite noticeable even without the meter.
But also true that if the individual upgrade was only from 619 to 623 it probably would not have stood out at all.
This is also why I am enjoying skinning a lot more this expansion. Sharpen your knife instantly give you 100% chance to get rare items (which also improves perception chance). Ability–>obvious effect. This is what they need to do to mulch.
Green thumb is the perfect candidate for herbalism’s version of sharpen knife. Using it prior to hitting a lush herb at the moment is like a big wet petard! Lots of anticipation for such often a let down.
Well, green thumb gives you another roll… It is like having another herb… so you could think of it as “make any regular herb lush”. … It’s just the way it is presented makes it seem unimpressive.
You’re forgetting that it takes more deftness points per % in War Within compared to DF – three times more, in fact! Thus, each KP spent on WW’s Mulching tree gives the same relative benefit that each KP spent on DF’s Conversance did.
so you could think of it as “make any regular herb lush”. … It’s just the way it is presented makes it seem unimpressive.