Feedback: Sand & Water gathering

[Chaldor Itieles]

I'm leveling alchemist atm and i think the crafting sys for this school is one of the most complex in game, but the gathering of sand and water is one of the most boring things.
To stand 10min in front of a well and gathering wather up to an amount of 1000 were water cannot be processed directly for xp gain and the same with sand, where the xp for glass nudles or vials ar so low that u could say its near 0, is quite boring.

So to improve the alchemist craft a little and also turn the boring water & sand gathering a little more realistic, I thougt about a redesign of some little things:

First it would need a change for the bucket.
- undock the gathering with buckets from the normal skill based gathering
- I dont think its realistic to need a skill to get water into a bucket :P
- change the amount of ressource that will be gathered with buckets (in one animation) then as follows (linked to the tier of the bucket):
Tier 1: 10 units
Tier 2: 15 units
Tier 3: 25 units
Tier 4: 40 units
Tier 5: 60 units
Tier 6: 100 units

- then change the amount of sand and water needed for things:
f.ex.
- potions will always only need 1unit of water
- glass noudles need 2 units of sand and a glass vial only 1 noudle

So if u want to create 50 potions u need only to gather 25units water (1:2) which is done in Tier 3 with one hit at the well.
By this u save a lot boring time.

An other little remark for alchemist:
the creation of colors atm is linked to a millstone
but the ingredients are ground gems and water (nothing to ground again, but to mix)
It would make more sense to create colors out of these with a cauldron than a millstone.

Your opinions on this?

[Snowdonia Honeythorn]

As boring as it may seem, sand and water are the ONLY gatherable resources with no cap. This means that the full skill is used in regards to gathering these two resources. So, for example, at foraging or quarrying of 1000, your gathering rate for these two resources will be phenomenally more than you would gather any other T1 resource because all other T1 resources have a cap that only allows for so many resources to be gathered in a "hit." Yes, at low foraging/quarrying skill you're gonna gather low amounts of sand and water but so too will you with your scheme. I personally prefer the way it works now.

At max eff, a potion combine (which nets 2 potions) only takes 4 water. That's only 2 water per potion when broken down which makes sense and really isn't that bad a deal. Dyes are the same way. Compared to the other amounts of raw resources you need at max eff, you honestly don't need/use near as much water.

Sand on the otherhand, IMO, you need far too much of and I completely agree with that assessment. This is why I don't even use the sand piles and would rather go to Tazoon crater, spend the same amount of time gathering glass nodes and come back with nodules enough to make triple the vials. FAR too much sand is required in making nodules and the amount of nodules to create vials could also have their numbers cut.

On dyes, I've always seen this process as grinding the ground gems/metals even further into a very fine dye paste. I honestly don't see the sense of cooking ground gems and metals to extract the dye quality from them. Had they used organics for the dyes, I could see a caulron being used, but since it's mineral based, I think the millstone makes much sense.