Blight Update 208 Comment

[Zanon]

I never thought it happens that dragons can gather wood. I am happy about this change, if you don't want to gather wood, just don't gather it. I love to help my biped friends with at least suppling them with the basic ressources if I can. I hope in the future fabrics will follow, and the crystals for the bipeds at least to gather.

Aye. I rp a lunus, but i do not let my rp interfere when my friends need help. Wood gathering is nothing bad. Lending a paw instead of just being lazy is fun.
Plus you might get paid !!! which is good for starting dragons.

[Akrion]

I'd still like to know how Dragons using ingenuity to gather wood compares to a biped gathering wood, how effective it is in comparison.

[AmonGwareth]

I'd still like to know how Dragons using ingenuity to gather wood compares to a biped gathering wood, how effective it is in comparison.

Its the same, but Dragons won't get any bonuses.

[Akrion]

Its the same, but Dragons won't get any bonuses.

What do you mean by bonuses, exactly? What I'm curious about is how well they will be able to harvest Yew and Thornwood compared to a biped. If they harvest anywhere close to 'just as well' then it may be ultimately pointless to harvest Thornwood as a biped. Dragons can get around faster, get around safer, fight more effectively, escape more effectively, carry more without compromising their armor (And just carry more period), and won't ever need to worry about bringing gear or tools with them so they can simply be in pure combat gear.

I hope that it wouldn't become a matter of a Biped player just hopping on a Dragon character to gather the upper tiers of wood, I know it will happen for lower tiers of wood. Dragons are just faster, and I'll probably not bother harvesting Cedar, Elm or Maple on Akrion and rather do it on Ikaron simply because of Dimensional pocket, flying, double speed scales, can deal with guarded spawns much better, etc.

[Sigi]

What do you mean by bonuses, exactly? What I'm curious about is how well they will be able to harvest Yew and Thornwood compared to a biped. If they harvest anywhere close to 'just as well' then it may be ultimately pointless to harvest Thornwood as a biped. Dragons can get around faster, get around safer, fight more effectively, escape more effectively, carry more without compromising their armor (And just carry more period), and won't ever need to worry about bringing gear or tools with them so they can simply be in pure combat gear.

I hope that it wouldn't become a matter of a Biped player just hopping on a Dragon character to gather the upper tiers of wood, I know it will happen for lower tiers of wood. Dragons are just faster, and I'll probably not bother harvesting Cedar, Elm or Maple on Akrion and rather do it on Ikaron simply because of Dimensional pocket, flying, double speed scales, can deal with guarded spawns much better, etc.

Isn't that allready the case for stone and ore and gems? And still bipeds are gathering their materials. And even if they would use their dragon what does it matter?

[Akrion]

Isn't that allready the case for stone and ore and gems? And still bipeds are gathering their materials. And even if they would use their dragon what does it matter?

At least these resources are used by both parties, and I don't really gather them with my biped. Swapping from Stone to Metal with Akrion I would need to go to my plot, drop off some tools, pick up other tools, swap crystals if I don't have dedicated crystals for every tool, change my armor, potentially change my jewelry, and run out to a the field.

Now, of course, Dragons would still need to swap their armor, but my point here is that just to change resources I need to either carry all my tools with me, or make a trip just to swap so I can gather or work with something different. Aside from that, if I want anywhere near the storage capacity of a Dragon with Dimensional Pocket I need cargo armor, which is terrible as far as armor is concerned. My crafting armor needs to be dedicated to both carrying and boosting craft skills. I can't have a good carrying capacity, a good armor rating, and good craft skills all at once unlike a Dragon. Nor can I have double speed techs. And if you use a two handed weapon? You have to swap in and out both your tool and your bag if you suddenly need to fight. A Dragon's gold rage will effective enough to not bother swapping out your tool claw.

Sure, I have Alacrity but Dragons also have it now, reducing further any reason for me to gather lower tiers as a Biped. So the only reason for me to gather with my biped and not my Dragon is because Bipeds can (if geared and skilled properly) gather the top tier resources, specifically tier 6, better than a Dragon ever could. But, if a Dragon can gather Thornwood with reasonable numbers becuse of Ingenuity, there would be no point to do that as a biped either. And of course there's the reasons I listed above in regards to protected spawns.

[Zanon]

At least these resources are used by both parties, and I don't really gather them with my biped. Swapping from Stone to Metal with Akrion I would need to go to my plot, drop off some tools, pick up other tools, swap crystals if I don't have dedicated crystals for every tool, change my armor, potentially change my jewelry, and run out to a the field.

Now, of course, Dragons would still need to swap their armor, but my point here is that just to change resources I need to either carry all my tools with me, or make a trip just to swap so I can gather or work with something different. Aside from that, if I want anywhere near the storage capacity of a Dragon with Dimensional Pocket I need cargo armor, which is terrible as far as armor is concerned. My crafting armor needs to be dedicated to both carrying and boosting craft skills. I can't have a good carrying capacity, a good armor rating, and good craft skills all at once unlike a Dragon. Nor can I have double speed techs. And if you use a two handed weapon? You have to swap in and out both your tool and your bag if you suddenly need to fight. A Dragon's gold rage will effective enough to not bother swapping out your tool claw.

Sure, I have Alacrity but Dragons also have it now, reducing further any reason for me to gather lower tiers as a Biped. So the only reason for me to gather with my biped and not my Dragon is because Bipeds can (if geared and skilled properly) gather the top tier resources, specifically tier 6, better than a Dragon ever could. But, if a Dragon can gather Thornwood with reasonable numbers becuse of Ingenuity, there would be no point to do that as a biped either. And of course there's the reasons I listed above in regards to protected spawns.

I bet its going to be like all the other things we are allowed to do. we do not get bonuses in terms of extra items, other tier items and the like. In the end due to the bonuses the biped will shine out gathering more in the long run

[Akrion]

I bet its going to be like all the other things we are allowed to do. we do not get bonuses in terms of extra items, other tier items and the like. In the end due to the bonuses the biped will shine out gathering more in the long run

Are you talking about the bonus 10 resouces you get on occasion? From my experience that makes very little difference in the long run, you can't rely on it in any way. The ability to transit between nodes quicker, fight off protected fields quicker, not die as easily from said fields, escape a dire situation with no more effort than pushing the 'fly up' button, in my opinion all far out weigh an occasional bonus 10 resources you would get as a biped.

[Shian]

And bipeds can craft T6 resources better than any dragon. Sounds like a pretty good reason to have both. Huzzah interdependence?

[Khalon]

I am a little concerned over the new change to dragons:



It's hard enough to get elm at places like Elmnic when there are 2 bipeds gathering logs on the map. IMHO, gathering elm takes twice as long as any of the other construction resources (bars, bricks, spools, even orbs) due to the amount of time spent chasing trees from field to field. And the respawn rate seems very low.

Are you going to increase the spawn rate in order to support the addition of dragon now gathering logs?

I'd imagine that any dragons you see gathering wood will be substituted in for a biped who would otherwise be gathering. Development Team, thank you very much for this change .

[Akrion]

And bipeds can craft T6 resources better than any dragon. Sounds like a pretty good reason to have both. Huzzah interdependence?

And what is T6 used for? Disks, packs, and top tier plot constructions. Compared to T5 which is Disks, packs, plots, armor, jewelry, spells, etc. I don't see much reason to have both at all.

I'm sorry but 'Interdependence' doesn't work in this regard, unless you can tell me just what T6 items a Biped can make that a Dragon could use, or for that regard, what a Dragon can make that a Biped could use. All I can think of is some food, then yet Confectioner is also the only class that has t6 tools and is somewhat unique from everything else. Also, considering how clear you made your stance regarding helping with other plot construction in Lovwyrm's thread, I don't feel 'plot construction' would be a valid reason either. All a Biped could do is gather anyway.

To me you're a biped, after leveling Miner and Gatherer to 100 (and trashing your ability to grind craft if you do it early) and can gather T6 faster than any Dragon (This isn't counting the schools you'd need to push to 100 to process it). Or you're a Dragon with 2 craft schools and can gather t1 to 5 better and more effectively than any Biped (Not counting the resouces that Dragons can't gather).

I feel I must point out, in response to the OP, that I also have had a terrible time with Elm back when I had to gather it. Just 1 building on the plot I had in Aiya required 30,000 logs at optimal, and it took me almost as long to gather the Elm I needed from Elmnic as it did gathering the ~200,000 sandstone slabs I needed from Parsinia. And Order is significantly smaller than Chaos, I can definitely see concern about Elm becoming even more annoying to gather.

[Takora Drakan]

I really don't see what you are complaining about Akrion. It's not like the economy will turn upside down because dragons can gather wood now. Because there is no friggin economy to begin with. If a dragon wants to supply a biped with wood, well who cares? That has been done since the very beginning of the game, but with other materials. I saw countless times where a ancient dragon dragged a disk full of ore/gems/stones/whatever to their biped friend, gave them the stuff that they can process and so easy level with that. And also the other way around.

See it from the other side, you can now hire flying sawmills that will sure be happy to fill up your silos with raw wood if you wave with a bit of hoard around.

[Akrion]

See it from the other side, you can now hire flying sawmills that will sure be happy to fill up your silos with raw wood if you wave with a bit of hoard around.

Hire them with hoard? Do people actually care about hoard? Me simply leveling Ikaron to 100 as a hatchling netted me with nearly 7 million hoard (not counting hoard lost from consistant gold rage use). Only other reasonable thing you could hire someone for is with money, which with the non-existant economy is pointless. Everything made all the more difficult with Order's population.

My problem with this is simply that the ingenuity could push a Dragon to be effective enough at gathering T6 to make gathering as a biped pointless, and potentially make already weak resource spawns even more strained, especially if it's proven effective enough to be worth while gathering to consign, and if a number of Dragons begin gathering from the Yew and Thornwood fields to consign the logs, it could make it significantly more dififcult on the bipeds that wish to gather said wood.

The amount of running you need to do to gather some tiers of wood is already crazy. The fact that the Elm spawn goes from Solitaire almost all the way to Arvus with most trees being roughly 50 to 90 meters from eachother, all of which are the equivilant of a small node, is just mental.

Hopefully it won't be too bad, but I can definitely see Dragons consigning wood because they'd be able to harvest it quite a bit faster, and that will only serve to make an already annoying job even more so. And ultimately, I see many people who have Dragon crafters just swapping to them to do wood harvesting now, which will make things worse still for those who choose only to play a biped.

I'm mostly thinking about Chaos, in this regard, simply because of population. I don't see this becoming much of an issue on Order, other then you'd just never find any dragon to hire ever. xD Just my own experience gathering wood tells me that more strain on tree spawns may hurt more than dragons gathering will help. Otherwise, on a purly mechanics level, Dragons just shouldn't be able to gather wood more effectively than a Biped. But that's just personal opinion.

[Takora Drakan]

Dragons don't gather better wood than bipeds. This is just another pointless dragon vs. biped debate. Bipeds get higher woodgathering skill because of their different schools they level to gather wood, and have those in the back up. An Ancient dragon has around 1000 base and 1122 current(depends on the individual dragon), and we don't have yet numbers from the blight dragons that can give accurate numbers.

Dragons are NOT faster than bipeds, a biped can easy outrun with the right gear a dragon, also they can gather more with the cargo gear if the have it on. It all depends on well equipped your biped and dragon is. If you feel so handicapped with your biped, then send your friggin dragon and see how much faster a biped speeds by and harvests the wood more effective.

And so what if dragons consi logs? Saves you the time and gives you a use for the worthless coin nowadays. But I doubt that it happens because most dragons wont waste their time with guess gathering something they might not even sell. Most times they will probably go out to help their friends and fill a silo with the requested ressource.

This whole argument is just freaking pointless. I never thought that there would a wood envy occur here because of something such minor.

Dragons can also gather clay, anyone complain? Nope.

[awdz]

I really don't see dragons being able to gather wood as anything but helpful.

From my experience, resource gathering is project-based; more help = project gets done faster. Competition for resources is not a big issue for any forest as far as I can tell, if folks consider alternatives to where they're accustomed to gathering. There are multiple sources for all lower tier trees.

Elmnic is great for elm but there's a huge area just outside Chiconis with walking trees you can summon to the woodcutter. Don't want to deal with them? Go south; just above South March there's another elm forest, no treants. I don't remember if the ruxus on Abandoned Isle interfere with gathering elm there or not.

Oak is around Mahagra and on Trandalar. Cedar is abundant on Spirit Isle, New Trismus and near Parsinia. Even maple, while one big forest, spans three different gathering/work areas.

Are those choices sometimes less convenient that what you planned? Perhaps. But there is no lack of materials, especially relative to the current active population likely to be gathering. And I don't think having folks revisit areas they have not been to in a while is a bad thing.

[Frith-Rae]

EH I see AKrion's point, or at least part of his point I think, in the statement of "interdependency" its a bit of a copout to me. Because he is right in that real interdependency involves much more than this.

But I also don't agree with the idea that its going to break, or really effect, much of anything. Which perhaps is a negative in that its not really giving us much interdependency, but its not hurting anything either and its more of a "Why not?".

I can't speak to the effect on spawns though, not having a biped I've never had to harvest trees before . Perhaps others who have both and play regularly can comment about wether the tree spawns in some instances are too quickly decimated (or rather, comment more on that as I see it as an issue that would need to be fixed).

[Creme]

Dragons are NOT faster than bipeds, a biped can easy outrun with the right gear a dragon, also they can gather more with the cargo gear if the have it on.

An Ancient has more carrying capacity than a biped with full cargo gear and using the same capacity crystals.

[Draeconis]

I kind of like the idea of dragons being able to harvest trees. Although, what I call harvesting (in my mind) is an ancient dragon ripping trees from the ground and dropping them on said woodworker. Guessing the graphics for that would be too difficult to do, though.

[Akrion]

Dragons don't gather better wood than bipeds. This is just another pointless dragon vs. biped debate. Bipeds get higher woodgathering skill because of their different schools they level to gather wood, and have those in the back up. An Ancient dragon has around 1000 base and 1122 current(depends on the individual dragon), and we don't have yet numbers from the blight dragons that can give accurate numbers.

Most of the craft schools will leave you with either 700 or 800 base logging, with only Gatherer allowing you to get 1100 base, which is a school typically taken when you're near grand master because these schools completely trash your ability to level other craft schools efficiently due to the salvaging skill. This would put a Dragon by default at a higher base skill than most bipeds would have.

And how does having multiple schools that provides logging matter in any way, shape, or form? Besides, the level of your gathering skill only matters for tier, so if Ingenuity is treated anywhere near equal to woodgathering, a max level crafter Dragon will harvest wood just as fast as any biped, because gathering rate caps. So it doesn't matter if a Biped has 1200 woodcutting, that biped will harvest T1 at the same rate they harvest T5. The only thing a Dragon having 1122 ingenuity would affect is the rate they harvest T6.

Dragons are NOT faster than bipeds, a biped can easy outrun with the right gear a dragon, also they can gather more with the cargo gear if the have it on. It all depends on well equipped your biped and dragon is. If you feel so handicapped with your biped, then send your friggin dragon and see how much faster a biped speeds by and harvests the wood more effective.

Dragons are not faster than bipeds? Really? An Ancient with double velocity scales and gift of velocity can easily match a Biped's running speed off road. Sure, Bipeds can throw on Swift Feet and Sprint but that's not a really good payoff.

A Dragon doesn't have to run around mountains or setscale over them, a Dragon doesn't have to follow the winding roads and make their way from point A to point B in a straight line. So a Dragon can get to and from a field much faster than any biped in just about any situation.

As for going between nodes, bipeds might have an edge on speed but Dragons definitely have the edge on capacity. And not only do they have the edge on capacity, they also have the edge on combat which doesn't affect their capacity any (As I said, cargo gear is terrible armor). A level 100 Dragon doesn't even need to worry about protected spawns save for some T6 named golems, which even then just fly up and you're fine. A Dragon can be swamped by mobs and just fly away to another part of the field or to wait for the mobs to split up so they can take them out and continue about their harvesting. A Biped in cargo gear and maybe 650 armor will either have to run far off the field until the mobs lose agro, or could very well just die on the spot and have to run back out to the field.

And so what if dragons consi logs? Saves you the time and gives you a use for the worthless coin nowadays.

My point was that if it happened then it would put further strain on the fields.

This whole argument is just freaking pointless. I never thought that there would a wood envy occur here because of something such minor.

Dragons can also gather clay, anyone complain? Nope.

And I assure you that there would be Dragon players that would complain if Bipeds were able to harvest crystal, or if Bipeds were given access to the resource fields on Drakul.

I'm saying that I hope it doesn't become more worth while to gather wood as a Dragon, and that I see the concerns of the OP, and arguing why Dragons as a whole are more efficient at harvesting, especially when it comes to protected spawns.

[Shian]

Let me see if I get this right... you're worried about dragons holding a monopoly on wood? By.. selling it for coin and having to pay the biggest currency in this game?

That's the weakest argument I've ever heard. If nothing else, this might create an economy though I doubt anyone would pay that kind of currency.

Hey, can we have bipeds gather crystal now please? I'd LOVE for them to spend the time to gather it, not be able to use the raw resource, and as a consequence have to sell it. That's hours less time I have to spend gathering it.

As for the faster argument, Knossos can out gather Shian any day of the week on almost any resource. The exception would be T6 crystal because of the mountain its in, but that's irrelevant.