So, I really don't mind spending hours in a game gathering. The gathering loop is pretty rewarding, while also still being a bit RNGy. Not my favorite thing, but easy to feel like i make progress with something when i just want to do something mindless and be antisocial.
I do like the randomness of quality of gatherable. These being increased by artisanship cloathing and tool tiers is great. Node enhancements granting buff in the zone of influence is awesome. Weather artisan shirts providing buffs to enhance combat is a separate issue and a divisive one, that I'm not going to go into detail on here.
Pylons:
I do really wish Pylons were currently craftable in this current build. Fingers crossed they'll come back soon.
There was another related discussions about pylons being tradeable and gathering being enhanced by pylons.
-Tradeable?- I liked that they pylons were tradeable to help Arcane Engineers on the market place more.
-Pylon's quality and Spoils- It seems to me that the spoils and quantity are driven several factors: Gear (the perks on the gathering tool), Cloathing ( the artisanship profession's shirt/skivvies/toolbelt, the settlement's buffs… and then plyons. Gear is player dependent, settlement buff is zone dependent and the pylon would be something else- wide AoE effect… but really just reveals what is based on the player's activation of the tier of pylon (believe quality of pylon extends radius but does not increase quality of what is in the area). Area quality is dependent on what buffs are currently acting on the player (where you are, what you have equiped and have consumed [food buff]), not on the resources within the scanned area.
Gathering:
Having the pool of gathering only up to novice across all skills is frustrating. It's maddening to try to juggle buy orders and even advance processing and crafting professions beyond novice with gatherable skills gate-kept behind the promotion or demotion system. I see the benefit of selecting a more narrowed lane for gathering at a journeyman level and higher, but to have such a limitation on the pool of skills to apprentice, journeyman, master and grandmaster.
By the time most players get to an apprentice level, they're just getting started and begining to move out of a tier of novice resource gathering and still aren't usually able to even begin processing/crafting with any efficiency. My suggestion is that the floor should be raised to allow gathering up through the apprentice levels across all gathering professions without needing to promote.
These skills would be required to be promoted past journeyman and balanced among the processing/crafting profession planner (Thanks Ashes Codex!).
The appropriate gathering tools would still be required to collect those mats.
Processing and Crafting professions are not affected by this. This is solely for gathering materials in the wild.
I don't want Ashes identity to mirror that of something like New World where you can gather and craft anything without having to specialize and be thoughtful about how you're going to progress.
Bags & Resource Drop Rate on death:
It would be cool if apprentice and journeyman bag reduced the loss qty on death even greater (regardless of guild upgrade perk. Like 10-15% loss reduction on apprentice bags for that specifc resource in the bag on death. Journeyman gives 20-25%. Something where the final math would look like if you had 3 journeyman bags full of basalt and died, (without guild buffs) would've only have a 10% loss of basalt.
I would envision this working as if you were a Journeyman/Master/Grandmaster in a gathering skill, and had the equivilancy in bags AND your guild spec'd into Resource Drop Rate upgrade, you could retain 90% of your mats in those bags.
