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Apothecary Bottleneck
Rhyot
Bloodloch
Apothecary
======================
- [2681] Decreased reset time on crystalline entities in the Fractal Bloom to ~8 minutes,
down from 1 hour.
- [2681] Mugyiks can now be found in the Northern Tundra (previously only Western),
increasing the total available.
- [2681] The amount of wings dragonflies can give has been increased in range to 2-4, up
from 1-4.
I don't really feel like this addresses the difficulty of Apothecary. While it is a nice change for crystalline entities (powder which is only used in mana), Mugyiks (frost and soothing), Dragonfly wings (levitation)... it doesn't exactly fix the underlying issue that Apothecary holds. The underlying issue is the limitation of mobs.
Right now, it takes ages to fill up one's cache due to the severe lack of VERY SPECIFIC mobs. There are 10 boars in aetolia.. 4 in Ollin, 6 you have to search for throughout Three Widows, and 3 in Aureliana that you have to search for. There are only about 8 mesia birds between Western and Eastern Itzatl and you have to run the entire forest to find them. Mugyiks, dragonflies... Both are severely limited to less than 10 mobs each. There are only 10 stags in the game, all located near Duiran. Snakes are probably the easiest thing to get for skins and oils because you have an entire bashing area DEDICATED to snakes, not to mention the Mhojave and Tcanna snakes. And these are just the ones that I personally hunt for on a consistent basis. Overall, the trend for Apothecary is nothing but a massive headache and pain in the ass for anyone who was stupid enough to invest in it.
On top of the severely limited mobs, every Apothecary user has to hunt these insanely limited resources. Sure, theres a respawn time of like 10-15 minutes, but thats 10-15 minutes that we have to wait, hoping that some other Apothecary user doesnt end up needing the same items. Tap this onto the fact that you can barely get anything when collecting... Usually anywhere from 1-10 pieces per mob... If you're lucky.
Now compare this to Herbalism. You need yarrow? Walk into literally any forest room and you can get 30-40 of them. How many forest rooms are there?? HUNDREDS!!! W/E Itzatl, W/E Ithmia, Tcanna. Just to name a few places. Sure, you have to compete with other people for herbs too, but there is literally hundreds of forest rooms for herbs. Same with water rooms, plains, underground, insert environment type here rooms. There is never a time where you wont be able to find herbs, whereas with Apothecary someone might have just cleared out the mobs and now you have to wait and compete with them for resources. Herbalism is the quickest and easiest thing to spend minutes gathering supplies. So why is Apothecary so time consuming, demanding, and absurdly limited??
As such, I propose the four possible solutions:
1) Make Apothecary similar to Reanimation. If the corpse is male, you get testicles. If the corpse is an avian type, you get wings. If the corpse has horn, you get horn pieces. All corpses can give bones. If it has a tail, you get tails. I think you get the idea.
2) Increase the sheer number of mobs for each type. There is no reason why there should only be 6-10 mobs of each type that is required to harvest resources. Apothecary users shouldnt be pulling their hair from their heads to supply their cities with curatives. Make all these limited mobs up to around 40 or so, until they are not so limited.
3) Change the way the artifact scalpel works by adding in the ability that it doubles the amount of items the Apothecary gets when they collect from a corpse.
4) Create a flat increase in how many pieces the Apothecary gets when they collect. Normally, people would get anywhere from 1-10 pieces of various items, 2-4 wings from dragonflies, or 2 legs for toads. Multiply everything by a base of 5.
There is absolutely no reason why Apothecary should be an overarching headache, while its counterpart of Herbalism is a breeze through the park.
======================
- [2681] Decreased reset time on crystalline entities in the Fractal Bloom to ~8 minutes,
down from 1 hour.
- [2681] Mugyiks can now be found in the Northern Tundra (previously only Western),
increasing the total available.
- [2681] The amount of wings dragonflies can give has been increased in range to 2-4, up
from 1-4.
I don't really feel like this addresses the difficulty of Apothecary. While it is a nice change for crystalline entities (powder which is only used in mana), Mugyiks (frost and soothing), Dragonfly wings (levitation)... it doesn't exactly fix the underlying issue that Apothecary holds. The underlying issue is the limitation of mobs.
Right now, it takes ages to fill up one's cache due to the severe lack of VERY SPECIFIC mobs. There are 10 boars in aetolia.. 4 in Ollin, 6 you have to search for throughout Three Widows, and 3 in Aureliana that you have to search for. There are only about 8 mesia birds between Western and Eastern Itzatl and you have to run the entire forest to find them. Mugyiks, dragonflies... Both are severely limited to less than 10 mobs each. There are only 10 stags in the game, all located near Duiran. Snakes are probably the easiest thing to get for skins and oils because you have an entire bashing area DEDICATED to snakes, not to mention the Mhojave and Tcanna snakes. And these are just the ones that I personally hunt for on a consistent basis. Overall, the trend for Apothecary is nothing but a massive headache and pain in the ass for anyone who was stupid enough to invest in it.
On top of the severely limited mobs, every Apothecary user has to hunt these insanely limited resources. Sure, theres a respawn time of like 10-15 minutes, but thats 10-15 minutes that we have to wait, hoping that some other Apothecary user doesnt end up needing the same items. Tap this onto the fact that you can barely get anything when collecting... Usually anywhere from 1-10 pieces per mob... If you're lucky.
Now compare this to Herbalism. You need yarrow? Walk into literally any forest room and you can get 30-40 of them. How many forest rooms are there?? HUNDREDS!!! W/E Itzatl, W/E Ithmia, Tcanna. Just to name a few places. Sure, you have to compete with other people for herbs too, but there is literally hundreds of forest rooms for herbs. Same with water rooms, plains, underground, insert environment type here rooms. There is never a time where you wont be able to find herbs, whereas with Apothecary someone might have just cleared out the mobs and now you have to wait and compete with them for resources. Herbalism is the quickest and easiest thing to spend minutes gathering supplies. So why is Apothecary so time consuming, demanding, and absurdly limited??
As such, I propose the four possible solutions:
1) Make Apothecary similar to Reanimation. If the corpse is male, you get testicles. If the corpse is an avian type, you get wings. If the corpse has horn, you get horn pieces. All corpses can give bones. If it has a tail, you get tails. I think you get the idea.
2) Increase the sheer number of mobs for each type. There is no reason why there should only be 6-10 mobs of each type that is required to harvest resources. Apothecary users shouldnt be pulling their hair from their heads to supply their cities with curatives. Make all these limited mobs up to around 40 or so, until they are not so limited.
3) Change the way the artifact scalpel works by adding in the ability that it doubles the amount of items the Apothecary gets when they collect from a corpse.
4) Create a flat increase in how many pieces the Apothecary gets when they collect. Normally, people would get anywhere from 1-10 pieces of various items, 2-4 wings from dragonflies, or 2 legs for toads. Multiply everything by a base of 5.
There is absolutely no reason why Apothecary should be an overarching headache, while its counterpart of Herbalism is a breeze through the park.
3
Comments
Even if you look at directory, there's 37 shops selling pills right now, with multiple in every city + Esterport. Is this really such a big problem?
Furthermore, basic curatives shouldn't be an economy, but that's just my opinion.
Herbalism is tied to 9 different areas, all of which have literally HUNDREDS of rooms to easily find herbs in... Forest, Grasslands, Desert, Swamp, Underground, Tundra, Mountains, Jungle, Valley. And in each room are 30-50 herbs of the various types.
With Apothecary, you have to run all over the game, find the specific target, kill it, harvest. Wash/rinse/repeat until you're waiting on the respawn. Which is usually about 10-15 minutes. Keep in mind, when you harvest the items, you might only get 1-10 pieces depending on what it is. There are only 6 dragonflies, and if RNG is nice to you, you'll get 24 wings. There's only 12 toads in Morass, so you'll only get 24 legs... then you have to wait on the respawns.
Apothecary is a time game where you have to not only fight against other people hunting the same pieces, but the respawn times as well. Herbalism doesn't have this bottleneck because there are LITERALLY HUNDREDS of rooms of each of the 9 various types of environments you have to harvest from.
"You aren't wielding anything in either hand.
You are holding:
"dragonfly145010" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly135226" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly144953" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly108932" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly144487" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly132561" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly106432" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly8577" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly175974" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly7311" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly283969" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly69462" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly283831" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly65434" the corpse of a dragonfly.
"dragonfly13966" the corpse of a dragonfly.
You are wearing:
You are holding 15 items."
there's also a lot of frogs you can also get legs from too, not just toads.
personally i've never had an issue with finding the mobs i want for apothecary. And i don't think of it as "a chore" but i try really hard to make sure no gameplay does to me and i step back from a mechanic the minute it becomes a chore or obligation rather.
apothecary fits really well with my char. can't wait for butchering! I do a lot of rping about it anyway. and i love getting youngsters involved too with bringing me corpses. helps them feel involved n they're mostly low level stuff so it's easy for em. I could count on my hand the amount of times i've gone out looking for an animal and it's not been there. So i just go for a different one, and by the time i've found some rats or something, then the stags i wanted will be back
I've never been a herbalist. and i know i'm a weirdo, but i -like- that it's an involved mechanic rather than something i just set up a script for and walk around areas auoting it. I'm not sure if it's meant to be a "mirrored" skill to herbalist, but if so it -is- unfair that one is simple and the other is more involved. Personally though, i'd rather the skills be totally different rather than the same code with a different overlay.
from a lore/rp side it makes perfect sense to me that gathering animal organs would be more labour intensive than picking herbs. it makes sense that herbs would grow together in patches, and that you could pick them all without resistance quickly and easily. but if you're after rats tails they are gonna skitter about, and need to be killed, and fight back.
I also don't agree that everything should give bones or things with wings should drop wings, from the rp/lore side. It's chinese-medicine stuff here. We're talking crushed up tiny bird bones, an orc femur would not have the same medical properties. it's bug wings, not the feathery wings of a toucan...
tldr: no problems with apothecary ratios here, but i am interested to know if it's meant to be a direct mirror to herbalism, as the two are drastically different in levels of input
Any mob you can get up to 10 pieces from (bone, feather, fat, scales, powder, horn, claw, heart, intestines, tooth) is actually a 5-10 range, not 1-10. Oil is 1 per snake, but -any- snake works (snakepit, along rivers, Enorian vermin), Wings are now 2-4 rather than 1-4 which is nice, frogs and toads count for toad legs (a change put in not long after Apothecary went live) and do give 2 apiece but a run up to Attica's lake has you good for a while.
I do wish some mobs were increased (looking at you, boars), but for the most part, I've never had -too- much of a problem hunting down what I need. The idea for arti scalpel to double collection rate would be nice though, I've never hit my cap ever.
Hi.
@Skiva Ok, so I stand corrected, there are 15 dragonflies that can be found. Maybe not all in Tasur'ke, but that still provides the point I'm trying to make. The Apothecary user has to run around a plethora of areas, go through dozens of rooms to find a single target in a single room to continue on this venture of Hide and Seek to get the corpses for materials to create elixirs.
If you truly wanted to go with a lore/rp bit, there was no real reason for Apothecary to be created in the first place. Concoctions (the skill that Herbalism replaced) covered everything: herb for cures (now pills) and the items needed for elixirs. It was all already in there. Apothecary was created as a replacement for Reanimation, however Reanimation was much more open in the corpses that could be used to create the curatives needed.
Quite often I have run into other Apothecary users who are going after stags, boars, mugyiks, beavers. Sometimes the snakepit is cleared, but generally I'll just go to Tcanna and kill the pythons and copperheads there. Overall, there is no reason that this should be a headache or something that takes 20 minutes to do for a single material when Herbalism takes 20 minutes to reach the daily cap for multiple materials.
the hide and seek is fun for me. or atleast enough of a change of pace from ylemming or bashing or running through the mines to seem refreshing.
The fact we HAVE to spend hours upon hours collecting materials AND play hide and seek is an absolute mindboggling experience that makes most Apothecary users bang their head into a wall. Yet when you compare this to Herbalism, it is such a different way of getting things. Herbalism is done in a matter of 10 minutes for the day due to reaching daily cap (even with the gloves). In 10 minutes, the Apothecary is still hunting down various mobs and collecting the materials, while also probably competing against other Apothecary users for such.
Please give us more boars! Please please!
As for time. It took me an irl month to gather 1k of each apothecary component, harvesting daily for my guild shop restock. My personal shop had to get neglected for a full month for me to do this.
It would be nice if we could figure out a way to cut this time sink down some.
This is thanks to fluidcaches being relatively recent compared to regular caches, which were always there. You need to go through more trouble to simply sell Apothecary goods. I'd love to see fluidcaches implemented in shops.
I get that it's not quite as efficient as herbalism, though. Sure, there is a respawn time, and the xp is negligent (without having certain costly ylem perks active, you get no xp from harvesting plants), but most people hunt for experience and levels, so younger people can be involved and engaged in killing things, so long as they have somewhere to go with the parts.
Perhaps it would be possible to install a person where people can take corpses for dissection? A place that, for the sake of fairness, would not allow a herbalist entry. That way, if you always come around when someone else has cleaned house, perhaps someone else is more lucky and can get parts for you?
Second, people don't get into Apothecary for experience gain. They do it to either have a half form of self sustaining or to make sure their cities have various elixirs for combat/PVE. However, it still needs to be looked at so that Apothecary can be as simple and not as time consuming as Herbalism.
i know everyone -assumes- they're meant to be on par for investment/output ratios, but I know one skill is older than the other, and new things are tried with new skills. So we could be wrong
Source: I was there. The event was at least a month long and brutal.
From reading this through, the information is bringing me toward the idea that that Herbalism needs to be made a bit tougher to even out with time investment/resource competition to bring it into level with all the other merch skills.
-Plants harvested down to 0? Well, now you have to wait at least a few days before you can harvest for that plant. Sorry. All plants shared across users of the game and don't repopulate quickly. (Yes, I recognize this is rare, but I -have- run into it before. I've gone for reishi and madder before and had a hard time getting more than maybe 20-30 of each at the time because it was all harvested out)
-Ash/ice expensive and make the sell price for pills high.
-You go through pills fairly quickly if you bash often.
-If you don't make with ash/ice, you get one pill per group of plants. So, you'd have to harvest even more plants for the freeness.
Apothecary downsides:
-Have to bash for the npcs, which is shared across all players. Reset times range from 10 to 30 minutes.
-Limited number of zones you can get the npcs from and limited in number in total npcs you can collect from.
-Gold/silver not the cheapest things.
-If you do make without gold/silver, you get one fill per set of animal parts. So, same as above.
On my end, while frustrating, I think they are fairly similar in their downsides. The advantage of apothecary is that if all the bodies are gone? Wait 10-30 minutes and they should be back again. For herbalism? If a lot of people are doing it, you can't immediately get your plants you need. They don't repopulate as quickly. I want to say a single plant in a room repopulates each day? Something like that? But at least we don't have to worry about snuffing out the plant entirely when we harvest it down to 0, which was the issue in old concoctions.
Downsides of other mercantile:
-Comms for forging can be very expensive and everything requires a lot of them. You cannot gather these commodities from anything but comm shops.
-Toxicology requires venom sacs, which can only be attained by certain npcs in certain frequencies.
-Enchantment is expensive. Their comms are a mixture of regular comms from comm shops and crushing gems.
All of them have their downsides, but at least the two big ones can be attained fairly quickly if you just want 'free'. Two of the other mercantile skills don't allow you to do that at all. Toxicology is probably the only 'unbalanced' one as far as gathering materials, since it's entirely free. But, you have to hope no one else went to kill all the venom sac npcs.
TDLR: I guess my point is that it is fairly balanced compared just to herbalism, even if it doesn't feel like it, but definitely kinder than some of the mercantile skills. If you give more to apothecary, like old reanimation, I do think it'd be fair to ask for that artifact to also work for toxicologists and their sac gathering. So, I'm not against the proposed updating of the artifact for apothecary to give more on pulling of parts, though all-in-all doesn't feel like it's necessary.
So I don't think you quite understand the difference between Herbalism and Apothecary.
While yes, madder is located in Valley/Grassland type areas (Mamashi and Liruma), those two areas have in total at least 100 rooms. I'm not sure what other valley/grassland areas are in the game as I'm not an explorer, but I did quickly look at my map and was able to see a large selection of rooms that would have madder. Reishi on the other hand is located in forest areas which there are at least a dozen of those types of areas.
Apothecary is limited to specific NPCs, which are limited in number, and limited in areas which you then have to search for. To put it in perspective, here's how Herbalism would be the same as Apothecary.
Madder can be collected in only Mamashi/Liruma, each room has 5-8 madder pieces, there's only 10 rooms that have madder in them, and they are constantly changing where they are at every respawn. Also, you have to wait at least 25 minutes before they respawn again and other people can find them first.
At some point, the sheer limitation of that would make Herbalists just as upset or irritated as an Apothecary user. That is what I think needs to change, because at this point, Herbalism doesn't have that limitation that Apothecary does and I don't feel that there should be a limitation on Apothecary.
Bashing, you can get those NPCs every 10-30 minutes as long as someone else hasn't killed them. And you can hunt them at any time 24/7. But, someone could still do much the same.
So, they're the same, just doesn't -seem- like it when you look at it room to npc totals. Timing and limitations wise, they are not that different.
went for dragonflies. Found all the ones I know of (my character is a scout, so she knows places)
24 bugs,
48 seconds to get 83 wings.
first bug killed at 31 past. running around attica like a fool till the first one respawns. it did at 40 past. Ima call that 10 mins.
they all "feel" quick. stupidly so, if i kill too many when i go to harvest they will be starting to decay. I'm betting all are on the 10 min tic apart from snakes. seen as they are a quest item and a bashing area, they seem to have a half-hour-ish respwan. ( i -only- hunt snakes in the snakepit, not the running around game)
these might seem like petty numbers. but when you're thinking that everything takes half an hour to spawn, and only finding a quarter of the animals out there that give the thing, i can see why you're frustrated.