Harvesting Nodes (split)

[elquar]

Hello

from my personal experience nodes did not have better drop rates. I am not sure about higher tier nodes but the stuff from level 1 to 27 tier I, II , III metal and mineral was always same drop rates to me.

[Starcrusher]

Don't forget that many of the fields were linked with another one so that you had to harvest one set of nodes to get another set to pop. If you just harvested one field, it would stop spawning until you found the linked field and harvested it.

[Ratief]

If you just harvested metal/stone then you probably didn't see the patterns. It was much easier to see the patterns with plants as they were normally in a little circles. Most of the time two circles would be linked, 10 total spawn points. There could only be 4 up at any one time. So if you skipped one node per round you could get them to spawn in a nice orderly pattern of one circle then the next, wait 30ish seconds and repeat (I always had bard speed). They would spawn in a FIFO pattern. The trick to fast harvesting was knowing which circles were linked. With metal/stone, you just have to know where all of the linked spawn points were.

Also, if you left a set of spawns, then after some time (maybe 15 minutes), one spawn (one of the ones not currently up) out of the set would change order (I'm pretty sure that it was only a single one). This caused you to have to fix your harvesting pattern, but it was much easier since only one would be out of order. I have no idea why they went to the trouble to do that, but that is how it worked. It was probably a bug that was never intended.

Edit: No nodes had a better change then any other. Most of the rares you would get were from the bonus chance that each hit had. IE, the more harvesters the better chance of getting a bonus rare/UR. Faster tools would help as well. I have no idea what that chance per hit was though.