Just how much does Treasure Hunter help anyway?

[Kronikle66]

About 2 and a half months ago, I made a commitment to raise up enough money to buy myself an Ochiudo's Kote for my Monk. After spending 2 months of farming without Treasure Hunter sub and only amassing 350k, I decided to level THF up to 15 to use that as my sub for the obvious Treasure Hunter.

When I first got it, I headed to Jugner forest for tigers. First drop, tiger fang and tiger hide. WHOA! Next 10 drops, nothing! Well, I wanted to move around, try different places.

South Gustaberg was next on my agenda for Vomp Hill for the beehive chips, wild onions, and goblin armor. First drop from a bee, beehive chip. Whoa! Next 20-30 bee/goblin drops, nothing! So I move around to a new place.

I then tried Passhow Marshland. First Goobbue kill, Tree Cutting and Boyhada Moss! WWHHOOAA! Nothing for the next 10, treant bulb, then nothing for another 10. I camped Jolly Green and fought him twice, both times he dropped nothing. Then I found an area where leeches and crawlers spawned almost infinitely. I swear, it took 50 kills for something, ANYTHING to drop! I spent the next several days there, usually 5 hours a day, only amassing 3 stacks of silk and beastmen blood. I fought Bloodpool Vorax 3 times, and all three times he didn't drop a damn thing. Not even fiend/beastmen blood. So today I woke up really early to see if my stuff sold. Silk did, but not beastmen blood, never beastmen blood!

So I tried to farm specifically for silk. Off to bubumiru. The drops were about 1/20. For every 20 kills of crawlers, 1 silk would drop.

My friend who was a RDM/BLM came into Passhow and got silk on her first crawler kill and beastmen blood on her second leech kill. No THF sub.

Does Treasure Hunter help at all? It doesn't seem like it. After spending the good majority of today farming in Bubumiru, I finally got 450,000 gil and went to go buy Ochiudo's Kote.

Price history went a little something like this:
450,000
450,000
451,436
450,000
450,000
450,000
450,000

That's what it was like this morning. This is what it's like now.
451,436
450,000
450,000
450,000
490,000
495,000
500,000

So now I'm going to have to farm another 50k. And I'm asking you if you feel having Treasure Hunter subbed is worth it. Everyone has been telling me how they can't farm without TH and how it's help has made them rich. I don't see it.

-Kronikle

[modnar]

I think TH does not kick in if you finish the mob with a spell or a weapon skill. only with a normal strike. I think its true. Anybody concure?

[Omena]

I think it's just bad luck. At least TH2 is a noticeable improvement over TH1. I haven't farmed without TH for ages so I don't remember how it was.

[METDeath]

Most of my /thf farming i go after gil drops, which are garunteed, and have a noticable increase with gil finder, unlike drop rates of items... silk, hides, what have you... and the amusing thing to me is, that the higher level mobs seem to have a lower drop rate than the lowbies, and i mean in the actuall kill/drop ratio, go farm saru for... 100 crawlers, then go hit bubu for 100 crawlers... notice a difference in threads? yeah....

[Kuy555]

Originally posted by METDeath
Most of my /thf farming i go after gil drops, which are garunteed, and have a noticable increase with gil finder, unlike drop rates of items... silk, hides, what have you... and the amusing thing to me is, that the higher level mobs seem to have a lower drop rate than the lowbies, and i mean in the actuall kill/drop ratio, go farm saru for... 100 crawlers, then go hit bubu for 100 crawlers... notice a difference in threads? yeah....

Yea here I agree. I hunted for hours in Sarutabaruta and got many silks w/e THF sub. A BLM in my LS was farming Crawlers in Buburimu at the same time and he told me he was getting more Silks in Buburimu than in Sarutabaruta so I went to Bubu. Well the spawntime is good there but I really didnt get a shit. Killed like 20 Crawler for 1 Silk -_-" But now I dont get as much Silks as then, some players told me that SE changed the droprate but I dont know.

[METDeath]

yeah, i am currently trying to level my cloth craft, and even farming as mnk/thf in bubu i still get less threads than farming as thf/rng in w saru, regardless of the time i spend in either place, i may try the ones in the maze, doing goblins as well, maybe the occasional scorpion

[Tetsura]

The higher the lvl gap over the monster the lower the drop rate. That is why you get so many drops in partys, and low lvl hunting.

get a job at 30 and go kill stuff, if your committed you can keep killing the job to keep it at 30 and drop rate high. Try this in Pashow and you wont be sorry you did.

[guyincorporated]

Originally posted by Tetsura
The higher the lvl gap over the monster the lower the drop rate. That is why you get so many drops in partys, and low lvl hunting.

I've never found this to be supported. The reason we get lots of drops with low level hunting is because we're killing a bunny every 30 seconds.

This is one of the parts of FFXI that really bugs me, actually. There is just too much uncertainty. How much does TH help? What affects steal? How is SA/TA damage calculated? Is there a damage cap on SA/TA? Does 2 dex really give 1 accuracy? What about agility and ranged damage? Dex and critical hit rates? How do we even know for SURE than agility affects Trick attack and dex -> Sneak attack? Whats the relationship between STR and attack? VIT & Defense? Does charisma affect provoke?

The community has educated guesses for each of these, and a number are assumed to be correct, but the vast majority of these guesses simply come from arbitrary observations and generalizations. Kinda sucks that the majority of those are questions that only thieves have to concern themselves with =/. About the only hard evidence we have is that one interview with the squeenix people (which I can't seem to find anymore - could someone link it up?)

[Ixaera]

At ~30 I was farming silks in bubu. I got a stack every 3 hours :/ (Of course, you must factor in that it takes a 30 thf more time to kill those crawlers than, say, a 30 drk.)

At 52 I went back for wind clusters, and farmed silk just in the meantime when there was no wind weather. I was out there for 2 hours and got a stack and a half.

I *really* think part of the reason a lot of people think TH isn't worth it is because they are expecting drops every fight/every other fight, and so on.

If you're fighting crawlers without TH and you get a drop 1/20, all that happens when you get TH is that your overall chances are increased. Even if TH were to double drop rate (which I doubt it does, probably more like a 1/3 increase at best), and the overall drop rate increases to 1/10, that doesn't mean you're going to get a drop once every ten fights. It means that each time a crawler corpse hits the soil, you have a 1 in 10 chance, instead of a 1 in 20. This, sadly, still means that you can go 20-30 fights without a drop if you get a bunch of bad rolls.

Another note: with VERY low drop rate creatures, TH is BARELY noticeable, if at all. It's the most noticeable on creatures that drop more frequently. On Raptors in Meriphataud, raptor skins drop pretty rarely. Just for the sake of a demonstration, let's pretend the base drop rate of a raptor is 2%. Also just for easy numbers, let's pretend TH doubles the drop rate (which it doesn't, I would bet). TH would theoretically (just with these play-numbers) make skin drop 4% of the time. Not much difference, there, is there? However, if you're farming a monster with a 25% drop rate, that's a very big difference.

My opinion based on farming experience: level difference between you and the mob doesn't appear to matter. Using ws or spells on the killing blow seems to matter, but is impossible to prove without some kind of word from SE.

[midnilux]

I think TH1 is crap.

I mean you gotta realize it's a level 15 passive, how long does it take to get to 15? If you have a friend or pay some 20-30 whm noob that thinks 10k is alot of money you can do it in a day without breaking a sweat.

That is why I think it sucks, I doubt the developers would make TH1 be the shit and double or triple droprates when all it takes is a few hours to get that ability and sub it on ur main. TH2 I dont know much about, all I know is that in PTs with THFs you can really see more stuff drop.

I think only crystal drop rates are dependant on level and signet, thats why you go slaughter a VT mandragora in a PT and you get 4 earth drops regularly, but you go solo one when your 20 levels higher and you dont get shit. However other drops like for example their mandragora buds, would have the same consistent droprate they did 20 levels earlier.

You get more conquest points per harder mob you fight, and you can extract crystals thanks to sgnet, and get conquest points thanks to signet, it all seems related so thats why I think for sure crystal drops depend on how a mob checks to you. Or it couold just be all the signets from 6 people in a pt make them drop more frequently, I dunno.

[neighbortaru]

you will never get crystals from any mob that checks as too weak. I hope you knew that :|

as for TH1 and TH2, there was a post way back where some JP LS (or board) ran a test to see the effectiveness of it. I'll see if i can find it again.

edit: ah! here it is http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/sho...880#post350880

[Omena]

Originally posted by midnilux
I think TH1 is crap.

I mean you gotta realize it's a level 15 passive, how long does it take to get to 15? If you have a friend or pay some 20-30 whm noob that thinks 10k is alot of money you can do it in a day without breaking a sweat.

That is why I think it sucks, I doubt the developers would make TH1 be the shit and double or triple droprates when all it takes is a few hours to get that ability and sub it on ur main. TH2 I dont know much about, all I know is that in PTs with THFs you can really see more stuff drop.

I think only crystal drop rates are dependant on level and signet, thats why you go slaughter a VT mandragora in a PT and you get 4 earth drops regularly, but you go solo one when your 20 levels higher and you dont get shit. However other drops like for example their mandragora buds, would have the same consistent droprate they did 20 levels earlier.

You get more conquest points per harder mob you fight, and you can extract crystals thanks to sgnet, and get conquest points thanks to signet, it all seems related so thats why I think for sure crystal drops depend on how a mob checks to you. Or it couold just be all the signets from 6 people in a pt make them drop more frequently, I dunno.

You get many crystals because there were multiple people with singet in the party, not because the mob conned VT.

[Huck]

I've farmed a lot.
I can probbaly credit 4,000,000g to small drops, less than 20k/ea

From my experience farming, from virtually any place in the game I can say this.

TH1 : Doubles the ammount of drops you get. (Excluding rare/ex)
Th2: Doubles the ammount of drops you get again. (Including rare/ex)

So with TH2 you get 4x the normal drops you would get with no TH, and 2x the rare/ex drops you would get with no TH.

Any item with "Treasure Hunter"+1 is refering to TH, not TH2.
So with an item like this, you would get 8x the normal drops, but still 2x the rare/ex's.

Multiple thf's do not double the drop rate of having one thf in the party. It's either diminished, or a 2nd TH does nothing.

[frogurtx]

Originally posted by neighbortaru
as for TH1 and TH2, there was a post way back where some JP LS (or board) ran a test to see the effectiveness of it. I'll see if i can find it again.

edit: ah! here it is http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/sho...880#post350880

This study does not take into consideration the phase of the moon. From what I hear, the closer you are to a full moon, the higher the drop rate you will have. Can anyone confirm this?

[Demon_of_Elru]

I've been farming Silk for days now in West Sabaruta. I was a level 19 Sam/War

Drop rate esstimate = 1 silk every 8 crawlers

Decided to Lvl Thf to 15 for Treasure Hunter. Now changed jobs to Lvl 34 War/ 15 Thf

Drop esstimate = 1 silk every 15-16 crawlers....

Totally frustrating..... I was better off WITHOUT treasure hunter. I have wasted SO many hours in that damned place now. *Note* This was AFTER the latest patch.

I believe one of these conclusions is the cause of the lower drop rate.

1. SE has put a limit to how many Silk drops in an area at anyone time (alot of people farming the same thing).

2. SE has limited the amount of drops gained by how many your character has (I had like 5 stacks of silk when farming with Treasure Hunter for the first time)

3. There is a difference in drop rate due to the difference in levels between the mob and the PC. (First time I was lvl 19 doing OK. Next I was lvl 34 doing really badly WITH treasure Hunter).


I seriously think Treasure Hunter II wont be effective on Silk Threads. I would be VERY suprised if the ratio droped to 1/7 or lower.

Also just to note, I did notice a difference in the amount of Beehive Chips dropped when using Treasure Hunter and not using Treasure Hunter.

2.5 stacks of Beehive Chips every stack of Silk with Treasure hunter as apposed to 1 stack of Beehive Chips and 1 Stack of silks without Treasure Hunter.

.....just my thoughts