Using a prospector tool and gargoyle pickaxe (AKA Pickaxe of Excuvation) I get an even spread of ore. Just no Dull Copper that would be cured with eli spawn and 25 ore on them instead of 2.
Now add in some upgrade tools for lumberjacking. Add in rarewood treefolk spawning. Then it WOOD be worth while. Have one those crystals as loot on the rarewood treefolk some times. Don't forget to lvl 1 Tmaps as loot also for us that gather in scripter free paragon land. Frostwood Treefolk Paragon chest next to the stack of 25 frostwood logs. Call it the Reaper Hatchet and add to the Reaper loot like the garg pick on Stone Gargoyles. Magic resist skill training a pet can have a side bonus of hatchet looting.
Something like this, yes; At present what stops me mining is that, apart from the lack of uses for high end ingots, to get the Gargoyle Pick Axes means doing an entirely separate system, that is BODs, which adds even more time to the mining... When Gargoyles Picks are common on vendors I'd buy them all up, but the last vendor who stocked them that I know of went under a year ago; I looted alot from Idocapalooza recently too for this reason.
But when I
do have them, it's relatively easy to get even Valorite with an hours set up; mining along any mountain in one direction and marking all the locations will usually reveal maybe 5 Agapite spots, which can be boosted to Valorite. Using the gargoyle pick allows me to pull elementals which my Miner is combat capable enough to kill and get another 50 ingots (hopefully!) as well as the blackrock for imbuing which actually makes it profitable to do.
This was how I saved up about 20m to go towards buying my first dreamed of Rare, So that kind of system
can work, and in favour of the honest players against scripters, as you can't script the elementals turning up, or killing them when they do. They just need to make Gargoyle Pickaxes and Prospectors a purchasable, or maybe a faction reputation reward, instead of a BOD reward, so people who actually put honest time into mining can do so productively; otherwise what you are doing is multiplying one random fractional chance against the second random fractional chance, which due to simple basic maths, means you'll end up with a smaller, more time consuming figure.
The problems as mentioned with lumberjacking is twofold; you can't seem to get the higher board types anyway (My record is two bloodwood trees marked after chopping literally the entire Yew forest; I've never naturally found Frostwood, only looted it from idocs) and there's no way to manipulate the spawn to do so, with attended risk... so the above idea, which is transplanting mining mechanics into lumberjacking would be a good one. With the tweak of course that it shouldn't be tied to any form of BOD. Make it a heartwood reputation thing to buy the mystical wood transmuters in turn.
If I mentioned it would be a "miner" goldsink too, if you had to buy the items for even a tiny cost, instead of winning them in a free BOD lottery, do you think the devs will like the idea more?
