20 minutes? If only. It seems to take at least an hour to cycle through my 18 characters for this. It would be nice to be able to cycle through them all and get back to doing something else that quickly. They can produce a stack of 70-90 of a material (depends on how many get allowed 4-6 harvests instead of the usual 1-2 harvests) on each cycle like that though.

I don't typically do this to sell. I stockpile for my own crafting. It's a nice boost if I'm in short supply (compared to other stockpiled materials) of something specific though.

But about that comment about a run like this being worth 100k (give or take depending on exact yield and exact going rate for them on the GTN), I guess compare that with any max level character being able to run Black Hole, Section X, Oricon, etc. in about an hour per dailies area and pulling in roughly 100k for that hour of dailies. Run four dailies areas on one character or the same dailies area on four characters and that's around 400k in the time it will take to run out the timer on your legacy's exhaustion buffs. (And the characters running the dailies could scavenge some grade 6 / grade 9 stuff along the way on top of that.) I'm pretty sure dailies still have the edge there.

Even if someone can cycle through 16+ characters in less than half the time it always seems to take me to cycle through mine, they're still locked out of getting more than that out of the nodes for 4 hours. Your productivity for stronghold gathering is capped for that 4 hour window between when the first character in line harvests something until their exhaustion wears off.

20 minutes? If only.

That was just a guess. I've only got 8 characters, and I've never timed it. But figured about 15 seconds for switching characters, 15 seconds to put down and later pick up the utility decoration you're harvesting, 15 seconds per harvest, and you typically get 1 harvest (I've never gotten more than 4, so that would be a full minute of harvesting in a very rare case). So if you're being completely efficient, and you're standing right next to your legacy storage, so you can put stuff in as you're harvesting, you can probably average about a minute per character. But I tossed a little extra time just to be more realistic.

If I'm being honest, I don't know why it would take you an hour to cycle through 18 characters unless all of your characters are improbably lucky!

[Edit: Did it this morning--took me 9 minutes to harvest on 8 characters. I think I got about 14 harvests (got really lucky on one character). So figure average of (being generous) 4 materials per harvest = 56 materials, sell for, let's say, 1000 each, you can make 56k in less than 10 minutes (with some good luck). So...that's not bad, to be sure. Comparable to plowing through CZ-198 with a well-geared level 55 character.]

But about that comment about a run like this being worth 100k (give or take depending on exact yield and exact going rate for them on the GTN), I guess compare that with any max level character being able to run Black Hole, Section X, Oricon, etc. in about an hour per dailies area and pulling in roughly 100k for that hour of dailies. Run four dailies areas on one character or the same dailies area on four characters and that's around 400k in the time it will take to run out the timer on your legacy's exhaustion buffs. (And the characters running the dailies could scavenge some grade 6 / grade 9 stuff along the way on top of that.) I'm pretty sure dailies still have the edge there.

Yeah, maybe. Unless you really hate running dailies.

I'm comparing it with running, say, CZ-198 and Black Hole, which would take me about 25-30 minutes and probably earn me about...well...100k once all junk and loot is sold and mission rewards are claimed. Probably slightly more profitable, and certainly less of a hassle than trying to sell on the GTN. Plus, I'm getting reputation in some cases, and commendations, which can be turned into credits if you want to.

I agree that it's probably a better use of your time if you're just doing it for your own stockpile and what you're harvesting isn't something that has a lot of supply on the GTN (otherwise, you'd just run dailies and buy what you want and pocket the remaining credits, right?). E.g., I've used the color crystal utility decorations for this purpose. Much better than running the color crystal missions or buying on GTN, where supply and prices are super-erratic.

I think you should be guaranteed multiple pulls if you have max level in that harvesting skill (450 archaeology should be able to get 3 or 4 pulls per arch node).

Also, the resource cool down is completely pointless with the exhaustion debuff when you can just pick up the node and re-drop it to reset it.

on a side note, has anyone gotten more than 8 pulls on a node? I have gotten to 8 twice so far, but never higher.

I think you should be guaranteed multiple pulls if you have max level in that harvesting skill (450 archaeology should be able to get 3 or 4 pulls per arch node).

 

Also, the resource cool down is completely pointless with the exhaustion debuff when you can just pick up the node and re-drop it to reset it.

 

on a side note, has anyone gotten more than 8 pulls on a node? I have gotten to 8 twice so far, but never higher.

You would think so, wouldn't you? It doesn't seem like that has been the case for me though. Whether I get 1-2 pulls or 5-7 pulls seems to be completely independent of whether a character has the correct skill and whether that skill is 100 or 300 or 450 or whatever.

And I'll say again that I am absolutely certain now that there's no such thing as an internal cooldown on specific nodes. It's a bug caused by relogging into the same stronghold without logging into and loading in from somewhere else first each time. I have seen it happen every time I have had characters left logged out in the same stronghold and cycled through them to harvest nodes. It also happens when a friend who has keys on several characters is hanging around in there while I cycle through characters to harvest nodes, but aside from that I have never noticed a node become unclickable when characters were not left logged out in the same stronghold. When a node does bug out though, it is true that you can just pick it up and place it back down again to reset it.

Crafting nodes is a great idea. But I concur with the OP in that a blanket 4 hour CD for all conquest crafting nodes is overkill. 60-90 mins seems more reasonable.

Or they should limit the number of alts that can gather them....

Got 10 characters, I'm actually making an insane amount of credits just logging for 1-2 min on each of them every 4 hours and reselling the mats. If they lower it to 60-90 min guess I'd do over 5 mil a day without breaking a sweat...

They created a situation here, we'll see how it goes