it has come to my attention my clan and i have no idea how to farm effectivly (the harvesting thing) and wanted to know if anyone knew how to effectivly harvest. or even how to harvest really. we have never gotten the jist of it and are wondering if anyone knows how to farm effectivly.
can you mention what level character you are planning to do seeding with? i do seeds on my main sometimes, and also seed with a character that i delevel to 25ish, then manor back up to about 30.
MANOR FOR DUMMIES
step1: buy seeds from a manor manager that are about your level and have some type of reward you want. there are 2 rewards for each seed type, and sometimes all the castle owners have the reward set to type 1 or type 2, so it may be hard to turn it in for an "uncommon" reward type. example, i am level 27, red coda is level 15. ol mahum deserters are 23, and should be green to me, so i will be able to kill them fast, and if they turn blue to me there are plenty of slightly higher level ol mahums at abandoned camp i can seed. i look at the reward type, its set to reward type 1 in every terriory, meaning i may have problems trying to get something other than varnish from the fruit trade-in later. also make sure that there is a mob near the level of the seed in that area. do not buy coba (lvl 70+) seeds in guldio.
step2: congradulate yourself on succeding step1. you should always have in mind before you buy the seeds what mobs you will use them on, and what reward you want to get for the fruits later.
step3: look at crop buyback prices. different territories will give you more value for your fruits, always trade in seeds at the town that gives you the most value for them. this way, you will get the most materials for your effort. you may want to monitor prices for the crop buyback for a couple days to make sure that you are selling them at absolute peak value when you hand them in later.
step4: put the seed on your hotbar and use it on a mob. looks for a message that says if the seed is succesful or not. if its not successful, use the seed again. note that if a previous seed has already been successful, you will get the error message "seed has been sown" or something like that, so the game will not let you waste seeds on already-seeded mobs. i think this was a change from the C4 update.
step5: kill the mob. lots of different ways to do this. you can even do step4 while this step is in progress.
step6: use the harvester on the dead mob. if you loose target, you can hold shift and click on the mobs name to target it. when harvesting, you will sometimes fail, meaning you get no fruits. failure rate on white and blue mobs is 0%. failure rate on light blue mobs is significantly higher. the amount of fruits you will get is also based on mob hp. in general, x4 mobs yield x4 fruits. this is not of course completely accurrate for all situations and level combinations of seeds/mobs/player.
step7: take fruits to manor manager at 9pm EST. trade them in and get materials. if you are successful in trading the fruits in, skip the next step.
step8: if you cant trade in your fruits, the bots probably beat you to it. start up a new thread in the "i want a pony" forum on the boards, or be persistant and try again tomorrow. or pm MalineII and ask her what brand alarm clock is most L2 compatible. what seems to work best for me is to give all my fruits to an alt and log them off in the town i want to trade to. i then spam the window from 9:05 to 9:06 and sometimes i am graced with some chinese swear words that i didnt know.
ADVANCED MANOR
necros seem like good places to do seeding, but if you are going to be soloing its very hard to do without deleveling, or will be so slow it wont be worth it. the only effective way to manor at higher levels is to get a party of friends/clannies that need the same material, and split the fruits and costs of seeds with them. ussually i buy the seeds and split them up according to the amount of time people spent in party. i take note of how many fruits i have each time someone leaves/enters party and calculate a fair fruit distribution based on it. also, it is best to seed green mobs. my favourite party for manoring would be myself, a DD, a healer/buffer, and a BH. the healer/buffer recharges the BH for more spoils or saves us money with haste buff. the DD does not spam skills and drain all their mp in 2 seconds, and lets me take enough damage from the mobs so i can get into frenzy mode and wipe out the whole room, while the BH complains that we are killing mobs too fast and she cant spoil every mob :D
also, you want to get mobs that are slightly above the upper level limit of the seed. this will cause the seeding to fail sometimes, but will have no impact on the harvest fail rate. you may be wasting a few more seeds, but your overall return rate per minute will be higher, because it takes about the same time to kill the mob, whether you seed it once or twice, and seeds (for the most part) are dirt cheap. by "slightly above" i mean that the mob should be about 10 levels above the seed. but different seeds may not work outside of their level range in the same way. you get a fell for it after a while.