Mining hat

[Emerald]

First off, let me say that after I read about the hat's effect, I got dizzy and threw up in the bathroom????Hooray~!

Anyway..

I mined around 1000 picks with the mining hat today (240 per run, plus the picks the quiz NPC gives you) to get a more thorough analysis of it before posting my thoughts and noticed absolutely no change whatsoever. After my first 2 runs I thought, "Oh, maybe it just keeps you from having a bad/unprofitable adventure", but then the next attempt was just that; no golds, cards, treasure boxes, etc--and no orichalcum ores during any of the runs. All other items seem to be at the same drop rate. At least half of the drops that you get are still stones, picks break at what seems to be the same level, and you pretty much get the same results as before.

The difference between lowering the fail rate for fishing and lowering the fail rate for mining is that it probably considers getting-a-stone a success--or, rather, it's more of a 'neutral' thing, since nothing's really lost or gained since you didn't break a pick and you're most likely NOT keeping the stone that you got (onto the floor it goes!)

I assume that your chance of breaking a pick/getting a stone is 50-60% with the hat on (I compared the numbers of items gained vs stones for that.) Your chances of not-getting-anything-fishing probably aren't at all proportionate to this; the end result of having a fishing hat is highly noticable while there's no real difference when using the mining hat because the chances of getting a stone are much higher.

Either way, if what you said is true, it's about the worst quest payoff in the game I THOUGHT something might've been wrong with it when the playtester crowd didn't bother trying to get it and nobody would explain what it really did. Although chances are there's nothing that's going to be done about it, I assumed it would have been more useful if the reverse effect was given--better chance of getting benign/rare items rather than lowering the chance of getting a stone/losing a pick, or even made losing-a-pick become a MUCH rarer occurrence, making it so that you would need to buy far fewer picks to get the same end result.

...Or that it would AT LEAST stop doing THIS so frequently ?_?



End result: I'm guessing the hat is good to have under the pretense that its effect could be reconsidered and changed/enhanced (It's a LOT harder to get than observation wings), but other than that it seems useless ??Fortunately I've recently job 70'd my whitesmith and got a lot of accumulated forging materials from trying to get this thing, so... making use of that stuff will be nice???D