FFXIV: What Does Luck of the Mountaineer Do?

Luck of the Mountaineer is a skill that’s used to discover hidden items that might be found in a gathering node. It can be learned by Miners at level 55 after completing the Job Quest “The Same Vein”.

Once you learn this action, you’ll find it isn’t like the others where you can use it right away. In order to activate this skill, you will first need to attain an HQ Chain of 2.

This means you’ll have to perform a high-quality gather three consecutive times before being able to use Luck of the Mountaineer.

What Are Hidden Items in FFXIV?

When you’re looking to gather items in FFXIV as either a miner or botanist, you would normally look that item up in your log. There, you can see what area and node type holds the item you are looking for.

For regular items, they will always show up in the particular node type they are listed under, as long as you’re in the correct area.

This is not the case for hidden items.

Take the Black Limestone for example. This is listed as a hidden item in your mining log and shows that it can be found in Level 50 Rocky Outcrops in the Quarterstone area of Western La Noscea.

When you get to the corresponding node in the right area, you’ll find that not all of them contain Black Limestones. In fact, in some cases, you may find hidden items to be quite elusive.

This is where Luck of the Mountaineer comes in handy. Using this action will reveal any possible hidden items in the node you’re currently gathering from.

Getting the HQ Chain

As we’ve mentioned earlier, the activation of Luck of the Mountaineer requires you to first attain an HQ chain of 2.

In other words, you would need to do a high-quality gather three times in a row.

When you open up your gathering UI, you’ll notice that each item found in the gathering node has two percentages displayed on it.

1. The number on top shows you the chance of successfully gathering that item
2. The number on the bottom indicates the chances of gathering high-quality

So how can you tell that you’ve succeeded in doing a high-quality gather?

Another thing indicated in your gathering UI is the number of items a node will yield each time you gather from it. You can find this on the lower-right corner of the item’s icon.

Gathering successfully will count towards your high-quality chain if you’re able to get more items indicated by this number. This is actually a recent change since patch 6.0 removed HQ raw materials from the game.

Your chances of getting a high-quality yield can be improved by raising your Perception stat. That being said, Gathering is just as important, as it affects the probability of successfully gathering from a node.

Both an unsuccessful gather attempt and a normal-quality yield will break your HQ chain.