I'm curious, though... as you farm, do the drops get more frequent? I'm not seeing that at all, but I'm wondering what people's experience is.
Do the cows and stuff in Poitain also drop leather (critter type mobs)? Just wondering, since I've finally started to do some gathering lately (apparently it's more gold per hour than doing faction quests in Khitai), but I've been pretty baffled as to how to find rough leather in Poitain.
Killed like 10 cows or so, haven't seen a drop yet.
I've seen no correlation between time spent and any improving chance for drops. It seems a straight random chance each kill.
However, I've found that cycling thru three groups of Beakers just inside the entrance of Purple Lotus Swamp can be efficient. (There's one group of seven to the left, one to the right and another straight on a ways.) they are easy to kill with a white hit from a bow, and by the time I've done the third group and run back to the first spawn area, the first group has respawned. I can easily get 20 rough and 6-8 brindled leather in 45 minutes - usually more.
Cows in Poitain are good too. As are deer and moose in Lachiesh Plains.
Any 'prey' animal tends to have just leather on their loot table, so when you see a bag/chest you will have leather.
At launch it was conventional wisdom that they were awful for leather drops, but sometime in the first year Funcom either made it so they dropped leather or corrected an error that was preventing them from dropping leather. But by the time of this change, people had gotten so used to them not being worth hunting that you'll still see people urge players to go after crocs in Khopshef, bears in Wild Lands, or Wolves in Connalls. Those animals do drop leather, but since you can also get 'small mangled fangs' and other vendor loot that pretty much aren't worth picking up, and because they aren't one shots and don't respawn quite as fast, the 'normal' mobs aren't quite as time-efficient.
The cows in Poitain are all I farm for rough/brindle and calloused/grained leather. There is an area on the east side about in the middle next to the guild city plot.
There are 2 levels, about 20 - 24 cows all together, by the time you work your way through on set and circle back the next set is starting to respawn.
I usually farm them every time go to gather any other materials, spend 15 - 25 minutes there while the other nodes populate and you can generally get 20 - 30 different leathers on bad days.
I also favor Lacheish plains goats, deers and mooses over cows in Poitain. The bag are not hidden by the dead corpses or the high aquilonian verdant grass =)
Generally speaking for hunting preys, you want to jump from one to the other riding on horse and shoot all you can (x-bow/bow). You dont need to get down of your horse to pick the bags, so that makes the hunting very fast.