The New Gathering Role

I decided to do a little gathering this morning because I ran low on two items. I make my gil in Final Fantasy XIV mostly by gathering and cooking. By doing some gathering before work, I hopefully have time to do some fun things in the evening. Apparently I didn't read the patch notes carefully enough, because upon gathering from my first bush, a tutorial pop-up appeared telling me about gathering roles.

The actions all gatherers can now use

Simply put, all gathering classes now share the basic gathering search abilities. Botanists can spot mining nodes, miners can find bushes and trees, and fishers can do both. Before the advent of the gathering role, players could do the same, but the system for doing so was clunky, and after putting the Truth abilities on my hotbars, I quite frankly ignored the system.

As a max level botanist, miner, and fisher, the two gathering role abilities I have on my gathering classes hotbars are Truth of Forest and Truth of Mountains. The abilities allow your character to detect unspoiled, legendary, and clouded nodes in the current zone. Those are special nodes usually worth more than the normal nodes and sometimes I stop what I'm doing to go gather from them. So my botanist always runs Truth of Mountains and my miner always runs Truth of Forests. When fishing, I should run both, but if I'm fishing, I'm either doing so to get particular fish, or to relax. I usually don't feel like rushing around.

Apparently, I'm not the only gatherer who didn't use the old system. The developers probably saw the usefulness of allowing gatherers the ability to see all the nodes, or just selected nodes, in an area. I can see wanting to run both Prospect (sees mining nodes) and Triangulate (sees botany nodes) when exploring a new area. I imagine the ability would also help when leveling gathering classes. 

Some might think a better way for searching for gathering nodes is to update the mini-map with new filters. But I'm wondering if the easier solution was to create the gathering role. Either way, searching for more than one gathering classes' nodes got a little easier in Patch 6.3.