Who Gets the Node in Forever
A gathering route pays by the hour, and the hour is decided by rules nobody writes down: who owns a node, who may take a skin off a corpse, and what the minimap highlight actually marks. Here is how those rules work and where they are still unconfirmed.
One node goes to one gatherer
A gathering node is not shared loot. The character who starts the cast and finishes it takes the whole node, and anyone else standing on the same flowers walks away with nothing. There is no partial credit and no second pass: the node is gone for everybody once it has been emptied. If the cast is broken by movement or by damage before it completes, the node is open again for whoever reacts first, which is usually the player already standing beside it.
What that costs a gatherer is rarely the node itself. It is the stretch of road walked to reach it, and that time is spent whether or not the cast lands. A route loses income in travel minutes rather than in missing stacks, which is why time spent on the road decides an evening more than the density of any single area. Two gatherers running the same loop in the same direction do not halve the yield; the one behind pays full travel for a fraction of the stops.
Running the loop against the crowd is the usual answer, and so is moving between copies of the world when a zone is busy, since how layering splits a zone sets how many people are competing for the same spawn points at the same moment. Neither habit changes the rule about who gets the node. Both only change how often you arrive second, which is the part of the loop you can actually plan around.
The skin belongs to whoever reaches the corpse
Skinning follows a corpse rather than a node, and that puts a second claim on the same kill. The kill decides who may loot the body; the hide is a separate step that happens after looting, and in the Classic line any skinner who reaches a looted corpse can take it. The player who spent the time and the mana on the mob has no further hold on the skin once the body is empty, which is where most of the complaint about stolen hides comes from.
The arithmetic is uneven rather than unfair. A skinner farming alone pays for the pull, the loot and the skinning cast; a skinner following somebody else's pulls pays only for the cast. Inside a party the order runs the other way: a corpse nobody loots cannot be skinned at all, so a group that ignores low-value loot blocks its own skinner. Hides taken from a party's kills are the version that comes up most often, because the loot setting and the skinning step interact.
For planning, leather is the one gathering product where another player can take the result of your work without ever touching a node. That is a reason to weigh a skinning route against demand for finished leather before committing an evening to it, and a reason to farm packs that nobody else is pulling rather than the convenient ones beside a road.
Tracking marks a node, it does not reserve one
The minimap highlight is a search tool. Herbalism and mining put their nodes on the minimap for anyone holding the skill, and the marker shows what exists rather than what is yours. Two herbalists on the same copy of a zone see the same dots in the same places, so tracking tends to concentrate traffic instead of spreading it: everybody is steered to the same spawn points by the same display, then the cast decides the rest.
In the Classic line a character carries one tracking type at a time, which forces a choice on anyone holding two gathering trades. A miner who is also a herbalist watches one and finds the other by eye, and that usually means one of the two trades is being run at half attention. It is one of the arguments for splitting trades across several characters rather than stacking both gathering skills on the same body.
Mobs sit under a different rule again, and it is easy to carry the wrong one across. A tagged mob belongs to whoever struck it first, while a node belongs to whoever finished the cast, so the race is decided at opposite ends of the action. Kill credit and respawn timers cover the mob side, including what happens when a camp is shared by more people than it supports.
What we have not seen confirmed for Forever
There is no Forever-specific documentation we can point to for any of this. Nothing published states how node credit, skinning rights or tracking slots behave on these realms, and the beta coverage we have read dealt with recipes, vendors and levelling rather than with gathering credit. Everything above is written as inherited Classic behaviour, which is the sensible default for a project built on that line, but inherited is not the same as confirmed.
The specific gaps that matter for planning are narrow. Whether an interrupted cast reopens the node for everyone immediately, whether a corpse becomes skinnable the moment the last item leaves it, and whether tracking is still limited to one type at a time. All three are testable in minutes with a friend on a live realm, and none of them are things we will state as fact until somebody has. If any of it turns out to work differently, the lines above get rewritten rather than quietly patched.
Questions
Two of us click the same herb at once. Who gets it?
Whoever's cast completes first takes the entire node, and the other player gets nothing at all. There is no split and no leftover, so the loser of that race has paid the travel time for a stop that returned nothing. If the winner's cast is interrupted by damage or movement before it finishes, the node becomes available again and the nearest player usually takes it.
Can another player skin a mob I killed?
In the Classic line, yes, once the corpse has been looted. Killing the mob decides who may loot it, but it does not reserve the hide, so a skinner who walks up afterwards can take the skin without having fought anything. We have not seen this confirmed specifically for Forever, so treat it as inherited behaviour rather than a documented rule.
Does the tracking highlight reserve a node for me?
No. Tracking shows nodes on the minimap to everyone who has the relevant gathering skill, and it makes no claim of any kind. Everybody with the same skill in the same copy of the zone sees the same markers, which means the highlight often routes several gatherers toward the same spawn rather than spreading them out.
Does switching layers change who owns a node?
No. The rule is identical in every copy of the world: the finished cast takes the node. What changes between copies is how many other gatherers are standing on your route at that moment, so moving affects how often you arrive second rather than what happens when you do.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site for the Classic line, where feature posts and patch notes for Forever are published — World of Warcraft Classic.
- The official Classic forums, where beta reports about gathering behaviour would surface first — Blizzard WoW forums.