Guild Wars 2

Hi, this post is just to mention something I noticed last night as I was browsing through the TP looking for a few upgrades and to see whether anybody has any insights they could add as to why this may be the case.

Firstly, some context. I was planning on taking my level 41 Guardian through AC story mode with a few friends and decided to see if I could pick up some upgrades to a) replace some low level items I still had, and b) pick up some extra toughness and vitality to improve my survivability in the dungeon I was about to attempt.

I first looked at some of my armor slots needing upgrading (shoulders, leggings, boots) and used the filters to look in the level 35 to level 40 range, and entered “Hearty” into the text box. Given I didn’t have a lot of money (having spent 1g at level 40 on the master trait book), the results were discouraging as the cheapest (usable) items for sale were slightly over 15 silver.

I then did a quick check for some weapons using the same filter & search criteria, and found both a sword and scepter upgrade for less than 40 copper each.

Now I have a basic understanding of supply and demand, but I’m trying to understand what is driving this discrepancy in pricing between armor and weapons. They were all of fine (blue) quality, and I realise the hearty affix would be in demand to some extent, but why would armor pieces command approximately 40 times the price of a weapon?

For the armor pieces, the quantity available for sale was in the 15+ range, but I was in a bit of a hurry at the time and didn’t notice how the quantity of weapons listed for sale.

I did place a buy order for some shoulders and noticed that the majority of the existing buy orders were in the 3-4 silver range. For this level of item, 3-4 silver would be a healthy profit above vendor price, 15+ silver is (IMO) overpriced for that level of item even taking the desirability of the stat affix into account.

So I guess I have 2 questions, is this part of a wider phenomenom, in that generally armor is priced more expensively than weapons on the TP (for desirable affixes at least)? Or is it possible that someone has found a small niche in the market where they can try to make some speculative gains? Sadly, it will be a few days before I have time to log in and get some more data to see if this was an isolated case or not.