Guild Wars 2

I recently just got my weapon smithing to 450 and i can finally start making ascended ingredients. The thing that stuck out to me like a sore thumb is that i can only make 1 elder spirit residue and one lump of mithrillium and have to wait 5 hours till i can make another two.

Other than being a huge inconvenience can someone explain to me why these are on cooldowns? At first i though it was something to do with selling them on the TP, but they are account bound so whats the deal?

One per day per account.

But why? Is it just meant to be time consuming?

As soon as you refine them, you can sell them on the tp. The 1 per day per account limit was introduced as a timegate for several reasons. It gave crafters the opportunity to make some decent gold when they sell it to people who would pay a premium to get their ascended gear faster than they can craft. Another reason was to limit consumption of the crafting materials. When ascended crafting went life, the crafting materials (wood, ore, cloth; leather not so much) all had a price spike. If there was no timegate on how much you could craft, that price spike would have been alot higher.
Ascended gear was also designed as a long term goal, so thats another reason for the timegate.

I can think of a few reasons for having time-gating for the first month or two when ascended came out (don’t consume every basic material in the game on day one, don’t cause too much havoc on the economy, let people who don’t want to make ascended equipment make a profit instead, people who want it RIGHT NOW need to pay more).
I can think of no reason to have it there months later, and from looking at celestial equipment, I’m guessing they’ll never remove it.

It is not unreasonable to begin the conversation of when this time gating might be removed (or altered to a lesser wait).

On one side people complain that rich players can buy anything they want on the tp and there should be account bound rewards in the game but when they introduce rewards and gear that can only be obtained by personal achievements, people complain that they cant sell it….

I’d also like to add that making a time-gated material TP-able completely obliterates above and beyond regular amounts of reasons to have that material be time-gated in the long term.

So you can make a profit selling them. Honestly I wish the timegate was longer so I could make more profit and eventually have my 500 huntsman pay itself off :P