Guild Wars 2

Am I missing something, or does this non-legendary currently cost around 700 gold to make?

I’ve been trying to farm Charged Lodestones for it for a while and 250 is just completely insane. This isn’t a long-term goal, this is a no-life goal. If I put in enough grinding to actually get it, I would hate this game by the time I actually went to use it.

I understand making special items rare, but man. Non-legendaries shouldn’t cost more than 100 gold to make, much less close to ten times that.

I really, really hope that the promised fix to the lodestone issue wasn’t FotM because prices for Charged Lodestones have gone up since its introduction, not down.

I can see you amended the gold cost from 1000 to 700.

Anyway, legendaries also have karma, wvw badges, map completion, 2x 400 crafts etc i.e. an added time element to them. A full completed legendary has roughly the same gold costs as these exotics but with the addition of the added time sinks I’ve mentioned, it can total hundreds of hours.

Infinite light meanwhile can be bought in a completed state for 700g – you can actually make it for closer to 500g if you invest 250 skill points and farm the ori yourself. These expensive exotics are alternatives to legendaries for people who want pretty skins but either do not like the legendary looks (e.g. necros and Bifrost) or are unwilling to put the time commitment in.

Specifically related to infinite light, it’s a very rare sword and only a handful of people have it in the entire game. The way to acquire these weapon is farming 100-200 gold then investing it in the TP to increase your money. That’s how 90% of people get these weapons (the other 10% buy gold). If you realistically want this and similar weapons you need to invest your gold more.

Should these exotics cost under 100g? I don;t think so, they’re there to provide people with rare skins and by attaching substantial gold costs to them they keep them rare. If you are unable to farm/ play the TP for gold then you either need to make this a very long term goal or look at alternative weapons.

I’m sorry that this sword appears unobtainable for you at the moment but I can’t see/ don;t think anything needs to be changed.

If vertical progression is where this game is headed, then some of the current exotics need their stats adjusted to account for the somewhat lengthy grind, otherwise people will skip them to go after a legendary and once again you get into the debate about this “time gap”.

Again this goes back to ascended being released way way way too early without proper planning. Either certain expensive/grindy exotic recipes need adjustment or they need to be bumped to ascended-level status.

Well, at beginning mats was cheap to get ( not mentioning cloning them with the TP) , that’s why who long ago abused of TP old price when people was ignorant about lode, now wield this weapon.
In the Kingdom of the Blind, the Man with One Eye Is King

I’m fully expecting ANet to upgrade some of these ultra-rare Exotics to Ascended status in the future.

Feel free to forget it, at all

Since this there is no stat difference and is purely cosmetic, the weapons don’t need to be changed.

I wrote a lengthy post but then my internet acted up and I lost it all.

In short:

-This is a bad trend to have for a casual/semi-casual oriented skin. I can’t speak for the developers but this to me is a medium-length goal. It doesn’t even have ascended stats.
-Not everyone can get a legendary, so people should be able to have goals that aren’t on the scale of a legendary grind-wise. 700g is a grind. No matter how you put it, it’s unhealthy.
-GW2Spidy shows Onyx and all other Lodestones around the same price as each other meanwhile Charged Lodestones are 50% more and sometimes more.
-Reason for Charged Lodestones price difference is not the fact that they’re rare (it might very well be), but it’s the fact that the prime Dungeon they drop from (CoE) is long, unrewarding, and hard. The risk(time risk) vs. reward is not there. Meanwhile places like TA and CoF are run a lot and the lodestones are priced as such.
-There is some demand for this, more than most lodestones, but I think it definitely comes down to the lack of supply due to the above bullet.
-Robert H. implied that they will be improving loot in harder dungeons like CoE which take a lot of time. I see that the prices on these will probably drop in the near future.

@Terra: Yeah – I amended it after checking the current prices. I figured it was better to give a closer estimate than to ballpark it. Realistically though, 700 and 1000 are about equally unimaginable to me, and that’s saying rather a lot because, while I don’t play nonstop, I do play a fair bit every day.

The issue I think is that, like legendaries, it isn’t hard to get, it’s just long to get because one of the materials is ridiculously scarce. It isn’t hard to farm 250 charged cores, it just takes about twelve solid days of playtime killing one or two particular groups of fairly boring enemies or a much longer amount of time running a fairly unrewarding dungeon. Either way – it’s pure grind and more grind than the other, similar items that take different cores.

The charged lodestones are considerably worse off in this regard than any of the others.

As for being between a normal exotic and a legendary, sure, that’s clearly the intent. But it’s also clear from every other similar weapon that doesn’t involve charged lodestones specifically that it isn’t necessarily intended to be this hard. And that makes sense – the ideal difficulty curve for goals like this is exponential, which is exactly how the other weapon skins are designed.

Edit: I’m also not sure how I feel about the idea that these should only be reasonably attainable through buying gold or investing in the TP. That doesn’t seem like a solution, that seems like a problem.

Yes, it would cost about 700g to make.

Crafting in GW2, in general, is a huge disappointment and a complete mess. Boring and grindy beyond belief. Compared to crafting legendaries (or anything else, for that matter) in GW2, WoW’s level 20 weapon quests (ex., “The Hand of the Light”) were a masterpiece.

I have to agree with everyone here. Farming these Lodestones are downright depressing. Out of the 8 total hours I spent killing Sparks and Air Elementals in Orr with full MF gear and jewelry, I managed to find 1 Lodestone.
The main dungeon it drops from, CoE, is incredibly tedious to play; Boss design is horrible and not fun to play at all. My entire guild got tired after 2 runs.
There has to be a fix or alternative ways to obtain the Lodestones, because 250 is a joke.

There is, fractals.

If you’re implying fractals is a good source of Charged Lodestones, I would have to disagree with you due to the varied number of stones you can get to drop from it. That and coupled with the fact that people don’t do CoE while doing fractals is making it hard to find this component.

yeah, but you can sell lodestones you don’t need and buy ones you need

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

There is, fractals.

Really? So which fractal reliably drops charged lodestones? And how can you ensure that you will get that specific fractal, and not a set of three different ones?

tristen.7684:

yeah, but you can sell lodestones you don’t need and buy ones you need

Which applies to any item in the game, no? You can sell any item you don’t need to buy the ones you need. The problem is when the ones “you don’t need” sell for 30 silver a piece while the ones you do need cost almost 3 gold, due to the disparity in their drop rate and the nonsensical material requirements for some recipes.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

There is, fractals.

Oh yes, forgot to mention that also. Thanks for reminding me.

But still, no.

Even if you can sell the lodestones you don’t need, other lodestones doesn’t cost as much as Charged lodestones, which doubles in price.
Currently, the prices for Charged Lodestones and Cores in the BLTP has skyrocketed.