Guild Wars 2

Cooking ingredients like sesame seeds, cloves, yams, coriander seeds seem disproportionately priced. In fact did you know that coriander seeds are more costly on the Trading post than Orichalcum Ore, a high end crafting material? In fact, coriander seeds are more valuable than any gathered crafting material in the game. The only base crafting item more valuable, is gossamer scraps, which cannot be gathered.

While yes, the fact that coriander seeds are used to craft the master unidentified gray dyes, a key reason for why all these herbs are higher priced than they should be is in the design of how they are gathered.

All of these herbs/roots are gathered from “mature herbs” or “varigated taproots” or similar plants that have a mixed loot table on them (compared to mining nodes that always say what they give). The problem is, that you can get lower level herbs from higher level nodes. When farming for Coriander you’ll often get garlic and peppercorn, 2 base cooking ingredients that you can get in 1-15 zones. This would be like farming an orichalcum ore node and getting copper ore.

The other problem as far as I know anyway, is that cooking ingredient nodes seem to be climate dependent. IE you can only get Coriander in tropical zones, most notably bloodtide coast.

Honestly I hope to see some changes to this system, most notably, I should not be looting garlic from level 45-55 nodes.

Herbs in general could use a look at. I’m noticing now that people are running out of their stashes of herbs/spices that were bought with karma in bulk and they’re needing to farm for them, which is extremely inconsistent considering how many ingredients share the same gathering nodes (even low levels garlic vanilla parsley thyme peppercorn all from the same nodes)… prices on the TP are going up. Something needs to be done. I’d prefer more wysiwyg spawns for herbs.