Good morning. After reading through a few pages and a few vigorous google searches, I have come to the conclusion that if anyone is discussing the not-in-game materials yet, it is in closed session. So I wanted to speculate as to how and where we would go about finding the new materials, and how this may affect the market.
In an excellent thread a few days ago, Varonth outlined what we may need in basic materials: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Depressed-crafting-weapons-Wait-for-armor/first#post2898959
I think this is a very good guess, and it has in part fueled the spike in price of basic cloth both refined and unrefined, because as others have pointed out, they are different than most other basic mats in a few ways:
-No open world harvest
-A limited window for farming/salvage different tiers
-Used in ALL 3 “armor” crafting disciplines
-There are 6 pieces of armor that we wear, compared to a max 4 weapons at any given time
Thus, the same thing we are seeing now with prices of different tiers of mats will be increased quite a bit, with cloth taking the prize for most inflated.
I am (dangerously) assuming some parallels with the crafting process for weapons, but with a few key changes I will outline here:
First, we know that there will be T7 mats, the ecto-upgrade will be time-gated, like Mithrillium, the Spools of Silk weaving thread will require Ectos, bolts of silk (50), and most likely Thermos.
If you look at the ascended material section of your crafting bank, you will notice that those aren’t the only 2 unimplemented mats, with both 2 levels of Crystalline mats, and the Xunlai Electrum Ingots. Based on their location, the Crystalline Ore will most likely be a world drop of some sort, but I think they have their bases covered with the other 3 materials. So I believe there are 3 potential options:
1. Crystalline Ore will replace the Bloodstone glut in some fashion, most likely with RNG from individual champ boxes. The amount people are recieving in just one dungeon run outpaces the Empyreal mats by quite a bit.
2. It will be a common drop from harvesting T6 materials, such as Ori nodes and Ancient wood trees. This encourages more harvest and price stability.
3. There will be a new system in place like champ boxes that we haven’t seen yet, such as salvaging new drops that would also provide cloth, to stabilize basic cloth prices somewhat.
The reason I think this is important is simple, I think that vision crystals will REQUIRE the new material after the ascended armor update. I am not a veteran of GW1, but my understanding is that there was no vision crystal parallel, just the crystal itself that you made. Please correct me if I am misinformed about this.
There is always the possibility that there will be some other type of crafted item that will be required for the armor pieces, it may even require LESS of these materials the the weapons, since even 6 pieces of armor will not affect the combat calculation as heavily as a 5% boost in weapon damage (except for pvt gear, perhaps).
I will be stockpiling a few vision crystals, just in case. I can always use them for weapons later.
The Xunlai Electrum Ingots will be a bit more straight forward, in that they sit next to the dark matter and the thermos, so for those I would guess that they REPLACE the dark matter in crafting armor, and are salvageable from Exotic Armor, splitting from Exotic Weapons giving dark matter only, after the ascended armor patch. They could also be a vendor gold sink, like the thermos are, but I think that ANet will want to increase the amount, specifically, of gossamer insignias, to help stabilize their price after the ascended weapon frenzy dies down a bit.
There is also the outside possibility that they are looking down the road to ascended jewelcrafting for the Xunlai Electrum, since electrum is classically a mix of silver and gold, there is every possibility that this will be used to crafted the filigree, etc. for jewelry. I am hesitant to consider this, though, since there only seems to be a refined version of it, whereas with most basic jewel-specific metals, there is an ore AND an ingot.
This is all, of course, rabid speculation, the devs can always reshuffle the ascended mats section of the crafting bank and render much of this obsolete. They can get feedback from players and their economists and decided to relieve stress on certain segments of the market, or scrap the whole thing and start over for the ascended armor crafting.
Caveat Emptor.
Thoughts?
Physti – Elementalist | Fistful of Blades – Thief
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