Guild Wars 2

The massive disparity between lodestones is getting absurd. 100 glacial lodestones will only run you 15g while 100 charged lodestones run for over 300g.

If we had a recipe to transmute different variety lodestones it would normalize the lodestone prices and stop the crazy market manipulation of the rare lodestones.

I do not like this idea… it makes ZERO sense for a charged lodestone to become a molten lodestone or vice-versa.

However, the OP is right that lodestones need to become a little less rare. They are so scarce right now that prices are rising exponentially. There needs to be another way to get them… just not the way that the OP listed above

Maybe tie their droprate to the average trading post value (only buy orders). If its worth below 1g, reduce droprate, if it becomes worth more than 1g raise droprate dynamically to keep an equibrilirium.

Theres a couple problems with lodestones in the game I feel…

1. Few locations to farm them. Most of which require a temple in Orr to be controlled and even then there are scarce mobs that drop them.
2. Current Mystic Forge recipe of upgrading cores to lodestones require 3 levels for every 10 cores you upgrade. Even if you farm cores which have a low drop rate you’ll be spending levels to do so at the same time.
3. No alternative methods.

Personally someone on these forums recommended tieing them to dungeons and allowing them to be purchased through them. It would make sense in a way as it allows the players to dump access tokens to the vendor and give another form of acquring them. Another option would be add a random generator mystic forge recipe that doesn’t require levels but, you’re not sure which lodestone you’ll be recieving.

-Even if they increase the droprate (again) it won’t solve the issue of the lack of mobs that drop the item and the farming teams that destroy the areas that the mobs are found in when avaliable.

As additional content gets added to the game, the market on these lodestones will change. For the most part, all the lodestones and cores that are currently expensive pertain to the types that relate to Elder Dragon minions. Once new zones get added that make way to challenge these EDs or simply get closer to them, we will see more availability of these lodestones and cores because of newer high level mobs that have a chance to drop them. It’s inevitable for these things to happen.

At the moment, the only easily obtained rare crafting material of this sort are essences dropped from Zhaitan’s risen. True these aren’t lodestones or cores, but are analogous in the manner that they only drop from these mobs. The pricing on these items are relatively cheap, because of how many people have been killing the vast amounts of risen in Orr.

My advice is to simply wait out on anything that deals with such lodestones and cores until content gets added that makes it readily accessible. I agree that there are a lot of high level recipes that call for them, but you’ll have to expect paying a lot of gold to make things with them the way the market is currently. Personally, I’m quite patient and dislike farming, so see myself saving a lot of game time and gold by waiting it out and focusing on other areas of the game.

Crystal lodestones will drop in price as we get new zones closer to Kralkatorrik, destroyer lodestones when dealing with Primordus zones, and corrupted lodestones with Jormag. Elemental lodestones such as glacial, molten, onyx, and charged lodestones will be more accessible with these higher level areas as well. I’m predicting that if a dungeon opens up in the Wizard’s Tower, then that would be to go to area for elemental drops.