Guild Wars 2

I have been a level 400 cook for some time now, but I had previously never bothered making dyes through the profession, because I used to get dyes frequently in drops. After ANET “fixed” the dye drop rates and the price of dye on the TP went through the roof I decided it was time to test out the profession and see if I could craft some of the harder to get dyes I was missing. I decided if I was going to do it I would shoot for the moon and try and get a dye in the Rare Grey category. With the price of Abyss dye sitting at 20g on the TP currently what could it hurt?

Getting the 100 Black beans, and walnuts respectively was no problem. I spent about an hour running around Orr for the Truffles which was also not that big of an issue. Where I started running into problems was the Coriander Seed. First off, to farm for these it requires you to harvest Mature Herbs. There are only a few select areas in the game where these grow. In each of those areas I could only find 2-3 Mature Herbs growing. To make matters worse when you harvest mature herbs you only have a slight chance that you will actually get the Coriander Seed itself. Long story short I spent the better part of a full day farming for these and scouring areas for mature herbs. In the end I did not get a single seed. Now, I know I could have spent the next week, or 2 revisiting these areas in hopes that I I may get lucky enough to find all 25 of these that I needed, but I was tired after 4 hours of farming and just wanted to get it done, so I broke down and bought the remaining ingredient off the TP for just over 2 gold.

At this point I was ready to make my dye, and see if I could get lucky and find a dye I needed. As it turns out the % chance of actually getting a “rare” dye from the “rare” dye recipe must not be that high, because I ended up with a common grey dye I already owned worth about 52 copper. To this I was not mad. I knew it was only a chance to get a rare, not a promise, and seeing as how I still had plenty of the other mats I needed I decided to gamble one more time. I went and invested 2+ more gold in Coriander Seed, and set off to craft a dye again. Once again I was given another common grey dye worth a little less than half a silver.

At this point I have learned my lesson. I spent 4+ gold, and more than half a day worth of playing to scrounge together the mats for this experiment. What I learned is that I could have saved myself hours of farming, and a lot of trouble if I would have just invested that same 4+ gold on Unidentified dyes on the TP for 12 silver a piece. I could have gotten roughly 33 tries instead of 2. More importantly it would have taken less than a minute on the transaction. I could have then used that time running dungeons, WvW, or other more productive things.

In conclusion, this post is not a complaint per sey. I knew what I was getting myself into when I went about the process. I just feel that others could benefit from my experience and avoid the same trouble I went through. If you really want dyes there are much better ways to go about it than crafting. The ends do not justify the means.

As a small note to ANET on this subject. The act of crafting a rare dye is very tough. The mats are not easy to come by and are fairly expensive to buy on the TP. It would seem that if people are going to invest that much time and effort into crafting the rare recipe in hopes of getting a rare dye the least you could do is adjust the %, so that there is a reasonable chance that it may happen. Getting 2 commons in a row out of a high end recipe is pretty disconcerting.

RNG strikes again
Lets have a moment of silence for our fallen brother

I just tried to craft a “rare” grey dye last night only to get a common I already have.

there was no point selling it since I can never recoup the cost of the coriander seeds I bought from the TP so I just gave it to a guildie.

I don’t think I will craft dye again, which is sad since I think it would be fun to do.

Yeeeep. As it stands, there is no real reason to craft dyes through cooking; the initial investment and high chance of failure is just not worth it.

Were it up to me, I’d make crafted dyes give a GUARANTEED dye of the tier they were crafted at. Not only would it give Chefs another way to potentially make money, but it would help increase demand (and prices) for lots of low-valued materials like Onions and Blueberries (I would have added Butter, but prices for Butter have actually risen lately for a reason I’m not sure about), thus helping to spread wealth among the player base who are still in low-mid level areas.

On a side note. (A happier note I will add) I took my own advice and bought 33 Unidentified dyes for just over 4 gold total. I got 5 uncommon dyes I did not have, a rare dye I was missing, and a Midnight Ice dye I already had, but was able to reinvest back for 6 gold netting me a 2 gold profit overall. I then took the leftover dyes and forged them for extra chances, and ended up with 2 more dyes I needed to complete the set. This more than made up for my crappy experimentation with crafting dyes.

At the other end of the spectrum I casually farmed up 17 corianderseeds, got bored looking for them, bought the other 8 for 40s and executed my rare grey dye recipe – which turned out to be Celestial and is now gracing my Guardian. I have only ever made 1, but I am considering having a second go next time I harvest at least 10 coriander seeds myself.

RNG cuts both ways, clearly.

Really? I thought you always got rares. I got abyss die twice -_-

Akuma The Wicked.9528:

Really? I thought you always got rares. I got abyss die twice -_-

lucky you then. I tried to make dyes twice and always ended up with common ones. OP is right on one thing, it is way cheaper to buy unidentified dyes from TP and hope RNG is on your side. At least you have a chance to make some profit.

If you can’t stomach RNG, outsource the risk.

I have always gotten a common blue as well. I find it odd that coriander is so rare though, you would think the truffle would be the high end ingredient since it is a higher level to get it.

“We are working on a a way for you to make the exact color of dye you want using the Mystic Forge. You will need to get a specific crafting material for each color but you will get the exact color you want.
We really don’t want dyes to be a Gem Store only feature, we understand that some people would be willing to pay more to get exact dyes or all the dyes but we want to keep some aspects of the dyes system in the game.”

Crystin Cox – 13th June 2012

I guess they’re still working on those Mystic Forge recpies huh? Or maybe that was a flat-out lie to shut us up.

I’m actually relieved there’s no way to grind out a specific colour. Given how much grinding is required for a single Ascended backpeice, I can only imagine at the mats you’d need to craft Abyss dye…

4x Twilight in mystic forge = Abyss?

jazzllanna.1278:

I have always gotten a common blue as well. I find it odd that coriander is so rare though, you would think the truffle would be the high end ingredient since it is a higher level to get it.

They really screwed up all the cooking ingredients when they ripped out 90% of the karma food you could buy from karma and heart vendors. After the fallout from “The Butter Incident”, I guess nobody at Anet wants to touch it.

They’ve yet to go back and look at it again and fix cooking item rarity, so cooking is still really a mess.

Stuff that should be common and reasonably easy to get hold of like Coriander seeds are stupid expensive, wheras stuff you’d expect to be rare like Saffron and Lotus root are some of the most abundant ingredients in the game…

In all fairness to the OP, I know these mats are expensive/hard to farm, but even if the chance of getting a rare dye is as high as 80%, it’s entirely possible you’d get 2 commons in a row. Two is a very small sample size.

I would be more in favor of reducing the material requirements than I would be for increasing the rare drop rate. Rares should be rare, but I know it feels like getting punched in the gut when a common drops.

The value in the TP generally is correct. There are manipulations and mis-pricing, so I applaud your effort to find one, but I’m never surprised when I just say to myself “it would be easier to just buy that”.

If you had a better than 1/5 shot to get something for 2g that is worth 10g, that situation would not live very long.

Your mistake, OP, was thinking you could meet goals in the game by simply playing the game and farming. That is a huge mistake.

Instead, as you should know, you’re supposed to buy gems and purchase dye packs.

By this logic alone, you stand a better chance throwing cheap grey dyes into the forge than crafting.

I am not upset about the results. I knew full well going into this that it was going to require time and effort. I also knew it was not a guarantee of success. Having never used my 400 cooking skill for anything but Omnomberry Bars I wanted to try something different. What some people have suggested is whining was simply my account of the process. I also understand that 2 attempts is not a large enough sample size, but I play fairly casually, and don’t gamble trying to flip the TP, so I don’t have just tons of gold to spend on it. This was not a ploy to make money for me. It was to see if I could find any of the dyes I didn’t already have. For the record had I pulled an abyss I would use it right away, not sell it. After 2 attempts I honestly felt I would be better off just buying the unidentified dyes outright and that assumption proved to be correct. After that I had no more reason to continue the experiment as I had found a better way to accomplish my goal.

I know some of the people reading this are “experts” at the game, and think I am dumb for doing something they knew all along. I wanted to see for myself, and I did. I have no regrets. This post is not a cry for pity. I will tell people where they can stick that pity. It is simply an information piece and a heads up for anyone else who was wondering about this subject themselves. Do with the info what you will. If it helps you great! If you didn’t find it helpful what did you really lose? You were sitting here killing time reading these forums anyway. As for wanting a bigger sample size. Be my guest. If someone has the time and resources to tackle it they are in a better position than I am. For me? I am going to continue using what works for me.

I think this was a very valuable post! I thank you for the information, because I could see myself trying the exact same thing!

Also, to the person who said you should just buy dye packs with gems, this isn’t a reliable way to get rare dyes either. You’d likely be better off buying gems and trading them for gold and buying unidentified dye rather then buying the dye packs. Each dye box contains 7 random dyes (5 common and 2 uncommon or a rare).

I want to say Thank-You for this post I too have been let down by the not so stellar results. My main issue is availability some of the materials required are really scarce. And as stated sometimes your’re lucky to break even with the costs only to discover that the item you spent gold or silver on is only going for copper in the TP. I feel like there should be a little bit better pay off in percentages with what it takes to craft it. Moral of the story is craft at your own peril and know that you have other less time consuming options!

Rarespawn.6028:

Also, to the person who said you should just buy dye packs with gems, this isn’t a reliable way to get rare dyes either.

I probably should have been more clear, but that post was tongue-in-cheek. I was pointing out how screwy it is that you can’t even farm to make something as simple as a dye without insane RNG rearing its ugly unfun head.

@Sir Digby
I appreciate what you did here. In fact, last evening I tried your unidentified dye method. So you can add my results into the mix …

I spent exactly 5g buying 40 unidentified off the TP. These were bought in 2 batches of 20 (2g 50s each batch).

Rares
In each batch of 20, I got 2 rares, so 4 rares in total, but 1 rare from the 2nd batch was a repeat of 1 rare from the 1st batch! So, in the end only 3 different rares, and none of these were very valuable, Each fetched around 25s on the TP. The only one I liked was the repeated dye, so kept one of those, and sold the others

Uncommon
Each batch of 20 netted around 4 of these, so 8 in total. One of these I already had and was worth around 1g 50s, so sold that. The others were worth around 6-8s each. There were only 1 or 2 of these I liked, so sold the rest.

Common
Lots of these, many I already had, others I didn’t like. I kept around 4 and sold the rest for 70c each …

From the 5g I spent, I made back 2g 50s from selling the repeats and ones I didn’t like.

@bri
I was very lucky in pulling a Midnight Ice on my attempt. Since I already had it I had no problems selling it for 6g. I tried twice more with about 30 dyes total. Like you on these last tries I ended up with only a handful of dyes I didn’t already have, and I did not make all of my money back. I did get a few uncommons and 1 more rare I didn’t have, so I still feel that to me it was worthwhile to try. My eventual goal is to have all the dyes. Not so much, because I intend to use them all, but so that I can see the pallet in action and know what dyes to get for my alts moving forward.

@Antitheist
I agree with you. A reduction in mat costs is more favorable to me than increasing a %.
I don’t mind farming for mats. (Ironically, isn’t that something ANET keeps chirping about? You don’t have to farm in this game? I call nonsense on that.)

On a side note: Coriander seeds are currently selling on the TP for around 6s a piece. At this point if I was to farm for them again I would more than likely sell them outright instead of using them in a dye recipe.

Just a fyi about coriander…not all mature herbs have chance at them. They are region specific. So the mature herbs in Blazeridge (for example) will not have a chance at them, instead you’ll get mint. You will however be able to find them in areas like Bloodtide Coast.

Thx for sharing Digby, I was starting to think about crafting some by myself, but seems like it’s better to just buy something I need in the BL.

The last time I thought about crafting dye was a couple months ago when I noticed some of the recipes were pretty accessible so I went around and amassed a huge stockpile of mats and was ready to go to work (literally…going to my job IRL)

Upon returning home from work, they patched and changed these recipes. I have no idea what I’m going to do with 2500 account-bound peaches but I have ’em.

I learned pretty early on that Crafting is not a priority or even a ‘thing’. It’s only been reinforced by the fact that the most significant things you can craft are account-bound and the best-in-slot accessories are exclusively looted (though I have a faint hope that part of these 275 new recipes were going to make crafting at least on-par with not-crafting).

I have all 8 disciplines @ 400 and have been grabbing up the new recipes when I can find them but crafting is the one thing that GW2 has done that’s left me feeling pretty discouraged and disappointed.