Ascended armor/weapon: Craft or vendor
Which Vendor? Fractal/Raids??
Which Vendor? Fractal/Raids??
Fractals
- Always buy ascended anything with raid tokens first, as those actually save money.
- The Fractal vendor is more expensive in every possible way than just crafting your ascended gear.
- The Fractal vendor is more expensive in every possible way than just crafting your ascended gear.
Mostly true. Last time I did some napkin math, fractal vendor was about double the price of crafting. I’d pretty much always craft unless I only need one or two items from that armor class (and don’t have that one at 500).
There is no loyalty without betrayal. -Ann Smiley
That’s true, my previous post was assuming you already had the crafting discipline at 500. If you don’t and only need a few pieces, it could be worth it to use the Fractals vendor.
Craft.
Other places where you can get ascended armor/weapon then change the stats via the MF:
If you are into FotM: Get your ascended trinkets with the end-game AR (6 + 9 infusions on attuned earrings, 2 + 8 on ascended backpiece and 2 + 8 on rings) this will get you to 86 AR meaning you can run all the daily initiate and adept fractals and some on expert tier (til level 60) for a (not so high) chance to get ascended equipment as a reward.
PvP and WvW tracks also have a chance to reward ascended chests.
Some achievements like Ambrite Weapon Collection, Leystone armor and Machined Weapons collection will give you ascended equipment once they are completed.
On the other hand, if you have a large amount of gold just buy but crafting/getting from drops and achievements is way cheaper.
There are 3 easily renewable sources of ascended gear: crafting, fractal vendor, magnetite shard vendor. (Several collections provide one-off pieces — those are fine to top off your sets; they aren’t reliable for completely outfitting your character.)
Even including the costs of leveling your crafts, crafting is cheaper than the fractal vendor unless you plan to stop after 1-2 pieces. Using magnetite shards is competitive with crafting for armor and one-hand weapons, especially for leather armor; it’s overpriced for two-handed weapons.
tl;dr crafting is cheapest, unless you have tons of magnetite shards and no idea how to monetize them. The fractal vendor is always the most expensive option.
added: raid-magnetite is currently a great option for leather armor and the smaller armor pieces
According to GW2Crafts.net, leveling a weapon craft from 0 to 500 costs under 150 gold; armor disciplines cost under 60 gold, except leather which is currently ~125g.
According to gw2bltc.com, the costs for crafting Zojja-stat items are:
- Weapons ~75-90g (depending on weapon type)
- Armor 80-120g (depending on piece, weight).
The fractal vendor costs are:
- Weapons are ~ 136 gold = 60g coin + 20 Integrated matrices (~76 gold worth of ordinary matrices)
- Armor is ~124 to 165 gold = 56-70g coin + 18-25 integrated matrices (~68-95g worth of ordinaries)
The magnetite shard vendor sells ascended weapons for 15-30 gold + 250-500 shards and armor ranges from 5-15 gold + 150-400 shards. Shards can be monetized by converting 1000 to ghostly infusions, which sell for ~300g, less 20g conversion costs and 15% TP fees, i.e. 23 silver per shard. Thus we can estimate raid vendor costs as:
- Weapons: 74-147 gold
- Armor: 40-109 gold
(edited by Illconceived Was Na.9781)
The math
Thank you for this insightful post!
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