Guild Wars 2

Hello Everyone,

I’m still a little new to fractals and was wondering if there is a big price difference with buying the ascended chests from the vendors vs crafting them. Or is it just an alternate way with little to no difference in price?

Thanks

It’s more expensive to buy the chest/box, by design, in that anet wants crafting to be the main method that ascended gear is acquired.

With stabilizing matrices at the current prices, the vendor is more expensive. But if you plan to never level up crafting, theoretically, you could buy just enough ascended pieces for 1 character to get to T3/T4, then rely on drops to get enough ascended boxes to finish that character’s gear, and then your alts too. This update removes crafting as a semi-hard requirement to play higher fractal levels (you can get ascended gear from Teq, TT, PvP, WvW etc, but the RNG is minuscule)

So, in short, yes, there is a big price difference. Crafting is way cheaper.

Those vendor boxes are much, much expensive except matrices would suddenly drop a few silver/less than that (at which point, anet would fix that “problem”)

As has been said, they want crafting to be the main way to get them and only offer different ways to get ascended armor/weapons to people who absolutely refuse to craft

I see the chests as a way to speed up/complement the process. Unless you have tons of gold, it will take you weeks to craft the time-gated materials for the ascended items, all the while you run fractals and stack the rewards to buy chests (and drop chests depending on your luck)

This works better for gearing alts since a single/main non-geared character will be missing T4 rewards

HELLruler.4820:

I see the chests as a way to speed up/complement the process. Unless you have tons of gold, it will take you weeks to craft the time-gated materials for the ascended items, all the while you run fractals and stack the rewards to buy chests (and drop chests depending on your luck)

If you don’t have tons of gold or the equivalent in matrices, how can you afford the alternative? Even if you buy the time-gated mats on the TP, it’s still cheaper to craft.

The devs have explained that the purpose was to make higher-level fractals more accessible to those who refuse to craft.

If you don’t already have journals or pages stashed away, the time-gate for this vendor is just as bad if not worse than the one for ascended material crafting.

Worse, if I’m not mistaken. But anyway, that’s fine for an alternative path to ascended items.

CptAurellian.9537:

Worse, if I’m not mistaken. But anyway, that’s fine for an alternative path to ascended items.

It’s an alternative the same way walking from LA to SF is an alternative to flying/driving. It’s there, but somehow i don’t see people thinking of it as an alternative anyway.

Astralporing.1957:

CptAurellian.9537:

Worse, if I’m not mistaken. But anyway, that’s fine for an alternative path to ascended items.

It’s an alternative the same way walking from LA to SF is an alternative to flying/driving. It’s there, but somehow i don’t see people thinking of it as an alternative anyway.

You keep trying to insist that it’s not a viable alternative and that’s demonstrably untrue — it’s been praised by all of the people that I know who like fractals but hate crafting. Obviously I don’t have access to a large sample size, but since they are members of the target audience and neither you nor I are, shouldn’t we accept their word that this is, indeed, a helpful alternative?

Thus, it’s more like choosing to take AmTrak from LA to SF: instead of a 70-minute trip by air, with lots of convenient departure times, it’s an 11-hour trip with only a few departure times. Horrid if you’re a business traveler; just fine if you are too afraid to fly.

The price difference is big, but take into account the amount you’d spend in materials (and time) to merely get to 500 crafting (and you need 500 in nearly every craft if you intend to make the 3 weights of armor) and it starts becoming attractive actually.