Guild Wars 2

The recent changes to ascended vendors made it so that you had to craft something to buy ascended gear from them now. I thought it would be nice to see a comparison between what is required to craft the ascended armor or buy it now. Note that this all assumes you already have 500 crafting in the necessary disciplines.

• Crafting Ascended
  https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/48099-Ahamid's-Masque,48101-Ahamid's-Epaulets,48097-Ahamid's-Doublet,48098-Ahamid's-Wristguards,48100-Ahamid's-Breeches,48096-Ahamid's-Footwear

Requires 365 gold to craft a single set of light ascended armor, and it would require 35 days to craft all of the time gated items. Some items deserve special mention in that you need a metric kittenton of them. They are

• T5 raw leather – 4800
• Silk scraps – need over 10 thousand
• 90 Obsidian shards (this is actually quite low, just thought some people would like to know how many are needed to craft ascended)

• Purchasing Ascended
  https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/46742-Lump-of-Mithrillium,46740-Spool-of-Silk-Weaving-Thread,46745-Spool-of-Thick-Elonian-Cord,19747-Bolt-of-Silk,19683-Iron-Ingot,19688-Steel-Ingot,19681-Darksteel-Ingot,19740-Bolt-of-Wool,19742-Bolt-of-Cotton,19744-Bolt-of-Linen,19733-Cured-Thin-Leather-Square,19734-Cured-Coarse-Leather-Square,19736-Cured-Rugged-Leather-Square

Requires 299 gold to craft all of the required components, + another 14 gold to purchase the ascended armor from the vendor, + 3,000 fractal relics + 88 fractal research pages (+ 30-40 pristine relics to buy the crafting recipes)

Requires 40 days to craft all of the timegated components. There are also some items that deserve special mention in that you need a metric kittenton of them to craft:

• 2000 mithril ore, for light armor of all things
• T5 raw leather – 4000
• Silk scraps – You need 21 THOUSAND
• 0 obsidian shards (again, just included in case anyone is remotely interested in them)

Quite frankly I’m extremely disappointed with this implementation. It takes longer to purchase ascended armor now due to needing more time gated, account bound ascended mats to craft the gifts required for purchasing. You need over twice as many silk scraps (seriously, 21 thousand is extreme), nearly the same amount of thick leather sections, 2000 mithril ore, T2-4 refined metal for light armor. Its ridiculous honestly.

I understand that you wanted to promote crafting ascended instead of purchasing it. But as of now, the discount you get for purchasing it is 50 gold for the entire set, which is not that much if you are crafting an ascended set. And if you have to level up to 500 to be able to craft the gifts, it will cost far more than that 50 gold. It takes an even larger amount of mats than regular crafting does for no real reason, and takes ridiculous amounts of fractal currency on top of all of this. If you also accounted for the cost of the 3,000 fractal relics (afaik you can’t directly turn them into gold, but since you can buy a 20 slot bag for 250 relics and 20 silver, the following is a good enough approximation). A 20 slot bag requires a 10 gold sup rune of holding, and lets pretend the rest of the components have negligible price. Then 3,000 fractal relics are equal to 12 sup runes of holding, or 120 gold (ish). This now shoots the price of purchasing ascended armor way higher than crafting it, coming in at 434 gold to purchase the set versus crafting it yourself.

ANet this is a bit ridiculous. You said there would be a moderate discount if we chose to craft the gifts and purhase it. Instead, purchasing takes more time, takes ~10,000 more mats to craft, and is more expensive if you include the basic opportunity cost of the fractal relics. Even if you don’t count them, you are barely getting any sort of discount at all.

All in all I think this was a pretty poor way to go about this. If your goal was to make getting ascended gear cheaper/easier to acquire this did not achieve that goal.

Assuming what you said is true, way to go Arena net. Your implementation blows. I wanted it to be more fair but this is not that fair and it defeats the purpose of implementing ascended gear in PvP.

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

Mourningcry.9428:

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

I can do medium and heavy armor a bit later. But right now its kind of a pain to do so since GW2Effciency hasn’t updated to include the new crafting recipes. I have to check the amounts of every mat by hand and plug them all in. I imagine that it will be similar though, superficially it will be just a bit less expensive to buy them, but when you factor in the opportunity cost of the fractal relics it gets much more expensive.

Mourningcry.9428:

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

he crafted a very cheap set, the difference is more substantial on just about every other item combination.

OriOri.8724:

Mourningcry.9428:

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

I can do medium and heavy armor a bit later. But right now its kind of a pain to do so since GW2Effciency hasn’t updated to include the new crafting recipes. I have to check the amounts of every mat by hand and plug them all in. I imagine that it will be similar though, superficially it will be just a bit less expensive to buy them, but when you factor in the opportunity cost of the fractal relics it gets much more expensive.

Nah…. don’t waste your time, was just thinking of a back of the napkin calc… would have to take into account mystic forging…

Point being it may be a bit more circumstantial, especially when the value of pages and relics ate essentially zero to some folks.

Xevv.9175:

Mourningcry.9428:

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

he crafted a very cheap set, the difference is more substantial on just about every other item combination.

I honestly just chose the first name in alphabetical order. Even still for something like Commanders, the different in price for crafting it is only ~60 gold more, since all you need is to craft the cheapest ascended pieces and then craft the exotic insignias and convert the stats. The discount is not that high, and its still non-existent once you account for possible opportunity costs of the fractal relics. Yes, not everyone needs more 20 slot bags, but if you do that’s an opportunity cost that makes purchasing the ascended armor just as expensive as crafting it, despite being substantially more annoying

Think about all that time spent to gain those tokens. In the same time i could do some mindless box farm…. Not to mention, the mats and gold gains as pvp’er are abysmal outside of ranked arena during the season….
How to screw over players 101. I guess they balance this game for few people with 1 mil gold.

OriOri.8724:

Xevv.9175:

Mourningcry.9428:

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

he crafted a very cheap set, the difference is more substantial on just about every other item combination.

I honestly just chose the first name in alphabetical order. Even still for something like Commanders, the different in price for crafting it is only ~60 gold more, since all you need is to craft the cheapest ascended pieces and then craft the exotic insignias and convert the stats. The discount is not that high, and its still non-existent once you account for possible opportunity costs of the fractal relics. Yes, not everyone needs more 20 slot bags, but if you do that’s an opportunity cost that makes purchasing the ascended armor just as expensive as crafting it, despite being substantially more annoying

Ive got plenty of relics, and if you really want to pick at opportunity costs you arent even factoring in the cost for the recipes to craft the gear… youre just assuming you have it.

Thats some laurels and gold.

And ~25% cheaper on a set isnt that bad… not sure how much you were expecting them to cost, the whole point of them changing to this system is because the pvp set was way too cheap.

So if you expected to get this set for a fraction of what it costs to craft it the old way… well you just had some very unrealistic expectations.

I’d really just love to buy an ascended chest piece for 15g + 1000 fractal relics and some journal pages. That’s all I’ve ever wanted: a use for the account bound currencies that actually makes it reasonable to use the bloody vendor.

Suddenly I don’t feel as bad about accidentally buying too much silk

Xevv.9175:

OriOri.8724:

Xevv.9175:

Mourningcry.9428:

How does the analysis hold up across the various stat sets?

I don’t know much beyond the notes and various posts….

he crafted a very cheap set, the difference is more substantial on just about every other item combination.

I honestly just chose the first name in alphabetical order. Even still for something like Commanders, the different in price for crafting it is only ~60 gold more, since all you need is to craft the cheapest ascended pieces and then craft the exotic insignias and convert the stats. The discount is not that high, and its still non-existent once you account for possible opportunity costs of the fractal relics. Yes, not everyone needs more 20 slot bags, but if you do that’s an opportunity cost that makes purchasing the ascended armor just as expensive as crafting it, despite being substantially more annoying

Ive got plenty of relics, and if you really want to pick at opportunity costs you arent even factoring in the cost for the recipes to craft the gear… youre just assuming you have it.

Thats some laurels and gold.

And ~25% cheaper on a set isnt that bad… not sure how much you were expecting them to cost, the whole point of them changing to this system is because the pvp set was way too cheap.

So if you expected to get this set for a fraction of what it costs to craft it the old way… well you just had some very unrealistic expectations.

My point is that it isn’t even close to 25% cheaper. Its about 50 gold cheaper out of 360 gold. That comes out to about 13% cheaper. I didn’t count the cost of buying the ascended recipes because you buy it once and you never have to pay that gold/laurel cost again to craft more of them. But you will always end up paying the 3,000 fractal relics for each set you buy. That’s also why I didn’t mention the opportunity cost of the pristine fractal relics to buy the recipes for the new gifts. Its a one time thing that you can use over and over until you never want a new piece of ascended gear.

And I do think that its important to consider the opportunity cost of the fractal relics. A player that already has ascended is far more likely to already have their 20 slot bags and be all decked out. A player who doesn’t have ascended armor is far less likely to have 20 slot bags on all of their characters, just in terms of basic account progress. It happens, some people just don’t care about ascended, but its far less likely. Overall its not that much cheaper to buy it than to craft it, and it needs thousands of extra materials. Which really does turn it into buying what you need. How realistic is it to go out and farm 21 thousand silk scraps? Not at all, not even remotely close to being realistic. For that matter neither is 10,000.

At least it isn’t more expensive like it was before?

I’m okay with the prices. Alternatives are meant to be alternatives, which involves more of some things, less of others.

What frustrates me is that it’s now a burden for non-crafters, rather than an alternative:

• Each ‘alternative’ requires 500 crafting in the relevant discipline.
• Each requires learning new recipes, which have their own costs in the relevant currency.
• Each is now a recipe that requires more steps than before, including a minimum of two NPCs: you must visit a crafting station to make the mats and you must visit the local currency vendor after.

That is exactly the sort of silliness that ANet fixed when they changed the recipes for agony infusions, i.e. these days, you visit the fractal vendor and everything can be done there.

tl;dr costs are (at first glance) okay with me; I’m sad that they removed any alternatives to crafting and that the new process requires more steps in more locations.

Well that’s because it was turned into discounted crafting. A huge portion of the expense of buying ascended gear is bound up inside of the required crafting. its not even as if you have the option to just hand Bling9000 300 gold + 3,000 relics and get the whole set, you still have to craft it. And now that you need even more mats, the crafting will be even more tedius. I mean, regular ascended light armor crafting would require you to refine 10 thousand silk scraps, now you have to refine more than twice that. They introduced more crafting with this alternative

OriOri.8724:

Well that’s because it was turned into discounted crafting.

Precisely my point. Cost was never the issue for my non-crafting friends. Worse, for those who do care about costs, there are now more comparisons to make, between actual and opportunity costs (i.e. it’s not clear that fractal crafting is going to be cheaper for me, since I want the relics for other things, too).

honestly, that game should low way more the ascended “cost” / time to get because that game should promote “stat switching” because various build possible.

But instead, thoses guys turn the ascended even more cancer, so way more expensive / time consuming like a random [censored] mmo where class are totaly “fixed”

thoses guys make just no sense, look like they dont even understand their own game.

And i dont even speak about them forcing player to run their cancer gear check fractal so the necessity to FARM the AR.
And ofc, if you are a WvW players, you can just go [censored] and you are still forced to run that aid pve ?
Noice.

Before GW2 was more or less giving you choice, now, not anymore.
that’s just so bad.

Oh and i dont even speak about the cost… If you “only” WvW, sorry, but you are poor. I sit over a little 100gold, and with thoses change, its just impossible for me to do anything, because the cost of ONE ascended armor is insane.

How i’am supposed to gear up several character ? I “p2w” and buy gem to get gold… ?

gg

I got into a habit of crafting the time gated items (the 4 ascended ones and charged quartz) every day so when I do need them, they’re there. I know this isn’t an option for everyone, but for those it is an option you might consider it.

The real killer is the 88 fractal pages, of which you can get max 3 per day. Fewer for those who can’t get into T3 because they need the armor they’d buy with the pages to have the agony resistance to earn the pages.

Glad I spent all my ascended shards over the weekend.

Either the drop rate changed or my RNG luck is shot, but I haven’t gotten an ascended chest from fractals in a while.

Soo, now it is obvious that buying stuff with fractal pages is useless. It costs more than crafting, but it requeres crafting and uses more mats. I don’t really care, I was not buying acsended fractal stuff even before that change.
But what I care about is a bunch of fractal pages in my bank. Can we get a sink for them? So I could convert them in something usefull, like fractal relics, potions or gold.

After first change to fractal area….bought nothing, after second fractal update after change…still nothing. After this update…….still nothing, will anet see the problem, yet? I hate to join the conspiracy nut, but they might just be trying to push for gem to gold sales.

Yeah I’m really going to have to re-evaluate my goals in gw2. I’m fairly casual and terrible at making gold but I was attempting to get geared in ascended. Was trying to get them through fractals so I’m pretty sad about this update. The amount of gold needed to max professions just doesn’t seem worth it to me for how I play the game. Guess I’ll have to find a new goal or maybe take another break.

I will tell you a secret: even before this crafting token thing you could max a profession with just a portion of gold that was needed to by a single fractal armor/weapon box. Fractal ascended gear was for people who just disliked crafting and it punished them with higher prices.
So, if you are not a player who just dislikes crafting, you lost nothing. Go on, level up your professions to 500, and craft all you need. If you have trouble on 450-500 part, just buy some magi/shamans/whatever other cheap insignias and explore items with it. Then sell the items on TP, their cost will compensate buying insignias.

The only issue I ever had with crafting ascended gear was the time gated one-per-day items. It took months to craft a full set of armor for 1 character and after that I said never again. Even if I saved up mats I get while spending hours a day playing the game and have enough to craft multiple of a single time gated material, I was forced to wait. I also preferred to buy only the materials I needed from the trading post and craft everything myself to cut down on costs.

I remember seeing this a few months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/53o5mq/bling9009_merchant/d7ut7v7/

Ascended weapons and armor were added to BLING because there are some players who do not want to do any crafting, but do want to play Fractals. BLING gives these players access to Ascended weapons and armor without forcing them to level up their crafting skills.

For players who are interested in crafting, crafting remains the most efficient way to obtain Ascended weapons and armor on-demand, which is intentional, as Ascended crafting is the big payoff for leveling your crafting skills.

And now players are forced to level up their crafting. (Granted, I already have all disciplines, except scribe, at max level, but still….)

It’s pretty clear at this point: they want to force us to craft ascended gear one way or the other. What they should have done was remove all sources of ascended gear from the fractal vendor, PvP, loot box drops, etc., and make crafting the ONLY way to get it.

What’s the point of getting it from a vendor if we’re left to feel, as the dev said, that crafting it will always be a better option? It feels like the only reason they even added ascended gear to the fractal vendor was to shut people up about the time gating and costs with crafting it, NOT to actually give us an alternative way to acquire it.

The only thing missing from this is a thread titled “We’ve heard your feedback” and the only thing the post has is a selfie of a dev sitting in the office with his middle finger extended.

Obviously, it doesn’t do any good to even post this. They’re pretty adamant about how they want us to get gear in this game. It’s no use complaining about it, posting feedback, or suggestions on how to make things better.

So much for player choice.

Charrbeque.8729:

The only thing missing from this is a thread titled “We’ve heard your feedback” and the only thing the post has is a selfie of a dev sitting in the office with his middle finger extended.

Naah, they will just ignore it as that leather farm thread.

This is exactly what I feared.
Arena Net has completely lost touch with their gamers.
The vast majority of GW2 players are intermediately casual.
We are classical MMO and RPG players who enjoy earning decent rewards for decent effort.

But Arena Net has been on a one way trend to nerf all earned rewards. This is especially true in areas like PvP and WvW. The whole mindset that PvP should not be the “optimum” method of obtaining rewards flies in the face of their original ideals. Originally, GW2 was built on the philosophy of “Play your own way to achieve good and similar rewards.” Now, however, it is play and grind in the ways the Devs favor to get the rewards we slated for you.

PvP, PvE, and WvW should all be co-optimum ways to achieve the same rewards, with very few exceptions. Their initial implementation of the free ascended for coming back to PvP was broken. So now, they have completely gutted the system and forced all PvP players back into PvE if they want any rewards.

I have played this game since BETA. I have loved this game.
But if the Devs keep destroying it I am going to quit. This time for keeps.
I want to play the way I want to. And if Arena Net keeps punishing me for doing the things I think are fun. I am done.

I was holding out for the next expansion, but I cannot take very many of these “screw you” type “adjustments.”

Additionally, I am insulted that they give PvP players a “reward” that ultimately makes the costs for ascended equipment increase. Seriously, who came up with that idea. Here is your reward: you’re screwed. (I consider time as part of the “costs.”)

Here’s another idea they could implement along the same line.
PvP Perfect Mastery Tokens:
To make a legendary precurser, all you have to do is the PvE precurser scavenger hunt, plus 1000 Ascended Shards, 10 gold, and 85,000 Unbound magic.

After all, PvP should not be the optimum way to get Legendary Weapons.

Ider.1276:

Charrbeque.8729:

The only thing missing from this is a thread titled “We’ve heard your feedback” and the only thing the post has is a selfie of a dev sitting in the office with his middle finger extended.

Naah, they will just ignore it as that leather farm thread.

You’re probably right. The “leather farm” is just another example of them giving the players an “alternative” to something, but in reality it’s no better than what we already had. In fact, worse since you have to actually team up with others to do the farm.

It does seem at this point any time they listen to feedback and give us other ways to acquire certain things, those new ways are always going to be worse than what we originally had.

So yeah. For a long time players complained about leather prices and all. As I said, they only give us these new ways to get things to shut people up.

It doesn’t seem to be working because people are complaining even more than they were before.

The direction of the game seemed to be going good for a while. But now it seems almost as if ArenaNet has become resentful, or even spiteful, of the community.

Charrbeque.8729:

Ider.1276:

Charrbeque.8729:

The only thing missing from this is a thread titled “We’ve heard your feedback” and the only thing the post has is a selfie of a dev sitting in the office with his middle finger extended.

Naah, they will just ignore it as that leather farm thread.

You’re probably right. The “leather farm” is just another example of them giving the players an “alternative” to something, but in reality it’s no better than what we already had. In fact, worse since you have to actually team up with others to do the farm.

It does seem at this point any time they listen to feedback and give us other ways to acquire certain things, those new ways are always going to be worse than what we originally had.

So yeah. For a long time players complained about leather prices and all. As I said, they only give us these new ways to get things to shut people up.

It doesn’t seem to be working because people are complaining even more than they were before.

The direction of the game seemed to be going good for a while. But now it seems almost as if ArenaNet has become resentful, or even spiteful, of the community.

I wouldn’t go that far. I just think that they have lost touch with the average playerbase. To the average player, 300 gold being the “discounted” price of a set of ascended armor (which mind you does not include a weapon nor the cost of leveling your crafting disciplines) is huge. And its highly discouraging for the average player. That’s a huge cost for equipment that does gate endgame content behind it. And you will need to triple that cost if you want to be able to take all 3 weight classes through said content, nevermind the cost of switching the stats when you switch classes.

OriOri.8724:

Charrbeque.8729:

Ider.1276:

Charrbeque.8729:

The only thing missing from this is a thread titled “We’ve heard your feedback” and the only thing the post has is a selfie of a dev sitting in the office with his middle finger extended.

Naah, they will just ignore it as that leather farm thread.

You’re probably right. The “leather farm” is just another example of them giving the players an “alternative” to something, but in reality it’s no better than what we already had. In fact, worse since you have to actually team up with others to do the farm.

It does seem at this point any time they listen to feedback and give us other ways to acquire certain things, those new ways are always going to be worse than what we originally had.

So yeah. For a long time players complained about leather prices and all. As I said, they only give us these new ways to get things to shut people up.

It doesn’t seem to be working because people are complaining even more than they were before.

The direction of the game seemed to be going good for a while. But now it seems almost as if ArenaNet has become resentful, or even spiteful, of the community.

I wouldn’t go that far. I just think that they have lost touch with the average playerbase. To the average player, 300 gold being the “discounted” price of a set of ascended armor (which mind you does not include a weapon nor the cost of leveling your crafting disciplines) is huge. And its highly discouraging for the average player. That’s a huge cost for equipment that does gate endgame content behind it. And you will need to triple that cost if you want to be able to take all 3 weight classes through said content, nevermind the cost of switching the stats when you switch classes.

Maybe they should buff exotic armor.

Make exotic great again. Power to Orange.

Charrbeque.8729:

The direction of the game seemed to be going good for a while. But now it seems almost as if ArenaNet has become resentful, or even spiteful, of the community.

Not all of them. Story department actually listens to players, and recent events with Trahearn memorial prove it. Some of profession balancing team listen – rangers got improvements to pets, which they were asking for 4 years. It looks like that it is just team/person that is behind game economics is incompetent.

Maybe some of them will stumble across this post, so I will write this.
This was your mistake with new ascended vendor system: it should be an alternative to crafting. There are 3 ways (as I see) of being alternative to it:

1) alternative in crafting. Simple: crafting require crafting, vendors do not. This way appeals to those who find crafting system complex or just don’t like it. The prices of vendor asc. can be anchored to ascended materials (or your precious vendor tokens, if they were tradable).

2) alternative in price. Vendor ascended cost A LOT of specialized currency, but less materials and gold, than the crafted one. This appeals to people, who play fractals/raids/pvp a lot.

3) alternative in timegating. A really weak one, cause you can by ascended materials from TP and avoid timegating that way. But it could still be viable if combined with other alternatives.

The thing is, current ascended vendors fail in every and all of these ways, thus making crafting, well, un-alternative. Just crafting that ascended is better from any perspective.

And….this is why there was an uproar when ascended stat items got announced.

slow clap. congrats Anet. For kittening players. This was not how to “solve” this “problem.”
“Discount” crafting is not what everyone enjoys k?
So raids didn’t get kittened? How nice….
Fractals… got well…. why would you break it so badly?
PvP…. why would you do that this way?

If you didn’t want everyone to get asc gear so easily add $$$ to pvp gear… BLAM fixed.
Fractals was ok. Had to do time gated pages and cost more…

Make the new tokens mystic forge made or tradable and it won’t be a complete train wreck.

Some things I’ve found with napkin math:

First, every armor set, on the whole, will use more of their specific T5 mat buying than they will making, even Leatherworking when their Marks only take one Blended Leather Square (while the Armorsmithing and Tailoring take an extra Carbonized Mithril and Vabbian Silk, respectively) That being said, Light armor is the extreme; Heavy armor takes about 8000 mithril ore and medium armor takes OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAANNNNNNDDD! (sorry, but when fate gives you the chance…) specifically, 9120 Thick Leather sections. Leather in particular is less than two thousand more than what it takes to make it normally.

Also, when you go piece by piece, you see that there are some pieces you are better off hoping for drops (whether that means ascended chests or enough ascended mats from the fractal daily rewards to make the craftable path more palatable) because the savings simply aren’t there. Good example are light shoulders and Helm. both take the same amount of mats to craft, about 58-59g (depending on the stat set) Buying them with marks? just over 57g once you add in the 2g at the vendor- it’s is exactly 1g worth of savings to use marks than rather crafting (fyi, Weaponsmithing weapons that use only 7 deldrimor and 3 spiritwood -like daggers and shields- have the same pitiful amount of savings). On the other hand, light boots take 64g to craft, which makes buying with marks 8g in savings.

Biggest single savings I’ve found so far is Staff, 35g cheaper to buy with marks than to craft. While I haven’t crunched the numbers for Leatherworking, it wouldn’t surprise me if the chestpiece, taking only 15% more Thick Leather, comes close to matching that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/53o5mq/bling9009_merchant/d7ut7v7/

Ascended weapons and armor were added to BLING because there are some players who do not want to do any crafting, but do want to play Fractals. BLING gives these players access to Ascended weapons and armor without forcing them to level up their crafting skills.

For players who are interested in crafting, crafting remains the most efficient way to obtain Ascended weapons and armor on-demand, which is intentional, as Ascended crafting is the big payoff for leveling your crafting skills.

Just felt the need to point this out again. A complete 180 with this update on what they said a few months ago.

Something I just thought of. Not a defense so much as an observation:

While it’s true the overall cost if buying all the mats for the marks is not noticably smaller than with crafting, T5 mats are arguably the mat type that a casual player would be able to acquire an abundance of without having to go (too) far out of their way to farm. Thick Leather is arguably the exception to this, due to the amount you need for each square, but you’re still likely to get much more of it than thin or coarse unless you’re farming centaurs in Kryta

Considering that, personally, in my quest to outfit my characters in ascended, the one thing that I had to go out of my way to grind for/buy off the TP more than anything was the T2-4 mats, the fact that the marks take notably less of these for almost every item in question makes me wonder if the distribution of materials for marks vs. crafting was intentional.

Yea, a character could gather these mats. But the amounts are still pretty high. It sounds reasonable-ish for heavy/medium armor, you need less than 10,000 of the T5 mat. But good kittening god, 21,000 silk scraps for the light set? That is not something that is gatherable. Even if there were dedicated silk nodes, you would need to hit 7,000 of them to gather all of that. That’s not an acceptable number for something.

And unfortunately the amount of silk needed was put so high because of how cheap it is currently, but if a future patch changes that and silk goes back up, this recipe will never be adjusted if recent trends continue.

OriOri.8724:

And unfortunately the amount of silk needed was put so high because of how cheap it is currently, but if a future patch changes that and silk goes back up, this recipe will never be adjusted if recent trends continue.

Mithril ingot costs less than a silk scrap. Whatever the logic was to rise the silk recipe requerments it was not based on price.

Requires 299 gold to craft all of the required components, + another 14 gold to purchase the ascended armor from the vendor, + 3,000 fractal relics + 88 fractal research pages (+ 30-40 pristine relics to buy the crafting recipes)

To put this into perspective, the old recipe required

Fractals vendor:
354 Gold
202 Integrated Fractal Matrix (about 659 Gold with current prices)
132 Fractal Research Pages

313 Gold versus 1013 Gold
88 Fractal Research Pages vs 132 Fractal Research Pages
3000 Fractal Relics vs 0 Fractal Relics

Is the new recipe bad? Probably, but it’s a vast improvement over how it was before the patch

maddoctor.2738:

Is the new recipe bad? Probably, but it’s a vast improvement over how it was before the patch

Please, look up at the post where I wrote about that fractal vendor should be an alternative. The old vendor system was an alternative to crafting (at the cost of gold price). The new one is alternative to nothing. It is completely useless. You need maxed crafting anyway to buy things from vendor, you need mats anyway. With that crafting and that mats it is much easier and cheaper just to craft what you want.

Ider.1276:

maddoctor.2738:

Is the new recipe bad? Probably, but it’s a vast improvement over how it was before the patch

Please, look up at the post where I wrote about that fractal vendor should be an alternative. The old vendor system was an alternative to crafting (at the cost of gold price). The new one is alternative to nothing. It is completely useless. You need maxed crafting anyway to buy things from vendor, you need mats anyway. With that crafting and that mats it is much easier and cheaper just to craft what you want.

To max armorsmith you need 40g (27g extra to reach 400) total: 67g
To max leatherworker you need 91g (30g extra to reach 400) total: 121g
To max tailor you need 52g (27g extra to reach 400) total: 77g

From the OPs post:

This now shoots the price of purchasing ascended armor way higher than crafting it, coming in at 434 gold to purchase the set versus crafting it yourself.

If you add the cost of getting to 500 (assume Leatherworker which is the most expensive) it’s a total cost of 555 gold. About half of the old 1013 gold…

I’m not saying the new system is good. But the old system was far worse.

maddoctor.2738:

I’m not saying the new system is good. But the old system was far worse.

New system is pointless. Old system was good for people who disliked crafting and prefered to pay extra gold over doing things they didn’t like. I have a friend like that, he just hates crafting but has a bunch of gold. New system is good for noone, cause after maxing your crafting profession up to 500 you get to choose: craft ascended the normal way or craft it in a more expencive, more timegated and more relied on special currency way. A hard way without any benefits.

Ider.1276:

The thing is, current ascended vendors fail in every and all of these ways, thus making crafting, well, un-alternative. Just crafting that ascended is better from any perspective.

Not quite. they obviously want you to use the raid vendor (the only one that didn’t get those changes).
Raider population must be even smaller than i thought.

@maddoctor – Yes, its substantially cheaper than it was to buy ascended armor from teh fractal vendor pre patch, but this sidesteps the real issue. This was supposed to be an alternative to crafting if you wanted ascended armor. Now it costs about the same as crafting, yet requires even more crafting than regular ascended crafting. So you can no longer bypass crafting (even though when teh vendors were introduced it was specifically so that we didn’t have to craft it if we didn’t want to), and you don’t save any money this way even though it requires more crafting than actually crafting ascended armor

Barely no one were using the previous Fractal Ascended Vendo (With Integrate Matrix) . Now, still no one will use it.
GG ! LOL

Who with Max Crafting, will grind Fractal Pages for the small discount ?
This is maybe only usefull for players with already lots of Fractal Pages & Fractal Relics, which have probaly already got theirs Ascended equipments.
And this won’t help newcomer.

Its flat out worst thing I’ve seen Anet do in a long time the forced crafting makes me want to quit again, been here since alpha and never crafted, my main roles are non raid meta classes so I cant even attempt raid hand outs.

All my characters sit in exotic and I play fractal/pvp in hopes to finely get gear that allows me to be more favorable in groups and again locked out by CRAFTING thats complete bullkitten where my only way of obtaining armor/weapons is now from random RNG luck nothing else.

Can they at least just make a vendor with like 300g+relics for a set instead of doing crafting?
I absolutely loathe crafting. I have to look up external guides to craft to 500. Now I need a recipe? Looking up where to find it. What are the materials? Look it up. Oh the materials needed have sub materials? Look it up.

It’s such a waste of time and extremely tedious. I hate it.

I don’t see any issues with this at all. With fractals you can easily make 5 to 20g a day from dailies. By the time you finish all the time gated crafting fractals income literally pays for itself with a lot left over.

Same thing for Pvp, you have to comeplete chest 18 times and you’ll get over 450g for competing it 18 times, actually giving you more than enough gold to finish crafting.

Just about every game mode will casually award gold. You can even complete 8 Dungeons a day and get 5g, also get 2g from dailies.

I just don’t understand these complaints. Gold comes naturally to me

@Chase – Again missing the point. When the fractal ascended vendor was introduced it was marketed explicitly as an alternative to crafting to get ascended gear. And the extremely high price was the opportunity cost, you were trading in a bunch of extra gold to sidestep the annoyance of crafting ascended gear.

Now, you save little to no money (and even lose some depending on how much you value your fractal relics), yet have more crafting to do just to purchase the ascended armor than it takes to outright craft it. Where is the alternative? Why was it implemented like this? A lot of people were expecting a significant liquid gold cost and then a non tiered crafting recipe. Something to show you have 500 crafting, but its stupid simple to actually craft the token. This is not what we got. Instead we got ascended crafting 2.0. All that changed is ANet shifted around what materials you need and standardized it more across armor tiers. That’s it. You are still crafting your ascended armor.

Yeah, i already decided i’m not crafting or “purchasing” any armor set, i’ll get asc. trinkets and weapons from tequatl/collections for other chars and builds and that’s all.

Not going through all that kitten just for a hideously low improvement over exotic for 6 pieces of equipment.