Guild Wars 2

This post attempts to show the economic impact of the new recipes by looking at the recipes for traditional crafting versus Fractal or PvP crafting. Other threads exist to discuss whether folks like the changes (here & there) and there’s a decent reddit post that concerns itself with the costs. There’s also a comparison post, that focuses more on absolutes rather than a direct comparison.

Short story: Vendor crafting offers exactly what some people have been asking for: new recipes that require more of the mats that drop ‘normally’ for L80, alternative uses for non-open world currencies, and a completely different balance in requirements. Whether it’s better is going to depend on how one plays (and what one has stored) and depend heavily on whatever the market is doing.

Specific differences:
Aside from the obvious requirement of mode-specific currency, here are the major differences going from traditional to vendor crafting:

• Marks require a blend of T6 mats; traditional requires a lot of crystalline dust plus some specific mats. This reduces the cost of expensive variations (minstrels, etc).
• Marks require 40-60% of the T2-T4 leather|cloth|metal of traditional, reducing dependency on the TP (or alt toons to open bags).
• Marks require a ton more of the T5 primary mat: tailor marks use nearly double the silk, leather needs about a quarter more thick, and armorsmith over six times as much mithril.
• Marks don’t require any ascended mats (dragonite, bloodstone dust, empyreals).
• Marks don’t require any hardened leather nor any gossamer (neither method requires Orichalcum).
• All the marks use iron, platinum, and mithril ore; only traditional armor uses those.
• Mithril requirements for marks are huge! (Especially for Armorsmith.)

Similarities
A few requirements are about the same in both systems:

• The net gold requirements (from vendor + primordium etc) is close, with marks needing 3-6 gold more in coin.
• Both require rank 500 in the relevant craft.
• Both depend on time-gated material, which is great for patient crafters and terrible for the impatient. (The premium on Blended Leather remains much higher than that for Elonian Leather; that will change once people start converting Elonian Cord to meet the demand.)

Current Markets
The markets haven’t yet adjusted to the new requirements. We are still grappling with understanding the financial changes. To a certain extent, this has hurt the leather market rather than helped it — there are new items sucking up the supply of leather.

However, in the long run, this should be good for people who focus primarily on fractals or PvP, as it uses more of T5 mats (which drops naturally), fewer T2-4 (which do not), and a blend of fine T6 which should be ultimately cheaper for gear with meta stats.

It’s also good in the short & long run for people who make time-gated materials every day.

It is definitely worse for those who hate crafting (it’s more convoluted, since you can’t do all the work at a single ‘crafting’ station) and for those that were hoping to acquire ascended gear for ‘cheap’ (like PvPers who got used to last season’s rewards).

Other Notes

• I’ve ignored acquiring recipes and ranking up your crafts — those are worth comparing, but they represent a one-time cost.
• I haven’t tried to compare weapon crafting costs, also worth comparing, but more complicated.
• I’ve combined “gold costs” by using the base costs of anything purchased from a vendor for coin, including coal, thermocatalytic reagents, and, well, coin.
• To make the comparison easier:
  • I used Zojja’s recipes for cloth, leather, and metal armor sets
  • I compared the requirements for a full armor set; individual pieces will have different variations.

Personal comment
I’m not a fan of the new system — I’d prefer that people have the option to trade spending time or money to avoid crafting altogether. I also don’t like that it makes things more rather than less complicated.

Still, I can see why ANet implemented it. And I can make money selling the new time-gated materials and it will probably make a few pieces of gear cheaper for me to acquire.