Guild Wars 2

I’ve been working on some ascended armor for a few toons for raids, and have found myself bottlenecking on low tier leather and cloth mats. Mostly the tier 2-tier 4 things required to make elonian squares and damask.

I have no problem getting the wood and ore required as you can simply zone to an appropriate area and eventually farm what’s needed. But my issue is with the cloth and leather as you can only regularly get that from salvaging dropped items. Almost all of my toons are lvl 80 and the drops seem to scale up despite the area I’m in. I get tons of t5 mats, even in low areas, but almost no lower tier materials.

I’ve asked around, and my guildmates and others on forums have told me the best way to get lower tier materials is to make a low level character and have them open loot bags and then salvage the resulting items. If there is a better way to do this, someone please let me know b/c i may just be going about it wrong. But if not, I’d give feedback that this is a process I don’t like.

My reason is that it seems to penalize you for advancing your character. I like playing each of my different classes and don’t want to have to keep one at low level just to open bags. I haven’t been able to play at all on one of my slots because I don’t want it to go up in level and be unable to get those mats. But it’s just no fun keeping him on the sidelines.

I understand you can go on the TP and buy the mats, but they get very expensive, very quickly, and I always feel more satisfied when I generate the materials myself to make an item as opposed to simply buying it.

Not sure if this is the best place for feeback or where that goes, but that’s my 2 cents on it. Also not sure what the best fix for this would be. If I’m doing this farming thing completely wrong, I’d love any advice on how to do it better. Thanks.

The cost of two extra slots for low level characters of pays off quickly.

Originally, maps dropped items for the maps level, regardless of character level. People complained that we didn’t have any reason to play lower level maps after leveling past them. Anet changed the drops to be in line with character level instead. Cut to 2 1/2 years later, and those mid tier mats are not the most expensive and tedious to get, and once again I don’t have a lot of reason to participate in those lower level maps.

The bags you get in lower maps will give you material of the map’s tier, even if opened on a level 80 character. Same for the recycle-only things.

I recently and got quite a bit of linen (and some equivalent tier leather, though less) from bags dropped from Flame’s Legion in Fireheart Rise. I also remember getting lots of bags with cloth in the Hinterland, from the pre-events for Ulgoth. The drakes from Mount Maelstrom seem to have a decent droprate for recycle-things that give T4 leather.

To actively farm, the ‘difficulty’ is that you need to find the ‘best’ mobs/events in each relevant zone, since not all mobs/events are suited to drop lots of bags or recycle-things. And some events will require a few additional people to scale up the amount of enemies to truly shine.