Guild Wars 2

Is there a reason why it’s so god kitten difficult to harvest Pristine Toxic Spore Samples?

Can they just add in some conversion method to turn Mushed Spore Samples into Pristine?

Have a trader just straight up, convert X-amount of mushed samples for a pristine.

Or,

Some lame mystic forge recipe. X-amount of mushed plus other kitten to get rng 3-6 pristine?

Why it’s so hard to get pristine samples anyways?

You get one, or more, from every little ‘garden’ of the plants, and they respawn every 10-15 minutes. That doesn’t seem ‘so hard’ to get, to me.

Only the center one of the bunch gives the pristine sample. If you don’t want the mushed ones, then skip them and only harvest the one in the middle.

As for rarity? They were a bit easier to come by back during the events that created them, but I honestly don’t think they were ever worth it. What do you really need them for, anyway?

Palador.2170:

What do you really need them for, anyway?

The Superior Sigil of Torment comes to mind. I’m not the OP, but for me I’d love to get my hands on a couple of these sigils and not pay the ~17g TP prices.

I also feel that the Pristine spores are a bit more onerous to farm than they need to be.

But, hey, maybe at some point I’ll just park a farming alt in a field of ’em as Inculpatus hinted to do.

~EW

Inculpatus cedo hinted at no such thing; do park a character, though, if that would please you. =)

I just run around the map; there are a plethora of ‘gardens’ for them, and, as stated above, they respawn quite quickly.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Inculpatus cedo hinted at no such thing; do park a character, though, if that would please you. =)

I just run around the map; there are a plethora of ‘gardens’ for them, and, as stated above, they respawn quite quickly.

Lol, sorry to misrepresent. You hinted at farming and I extrapolated that parking a farming alt was one way to do said farming.

~EW

While the mushed ones are trash, they are, at least, expensive trash. For newer players, this may not be trivial.

You have to appreciate a resource node SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to reward the owners of unlimited sickles over those who use in-game coin sickles.

Nike.2631:

You have to appreciate a resource node SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to reward the owners of unlimited sickles over those who use in-game coin sickles.

You can use copper sickles on Toxic Seedlings, but considering even orichalcum sickles cost 8c per use, and Mushed Spore Samples vendor for 17c each, you’re still making a profit regardless. I’m not sure this argument holds water.

The main problem isn’t the mushed samples. You’re guaranteed to get at least 1 pristine sample per patch, occasionally more since you’ll sometimes get a bonus forage of the “good” plant. I’ve gotten as many as 4 pristine samples from a single plant before, though of course that’s incredibly rare.

Also of note is that there’s always only 1 good plant in a patch, so once you find it (its random) you can leave the rest alone if you don’t want the mushed samples. Though you make a profit on the mushed samples by vendoring them even if you’re using Orich sickles, so its not a complete waste to grab the mushed ones as well. It used to be that you could even tell which plant was the one that was going to give the pristine sample because it would show up on the map named while the others would just show as “.”, but they fixed that a while back.

Heck, there are even other ways to get Pristine Samples. Every Toxic Spore event is guaranteed to give you at least 1 Pristine Sample (you can harvest the spore after the event completes), and they occasionally drop from Toxic mobs as well, though the drop rate is hardly reliable especially since Toxic mobs are tougher than regular enemies and so you can’t really kill a lot of them quickly.

Rather, the main problem is that for the most part they only show up in a single zone, and a low-level one with no world bosses or anything at that. So aside from doing stuff like daily Kessex Hills event completion there’s really no reason to be there for most players. So you’re probably there specifically farming samples, which makes it seem like more of a chore.

The spore events do appear on a handful of other maps (Brisban Wildlands for sure, and maybe 1 or two others) but those are also all low level maps, and the events are too wide-spread to be a reliable source of spores. So realistically, its just Kessex Hills.

Only being on 1 lowly-populated map also has a side effect of making them fairly expensive to buy as well. Well, that and the fact that most of the items you craft with them take tens or hundreds to create.