Guild Wars 2

This is a relatively low level recipe and could certainly cost more, but it is one of my favorites simply because it requires 5 Ceramic Pots for some reason.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Potted_Night_Thistle

For Lunar New Year, all the new items cost a basic finishing kit, and it was basically the best thing ever. It was the first time my guild had ever been able to come together on building something and really feel like we’d made a part of the guild hall our own. It might be extreme, but I’d personally like to see everything except maybe a select few items cost these basic finishing kits. Making them less expensive is a good step forward, but for any good furniture item that’s out there, most guilds are going to want more than one.

Let us build things for cheap. Give us the tools to make our guild halls our own without it feeling like a chore. That’s what I’d love to see from scribing/guild halls.

Also, while this has nothing to do with the costs, I think we’d all really like to be able to craft beds. I’ve been sleeping on tables and boulders for months.

Make sure you test/reduce the Guild Barstool that one is like 130 gold + If I would craft one I wouldn’t even dare sit on it xD

edit:
After reading some posts I want to second my vote on that you have to be very careful with lowering the costs.
Yes things need to be adjusted but you must give guilds a lock on decorations in the decoration tab if you decide to lower the prices.
This has to prevent players who deside to burn through all the decorations like the lanterns and other things purely to level their scribe.
You want to avoid at all costs that these things happen since most current guild scribers have been working very hard in obtaining these decorations.
So add a Use crafted Decorations option in the guild pannel to prevent this possible issue if scribing gets improved and reduced.

Suggest this:

- Make Ceramic Planters a vendor item or craftable for a few silver. Upgrading shrubs and trees is pricey enough without the cost of the planters.

- Remove the resonating slivers requirement completely and instead make slivers an item to buy the minis/recipes in place of crystalline ore and gold. Make guild missions give a few liquid gold each to incentivise them.

- Reduce overall amounts of sand, flax, and pigment required. The price of these will just rocket if one or two are reduced without the others.

- Mast Pole still isn’t in the game, is Decoration Merchant 3 meant to sell it instead of Basic Flagpole?

I’ll also second adding a BLTP merchant to the guild hall (perhaps as a low level unlock). Throw in crafting terminals for the other professions and that side of the Halls would feel closer to complete.

Regarding slivers – one change that could be made is the supply. Currently the only source is from guild missions, which themselves have not changed much since launch. Combined with the new missions system, this becomes old even faster than before.

Why not add additional sources – if needed, with a twist?

— Award slivers from completing HoT story steps on any character (1 each). Perhaps also the LS2 steps. Use these to replace something else in the rewards, if needed.

— Add other things to Mission Opportunities, like dungeons, or the various world bosses (both have a range of difficulties for all opportunity levels). Have them grant 1 sliver and double the tokens (instead of two rares) as part of character participation. Very Hard opportunities in these new groups should have a higher base Favor (i.e. ‘Arah P4 under 2 hours’ would grant 800 Favor) and 2+ slivers. Something will need to be done with PvP and WvW missions in order to balance this; or just add dedicated ‘tracks’ for these. This adds more variety to missions (artificially, but its still more to do), as well as give smaller guilds other ways to gain the Favor cap each week.

Thank you for making this thread, Gaile.

I have a few suggestions to add to the discussion.

- Reduce the price of basic items from 50s to something far more reasonable, like perhaps 10s. We’ll be spending a lot of time and materials upgrading these items, so it doesn’t make sense to have them so expensive. Plus, to make some higher-level items we need many of those basic items (for example, a single crooked thorny mushroom requires 6 basic shrubs to make).

- Suggestions concerning coarse sand: make it guaranteed that you’ll get anywhere from 1-3 coarse sand from sifting 10 silky sand, and reduce the amount of coarse sand needed to make all levels of sandpaper. I actually like the complexity of the scribing recipes, and wouldn’t want to see that reduced, but the costs of so much sand makes crafting items very expensive.

- Resonating slivers are So. Kittening. Expensive. Using 81 of the silly things to make a single GrandMaster Finishing Kit is, honestly, outrageous. The sand requirements at least go up an equal amount with each level, while the sliver requirements basically triple with each level. This does not make sense to me, why not make it an equal progression for slivers as well.

- As mentioned in a comment above, a reduction to the number of slivers required to make “guild” items would be greatly appreciated. I don’t understand why I have to spend an additional 20 resonating slivers to make something that i will be converting into something else as soon as it’s done. That’s a steep premium. Perhaps change the recipes requiring “guild” items to require plain versions instead? If you want the snazzy one with the fabric on it, make it instead.

- Can the Guild Commendation Vendor NPC have either more stock available all the time, and rotate it more frequently? I haven’t seen wagons available for a very long time, and my guild would like a Fancy Wagon eventually. Perhaps if the third tab (scribing items) would have, for example, two crafting materials and two basic items all the time?

- Is there any way the Guild Decoration NPC could have seasonal items available all year round? My guild is planning on making lots of Wintersday items next time, and would like to be able to use all those tiny snowflakes to make snow piles between now and then, as opposed to storing them in their banks for almost a year. Same thing with luck – if a guildie has some luck accumulated they should be able to purchase lanterns when they think of it, not just during Lunar New Year time. The seasonal NPC is available year-round in LA, so why not?

- A QoL suggestion I’ve mentioned on the forums before involves karma merchants and the food items required to make unidentified dyes (to salvage for pigment). Scribes currently use a lot of pigment, and usually you require 100 of a karma-purchased material to make a single dye. This can add up to a lot of clicking, between buying that material in bags of 25, opening up those bags, then making and salvaging the resulting dyes. If it was possible to either (a) have an “open all” option on karma-purchased items, or (b) have those items available in larger bags of 100 or even 250, it would be a wonderful thing and appreciated by all of us chef/scribes who want to save our hands.

- Pigments. Yes, scribing uses a lot of pigments. I don’t have a problem with the layers of complexity for high-end crafted items, but I do have a problem with the sheer amount of pigment required for each step. Ten of each colour, per step, is a bit steep. The requirements could be reduced, to perhaps 5 (or less)? Or, the amount of pigment obtained from salvaging dyes could be increased, and/or more pigment drops from harvesting plant nodes (preferably the colour related to what you’re harvesting).

kolompi.1287:

Malediktus.9250:

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

No. You’ve decided to level scribing. Why would there be any compensation?

I decided to level scribing yes. But ~600g seems like a fair price to max out a crafting discipline. If you make it cheaper everyone can max it (like the other useless crafting professions we can do). If everyone is a maxed crafter there is no profit to be made because everyone will do it themselves. Only way to make some profit if everyone is maxed will be high volume crafting (like mithril greatswords before precursor collections) or heavily time gated stuff like t7 materials.
Anet hugely screwed up when making crafting so easy in this game.

Not everyone needs to have every crafting skill maxed or we might as well delete crafting professions and do everything via the mystic forge.

Malediktus.9250:

Anet hugely screwed up when making crafting so easy in this game.

Not everyone needs to have every crafting skill maxed or we might as well delete crafting professions and do everything via the mystic forge.

I’ll politely disagree with this. Not everyone in the game NEEDS to max crafting, but those that want to should be able to do so with approximately the same cost per profession (I’d say within +/- 100g of one another). I like that crafting is easy and want to it remain as such.

Like I said before the biggest changes that need to be made to scribing are:

• Fixed amount of slivers from each type of guild mission 3/5/10 for easy/medium/hard
• Reduce upgrade cost of slivers from 3 per level to 2 per level
• Create a consolidated unique recipe for each level of scribing kit used in recipes so there isn’t a huge nest of requirements.
• Slightly increase pigment drops.

Not huge changes overall, but just slight tweaks to make it consistent and ease the cost of some of the new materials like slivers and pigments.

As with any crafting profession there are going to be some things along the way of leveling that are going to cost more than others. I leveled scribe to 400 with relatively little cost comparatively since I have a hoarde of mats. My biggest cost was slivers and pigments.

It would be fantastic if you could level scribe by making decorations for the guild, but right now that’s cost prohibitive and the best way is to make WvW schematics and backpacks. That is great for guild that have the WvW stuff unlocked…..but crap for the others.

I am happy to see ArenaNet wants to make changes to the cost of scribing. I understand that they had a certain cost for scribing in mind. That it would take a few months before the cost would balance is something I totally understand. Now that prices are becoming more stable the time has come for ArenaNet to act and make the necessary changes to come to the cost of scribing they had in mind.

I don’t really understand why some players think that making these changes is unfair. Wasn’t it clear for them that the cost for some scribing components would change after the prices would be stable? That they would pay a lot for the “privilege” to be one of the first to level scribing to 400?

I do understand complaints from guilds in WvW about the advantage rich guilds had (or still have) in the game because they could afford some of the nice stuff. Stuff that isn’t cosmetic but influences the way the game is played. It is just one of the examples of why I think scribing is very badly implemented.

Because even though I like that ArenaNet is willing to make changes to the cost of scribing I think that scribing is a fundamental mistake. In my opinion the main issue with scribing is not the cost but the fact that it is a player based crafting profession that only benefits a guild. There is no incentive for most players to level scribing. As most guild hall related content I have the feeling it is only designed for economical purposes and not so much for the social purposes. And that is a shame.

Spurnshadow.3678:

This should have been addressed a week into HoT. Waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Really, it should have been addressed during the design phase.

Failing that, in QA.

It’s just absurd that this made it to live release, when there’s so much that’s so clearly broken.

PLEASE take a look at your process, folks.

Stormdancer.4972:

Spurnshadow.3678:

This should have been addressed a week into HoT. Waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Really, it should have been addressed during the design phase.

Failing that, in QA.

It’s just absurd that this made it to live release, when there’s so much that’s so clearly broken.

PLEASE take a look at your process, folks.

I don’t buy the balancing excuse when it’s as pricy as now, and will probably continue to be pricy even after the patch. It seems more likely to me that somebody higher up decided everything in HoT had to be a grind in order to artificially increase the longevity of the game. But this has never been GW2’s audience. I’ve seen activity in game/guild drop faster in the last couple of months than at any point before the expansion launched. People are complaining about the game feeling like a job, and that’s without raiding.

Guild Halls should be a casual place to relax, not a constant effort for scribing materials and expensive upgrades. The resonance machine and the aetherium is already a good way of slowing things down, so people don’t have 5000 decorations or a fully upgraded hall after a week. The additional major gold cost is utterly inappropriate and goes completely against the casual core of the game.

So I have a few thoughts on the issue.

Pigments
At a basic level, pigments are a nice idea. They give a sink to the dye market, they give more universally desired/valuable drops from harvesting plant nodes, and they’re a great trade commodity as they have a niche, but desirable use so that those that don’t need them feel compelled to sell rather than hoard while those that need them can’t reliably opbtain as many as they’d like so they’re incentivized to buy.

The problem with pigments is the rarity isn’t consistant with their use. A start would be removing the upgrade schema from the ink sets. This would lower the value of lower tier pigments and raise the value of higher tier pigments so that they’d eventually table out in value. Once you don’t need brown for every single item, then ever smaller amounts of the other colors the current supply/demand of the market may find that the current 10 pigments per color per set are at a good price point for buyrs, crafters, and sellers.

Resonating Shards
These are a fantastic design from an acquisition standpoint. They give value to guild missions and ensure that a resource used solely for the benefit of guild is acquired by running guild content. I believe the culprit here isn’t the supply, but the demand. most recipies simply require too many shards. If we cut the upgrade requirements from 3 per upgrade to 2, and remove the frankly ridiculous 20 shard requirements from the “guild” set of decorations they’d be far more reasonable.

Coarse Sand
Sand is one of the two the biggest problems with scribing. It can only be obtained in a very small area of the world, can not be obtained reliably, and is needed in obscene quantities per recipie. It is my belief that the top end of the price point of scribing should rest in the resonating shards, as an easily earnable but somewhat time gated material. Coarse sand needs its scribing requirements cut by 90%, just slash a zero off of all the sandpaper recipies. Additionally, its demand necessitates other means of acquisition. Sure, leave silverwastes as the most direct and reliable means of acquiring it, but how about adding packs of 10-20 to the commendation trader’s crafting materials page, as one of the random rolls on the Ley Essence converter purchase tables, and as a purchase from the pact Supply mastery’s vendors.

This would allow people to reliably acquire sand without forcing them to farm silverwastes over and over and over.

Linseed Oil
This is a major cost barrier not only for scribing but guild halls in general. The steep cost of 20 seeds per oil is, quite frankly, absurd considering the number linseed oil one must make for the various hall upgrades and nearly every single scribing recipie

Drop the flax needed per oil to 5 and it’s still a valuable commodity that rewards dedicated gathering, but doesn’t create such an uncomfortable choice between putting off decorations or hall upgrades for potentially weeks in order to afford the other. I should have to weigh my priorities and make decisions about where to apply my resources, but the demand versus supply of flax seeds creates such a high price point that they don’t feel like compelling choices, but annoying ones.

Dropped/unique scribing materials
These are the best parts of the system. I love that to make an ascalonian lamp you need a special piece that only drops in ascalon. I love that making god statues requires items from their respective temples. These create fun collection opportunities and interesting loot for unguilded people and non-scribes.

Banners
Simply put, when you can obtain both commendations and shards from a guild mission, and get upwards of 15 objectively superior banners from the commendation vendor, there’s no reason to spend hours waiting or multiple crafting steps to scribe an objectively less functional version. Scribed banners should have the same use restrictions and inventory ones, including being usable in instances, and should be functionally superior to justify not only their cost, but also their crafting time. Guild members using a scribed banner should recieve its benefits for a much longer period, say 2 hours, which encourages supporting the creation of these items and encourages guild members and leaders to treat them as guild buffs first, and public buffs second.

Finding a heroic banner dropped by another guild shouldn’t be as good as using a banner with my own guild’s name on it. Banners are a great way to help those around you, but they’re also a good recruiting tool. Ensuring that guild members recieve superior duration benefits from their own banners encourages obtaining more banners in stead of relying on the kindness of strangers while leaving the current philanthropic use of them unchanged.

Trophies should be trophies
Having a trophy for boss kills shouldn’t require a high level scribe, guild upgrades, or sacrificng a goat to rngesus. They should be fun markers of things you’ve killed that you can place in the hall and go “yeah, we have so many of this boss kill”

Trophies like the new boss ones are effectively guild acievement, and the hall is effectively the guild’s achievement panel. They should be treated as such, guaranteed drops from their respective content, and essentially cost free to combine in to higher tier versions. They don’t conflict with “real” decorations, and they would serve a much more compelling purpose if they simply had a few more upgrade levels (larger trophies after gold) and were free to upgrade. As they are they’re a curiosity, but have little weight as actual trophies due to the incoherant RNG design that makestheir acquisition representitive of luck rather than marking content completion numbers.

Trading
Schematics should be tradable. All of them. This lessens the apprehension of heavily investing in to a scribe that may potentially leave the game due to real life issues, allows scribes to recoup their investments, allows even small guilds with infrequesnt upgrades to acquire cool decorations, and may even allow some guilds to subsidize their hall upgrades via scribing!

Keep the implementation of the decorations being bound to the guild once created, but the blueprint should really be physical and tradable items.

We need more Scribing Decorations that do not require “Use Placeables”!

I want my guildies to enjoy Scribe, but I don’t want to risk losing my 200 Snow by giving away Use Placeables. Unfortunately, this means members cannot craft upgrades either.

Solution: Make Scribing decorations that do not require prior decorations.

Can we get some storage area for scribing mats? It kind of stinks having to have all the materials in my inventory and not be able to deposit them into a collection like all the other crafting materials.

MikeiMighty.5197:

This items shouldn’t cost much as they are DECORATIONS! Why make them so expensive.

Answer: Because decorations are optional.

It is totally normal that you have to grind and pay very high prices for optional things in the game. This is how GW2 is designed.

P.S. Maybe I am a little sarcastic about the grindiness of GW2.

Stormdancer.4972:

Spurnshadow.3678:

This should have been addressed a week into HoT. Waaaaaaaaaay too late.

Really, it should have been addressed during the design phase.

Failing that, in QA.

It’s just absurd that this made it to live release, when there’s so much that’s so clearly broken.

PLEASE take a look at your process, folks.

You’re missing the point. Four months like this took a whole lot of gold out of the game. Now they ‘notice’ that scribbing is more expensive than ‘expected’ and will ‘lower’ the prices. The slice of the population who had resisted leveling scribe because of the prices is now enticed. Another % of the gold of the game vanishes (in the meanwhile the first ones who swallowed the bitter pill get to watch).

Give it another two or three months and I predict another lowering of prices to snag another part of the population.

And please, please, don’t say no. No one makes a table or a chair or a shelf cost 400-900 gold by accident.

And don’t get me started about being in five guilds of which three I represent depending on the activity and with whom I am playing, and all three have variations of ‘Please donate X flax, planks and etc so we can upgrade the GH!’

Another thing you could fix is making Scribes able to craft Vials of Flax Seed Oil. It currently SAYS they can, like when you view a recipe that uses them, the little magnifying glass icon to bring up a subwindow for them is there, and if you have the mats you can click craft…

…the bar progresses and the crafting sound is heard, but it doesn’t actually consume the mats and make the item.

As a level 400 scribe with a level 51 guild hall, I would like to see both pigments and slivers increase in availability. Increasing the drop rate for slivers during missions would encourage guilds to continue missions even after their halls are maxed out and favor is no longer needed. Increasing pigments that drop from harvested plant nodes would encourage harvesting in various zones. This would be a win win.

Some of the other items used in scribing and decorating are pricey, but also make the decor special and require some team effort to acquire. To me that is the “guild building” part of scribing.

And finally, we love our Uzolan’s Mechanical Orchestra. Add more of these types of hard to get but dynamic decorations, please.

ElforTheLandStander.7052:

Another thing you could fix is making Scribes able to craft Vials of Flax Seed Oil. It currently SAYS they can, like when you view a recipe that uses them, the little magnifying glass icon to bring up a subwindow for them is there, and if you have the mats you can click craft…

…the bar progresses and the crafting sound is heard, but it doesn’t actually consume the mats and make the item.

Scribes can craft Linseed Oil, but only at level 400. The level for this is messed up in the panel and it looks as if it is craftable before 400.

Really good that this thread came up. Things that are becomming really grind-fests and or expensive are flax/linseed and coarse sand atm. We havnt got as far as to start using the slivers yet but by the activity in our Guild missions I can see why u bring it up and it will be (is) another bottleneck for us and others.
And we havnt even got to start building decorations yet, but are stuch with the huge ammounts of certain mats requiering sand and flax just to upgrade the GH.

Also, we need to be able to deposit scribing materials, or any material that says “crafting material” i its description. Bank tabs can and should be used for other things.

As far as the actual mechanics of reducing the price of scribing to reasonable levels, the changes needed are pretty straight-forward.

1) Increase the drop rate of pigments, or lower the amount needed for ink sets and kits.
2) Increase the drop rate of slivers, or lower the amount needed for various recipes.
3) Lower the amount of flax seeds needed to refine into linseed oil.
4) Increase the amount of coarse sand given by using silky sand.
5) Lower the amount of pulp needed to make paper at all tiers.

Actually balancing them properly so they don’t cause issues to the wider economy, or leave us with a bunch of materials that are worthless is the hard part. So exactly the magnitude of the above steps is the question.

For example, the price of brown pigment and resonating slivers are linked. It may not be obvious that this is the case, but as far as leveling up scribing, they are both bottlenecks for different items that can be crafted to gain experience. So they are substitute goods. If there is a glut of slivers on the market (as there was for a brief time due to a bug), people who are just trying to get their scribing level up will use slivers to make WvW consumables instead of decorations. So greatly lowering the demand for both at the same time may just end up with one being worthless because there’s some other bottleneck in the recipes. Flax fiber? Piles of shimmering/radiant/etc dust? Badges of tribute? Hard to say.

Instead of the “one giant scribing patch” I’d rather see 2 or 3 smaller adjustments to see how the market reacts to bring scribing costs down.

I too think slivers are in a good place. In the long term they will come down in price… We don’t want more useless rewards ;(

I saw some people mentioning about adding a Black Lion Merchant into the guild hall (as a guild upgrade would be lovely to allow other guilds to use different upgrades to get to 40!) But I would also like to add bring the NORMAL GUILD COMMENDATION GUY into the guild hall. It seems strange that he is the ONLY merchent you have to go all the way to Lion’s Arch to interact with and it makes it very clunky for new members. Especially since I keep getting asked “Where do I buy guild ascended????” Even if he turns out to be a guild upgrade unlock through Marketplace 1, it would be far more convenient for new and old players. (especially since he sells flag poles before Deco Merch 3 does anyway!)

Thank you for “rethinking / adjusting” the scribing costs.

I like Link Hughes idea about scribing materials being given as a reward to guild members for playing together. As many small guilds have at least 2 members who party together maybe slivers or other scribing items (various levels of scribing kits and tool kits), can be given as drops if 2 or more guild members are in the same party and complete events (not just guild missions). Or have those items drop only for characters who currently have scribe as an active craft profession.

I would also like to see Scribing being brought more inline with the rest of the crafting. While other crafts have very few recipes that do this other than backpack items. The Scribe is forced to craft EVERYTHING tiered as other crafts backpack crafting. That should not be so and contributes to mass consumption of lower materials only to craft 1 higher level item. That just seems wrong in my opinion. It makes sense with a bronze, silver, gold level as with world boss statues. It does not with everything else.

Just some ideas to help the creative chisles and quills think things over

Adjusting the scribing costs to something more reasonable is certainly a good idea.

Though I have to agree with Stormdancer.4972: it should have been quite obvious from just looking at the numbers (and the way how the materials are used) that the current system would result in way too high prices for scribing related materials.

But the damage has been done, for sure a lot of confidence in your design teams has been lost on the player side. So it is about time to change things. Some suggestions that came to my mind:

Pigments
The general idea of high-tier inks including lower tiers is actually good. Kind of like expanding a palette.
The main problem is that to craft a higher tier decoration, you often need to craft lower tier decorations first. Which might require decorations from an even lower tier.
As a result, the lowest tier of pigments becomes the most valuable, especially since the amount of pigments is the same at every tier.
Suggestion: make lower tier inks require less pigments. E.g.:
T1: 2 brown
T2: 3 red
T3: 4 yellow
T4: 6 blue + 6 orange
T5: 8 purple + 8 green (Yes, green, not yellow again!)
T6: 10 black + 10 white

Sand
Just look at a simple example: Guild Decoration Merchant 3 requires 300 Sheets of Extra Coarse Sandpaper. That’s 3000 Piles of Coarse Sand, or in other words: 30.000 Piles of Silky Sand. According to the Wiki, the chance of getting Coarse from Silky Sand is 70%, so you’d actually need around 42.857 Piles of Silky Sand – that’s 171 stacks.
If your develpers did not see this in advance … I feel very sorry for you.
Suggestion: simply devide amount of coarse sand required for all types of sand paper by 10.

Linseed Oil
It is probably an easy fix to add a recipe for the oil to the scribe profession itself, solving the minor of the two problems here.
Again, the numbers involved in creating this oil are rediculously high. A single character gets around 12-14 Flax Seeds from an 8-node Flax field, or in other words: not even enough for a single vial.
And now please consider that it is not only the scribe himself that needs the oil, but you also need tons of it for the guild hall (either directly or through kegs).
Suggestion: 1 Milling Basin + 3 Milling Stones + 5 Piles of Flax Seeds = 2 Vials

Flax Fibres
Lowering the amount for the bags required for WvW schematics from 25 to 12 was a good idea, even though something in the range of 8-10 would be even more reasonable (or make Flax Fibres a common drop from WvW synthesizers).
But you might want to look at the Linen Rope, too. 150 Flax Fibres? It is a simple intermediate item, not even a decoration! You might want to remove the 0.

Resonating Slivers
Including materials that can be earned via guild missions is, at its core, another good idea. Unfortunately you forgot to include new guild missions with HoT, so people have to do the same old guild missions again and again. As far as my own guild is concerned, typical participation in guild missions has declined from ~25-30 at the start of HoT to 7-8 players at the moment.
And the output of Resonating Slivers from the missions is too low.
Suggestions:

• Reduce upgrade factor (Slivers -> Fragments -> Cores -> Lodestones) from 3 to 2
• Increase Sliver rewards from guild missions (min. 5/10/15 from low/medium/high difficulty)
• Exhange the single Sliver from the Guild Trader with “Bag of Slivers” (5 Slivers) in exchange for a single Guild Commendation
• (long term) add more guild missions (especially Guild Puzzles)

Guild Decoration Merchants
Some of the lowest level scribe recipes require base objects that you can only purchase from the level 3 merchant. So you first have to upgrade your guild hall with three levels of totally overpriced GDMs before you can craft some level 25 decorations?
Suggestions:

• All level 0-200 items should be moved to GDM1
• All level 201-400 items should be moved to GDM2
• Remove GDM3 and refund guilds that already have it.
• If you want to keep GDM3, consider reducing upgrade costs by at least 50%

Paper
The conversion rate of wood planks to papers is terrible, further increasing the already high trade value of wood (thanks to ascended material crafting and the huge amount of wood required for the guild halls).
Suggestion: 2 planks per sheet of paper instead of 5

Buff Items
The scribe’s buff items suffer in two categories: they are way too expensive (thanks to requiring pigments and Resonating S/F/C/L), and they are inferior to basically any other “tool” type consumables. They need some functionality change and a complete overhaull of the crafting recipe.
Suggestion for basic changes:

• Reduce life threshold to 50% (or maybe 75% for Writs and 50% for Thesis to follow the general idea of a Scribe supporting others/ his guild more than himself).
• So far we have recipes for precision (claws), condition damage (venom) and power (blood). Add more variety by using other fine crafting materials, too: healing power (totem), toughness (scale), condition duration (bone), ferocity (fang)

Recipe revamp suggestion:

1. Use bronze/silver/gold ingots (T1+2/3+4/5+6) and dust to create thin/thick (T1,3,5/2,4,6) sheets of magical metal foil. 2 ingots + 1 dust for thin, 5 ingots + 2 dust for thick sheet.
2. Combine 1 magical metal foil with one pen and one fine crafting material to yield 5 writs (making in comparable to weaponsmith, etc. output)
3. With the increased output of writs, use 10 writs for one thesis, replacing the scribing kit with 1 or 2 dust.

Miscellaneous

• Make items like book covers, etc., tradeable. There is no reason to have them soulbound.
• The Scribe was a good chance to increase the trade value of silver and gold. You completely missed that chance.
• Consider refunding scribes (based on their level) when reducing the costs.
• Consider adding a “Can upgrade decorations” guild permissions, so that leveling the Scribe does not depend on the “Use Placeables” permission.
• Consider adding a “Scribe Material Storage” option for the guild bank (maybe replacement for GDM3?) which works similar to the Treasury: players can deposit scribe materials here, which can only be consumed by scribes who craft at the guild’s scribing station (Priority would be: player inventory > Guild Scribe Material Storage > player’s personal bank > player’s personal material storage).
• Base decoration cost at the GDM needs to be drastically lower (5s instead of 50s)

Interesting discussion. There are 2 main points in here:

1 The overall cost to level up a scribe in the first place
2 The cost of decorations.

I Agree that the current cost of decorations is too high and could use a nerf. Funny how everyone always points to the (brown) dye cost as one of the major issues while you only need 10 of them for 1 decoration which is even with the current high brown pigment prizes, ‘only’ 2.5 gold. The real problem for decorations are the high amounts of sand paper (both the sand and paper really add to the cost) as well as linseed oil. The other expensive part is the resonating sliver component, although the cost for slivers are getting lower and lower over time.

Even as one of the first scribes who already crafted quite some (overprized) decorations, i have no problem with it at all if this would be adjusted.

That leaves the cost involved to level a scribe in the first place.
At the time of this post, it costs you 680 – 750 gold (buy order- direct buy) to level a scribe when you use my guide (the one on dufly.net). This is already a lot cheaper that it was 1 month ago. Before i posted my guide on dulfy and we had the resonating silvers exploit, it was 1300 gold to level it up. when the guide was posted 1 month ago (right after the exploit) this was already down to about 1000 gold. Now it is already about another 300 gold cheaper ~700 gold. The biggest cost to level a scribe is still resonating silvers (you need about 737 of them, which is 270-310 gold)

Of course for the cheapest way to level up you need some guild unlocks (specially WvW ones). I personally like this design as it nicely combines guild unlocks and scribe leveling. For those that do not have the unlocks yet, you can always visit a guild who has them (we welcomed plenty already in the last month). Since guild decorations are currently so much more expensive to craft then WvW items, lowering decoration costs would not affect scribe leveling cost too much. In my opinion this is fine.

Scribe as a profession can be (and stay) a lot harder to master then the other ones. This is not a big issue since Scribes mainly craft guild related items. So if you have one in your guild you are good to go (yes i agree as has been suggested that it would have been nice to tie in scribe leveling to a guild completely… but this is not the case). There are only a few things that can be traded and only crafted by a scribe: paper, 3 sigils and some Nourishment. Most of these are not even worth the effort to craft and sell specially the nourishments. Paper is about 50% more expensive to buy from the trading post than to craft it, so scribes can make some profit there, though paper is not a large market atm (only required for some legendary collections and some guild hall upgrades).
Given these points i think that scribe leveling cost itself are not to bad, and do not need much tuning. As shown, its dropped nearly 50% in leveling cost in just over a month. To make sure the resonating sliver prizes keep slowly descending, they could increase their drop rates from guild missions (although this also happens naturally over time as more and more guilds level up and unlock more guild missions).
I do propose to change the drop tables from guild missions so resonating slivers no longer share a slot with “Shard of Crystallized Resonance”. Instead add the “Shard of Crystallized Resonance” as an additional drop for missions. This would increase the activity in the guild hall as members drop by to donate their shards after guild missions. In addition it helps to give the ability to build decorations faster without the need to adjust build times too much (some items could still use a lower build time though… banners come to mind).

If scribe leveling costs are nerved in a big way, compensation for early scribes would be in order, which should consist of a nice special decoration for in the guildhall (for those guilds who all helped to sponsor a member to level up a scribe) as well as something personal for the scribe(title and or shiny (perhaps a cool glider skin?), as many opted to peruse to level a scribe over working on a new legendary weapon or other expensive reward. Some scribes might indeed have made some gold by crafting and selling stuff on the TP, but those are only a few (the markets where scribes can craft for are simply too small to make huge volumes and provits) In addition consider how you would feel if your 1000 gold ‘achievement’ could be done a month later for a fraction of the costs due to changes to the game.
These rewards should be by crafting level tier so currently non max level scribes also benefit. I propose 5 rewards in total matching the crafting level tiers: (scribe level 75 is tier 1, 150 is tier2, 225 tier3, 300, tier 4, 400, tier 5). When the patch goes live, all current scribes get their rewards matching their tiers. To not make these rewards exclusive to the early scribes, new scribes can also earn these rewards by leveling up in the new system and then crafting X number of decorations that require a scribe finishing kit, for each tier, where X is chosen to resemble the cost to reach that tier in the current (expensive) scribe system.
This is very important as many scribes set aside personal interests (such as legendary weapons) and leveled a scribe instead so they could craft cool stuff for their guilds. Due to the guide i have chatted with many players who leveled up their scribe for this goal. Even now after the announcement has been made that things will change and (likely) get cheaper, we still get new players who do not want to wait and level their scribes now as their guild need one.

Ofcourse things get cheaper over time, if i leveled my scribe today i would safe nearly 600 gold. However i also would not have had the winters day decorations in our guildhall yet. This natural change over time is fine and you will not hear anyone complain about it or aks for compensation in any way. But, if things get changed due to a complete redesign of which we could not have known in any way at the time we spend the resources to level up a scribe, then it is a different matter and a compensation would be needed. I know that the amount of currently max level scribes is relatively low ( i think i have seen about 100 scribes that visited us to level up so they could use the guild unlocks). so it is a really small part of the community that would be affected by such a change, and probably a vocal minority to add. However most scribes that i spoke too did it on their own to help their guild. Therefore they should not be forgotten.
Also a small request, could you add a message that the queue is full when you try to craft an item as scribe while the guild already has 250 in stock waiting to be build? I keep getting questions about it from our guests and in case scribe leveling becomes a lot cheaper, more guilds might run into this matter in the future.

Rin of Rivvinda.4971:

Given these points i think that scribe leveling cost itself are not to bad, and do not need much tuning. As shown, its dropped nearly 50% in leveling cost in just over a month.

I disagree quite strongly. The only reason leveling cost is down significantly is because of the sliver exploit. The price of slivers has been almost flat since that was fixed. And leveling up using anything other than WvW upgrades (slivers) is completely unreasonable due to pigment/sand/oil costs.

All other crafting professions can be leveled to 400 with 35 gold or less. Scribing taking 700 gold is unreasonable. Yes, it is a more guild oriented discipline, so I’m not asking that it cost 40 gold. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say something in the range of 100-200g makes sense as something that wouldn’t unduly burden a guild of 10 relatively active players.

One thing I’ve felt with scribing is that there should be more separation between the items that can influence the outside world vs the ones that only affect the guild hall (i.e. guild banners/buffs vs decorations)

From my perspective, all of the decorations should be very cheap to create and the leveling process tied to making decorations largely. Doing this would allow bringing the scribe more in line with other crafting professions. Guild decorations do not affect anyone not presently in that guild hall. These things should be as easy for a guild of ten to craft as a guild 100+.

Leveling your scribe should be a straightforward and largely solo endeavor in terms of personal cost. This avoids the hard feelings and drama is a person chooses to leave that guild and lets us get to the fun bits of scribing faster. I also feel like there should only be one decoration merchant tier as opposed to the two. This might not be a big deal for a large guild, but the process of getting to that second tier vendor is insanely high for what boils down to pure cosmetic items. The first upgrade should remain as is in terms of cost and placement.

The items that I would say ought to remain at current costs or near that would be items that can affect things beyond the guild halls. These would be items such as banners, banquets, WvW items and the personal consumables that scribes can craft. In regards to the personal consumables, this would allow the scribe to make some gold or specialize in a trade skill and by keeping those costs in the same place or balanced to the economy would make those goals worth going for.

The other exception to the “make everything cheap” idea would be capstone decorations, those items of note that are high end, super cool. Those should remain expensive as a means of guild objective. Instead of keeping costs high, those items could instead be attached to collections similar to how legendary weapons work. This allows for guild to set their own goals and prioritize which items they would like to achieve first. I could see it working much the way the world boss trophies are being handled now.

The long and short is that leveling scribe should be far more simpler and straightforward in terms of costs so that it is more in line with the other crafting disciplines. Buff items, upgrades and personal consumables should remain relatively expensive so as to not diminish their value. End level guild decoration items should be handled in such a way to make their collection and creation a guild effort and something that guildies can point at and say “I helped get that”.

Tamasan.6457:

The only reason leveling cost is down significantly is because of the sliver exploit. The price of slivers has been almost flat since that was fixed. And leveling up using anything other than WvW upgrades (slivers) is completely unreasonable due to pigment/sand/oil costs.

The sliver exploit (after the initial hard crash and recovery) cut off about 300 gold on the crafting cost. However keep in mind that the scibe guide was also released at this time which caused an increase in demand for scribe items (as can be seen by the spike in flaxfibers). Despite all of this, the prize of slivers continues to go down over time. This is due to both an increase in supply (caused by guild missions, you can see a drop in the prizes after every weekend, simply because most guild missions are done in the weekend). Next to that, when a guild already has a scribe, not many will go level one up, as you do not really need one. I also suggested to increase sliver drop rates from guild missions so more are generated to ensure the prizes will continue to go down even further.

The current system is also not really suitable to having a lot of scribes around. Things take a long time to finish processing before they can even be used, so making scribe leveling a lot cheaper will cause for stalling at processing. Next to that there is the guild hall decoration limit.

Currently the only reason why you would want to have a scribe yourself are:
1 Your guild does not have a (reliable) scribe yet.
2 You really like crafting (then scribe is really your kind of thing as you need to craft a lot for 1 item)
3 The scribe backitem
4 The achievement points you get for mastering it (specially for AP hunters). or just general “i want to master everything i can”
The other items scribes can craft, can better be bought on the TP as you do not need a lot of them (you only need so many sigils and paper) and the bufs are so not worth it apparently that no one even put out a reasonable buy order for them yet.

As most scribes that i have seen so far paid for it by them selves the guild size matters less here then it does for building the hall (you still need to unlock that decoration merchant in your hall before you can craft most decorations). Though of course if you have 100 members, the chance that you have a member willing and able to spend the gold to for it is statistically bigger.

I fully agree that the cost of decorations need a nerf. This also hurts those who already crafted a lot of them (myself included) but we can also benefit from the cheaper decorations after the change…… You indicate the additional components already, but don’t forget that decorations also require more slivers (usually 3 times as many) then the WvW options at equal level.

But if they want to make scribe so easy accessible that many want to level it up , then just making scribe itself cheaper will not be enough, as it will just clog up the processing lines and take a lot of fun away from it again with that. This because it is really annoying to finally make something nice but then not be able to place it/use it due to processing (where it fist has to be put in the queue by someone with permission to do so and if there are say 5 scribes who all crafted 2 items they want to have processed… that adds up (for example making 1 colored balloon takes 5 hours of processing time…..).

I’m not saying that the current system is the best system. However those who already leveled up the craft should not be forgotten, and just making scribe leveling cheaper will likely create a new problem (at processing).

Just to bump this out of oblivion. Is there any news towards changes in scribing costs?
At least anything that can be shared if you don’t want to talk about it in detail yet.

is there a way to be a scribe without needing a GH?

sorudo.9054:

is there a way to be a scribe without needing a GH?

Considering that the whole purpose for scribing is for the guild hall, outside a few consumables, I’d say no.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Just to bump this out of oblivion. Is there any news towards changes in scribing costs?
At least anything that can be shared if you don’t want to talk about it in detail yet.

I think the soonest we will see any changes will be with next month’s quarterly update.

Scribe should be a guild craft instead of an individuial crafting profession. Since scribe is based in the guild hall we should be able to level scribe as an entire guild like we are doing with all the other upgrades for the hall. Once scribe is built there should be guild ranks related to scribe like who can make the recipes for the guild. I think that will fix most of the issues with scribe right now.

Ayrilana.1396:

FrizzFreston.5290:

Just to bump this out of oblivion. Is there any news towards changes in scribing costs?
At least anything that can be shared if you don’t want to talk about it in detail yet.

I think the soonest we will see any changes will be with next month’s quarterly update.

Yeah that’s my guess too.

Just wanted to know if there’s any details and or more precise date they can share at this point. And wanted to bring it more out in the open again, in case people suddenly think it’s a good time to invest in scribing and later feel cheated. That’s mostly also why it would be nice to shed a little more light on the case in general.

I can see where Scribing would be expensive … Making an elaborate Guildhall should take time, not two days and you got a palace fit for a king. However, the leveling and creation of Scribing items falls on any individual player that chooses that professions. Perhaps something can be done about that.

I had been lvling scribe myself a few months ago but god it was so freakin’ expensive……..
Even tho I put around 100-200 gold on it, I only made it to lvl 42 scribe

In the current market it is 675 gold to master your scribe, if you would buy order everything on the TP, if you direct buy it, its 780 gold. 270-350 gold of this is resonating slivers. It seems that the total leveling costs are staying constant atm. The silvers still get a kitteneaper but the rest of the mats are a bit more expensive which results in the total cost staying more or less constant the last month.

Also a guild hall (with workshop) is required to level a scribe, but you can just join any guild that has it to level it up. We are btw still accepting requests of any scribe that likes to level up and use guild unlocks to make it cheaper (see my guide on dulfy.net for details).

We’re atm just stuck on the decorator, in order to lvl scribe the most efficient way. You need so much sandpaper (read so much sand) and oil which eats up all the budget and resources I have to lvl my scribe, even with the combined guild effort (we aren’t a big guild). (and ty for the offer to lvl in your guild hall but it seems like a bit of waste to spend 700ish gold and you can’t even use the items you made in your own guild/GH)

But to stay on topic, I agree with most people here, sand, oil, insane amounts of wood and the silvers are the biggest bottleneck. I really like the fact that you need to do guild missions for the silvers but if you’re a bit unlucky in the rewards and in a smaller guild (so not able to do all the harder missions) you can make one whole blotting powder a week.
The pigments aren’t that hard to come by for me, by incorperating potatoes etc in my daily farm routine.
Needless to say I can’t wait for the update to come so we can finally put some nice statues in the guild hall

Sandpaper certainly needs looking at.
A glass mug requires 9 coarse sand.
A sheet of sandpaper requires 10 coarse sand – based upon how much sand you need for a glass mug either you are wasting 90% of the sand when you make the sandpaper or the sheet of sandpaper is 100’ square…..

Personally, I think it’s all absurd, having to spend tons and tons of game gold just to be able to hang lights here and place plants there….

You’ve immediately taken the fun out of decorating our guild halls the moment you introduced them by crooning to the “corporate guilds” (as I like to call them). Guilds that have a swooning amount of members in it that make dealing with the hall much easier.

In the ways of upgrading the hall itself, be this as it may… If these are the requirements, then touche, Anet.

In the ways of hanging lights, placing plants and…. just generally making it look less like any other guild hall and more like our own, I call fail. Sorry.

Gaile Gray.6029:

FrizzFreston.5290:

Just to bump this out of oblivion. Is there any news towards changes in scribing costs?
At least anything that can be shared if you don’t want to talk about it in detail yet.

I don’t think that there’s anything we can say at this time, but I will be happy to ask the team to see if there is.

Just going by past game design decisions concerning iteration towards the game economy, i would suspect the change to happen with the quarterly update in April.

Really the cost was only part of the issue. Many guilds only want certain people to be their scribe along with the admin rights that help to advance the profession. Small guilds are struggling with the high prices/demands and some can’t even open up a guildhall.

For many its just a waste because of what I pointed out above.

Just adding my 2 cents:

As most people are pointing out, it’s the components of the finishing kits that are killing it.

Specifically resonating slivers, flax, coarse sand and pigments.

These 4 things, required in every finishing kit the scribe has to make, combined with the fact that so many decorations serve has precoursers for further decorations, all of which are pulling for the same materials, and all of these materials being rather hard to farm in large quantity.

Resonating slivers are a 1x per week deal. The economy gets an influx once per week, with the scribe player alone maybe pulling in 18-24 on average (for me, I can’t run WvW missions with my guild because of servers). Now consider it takes 81 of these to make this part of a grandmaster finishing kit.

Coarse sand. There are exactly 2 full maps where this stuff can be farmed, and all of 6 inches of Verdant Brink. The problem is you need thousands of these as a scribe and they do NOT farm quickly. You need 300 of these for each grandmaster finishing kit.

Flax. Good gods wtf… okay, it’s a new material and that’s nice but why is it needed in EVERYTHING HAVING TO DO WITH ANYTHING WITH HOT EVER? While there are 2 farms in existence for it, it’s another material that is needed in overwhelming bulk. 20 of them for a single linseed oil, and 18×20 of them for a single grandmaster finishing kit? Then Gaile’s OP already pointed out that they are looking into things like SCRIBE CANT MAKE THEIR OWN OIL UNTIL LEVEL 400 AFTER THEY’VE NEEDED IT FOR 400 LEVELS OF SCRIBING. -.- Ouch.

And then the pigment… More nested crafting. The reason brown pigment sells for around 20s a pop is because, like the 3 other materials listed here, every scribe needs them at every level. This stuff I farm potatoes for my chef, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s another thing that is in higher demand than it should be.

So I’ve maxed scribe, and I’ve mentioned the grandmaster finishing kits here several times as the benchmark costs. The reason being, that these were clearly designed with the idea that most guilds are going to have (what would have to be) 50 people feeding a leveling scribe, and maybe 10-20 feeding a maxed decorator.

The problem is they really thing the majority of guilds are going to have even 10 people willing to give up so much easy personal profit for somebody else to progress, or for things they won’t really have a whole lot of say in themselves. Most guild members aren’t all going to want to invest in decorations that they really can’t do anything with, and my theory is that if they aren’t profiting, then they would probably rather try to build their own personal (bank) guilds to decorate on their own as some kind of de facto player housing.

The first post mentioned things like Uzolan’s orchestra, I honestly feel that the decorations themselves, minus the costs of the finishing kits are in an OKAY place in many cases. Where the costs get huge and repetitive REAL FAST are the kits.

Worst offenders IMO are the plants. They need multiple precourser plant decorations (finishing kits), and every single one of those needs a planter (more finishing kits).

The spooky cauldron…20 grandmaster finishing kits…wtf, they need to make crafting one of these things a guild achievement worth at least 3 full guild levels. xX

Couple of contributions from a 360 Scribe:

1. I’m ok with the cost of the major decorations IF the end result is worth it and right now its not. And that’s a problem. Currently I can make a silver Teq statue. The cost of that is 10 regular Teq trophies per bronze and 10 bronze per silver = 100 teq trophies. I’m assuming the gold will cost 10 silvers which will equal 1000 teq trophies. Along with all the other stuff. Same for Gors, Sab, etc statues.

Its expensive if the statues made you go WOW and was instantly something everyone in the guild wanted in the hall. But they aren’t. They are puny little things that are meh. I mean you look at them and your reaction is “I had to work that hard to make that insignificant thing?” — Surely you can do better than this. Its just not worth the cost.

And you can’t even show them off. There should be a lobby or something that people not in your guild and not repping can visit and see the amazing things your guild can do. But right now, and even if you make them better, once you’ve seen them 10 times they are pretty ignorable no matter how magnificent you make them.

I think the end result is the problem in many of these instances — not the cost to make. The cost to make is exorbitant — and maybe it should be. But you really should get something worth that kind of cost and in almost every instance you don’t.

And if you aren’t going to do this, then lets stop pretending that scribing should cost any more than any other profession. The statues are an extreme example but it really goes beyond that. The scribe-created banners aren’t as good as the guild commendation ones. The furniture is meh. The theses are pathetic. When was the last time you saw someone put one out at any major event. You don’t — because they suck. And they take a lot to make. There is very literally nothing a scribe can make that justifies the cost. It COULD justify the cost. These items could be amazing. But right now they are not.

So do one thing or the other. Either rack down the cost to match other crafts — which IMO would be a sad thing to do — or make scribing great – great enough to justify the costs. Now that would be truly awesome and wouldn’t screw over the people who spent 3425952359823459824509 gold to get their scribing and guild halls up.

2. Tied to guild hall. One of the things that makes scribing doubly expensive is that it is tied to guild hall expansion. So in addition to the cost of making the individual items, now there’s the cost of guild hall expansion. The guild has a hard time supporting the scribe when they are busting their kitten to expand the hall and might have other priorities (like wvw and the arena) to spend the mats on — for many guilds Market Resto and Basic Decorations come in a distant second to WvW and/or the Arena). And lets not forget that to build those two things (WvW and the Arena) you’ve got to expand the War Room and mining. If nothing else, make the base decorations purchasable for gold.

3. Put banks next to each of the proprietors kitten . (kitten lol) Its SO tedious to have to visit each of the proprietors to see what you need and then run over to the scribing station to get to your bank to get the stuff.

More….

If you are not going to untie guild hall expansion from scribing, make it possible that smaller guilds can hire scribes. Make a designation like ‘guest scribe’ or something that a scribe can carry along side repping his or her regular guild. Then let that scribe make things (like WvW stuff) while pulling guild hall expansion attributes from the larger guild that s/he is representing. This would also allow the scribe to make back some of the money that was spent leveling up the craft.

Gaile, save we scribers.