Guild Wars 2

I am confused why this is the case. not only is it the most difficult and expensive to level, then you need 300 scraps per day (about 7g a day!). Also it is the most in demand too, so the price is pushed up from that.

You can buy leather for almost vendor cost, and metals are easily farmable everywhere for all tiers. not to mention weapons and jewelry salvage into metals. Once you hit lvl 80 farming lower level cloth in a huge pain in the kitten .

I just do not understand why… if anything the other professions should be 3x the mat costs of tailoring.

because silk used to be worthless, so all at once they made it the most expensive and never adjusted it to be equal later

What Theordin said.

Also, Damask (and thus silk) has a much higher demand than Elonain Leather or Deldrimor because Damask is required in reasonably large quantities for all 3 ascended armours.

So it’s not just Tailor that struggles.

Crimson Clouds.4853:

What Theordin said.

Also, Damask (and thus silk) has a much higher demand than Elonain Leather or Deldrimor because Damask is required in reasonably large quantities for all 3 ascended armours.

So it’s not just Tailor that struggles.

well, if anet fix the drop system so that light armor will have a larger advantage of drops to even out the loot among classes. Less people will be complaining about tailoring.

Because they solve problems with sledgehammers/

Silk was too cheap.
Waaaa waaaaa, I salvage silk and can’t get rich selling it!
So in order to consume the excess supply to try to bring the price up to where “economists” felt a t5 mat should be they increased the scrap to bolt recipe from 2-3 and then made the ascended mat cost twice as much as the others.

This did the job quickly. Yay now my silk isn’t worthless!
Wait, now I need 3 times as much silk as other mats when making ascended mats?
And its required for all 3 armor types?

Ascended would have taken plenty of silk even with balanced recipes, there was absolutely no call to make both changes. One of them temporarily I can see, call it initial production costs of 3 scraps per that drops to 2 scraps per later on as either collectively “Tyria learns how to do it” or somply part of the crafting process your character gets more efficient.
I prefer the former method myself as then you have the gotaa have it nows paying the premium initial costs, and burning off the excess supply, without leaving the demand quite so high permanently.

It was ostensibly to bring balance to the prices, but look where they are now.

Izzy, what have you done? You screwed up again.

loseridoit.2756:

Crimson Clouds.4853:

What Theordin said.

Also, Damask (and thus silk) has a much higher demand than Elonain Leather or Deldrimor because Damask is required in reasonably large quantities for all 3 ascended armours.

So it’s not just Tailor that struggles.

well, if anet fix the drop system so that light armor will have a larger advantage of drops to even out the loot among classes. Less people will be complaining about tailoring.

Or just make it logical. Salvaging armors will give it’s type of material + scraps since it is made of scraps aswell. So a heavy armor will give some metal and some scraps. Light armor will give increased scraps.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Because they solve problems with sledgehammers/

Silk was too cheap.
Waaaa waaaaa, I salvage silk and can’t get rich selling it!
So in order to consume the excess supply to try to bring the price up to where “economists” felt a t5 mat should be they increased the scrap to bolt recipe from 2-3 and then made the ascended mat cost twice as much as the others.

This did the job quickly. Yay now my silk isn’t worthless!
Wait, now I need 3 times as much silk as other mats when making ascended mats?
And its required for all 3 armor types?

Ascended would have taken plenty of silk even with balanced recipes, there was absolutely no call to make both changes. One of them temporarily I can see, call it initial production costs of 3 scraps per that drops to 2 scraps per later on as either collectively “Tyria learns how to do it” or somply part of the crafting process your character gets more efficient.
I prefer the former method myself as then you have the gotaa have it nows paying the premium initial costs, and burning off the excess supply, without leaving the demand quite so high permanently.

It was ostensibly to bring balance to the prices, but look where they are now.

All this, plus you missed one thing. Elonian leather only takes 50 thick leather, but a bolt of Damask takes 100 bolts of silk.

Nah I covered that
“they increased the scrap to bolt recipe from 2-3 and then made the ascended mat cost twice as much as the others.”

Anet has a knack of never returning to a failed idea. Ascended crafting was a failed idea. It’ll never be fixed and never be returned to. Raiding brings in legendary armor, the new idea.

Anything that fails ANet just learns from the mistake and moves on. They don’t fix it, they do touch it, they forget it ever happened and move on. It’s a long running history in this game. Yes, they hammer fist a lot of issues and never go back to change it. Yup silk is stupid and damask bolts are stupid.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Nah I covered that
“they increased the scrap to bolt recipe from 2-3 and then made the ascended mat cost twice as much as the others.”

Ah, I missed that. It just wasn’t as detailed as the rest.

i still hold out hope that they’ll at least cut the silk reqs of damask down to 50, to match the other profs.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

It was ostensibly to bring balance to the prices, but look where they are now.

It was not to bring balance to prices — if that was the goal, then they wouldn’t have increased both the bolt/scrap ratio and the bolt/weave ratio. ANet game economist John Smith has said he is comfortable with there being a difference in prices of mats; there’s no rule of economics that requires that silk prices be equal to those of T5 leather or ore.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Because they solve problems with sledgehammers/

And it’s a decision that will persist in the entirety of Guild Wars 2’s life cycle, unless there are “silk worms” we can farm in the Heart of Thorns maps. /nodge /nodge /wink /wink

For anyone who’s curious, I made my ascended armor back in July, and in the process I did some estimates for how much the different armor weights cost. I don’t remember if these were crafting costs, buy costs, or sell costs, and the prices have changed since then, but you can look at these as a rough comparison:

Light
393g damask+12g leather= 405g
Medium
262g damask+40g leather= 302g
Heavy
273g damask+56g steel= 329g

(Other materials drive the cost up from there, but they’re consistent across weights.)

Varonth.5830:

loseridoit.2756:

Crimson Clouds.4853:

What Theordin said.

Also, Damask (and thus silk) has a much higher demand than Elonain Leather or Deldrimor because Damask is required in reasonably large quantities for all 3 ascended armours.

So it’s not just Tailor that struggles.

well, if anet fix the drop system so that light armor will have a larger advantage of drops to even out the loot among classes. Less people will be complaining about tailoring.

Or just make it logical. Salvaging armors will give it’s type of material + scraps since it is made of scraps aswell. So a heavy armor will give some metal and some scraps. Light armor will give increased scraps.

well, that will crash the silk prices again.

Ascended crafting followed the template used for lower quality armors. Any weight requires one cloth and each weight requires two components crafted from it’s normal material, cloth/leather/metal.

Now Damask. Yes it requires twice as much T5 to make it’s ascended intermediate than either of the other two and silk bolts cost 50% more raw materials than either the metal or leather ones.

Yes, it’s overkill. One or the other would have likely drained the supply enough to move it off the TP minimum has made the cost to craft roughly 3x as much as Elonian Leather or Deldrimor Steel and Damask is needed in all types of ascended armor, it’s increased demand means it sells at even more of a markup.

What we don’t know is the rate that silk is coming into the game relative to the amount is being used up crafting Damask. If they did drop the bolt of silk requirement from 100 to 50 so it matched the other two, would a glut start to build again causing a price collapse for silk scraps? Only the John Smith knows and he’s being Kosh like always.

Behellagh.1468:

What we don’t know is the rate that silk is coming into the game relative to the amount is being used up crafting Damask. If they did drop the bolt of silk requirement from 100 to 50 so it matched the other two, would a glut start to build again causing a price collapse for silk scraps?

Well, we don’t know, but we can venture an educated guess. Apart from levelling your armor crafting professions from 300 to 400, just about the only sink for silk in the game is ascended crafting, and it’s almost certainly the bigger sink by an order of magnitude or two at least. And when we’re looking at sites like gw2spidy or gw2tp, it seems like the price, as well as supply and demand, for silk has been relatively stable with no major, sustained trends in one direction or the other for a long time.

Conclusion: The amount of silk coming into the game is roughly equal to the amount that is being used up by crafting damask. Meaning that the only way to lower the silk requirements for ascended crafting without collapsing the silk price to the vendor value is to create a new large and sustained sink for it or to drastically lower the drop rate from salvaging and loot bags.

And this kinda ignores a few related problems like all the TP tax we pay on those expensive damask bolts which helps keep inflation in check, or the effect a major change in this market would have on all the other materials that go into ascended gear, first and foremost the already rather expensive T2-T4 cloth scraps (which likely means that damask will not get cheaper when you lower silk prices because linen, wool and cotton will rise and more than make up the difference).

Gudy.3607:

Behellagh.1468:

What we don’t know is the rate that silk is coming into the game relative to the amount is being used up crafting Damask. If they did drop the bolt of silk requirement from 100 to 50 so it matched the other two, would a glut start to build again causing a price collapse for silk scraps?

Well, we don’t know, but we can venture an educated guess. Apart from levelling your armor crafting professions from 300 to 400, just about the only sink for silk in the game is ascended crafting, and it’s almost certainly the bigger sink by an order of magnitude or two at least. And when we’re looking at sites like gw2spidy or gw2tp, it seems like the price, as well as supply and demand, for silk has been relatively stable with no major, sustained trends in one direction or the other for a long time.

Conclusion: The amount of silk coming into the game is roughly equal to the amount that is being used up by crafting damask. Meaning that the only way to lower the silk requirements for ascended crafting without collapsing the silk price to the vendor value is to create a new large and sustained sink for it or to drastically lower the drop rate from salvaging and loot bags.

And this kinda ignores a few related problems like all the TP tax we pay on those expensive damask bolts which helps keep inflation in check, or the effect a major change in this market would have on all the other materials that go into ascended gear, first and foremost the already rather expensive T2-T4 cloth scraps (which likely means that damask will not get cheaper when you lower silk prices because linen, wool and cotton will rise and more than make up the difference).

I would like to point out that at 300 silk scraps per piece of damask, and ~2s per scrap, a lot of people out there simply cannot afford or are unwilling to invest that much money on their daily damask CD. That’s partly why the price is so inflated compared to the others – supply is less than demand, so price is driven up until it reaches the point where it causes demand to slacken off.

Halving the silk requirements of damask would doubtless drive the price down, but to vendor value? the only t5 mat which is that low is leather, and that’s because only two crafting professions use it – LW, for rare armor and Elonian leather, and huntsman, for bowstrings. The other t5 mat prices are low, but not bottomed out, and they both are both easier/more consistent to acquire in bulk and used in fewer items (every character needs 6 armour pieces, but a maximum of four weapons)

What i think would likely happen if the crafting requirements were dropped to just 50 bolts of silk:
-The sudden halved demand from the people currently regularly buying silk causes a sudden glut on the market; the price plummets
-All the people who can craft damask but normally don’t start buying it as the price falls below the threshold they consider too expensive – lets just assume these people don’t outnumber those currently buying; price stabilizes again (at a lower level)
-With the efficiency of deliberately/dedicatedly farming silk drastically reduced, the people who make an income doing so turn to other ways to make money; supply is decreased (perhaps drastically) – price rises again (but not to old levels)
-ultimately, a new balance between supply and demand is reached – the cost of silk is lower but not abysmally so; perhaps not even half its current value (considering the increased demand and reduced supply, i think this is a very likely outcome)
-Damask is the lone casualty of the whole business. Its price falls a great deal, probably by more than 50% (though i doubt it will ever be the least valuable crafting material; i don’t ever expect it to even become the second most)

Honestly, the amount of silk coming into the game is probably similar to that of thick leather (cloth and leather have basically the same sources: salvage and loot bags), since pre-ascended armor they were both equally common and basically worthless.

Since when is this a daily? I just craft it when my bank is overflowing or I randmly see it :/

That its a cooldown on it doesnt make it something you have to craft every day.

because you cant use a hammer to draw out cloth, but you can with metal.

therefore, you need less metal to make armor.

#blacksmithfacts

Therodin.2970:

because silk used to be worthless, so all at once they made it the most expensive and never adjusted it to be equal later

Funny coincidence that the price just had to go up when I needed it the most. Need 100 bolts of it to make just a single piece of ascended. At least once my armor’s settled I can sell the scraps instead of consuming them.

But yeah farming linen and cotton is a pain, if there was a way to freeze a character’s level to farm it or better yet a way to gather it that’d be great.

This is something that really really bothers me. I made a ascended set of light armor 6 months back or so and it was crazy expensive. I’d estimate about the same as a previous poster at 400g+

The fact that silk has been so expensive for sooooooo long is what really irks me. I have no problem with mistakes being made. I do have a problem with the mistake never being fixed.

I do think 400 gold for a light armor set is about 150g too much.

so… what im read is: Ascended are to expensive to make… cry cry cry… it have to be that whay! hell i just picturing the amount of crying when legendary armors come around.