Guild Wars 2

So far GW2 has followed the traditional pattern of having tiered crafting materials that correspond to zone levels. The higher the level of the zone, the higher the crafting tier. ArenaNet has also made sure to include lower tier mats in endgame recipes to keep up demand for them.

This has caused a disconnect, however, because demand remains for both low and high tier mats, but due to population being concentrated in level 80 zones where there are only high tier mats, the supply does not match up. There is a glut of T5 mats.

What if future level 80 zones included a mix of mats?

There would still need to be a larger number of high tier mats than low tier, because there should still be an incentive to go to lower level zones if you want to farm lower tier mats. But if, say, 20% of nodes in Heart of Thorns zones were T1-4 it would help to reduce the flood of T5 mats coming out of the endgame population, as well as boosting the supply of T1-4 mats to balance their cost down against the higher tier mats.

I suspect that no, the new areas will not have the mixed nodes. From the information released, ANet is determined to have people go back to lower tier areas (can’t blame them for not wanting large chunks of barely populated world).

Although I am not sure how hordes of node farmers make the world more lively. In the best case scenario, the new dynamic event reward system will make the lower tier areas filled with more people. ‘ANY EVENTS?!?!’ in general chat will be even more common as people scramble to farm things like silver doubloons.

Zania.8461:

From the information released, ANet is determined to have people go back to lower tier areas (can’t blame them for not wanting large chunks of barely populated world).

Yes, I was thinking of this. The idea was that if the ratio was balanced, so that the majority of nodes were T5 or T6, it would still be most efficient to hit low level zones for low tier mats. But there would still be a supply of low level mats that would start coming out of the endgame population, and a reduction in the amount of T5 nodes, balancing the supplies of the tiers back.

What the ideal ratio would be, I have no idea, but I’m sure ArenaNet could gaze into their Metrics and produce a very good guess.

I would prefer to get lower tier leather or cloth. In low level zones is just a small chance to get them, if you’re lvl 80.

Weren’t new node images data mined by that_shaman? I got the impression we’re going to see some new mat nodes in the expansion, in addition to the existing t5 and t6.

Which, makes more sense to me than the higher level zones suddenly having the lower level nodes.