We are all aware of the biggest price difference between lodestones/cores (sometimes going from 40s to 3g). There are some dungeons that users like to run above others, because of their reward/skins, time needed to finish, etc. producing a steady income of some lodestones coming from the most farmed instances against lodestones from other instances.
We know that rare materials also drop from elementals (and there’s people out there farming it) but the drop % is really low to introduce it into the equation.
On the other hand, some lodestones are used more than others because the gifts needed for the most desired legendary weapons, increasing the demand for those kind of lodestones.
Through Mystic Forge we have a system, in the form of a recipe, to upgrade rare materials (cores to lodestones, and so on), what about introduce a recipe to transform those rare materials instead of upgrade?
Let me explain it!
The actual recipe for upgrading is this:
2xRare + 1xWine + 1xCrystal + 1xDust
You could swap the Dust for a common crafting material giving a fixed rare crafting material in return, something like:
Blood = Charged
Claw = Onyx
Bone = Glacial
Venom = Crystal
Totem = Molten
Fang = Corrupted
Scale = Destroyer
(just suggesting a system but as you can see, we have enough common materials to pair with those rare materials)
For example, using -> 2xMoltenLodestones + 1xWine + 1xCrystal + 1xT6Blood
would give 1 Charged Lodestone
Basically swaps two of a given rare material into another one that suits your needs.
The number of Common Materials could be higher (there was a post the other day
about increasing their “value” making those common materials more desirable).
Talking about economics and BT, “rarest materials” like Onyx and Charged will still be rare, their price would not plummet because of this but other materials like Molten or Glacial, cheaper materials, will increase their value because their new use. People will not be forced to run X instance N times to farm it, they can still do it, but the rare drops that they get in other instances could be transformed into those that they need.
Well, just my 2c about it