The Scrying Pool makes its return in 2014 looking at the cost of ascended armor.

In each article of The Scrying Pool, I look at what is and what could be. After taking a look at what is present in Guild Wars 2 now, be that lore or game mechanics, I then ask What If? What if this happened in the lore or this feature was added in a future patch.

The last patch for Guild Wars 2 was on December 10^th. Among the Wintersday and Living World content that was released, players were able to start crafting Ascended armor. Ascended weapon crafting had come out earlier in the year and displayed what players could expect from ascended crafting: lots of lower tiered materials and time-gated crafting.

After seeing what was needed for weapon crafting, I had started my own personal stockpile of cloth and leather materials. I knew that if ascended armor crafting was anywhere even close to weapon crafting, then it was going to be much harder to craft due to how cloth and leather are obtained compared to the metal and wood resources within Guild Wars 2.

Of the four common crafting types, metal and wood are the most straightforward to obtain. It involves going out with the appropriate harvesting tool, finding a node and collecting the resource. Finding the nodes would probably be the most involved step if not for amazing community resources that map out the current locations of the nodes. While all the common crafting types can be salvaged from appropriate level and types of gear, it was the simplicity of harvesting metal and wood that made weapon crafting so readily accessible.

 Cloth and leather on the other hand do not have a simple method of acquisition. In addition to being salvaged from gear, the only other method is from being dropped out of a bag that in turn drops from foes. Even if players are able to amass a multitude of these bags, the cloth and leather are only a couple of the approximately 20 possible drops from any single bag. Then after taking into account that 2-3 of each unrefined cloth or leather are needed to craft a single refined piece, acquiring these cloth and leather needed for crafting is quite an effort.

The end result is that leather and cloth make ascended armor much more difficult, and expensive, to craft, much more so than even I had previously guessed.

One of the suggestions I have seen for making ascended armor more worthwhile is to require it use less materials to craft it. Looking at just the refined ascended materials, however, armor uses about half the amount that it took to make ascended weapons. The big difference is that the Deldrimor Steel Ingots and Spiritwood Planks are currently valued at a third of the cost of Bolts of Damask.

Reducing the amount of the lower tiered cloth could work, such as reducing the number of Bolts of Silk required from 100 to 50, but even with this change Bolts of Damask would still be over twice as much as the ingots and planks since the supply/demand balance is causing the other lower tiered cloth to be highly priced. At least with weapons, if the supply caused high prices on something like Platinum Ore a player could alternatively just go out and harvest the Platinum themselves.

So what I would like to see is a direct source for these materials. My idea is to put in another harvesting tool that would allow players to harvest from defeated enemies. This skinning knife would allow for a direct source as well as put in an interesting feature seen in other games to acquire leather.

After an enemy is defeated, a player with a skinning knife could use the mob just like they currently use a mining node if they have a mining tool equipped. What a player could get is then dependent on the mob’s type and level. A level 1 boar would give low level leather since you are skinning the boar’s hide. A level 1 bandit would give low level cloth as if you are cutting off some of their clothes to gain scraps.

There are a few things to consider with this. Mining nodes and trees take a while to respawn, possibly a couple of hours. Mobs on the other hand can respawn within a matter of seconds. To this end players probably wouldn’t harvest scraps of cloth (the current unrefined materials) but a subdivision of that such as scrap sections. A player could then refine these sections into scraps which are then refined into bolts.

Scraps would continue to be acquired the same way they are now, these scrap sections would be an alternative method of acquisition. ArenaNet could then adjust the number of sections more dynamically to help keep the market at a neutral level. For example, since silk is in low supply maybe it only takes two sections to make a scrap, but if later on it becomes in high supply that could be adjusted so that five sections make a scrap.

The skinning knife would be added to the game to mimic the other gathering tools already available, so merchants would have copper, iron and up through orichalcum grade tools. This also gives another unlimited harvesting tool that ArenaNet could sell through the gem store.

Ascended armor doesn’t need to be made more valuable because it is already better than ascended weapons. In terms of ascended materials, a player can either make 3 weapons or a full set of 6 armor pieces. Those 3 weapons will give about the same amount of stat bonuses as the full set of armor. However, those weapons only give 3-4 infusion slots (4 if you made a two-handed weapon as one) while the armor set gives 6 infusion slots. Then only the active weapons will give their stat and infusion bonuses while the armor is always active. So at most you can only get 2 infusion slots from weapons compared to the 6 of armor and two-thirds of the stat bonuses.

So if cloth were more directly attainable, the price of the ascended cloth could drop to about the same price as the ascended metal or wood and make ascended armor way more valuable for the same price as crafting weapons. Ascended armor doesn’t need to be made more attractive, the base materials just need to be made more readily available for players to start crafting it.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams is currently filling out his PvP Locker.

The End Begins on January 21st! I am really excited for these next four patches. The End Begins on Tuesday and I can't wait to get in and play it. I was there on Blackgate for the world first Tequatl kill. Can we do it again for the Great Jungle Wurm?

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