Ascended weapons and armor were added to BLING because there are some players who do not want to do any crafting, but do want to play Fractals. BLING gives these players access to Ascended weapons and armor without forcing them to level up their crafting skills.
For players who are interested in crafting, crafting remains the most efficient way to obtain Ascended weapons and armor on-demand, which is intentional, as Ascended crafting is the big payoff for leveling your crafting skills.
At close to double the price per armor piece I'm not surprised.
A large portion of the cost comes from the fact that Stabilizing Matricies nearly doubled in price when the patch hit. Over time they should return to their normal price range, which will significantly reduce the discrepancy.
If for some reason the values do not normalize as we expect them to, we can certainly look into adjusting the vendor's pricing in a future patch.
PSA: You can actually sell infinite fractal pots for 1c. Be careful.
Oof, yeah that would be bad. I can disable vendoring on those for our next patch.
You can... but will you?!
whistles and walks away
Hey u/Anet_Sean, care to comment on this cost vs time breakdown?
We considered a pricing model more akin to the raid vendor, but a couple things led us away from that structure and to the current one.
First off, we wanted to ensure that crafting remained the primary way for most players to get their Ascended equipment. Due to their nature, Raids will never become the primary way for players to obtain Ascended, but that was a very real risk with Fractals as they are far more accessible and easy to farm.
Secondly, if the primary cost was a token instead of gold, we wouldn't be able to use either Pristines or Research Pages as players have had to long time to stockpile those already. Since we didn't want to add yet another token to Fractals, it made sense to make gold the primary cost and have the tokens be secondary.
Ultimately, after much internal debate, we decided the gold-based structure would be the best for the long-term health of the game.
Why was this vendor not treated more like the raid vendor? Instead of the main components being liquid gold and gold costing materials, have it more focused time-gated, account bound tokens. I would much rather invest time doing the related content than grinding up the gold to buy matrices.
We did look at the raid vendor, but ultimately decided to go with the current setup for several reasons explained here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/53o5mq/bling9009_merchant/d7v2a84
How were the gold amounts decided? The amounts seem way a bit disproportionate to crafting or just praising the RNG god for a box.
We took the current crafting cost, increased it slightly, then split that cost between matricies and raw gold.
This was based on the pre-patch pricing for matricies though, which spiked when the patch hit. Matricies should come back down over the next couple of weeks, which will help equalize the pricing.
If the price of matricies does not stabilize the way we expect it to, we can look into adjusting the vendor's prices.
I appreciate this opinion a lot and want to thank you for sharing, but think that this approach missed the mark by quite a bit. As it stands, if you have sufficient gold to spend on ascended gear, there is never a point where acquiring the gear by Fractals is a better decision than simply crafting it. You've introduced a relic / matrix sink that will never be realistically used except by accident.
As odd as this may sound, that is actually intentional.
For the majority of players, we want players to obtain most of their ascended equipment from crafting. However, we have some players who strongly dislike crafting, but still want to play higher level Fractals. This new option is our solution to that - by paying an increased cost for their ascended equipment, these players have a guaranteed method to obtain the items they need to play high-level Fractals without ever needing to craft anything.
For players who do enjoy crafting, or at the very least don't mind doing it, crafting will remain the most efficient way to guarantee acquisition of your ascended armor.
on that note, was it considered to trade in potions that drop from dailies for a small amount of relics? it's not a major problem, just a minor annoyance to get a drop thats literally worth 1c, after one bought all three infinite potions. just to give them a bit more value for people with infinite potions.
We're looking into a use for those once you get the infinite potions.
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