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Ascended crafting - marks or from scratch?


Veprovina.4876

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Hey all!

So recently i've taken up a task of ascended crafting. It's been long overdue and i need a better armor set. I crafted my first ascended piece (gloves) a few days ago, and i did it from the recipe. Light armor. I craft my daily cooldowns of everything so i have it in case i need it.

But since i do fractals every day, still T1 but whatever, i know there's a way to get ascended gear by crafting grandmaster's marks. Now what little i've seen, it's more or less the same except you don't need vision crystals, it seems like it uses less leather, but uses steel (tailor) that the "from scratch" recipe doesn't use.

Now, what's better to craft? 3-4 marks required for gear or the gear from scratch? Since it's light armor, it doesn't use steel at all, but uses a fair bit of leather and leather is expensive (for some reason, like reall, kitten?), but the grandmaster mark uses steel and i can farm iron and platinum for the ingredients easily and for free instead of buying leather from TP. I'll still have to buy silk and leather from TP but it may be cheaper? I don't know...

Marks also have more gated materials, so by the time i craft them all and save up enough fractal relics, i might get enough gold to buy the rest of the required materials from TP + farming...

Please advise, i don't know what to do... I'm not super rich, i'll probably go bankrupt doing either, then i'll have to farm gold to continue only to go bankrupt on the next piece and so on until it's finished, so i'd like a less painful route if possible.

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In some cases, marks require more time gated mats, but you can buy marks themselves on the TP for a high upcharge iirc.

Really what is cheaper depends on which item, what you have in your bank, and the current market. Sometimes its more expensive to use the marks, sometimes its cheaper to use them. Without knowing all the details, we can't really tell you. What I can tell you though, is that the price difference now, after the markets for those mats stabilized somewhat (a lot of them got more expensive when marks were introduced) is usually minimal. Almost always, when I check, its <10% maximum, and usually just a couple of gold. If you struggle getting the account bound mats, I would suggest marks. Otherwise use GW2Efficiency.com/crafting to determine on an item per item basis which is cheaper

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Edited, because I was wrong.

What ascended armor are you making?

You said you're making light armor, so I think that means you need Grandmaster Tailor's Marks? Those are 13g a piece to make. (Or is it just Grandmaster Armorsmith Marks? Those are also about 13g to make.) You need four for a chest piece, so roughly 52g.

If you wanted to make zerker gear, the coat would cost you 59g.If you wanted to make viper gear, the coat would cost you 60g.

So, there is a better way. Most definitely. If you like PvP, you can get the Marks at the end of a reward track as well.

Also, Efficiency works fine for me.

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Oh I thought I saw a post saying the API was back up. Either way, the price difference is minimal, and you can use the wiki to do the calculation, though its much more tedious. For instance, taking the ascended light coat (Illustirous doublet) with zerker stats, the wiki page has a breakdown of the cost to craft it here

It also costs 4 grandmaster tailor marks and 4 gold

If you don't want to use the links. It costs 60 gold to craft the light coat, and it costs 13.5 gold to craft each mark. So 4 marks + 4 gold means that if you buy it with marks, you will need ~58 gold. Or a net savings of ~2 gold worth of materials. Again though, it depends on what is already in your bank since they require different mats to go either route. In the end, we can't give you a definitive answer, but the cost either way is very comparable. Certainly you won't save enough to make it worth the struggle to go over this for each component in my opinion (though some people disagree).

Edit - It seems my links to the wiki aren't working properly due to how those pages work. You can check it yourself by going to the relevant pages (zojja's doublet and grandmaster tailor marks) and hitting the little "Show base ingredients" link in the bottom right of the recipe box

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@FANY.6524 said:What ascended armor are you making?

You said you're making light armor, so I think that means you need Grandmaster Tailor's Marks? Those are 13g a piece to make. (Or is it just Grandmaster Armorsmith Marks? Those are also about 13g to make.) You need three for a chest piece, so roughly 39g.

If you wanted to make zerker gear, the coat would cost you 59g.If you wanted to make viper gear, the coat would cost you 60g.

So, there is a better way. Most definitely. If you like PvP, you can get the Marks at the end of a reward track as well.

Yes i'm making light armor. I made Zojja's gloves cause that's the only recipe i knew but in the meantime i bought all the other recipes and the recipe for marks and stuff.And i know i can get marks and gear from PvP, but i don't like PvP or WvW at all. Maybe some day but i just don't like it now. And i suck at it so i won't be getting any gear anyway...

@OriOri.8724 said:Oh I thought I saw a post saying the API was back up. Either way, the price difference is minimal, and you can use the wiki to do the calculation, though its much more tedious. For instance, taking the ascended light coat (Illustirous doublet) with zerker stats, the wiki page has a breakdown of the cost to craft it here

It also costs 4 grandmaster tailor marks and 4 gold

If you don't want to use the links. It costs 60 gold to craft the light coat, and it costs 13.5 gold to craft each mark. So 4 marks + 4 gold means that if you buy it with marks, you will need ~58 gold. Or a net savings of ~2 gold worth of materials. Again though, it depends on what is already in your bank since they require different mats to go either route. In the end, we can't give you a definitive answer, but the cost either way is very comparable. Certainly you won't save enough to make it worth the struggle to go over this for each component in my opinion (though some people disagree).

Edit - It seems my links to the wiki aren't working properly due to how those pages work. You can check it yourself by going to the relevant pages (zojja's doublet and grandmaster tailor marks) and hitting the little "Show base ingredients" link in the bottom right of the recipe box

Yeah i'm totally lost without gw2efficiency. :tongue: I checked it again, the API still doesn't work...But yeah, 13.5g for marks, x3, and about 50-60g for crafting, but the thing is. I can farm iron and mithril for materials i need for the marks, but i can't farm leather. And just boots need 1000 thick leather, but the marks only need 200.

So, assuming i don't buy easily farmable materials, aren't marks better?

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I do, i farm iron and platinum. I have too much mithril for now idk what to do with all of it so i stopped farming that for the time being, but i can easily do a farming run (gw2efficiency also provdes that, and it takes like half an hour), and i can get back with over 250 stacks of iron and around 200 platinum. I salvage all my greens and lower so i have plenty of mithril and some other mats from that.

But leather is illusive... And i don't think there's a reliable way of farming it, maybe that's why it's so expensive. So, since light armor needs a fair bit of leather, maybe i should craft marks instead. i checked the material list, marks even use less silk than crafting from scratch, but instead use materials that aren't tied to my crafting profession like mithrilium, and of course, more time gated materials, but most of them i can make in a day so it's no big deal (cord, mithrilium, damask in one day, then the rest in a few days).

Oh i wish they would enable the API so i can see what i have in my storage. :tongue:

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I'm reposing something I wrote for the old forums. The specific numbers have changed, but not the conclusions. I've removed the detailed calcs, since they are now easily available via GW2 Efficiency & GW2 BLTC.


Short story: Vendor crafting offers exactly what some people have been asking for: recipes that require more of the mats that drop 'normally' for L80, alternative uses for non-open world currencies, and a completely different balance in requirements. Whether it's better depends entirely on how one plays (and what one has stored) and upon on whatever the market is doing.

Specific differences:Aside from the obvious requirement of mode-specific currency, here are the major differences going from traditional to vendor crafting:

  • Marks require a blend of T6 mats; traditional requires a lot of crystalline dust plus some specific mats. This reduces the cost of expensive variations (minstrels, etc).
  • Marks require 40-60% of the T2-T4 leather|cloth|metal of traditional, reducing dependency on the TP (or alt toons to open bags).
  • Marks require a ton more of the T5 primary mat: tailor marks use nearly double the silk, leather needs about a quarter more thick, and armorsmith over six times as much mithril.
  • Marks don't require any ascended mats (dragonite, bloodstone dust, empyreals).
  • Marks don't require any hardened leather nor any gossamer (neither method requires Orichalcum).
  • All the marks use iron, platinum, and mithril ore; only traditional armor uses those.
  • Mithril requirements for marks are huge! (Especially for Armorsmith.)
  • Marks don't require fulgurite, which is used for all HoT prefixes.

SimilaritiesA few requirements are about the same in both systems:

  • The net gold requirements (from vendor + primordium etc) is close, with marks needing 3-6 gold more in coin.
  • Both require rank 500 in the relevant craft.
  • Both depend on time-gated material, which is great for patient crafters and terrible for the impatient. (On the whole, the premium on mark-related time-gated refinements is higher than that for traditional crafting, e.g. Composite Wood is more profitable than Spiritwood.

This post attempted to show the economic impact of the new recipes by looking at the recipes for traditional crafting versus Fractal or PvP crafting. Older threads covered whether folks like the changes (here & there) and there's a decent reddit post that concerns itself with the costs., that focuses more on absolutes rather than a direct comparison.

In the long run, this is better for people who focus primarily on fractals or PvP, as it uses more of T5 mats (which drops naturally), fewer T2-4 (which do not), and a blend of fine T6 which should be ultimately cheaper for gear with meta stats. It's also good in the short & long run for people who make time-gated materials every day.

It is definitely worse for those who hate crafting (it's more convoluted, since you can't do all the work at a single 'crafting' station) and for those that were hoping to acquire ascended gear for 'cheap' (like PvPers who got used to last season's rewards).

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by doing spvp in the mist and completeing all the reward tracks you make over 20gold and get 3 marks for whatever you want.

i used these marks to get ascended pieces of gear or weapon i wanted however i'll tell you this i played noting but spvp so for me i was able to get ALL my marks for free from 2season/then crafted the remaining i needed with the amount of gold i made from 2 seasons of playing noting but spvp(600gold). i used that as a gateway to gear up a third character pretty much free. I think making the marks is 10x better then actually crafting a whole set of gear because that becomes a lot after a while at least to me it does.

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  • 4 months later...

@Veprovina.4876 said:Thanks but as I said, I suck at PvP do I don't want to trigger people by playing badly.

One more question, can I craft a weapon on another character, then pop it in the bank for my main to use? Because I can't craft weapons.

If you enjoy it go for it. You will likely end up in bronze and honestly if you can view the games as a fun mini game, or just another way to gear and get gold you will have a good time. A lot of people in that rank are just there to get the rewards too. I have never been that low in the rating system so I can't say how toxic it will be, but if you keep a positive mindset and really just focus on you getting better/getting your rewards I think you should do it. Don't worry about what people say during your first 10 games btw, those are your placement games and you may be playing with really good players if you win one or two so be ready for some anger unfortunately. I encourage everyone who wants to play pvp to try the ranked system! It's a video game, have fun with it and don't worry about your virtual rating. If you can do that you will get pretty good rewards from pvp!

edit- wow this thread is old... oops

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@Veprovina.4876 said:Thanks but as I said, I suck at PvP do I don't want to trigger people by playing badly.

One more question, can I craft a weapon on another character, then pop it in the bank for my main to use? Because I can't craft weapons.

Whether or not you are good at pvp is irrelevant. If you suck at it you will be in lower ratings with others who also have low ratings. If they have a problem with your skill level, then they can get better and get into a higher divisions.

The only consideration you should have in pvp is whether or not you enjoy the game mode.

I enjoy pvp and have crafted sets of ascended armor via marks. I have also crafted sets traditionally. Using marks was quite a bit cheaper. I spent about 50g less using marks than traditional crafting for the full set.

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