Crafting Celestial Armour

Can you finally drop the time gating or reduce the amount of items needed? Honestly, whose idea was it to require 5 Charged Quartz Crystals for 1 insignia and with that having to wait for a total of 30 days to wear what's probably not even the most used selection of stats.

Some of us have a day job too and would like to get it sooner.

If you don't want to remove the time gating, at least reduce is to something reasonable, like 1 Charged Quartz Crystal needed for 1 insignia. That way it will take a user one week instead of one month to craft it.

Thanks.

My standard tactic for timegated materials: plan ahead and craft one every day, whether you need it or not. It takes a second and after a while you'll have a stack ready and waiting for whenever ANet releases something and you do need it. I did the same for Bloodstone Bricks, Dragonite Ingots and Empyreal Stars. I've got 1 or 2 full stacks of each, and more than a full stack of charged quartz crystal, just so I'm never shy of those materials should I need them.

The time gate isn't bad if you are doing an Ascended set, since it's the same as the other ascended time gates, but it's WAY overkill for an exotic set. It would also make it easier to swap an existing ascended set back and forth if the exotic insignia was droped to 1 or 2 crystals.

As the others said you are intended to plan ahead and save up the necessary mats. Also, consider that celestial stats are really not the best, and the armor set I believe is account-bound, so unless you really want it there's no need to make it at all. There are cheaper sets that are better.

GW2 is a game of long-term goals. Regardless of how often you play, you should not expect immediate payoffs. Many people spend months to get a legendary item for instance. It's just the way the game is designed. This way we don't all have everything we want in a week and get left with no goals to pursue.

Actually, the only real problem here is that charged quartz crystals are Bind on Account. If you could at least purchase them from the TP, or get some friends to help you, the 1-per day wouldn't be as big an issue.

Bad enough that Celestial gear is account bound and the recipes aren't discoverable, (like Vipers and Marauders, etc) it doesn't make much sense to add an additional time gate to acquiring this gear.

I doubt anything will change though as "I did it, my father did it, and his father before him did it" type of mentality.

It's been over five years & ANet hasn't been persuaded that there's anything wrong with their first attempt at time gating. Personally, I've always thought that they should choose between mechanics, either time gating or account binding, not both. The market for charged quartz would be decent, as people (such as the OP) would be willing to pay a premium for other people's efforts.

Regardless, it not only is what it is, it's going to remain what it is, probably for another five years or longer, because this simply doesn't matter often enough for them to invest resources into addressing it. Hardly anyone gets caught by the issue twice: once you run into the wall, you prepare by charging a lot of quartz when you don't need it, so that you have it when you do.

There are some other alternatives that bypass the time gate. There are a number of "choosy armor boxes" or armors with "choosy stats" that include celestial as an option.

For exotic armor, there's bounty hunter, elonian, glorious, legacy armor (from PvP or WvW tracks, any of the skins), triumphant, and warbeast. For ascended, there are boxes of gear with the prefix: Defender's, Healer's, or Malicious.

I'm sure others can think of other examples.