So called "rare" items in Elona

Has anybody else been subject to this load of crap? Gold items are supposed to be "rare."

Perhaps my experience is too limited, but I've never seen a rare "Highly salvageable" item in Prophecies or Factions. Typically these are reserved for the "blue" items.

Maybe i've been very fortunate n all the other gold items i've found, but I see nothing treasurable in a Req 12 wand that does absolutely nothing other than wand. No bonus energy, no casting mods, no armor, no health, nothing.

You know what this "rare" highly salvageable item salvaged into? Wood. One of the most common of the common crafting materials in the game. Not coal, or steel or something one might qualify as a "rare" find by any means. And not all that much wood either. Factoring the cost of the use of the expert salvage kit, I was probably better off merching it "as is".

If it's supposed to be "rare", and gold items seem to becoming even more rare these days if you've been opening chests lately, it should genuinely be rare. This pile of wood crap is just that - crap.

No more gold items with the Measure for Measure inscription, please. You don't find them in the other two releases, no need to find them in Elona. No more of those "improved sale value" on golds either. Gold items already have a high merch value, and I haven't seen this inscription ever raise an item beyond that.

aww...boo hoo, baby didn't get her bottle.

Why don't you just mod it yourself and make something good out of it, this really isn't worth crying over.

what a shame
just because you got a bad one doesnt mean other did.
So you dont see hihgly salvagable ones in prophecies well thats obviously becuase they don't have inscriptions.

items like that you should either put a better upgrade on or merchant. 244 gold isnt bad for merchanting.
Why are you complaining? Especially as you've said all your other gold drops were fortunate

Honestly, that happens to me a lot. If it's a decent item (skin/Req), I just mod over it, but generally, I rip the Highly Salvageable off and slap it onto some Jeweled Daggers or somethin, which often gives up Rubies or Sapphires when I do. Not that big of a deal.

Personally I find gold items more of a problem in Tyria...although it is mainly wands... Is it just me that thinks a gold item should have the max number of mods it can? I found it laughable when my brother and I were doing Thunderhead Keep yesterday and he got a gold holy rod....it has one non-max mod on it. HOW is that allowed to be gold? Tyria seems to be particularly problematic for gold wands imo...I've very rarely had a dual-modded one

As for Elona...there do seem to be a LOT of Measure for Measure inscriptions around, but at least now they seem to actually be working. When they came out I put on on Jewelled Daggers and got 2 piles of glittering dust. Recently I've been getting 6-9 steel ingots off weapons which is better. The free chests chuck out a lot of junk, which I don't really mind, but it really gets on my nerves when you pay 600-750g for a key and get a single modded item...the only mod being Measure for Measure.

Golds arent "rare", they drop quite frequently. Its the skins which are rare. Its the perfect weapons which are are. Its the low requirement + max dmg weapons which are rare.

And i've never in my life got a "measure for measure" inscription.

Let me guess... you're low on funds.

You're p'd off because you cant find decent gold items to flog, or you cant salvage rare materials to sell.

Do you realise how vain this thread is. Gold's or greens are not the be-all and end-all of GWs. Golds or greens dont do anything amazing or special. They might have nice skins, and occassionally have some very nice mods, but their no different to any other weapon.

Take a normal - bog standard weapon. Stick some flashy mods on it and bam... you can probably make a better weapon then most golds or probably mimic most greens.

People who chase after gold weapons, are either PvP players who want to be L33t with the "perfect build" or their vanity players who want to be better then everyone else.

The rest of us seem to service without finding amazing, perfect, wonderfull gold weapons. Get over it.

^^^^Well said!
how could a rare item be rare if your expecting to get them all the time?

But would it not be better to make gold items ACTUALLY rare? - meaning they are always rare skinned with all their mods but have a lot less of them dropping? I would prefer that to the current situation of being swamped with "golds", most of which are trash, or at best, hero-worthy.

I would like this idea to be taken into account for GW:2.

I don't get the big deal. Isn't this a good thing?

Salvage and move on.

Dear me. What a thing to have to do. What a travesty! A common skin High req wand with no mods and a highly salvageable on it. What to do. Oh wait. 244 gold value. Hmm. Or u cud salvage it. Might get 50+ wood.

yes its crap. Big deal. As has already been stated, if all golds were rare and good, the market would be nuts and no one would ever have any money. So stop complaining.

To this I say:
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Rare

In Guild Wars, the rarer an item is, the more valuable and powerful it can be. There are five levels of item rarity. They are, in ascending rarity:

White: Common items without an upgrade or modifier.
Blue: Less common items.
Purple: Uncommon items.
Gold: Rare items.
Green: Unique items. These items don't technically have a place on the rarity spectrum.

On weapons, the quality of the modifier or upgrade on a dropped weapon increases with rarity.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Wisdom -the "official" wiki - wisdom title
Rare items are ones that are described with gold colored lettering.


Whether or not you acknowledge a gold item as rare is irrellevant, the game mechanics do.


Strength and honor comes in varying quality. Hale and Hearty comes in varying quality. Measure for Measure = Highly salvageable, and "Show Me the Money" = Improved sale value. Neither of these come in low or high quality, so how can a gold wand with this inscription claim to be more rare than a blue wand with the same inscription and stats?

As to the rest, money is not my concern. "Power" is not my concern. I have numerous items that are modified collector (traded shells for them) weapons. I pulled the nice bow strings of the high req gold bows, and placed them on the low req collector bows - for example. Destroying a gold to make a blue would make these "vain" people you speak of cringe. It's the established expectation, and the subsequent dissappointment that I'm upset about. For me, it's actually the principle of the thing (i really don't care about the GW$ - I regularly give high end stuff away in Ascalon and Kam). For all you know, this is a bug and entirely unintentional. Calling me a "vain" suck has nothing to do with the fact that common items are showing up as "rares." I never said the drop should be perfect. I'm not expecting some R9 +5e^50, HCT 20% (insert skill) wand. If it had a been a simple HCT 17 or 18% (insert skill) and nothing else, there would be no complaint. This is a common mod pretending to be rare. I'm just trying to point it out.


I tried the old "slap that mod on a jewel weapon for some rubbies" idea a number of times... always ends up with a tiny pile of dust. Don't trust it.

This isn't the first time it's happened. And unless someone says something (and I know a number of people who've been complaining about it) nothing will be done about it. If someone says something, perhaps maybe something will be done about it. Maybe my tone wasn't the greatest to start the issue, but honestly... I just wasn't pleased.

Rarity doesn't affect the skin or the type of mods, only the quality of the mods.

Blues range from 0-50% of the max value of the mod
Purple, 50-75%
Gold, 75-100%

The mods are random, and since measure for measure doesn't really have a quality, per se (would be nice if they did mind - 10-100% chance of salvaging rares out of it), they're unaffected by rarity.

Tada.

I personally don't actually care...I like the idea of golds dropping quite frequently, I'd prefer that to one dropping once a blue moon with a rare skin and low req. If It's gold and I Identify it, even if its only merchant-worthy its an extra point on wisdom at the very least anyway.

Okay, you can't exactly class your weapon as rare, but to hell with that you can overwrite it, and if req 12 isn't your thing whats wrong with selling it and being done with the fiasco. Though I do see your point that a highly salvageable mod on a weapon doesn't exactly seem worthy of being a gold weapon.

Your complaining you got wood from it...but I don't think any other material would really be suited, 'cept maybe glittering dust being equally as useless. I mean...steel Ingots from a wand? o_O Don't think so.

'Wooden Boar Sceptre' for a start, sort of hints your going to get wood from it ^^;

whats this nonsense, u wanna tell me that rare, aka gold items drop more frequently than purple or even blue ones? unless you have uber luck ingame, this isnt the case

Anyone want to give me a reason why this isn't just a semantic debate that has no value?

i got a req10 staff with a 10% casting mod and a +1 20% to its attribute

but seriously dude, so wat that u got a crap mod on ur gold, i merched hundreds of golds cuz they are crap, move on gg

i have problems with the golds to
why look for a gold anyway?
since they put all the greens in its kinda pointless to use any gold in my opinion... so why farm for any gold.....
oh yeah u have the rareskinned i play for long and never saw 1 and i solo farmed alot...
and what about the inscriptions that came with nichtfall?
making my old weapons crap!thx
ok this game is not seposed to be a farmgame i guess but i think they forget the fun in finding real unique items...
what to do after u lvled 4 characters in all campains?
oh i forgot here is the answer : buy gw2

colloasal scimitars and ele swords are the only 2 things in nf worth anything so farming there is usless, so much for "land of wealth and bounty"

When all golds were rare the market was nuts. I remember buying and selling junk golds i.e. inperfect while hexed for like 10-15k each. Bought my first Crystalline sword by the time I reached the desert on my first char. Back then it was waaaay easier to be rich. You could sell inperfect golds for alot of gold now you can only sell certain perfect ones.

Happened at the start of Guild Wars. Golds were actually rare. Too many people cried so Anet made them drop loads. Prices fell, golds became common, price of golds fell, most golds became junk, people couldnt make gold as easily....

Was nice to see people getting FOW armour from just one drop alone back in the day but now there are like only a few items which can offer that chance compared to dozens at beginning.

Kinda funny really. Rich stay rich while the poor struggle to make gold after demanding golds to be cheaper.

I bet thread will be closed as just guna be flame war.

My NF Ele has identified 241 gold drops, (none bought), and out of all those perhaps only half a dozen or so was worth selling. Salvaged mods off some but approx 80-90% goes straight to the merchant.

No point getting upset because you got a rubbish gold drop, join the club!

I've had 3 good gold drops ever.

Require 9 14% stance shadowblade
Require 9 15% stance shadowbow with +30hp bg
Require 9 10% recharge on spells shadowstaff +5 energy

hmm, the FoW loves me

The best weapon I got was a 15^50 require 11 wicked blade, that was purple.

Wooden Boar Sceptre there's your first clue. Weapons amazingly enough often salvage into what they look like i.e. wands, staffs mostly salvage in wood while sword, axes mostly salvage into iron and steel ingots.

Of all the gold items I got (apart from runes) they were 99% crap. I once got a +30hp mod for a sword and only very few times the 15<50 mod (not even on anything good) in my entire time playing Guild Wars (almost 2 years now). So, I've got virtually no gold items (mostly greens). So you better just get used to getting crappy gold drops unless you're lucky.

It's easy to get frustrated or let down because you don't get what you want. But I don't complain much because the odds are the same for everybody. You can't affect luck, so why waste effort crying about it? In all my days of playing GW, I have not ONCE had a gold item drop that I actually used. But that didn't stop me from using my brain to make some money and now I have just about everything I could want in the game.

Don't buy anymore keys?

But like most people here alot of my golds go to the merchant, or i'll give them to guildies / friends if they aren't to bad.

What I find funny is a lot of golds I get are req 13, yet purples tend to be req 9.

Gold may not be as valuable as they used to be, but you also don't need to find a perfect gold to get money out of it. Not a single gold drop i got in Tyria/Cantha was worth trying to sell. In Elona if i get a r9 Sword with 16 below 50 mod on it I can replace the mod, and actually sell it. If you had that mod on a tyria/canthan weapon? Merch. Just because not all golds have perfect mods doesnt mean they shouldn't be gold. And at least if it doesn't drop perfect in elona I can fix that.

You aught to read what people write

I was talking about wands...it's only Tyrian wands I have a problem with....staves almost always seem to come with an inherent mod whereas with tyrian wands I'm lucky if it comes with one mod...

A-net has better things they can do besides making sure an inscription that can be replaced doesn't show up on golds...like fixing [skill]Keen Arrow[/skill] to where you get the minimum damage bonus even when you don't crit like it's supposed to...

Higher value = you can sell it to the merchant for more than any purple item.

Nowhere in GW does it say that a Gold item is inherently more powerful than a Purple item. The mods can be "more perfect" than a Purple item, but in instances like this, the mod comes at the "perfect" level for all weapons with that inscription.

Actually,that Wooden Boar Scepter is both Perfect and Imperfect.

Golds and keys are a gamble, when I buy keys for, say, a tomb run I expect 99 shit drops and 1 perfect 15^50 stormbow. Best thing I got from Urgoz is a 15^50 zodiac longbow req. 11, the rest was crapola. I don't farm golds for selling though, just to make my heroes and chars look good. If you want perfect weaponry it's much easier to farm greens anyways. Open wiki, see which green has stats/skin you like and go get it. I always chuckle if I see people bragging about their newly acqiured Urgoz's Longbow while it has a sundering mod on it, brrr, pay 100k+ectos for a bow with shitty mods. Vanity, definitely my favourite sin ^^.

I get golds like that all the time, it's definitely not a rare occurrence. I really don't see what all the fuss is about...

I think you guys are missing the point.

GW has a color system for a reason: to identify rarity. I think the point he is making is: The color & the meaning don't match up anymore. Yeah, maybe they increased the drop rate of golds, but if the mods are the same as a purple or blue... why make it gold?

I would rather have the item colors be more accurate than to get 100 crappy golds to make me feel special. Why not make the req 13, 13% in stance items purple?!

I agree that the color should actually reflect the rarity of the weapon, instead of "oh well, it's another non-rare rare." If you want to do that, what's the color for?

I understand the irritation that gold rarely feels like it means anything - it doesn't mean rare skin, it doesn't guarantee max damage and it actually seems to mean req 13 more than any other colour (in my experience).

those are indeed purple ;P

sorry, couldnt help myself ;D. 13% can only drop as purples tho. 14% and 15% are the golds

Thanks for this response and sticking up for the OP. I think a lot of people on this forum are too F***ing quick to jump down peoples throats lately and I am personally getting sick of it. Did anyone but you even bother to read and think about what the OP was saying before getting on your high horse and posting the normal "get over it" response? Why do you even bother to post?

Wiki clearly states that items are graded on their rarity by what color it is! Ok, to you all who say your not guaranteed anything, then what's the fricking point of them being colored in the first place? And ya, maybe I am saying that golds should be perfect. They are, according to wiki, the RAREST items. Why not make the purples be the not perfect and let the golds be perfect? In the very least a gold should have the maximum number of mods that the item can have.

Gold items have a better range of available stats, meaning a better CHANCE of a good item, not a guaranteed 100k+ecto sale.

Also keep in mind that even if all the item has is a Highly Salvagable mod, if it has a good skin and req it can easily be modded into a valuable perfect-stats weapon.

(That said, I agree that getting the Precious or Highly Salvagable mods on a purple or gold is just silly... it'd be nice if it was fixed so they only dropped on blues.)

Bean, just because an item is rare doesn't mean it is of quality. As far as I can tell, golds drop about half as often as purples or less and they are rarely perfect.

Rare /= perfect.

What irks me is when a chest that requires a 1500g key drops you a purple. oh well.

Since there's a market for unid golds, I don't mind too much that most golds are junk.

Ok..what then is the definition of rare? I mean, I take it as meaning that it will not drop as often as other items. So then I assume (and yes I know that assume=ass*u*me) that if the item has a lower chance of dropping that it will, in essence, be much better than those that do drop frequently; even better than greens.

I'm not trying to start a war or anything but it would just make more sense if golds, being the rarest items according to wiki, be actually better than any other items. And I mean consistently better, not the completely random system that is in affect now.

I also believe that certain end game, high difficulty, areas like FoW, UW, DoA etc should have a much better chance of a chest having a gold item in it. It is just insane to pay 1.5k for a key, open a chest, and a purple item with the most insane mods on it drop. Then you sell it to a merchant for 186gold. Ya, thats a fair trade off.