Black Dye, the stable commodity

Personally, I think that the reason for using ecto in most ppl's minds is "hey, if it all goes to hell, at least I can pimp out 12 more characters with obby armor"

and yeah, thats the kind of rationale I use whenever I get the urge to farm uw

yeah and also because ectos are used more commonly
(think chaos gloves, fow armor)

Um ... in comparison to, say, any armor and equipment? Personally, I prefer white in most cases but black has never gone out of fashion among the larger populace.

Also, black dye can be farmed just like ectos, although its current price doesn't make it a very viable farm on its own, but combined with some other pursuit it's a decent bonus. Last time I checked there were 15 vials of black in my storage and I've probably used up as much, so it's something like 1 drop per month in average, although most of the drops have occurred during some farming frenzy (e.g., the Diessa Lowlands gargoyles provided copious amounts of dye when I stocked up skulls in anticipation of the latest Wintersday). Generally speaking, choose some low level monster that drops collectables you can trade for booze or sweets during festivities and go for the volume. There will be dye in storage for you, and in any case you can make a good profit with the collectables.

I've played GW for nearly two years now and I've had three black dyes drop for me.

There is no single place where you can go to farm for black dyes specifically, it all depends on being VERY lucky. Where as with ectos there is definitely a place, specific builds, teams, and an expectation of getting one or two per run in a specified area. Ectos are surprisingly stable for a completely player controlled commodity.

The only thing I see happening if we suddenly switched to black dyes would be a a huge jump in the trader value, then it would slowly start to decline, just like the then defunct ectos.

Use lockpicks...

You win this thread

lockpicks are the most stable but you can't farm those

There is no need to, there is infinite suply without the danger of changing prices through merchant selling/buying.
And you can farm them by doing anything that gets you gold.

No they can't. Ectos can be reliably obtained by a specific action. Black dye can only be obtained through pure luck. There is nothing you can do (short of Haitian voodoo in your underwear) to influence your acquisition of black dye, but you certainly can make an active effort to collect ectos.

It's sort of like the difference between making a living by expecting to stumble over a diamond in a field somewhere and actually going out to find and work a gold mine. You might fail either way, but at least in one of those pursuits you are actually influencing your odds of success.

The Underworld Chest aside, there's nothing incompatible between how you farm ectos or black dye. First you find out which monster has a chance of dropping what you want to farm, then you kill that monster until you get lucky. In the case of ectos, UW is a good place to start. In the case of black dye, Plains of Jarin is a good place to start. If I'm able to solo kill 1000 monsters on Plains of Jarin at the same time as it would take to kill 200 monsters in the Realm of Torment with a full team, I will have about 40 times better chances at getting a black dye when choosing to farm Plains of Jarin instead of Realm of Torment. If that's not influencing your acquisition rate then we are not using the same dictionary

Black dye wouldn't work imo as its too unpredictable a drop, you need something that has a regular drop rate.
I thought Lockpicks were the new ecto anyway.


Hopefully GW2 will start with more currency options.

Copper
Bronze
Silver
Gold
Platinum
Orichalium

Although that's probably more than anyone would ever need, just adding a third level would be more than enough.

just for info, there is a place that has a statistically higher rate of dropping dyes. pre. when i was going for LDOA between lvl 1 and 18 i dropped 300+ dyes. 12 of them were black and 18 were white.

oh god, not more currency. the system is a pain as is. dont make it worse.

PS: black dyes drop alot in pre, i collected 100 black dyes from drops in 3 months in pre. kill the scorpions.

That's because you spend most of the time entirely alone. Any black dyes that would have potentially dropped for you during the other sections of the game are usually consumed by heroes/hench.

Unless the price of ecto's seriously drops, down to <1k kinda price they will remain the currency of choice.

Not entirely.
I've played a lot with human teams and don't see blacks drop that often.
It's more that dye drops more frequent in Pre than Post.
And more dye means more chance for black.

Actually its because the monsters have the possibility to drop less items then monsters in post.

People have been making claims about "more reliable" black dye drops in certain areas since the game came out. I have yet to see any reason to believe any of the claims are true. In all likelihood, the "increase" in dye drops is related more to the style of play the area demands than anything involving the actual odds of a drop.

It's not the RATE, it's the ODDS. You can actively seek out ectos, you can not actively seek out black dye. It's that simple.

Lockpicks wouldn't work because they're to cheap. Ectos work because they approximate 5k each. To make the equivalent of an Ecto, you'd need 4 lockpicks, and if you're buying a high end item that's a lot of 'superfluous' stacks of items that would be taking up space.
Until Ectos are around 1.7k, people will still prefer to use Ectos simply so they don't need to have so many taking up storage.

Ectos are pretty stable, they don't change prices overnight. Yes, they are being devalued, but at a pretty slow pace. If there was something wrong with them the community as a whole would choose to use something else, but not beforehand.

Stacks of gold can only be obtained through pure luck. There is nothing you can do to influence the your acquisition of gold coins.

"Farming" for black dye is equivalent to "farming" for gold. The more monsters you kill, the better chance you have at a stack of gold coins dropping. You can increase the size of the stacks by dropping higher level monsters, but then its down to the trade off between speed and value.

I'm just saying....