Rubies and Sapphires

I'm tired of them being the only mats that consistently go up in price. Could you slightly increase their drop rates in some of the Dwarven areas so that the lolbar farmers will flood the market and down the price a bit?

It's obnoxious. 32 gems * the current 3.6 mats trader price is ~120k. And my only other options are buying them from other players (go try, they're sold ptp about as often as clay bricks) or repeating the trade contract quests ad nauseum on different characters until I get 224 of the damn things. And at 27 per character... well... I don't have 9 pve characters.

Vabbian armor is cute and all, but 200k armor it ain't. Hell, I only even noticed the obscene prices on gems because I'm on a Lawrence of Arabia kick and figured it'd be fun to get the stuff on my warrior.


Talk about a man's man.

I'm sure most of you are wondering why you should care that I'm too cheap to just buy it. Well, here's the deal. Most of the other 15k sets sit at around 80-100k. The newer it is, the more the campaign specific mats cost and all that. Heck, even Primeval Armor, the endgame set for NF, costs (in total) less than the mats for Vabbian.

Vabbian is, what, almost two years old now? And it still costs what seems to me to be obscene amounts of my filthy filthy lucre. This is silly.

I'm sure most people will respond with "lol go frm poor prson" or "just don't buy it!1!1!" or "urzan wey!", but this isn't so much a whine as it is a complaint that Vabbian armor is so out of whack pricewise when compared to other sets of gear. Even with FoW armor, if I got knocked on the head and suddenly decided that I wanted to spend a meeelion GWBucks buying it, I'd be able to go somewhere (random arena! I mean... uh... UW) and farm the specific items I need.


Full Disclosure: I've been playing for a few years now, and I've only got about 400k saved up, mostly from pvp (ab and halls drops) and being a total cheapo.

And yeah, this kinda is a whine. But it isn't like this change would bother any of you people -- I've seen, like, MAYBE one person still wearing Vabbian. It's soooo passe these days.


And now, a quote from my hero, judge floro:

source

Price has been going down on rubies. They used to be equal to ectos, and my Rit wears vabbian.

At least you realize it.

It's pretty easy to buy trade contracts from people at 300 gold to 350 gold a pop. Yes, it takes a bit of time, but you can get the 224 trade contracts you need for a little less than 80K. Combine that with the price and you're nowhere near the 200K you're quoting.

zomfg fow armor costs 15k looks ugly but has those damn ectos and shards that r so expensive zomfg wtf!!!!

get it now?

just cause it's '15k' doesn't mean it has to be as cheap as the others, and besides, vabbi is so much better looking than most others, so it may at least be expensive. :>

Even at the value you're quoting for total trade contract value, you end up with a total price of ~140k for a 15k armor set, which is more than a little absurd when it's a shade under twice the price of just about every single other one.

And that's ignoring the simple fact that after several hours of spamming I ended up with a grand total of 11 trade contracts and zero gems from trade. Yippee! Shoot me in the face now!

Depends on where you measure from. For a looooong while they were about 1k each, which I considered a more than fair price for them. You still couldn't give them away.

The reason there is price is because people like you want the armor. This seems perfectly logical. It's a vanity set like FoW.

gogo QQ thread
if drop rate slightly increases with ppl constantly farming the price will take a huge dive ^.~

Other possibility is that, unlike virtually every other high end mat, there simply isn't a primary source for the gems. They're rare because there isn't any interest in them, and they don't drop all that often.

In other words, rather than a demand side issue, it's a supply problem.

Unless you'd like to argue that there are tons of people out there wearing Vabbian armor right now, honest! Because I'd have to say that there is a thundering lack of evidence for that idea.

Out of curiosity, do they drop more than greens? They seem to be rarer than green weapons...

I got Vabbian on my Necro at the time when Rubies were I believe 5k each. You can get them for cheaper, it just takes time trading in major cities to get what you need.

In three years of playing, with about 2.5k hours logged, I've had a grand total of four drop while in pve. I've also currently got about 20 greens that dropped for me prior to Gwen with no particular value. So I'd say that they drop far less frequently.

Go spam ToA because both drop regularly in FoW. Throw in how often you get them from GW:EN dungeons, and there's no reason you should be bitching about their drop rate. >.>

Lol you're poor. Farm ectos->buy gems.

No, the drop rate is fine.
They don't need to be like onyx. I've had 2 drop for me in 3 years, 1 just this morning

There are other ways to get them. I've slavaged some from items such as ruby maul. I have 3 sets of them, the first set i bought when they where around 4k, the others i basicly got from slavageing crap r13 items. I'm also working on another set which i have gotten all of them the same way. Well some i got from the free chests in NF as well.

most of the Vabbi armors are ugly, i think this stems more from the fact that gems dont drop as often, because of whatever lack of attention to detail anet may have applied when creating the drop ratios.

on the other note...

warrior vabbi skirt+boots>all other butt and leg armors in game

Sorry bud, but I've got slightly better things to do with my time than lolbar for ectos in UW. Like, for instance, sew my orifices shut and die of toxic shock. I'm glad you enjoy it, I really am -- means you won't be breeding. Thanks for keeping the rest of the gene pool a little cleaner!


Okay, how about this. Yesterday, did a partial FoW run (full heroes, me and him, byob) with a friend of mine. We got about 7 shards (six him, one me, go figure) and zero gems. If the drop rate was weetodded good there, I'd expect to see one on a trip through most of FoW.

In Gwen, I've done all the dungeons (I still get messaged about a bow I picked up when Gwen first came out from an ad on here) and have only gotten diamonds and onyx gems. Maybe I deserve a "Ur doin it wrong" lolcat, but I'm pretty sure it's the drop rate and not me.

Believe it or not, some people didn't hop on the Ursan bandwagon and don't do 3 UW runs every day.

I never had a problem buying/selling rubies and sapphires.
Kamadan is your friend.

Remember, you also can expert salvage ruby weapons and others (check wiki for specifics). Make sure to use those "highly salvagable" runes.

Gems also can drop from the "keyless chests."

I have Vabbian on my Mesmer and it is pretty sweet. Well worth the price. The trader price fluctuates quite a bit, so watch it for several days. I actually sold all my gems once because the price went up enough to make it worthwhile. I bought them back when the price dipped. I've seen a range of 2.8k-4k over the past month or so.

you shouldn't complain, really
i've bought my first vabbian armor (for my sin) when the prices where 9.5k for rubies and 1.5 for saph (yes, rubies used to be that expensive)

FoW is a lot older, but the materials for it are even more expensive

I really like my sin, derv & necro vabbi armors (female)