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)

Then stop complaining you "cannot afford Vabbian". It's like QQing you cannot buy a Ferrari because you "have better things to do than work 12h/day to get the money".

One UW run (SF chaos plains) takes less than 30 minutes for 3 to 10 ecto's. And guess what, i even got 2 sapphires on 2 of my 3 runs yesterday.

All in all, you're looking at somewhere between 3 and 10 runs to get the money you need.

And IF the flickering toe on the para is removed - I am SOOO getting it!
(And I don't even play my warrior. I just have him so that I could get the Vabbi set ...)

I got at least 1 ruby or sapphire every visit to FoW, and I can't even count how many of both I've gotten as chest rewards or hidden chests. I'm still sitting on about 20 of each after I got Vabbian, so you're doing it wrong, even considering I have excellent luck.

You want vanity armour, but unwilling to put in the time? (the two bolded words go hand in hand)

His idea was a fair one. Farming ecto doesn't have to be tedious. Farm with a friend. Do 5-10 smite runs, then turn the ecto in gems. Rinse and repeat. Farming ecto would be quicker then just picking up what you get, or trying to buy them. But, wtf do I know right?

Couple of things:

*Let's assume that I'm not ignorant! I've been here for a while, I may have, oh, seen wiki a couple times and, um, been there on the opening day of every campaign. You know, stuff like that. Thanks for the polite advice and all, but you're barkin up the wrong tree!

*FoW Armor is an outlier. There is literally no other crafted armor even remotely close to it. Go plot it all out for yourself in excel, it's absurd. Vabbian, at 1/5th the price on a bad day, isn't even in the same game, let alone ballpark. All the other 15k armors should be compared to one another, not to something ridiculously out there like FoW. Stop being silly -- yes, compared to FoW, Vabbian is still cheap, as is everything else. But this isn't FoW. Heck, it isn't even an end of campaign set!

*Variations in price for saphs and gems do not reflect market values. They reflect the lack of a general farming area, something that isn't an issue for literally every other high level mat. Heck, even ectos would be a ton cheaper if they didn't have a double function as currency!

Yes, I spent a lot of time bitching about the armor, but what I'd really like to see is the drop rates increased in a specific area so that the lolbars can go there, farm it, and lower the price for everyone. I don't see how that could possibly impact anyone in a negative way. Most of us are not lolbars, so, as consumers, we benefit from price decreases. Only the lolbars suffer, but, hey, they love tedium anyway, so who cares about them. Plus, it'll give people like me who, for whatever reason, actually want Vabbian armor a specific location to hit to get the stuff for it. Everyone wins (except for the people who suck anyway)!

I. Stated. In. The. OP. That. I. Have. 400k.

I can afford it, I don't see why it needs to be that expensive when compared to other 15k sets in its range. Especially considering how unpopular it is!

I've cleared FoW twice, and been there, uh, more times than I can remember, to be honest. I've gotten one in FoW. Exactly one. And that was before Factions came out -- I remember how everyone was like oooooh a ruby, I've never seen one before! Mine! My precious! My preeeecious!

So I'm thinking you're probably a tad out there or doing a lot of farming.

Assuming that the other materials involved with crafting armor are the same...

Vabbian = 80K for gems + 25K for gold (5 pieces @ 5K each) = 105K

Elite [Insert Type] = 75K for gold (5 pieces @ 15K each) = 75K

So you're complaining about a 30K higher cost?

So you take the piss out of Ursan users (understandable), but you want them to farm the gems to excess so you can have cheaper armour?

No.

Aye. Nothing worse then poor people complaining for hours on forums instead of actually playing the game and earning money.

The price of vabian is what it is at the moment. Either you buy it or you wait for prices to maybe drop or just don't buy it and move on.

The time you invested in this thread was alrdy enough to do some smite runs. People gave you lots of advice. Stop the QQ, play and earn it.

A lock seems inevitable.

If farming is going about once a week with a full group, then I guess so? Maybe your problem is farming small patches of FoW instead of actually finishing the area. The drop rate is more than sufficient as is, at least for some of us.

Hey, I'm allowed to have my cake and eat it too here, you know?

What I have found to be a good way to get Rubies and Sapphires is the following: In various Nightfall areas you can find Rain Beetle mobs. These mobs drop a trophy called a Geode. The rare salvage from Geodes can be either a ruby or a sapphire. This may not sound like much... but in my experience I tend to get one gem every 5 or so geodes I salvage... I have tried salvaging ruby daggers and other such weapons and even with highly salvageable mods I never had much luck. The geodes on the other hand are easy to farm and are immune to loot scaling as they're a trophy. Soloing a typical mob of Rain/Rock beetles generally nets me between 2 and 4 geodes... and in several places you can find half a dozen such mobs.

Also, killing djinn can be helpful as well, as they drop a trophy that can be salvaged into gems. Hope this helps... I found this a much faster way to get gems than trade contracts or buying them from others.

Might want to try farming Geodes since it looks like's they have almost a 10% chance to expert salvage into diamonds, rubies or sapphires.

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Geode

Could be the heroes, as they do reduce drop rates. You're doing it full human? I gotta applaud that if you are, as I just don't have the time to hunt up a full group of non-Ursans.

Not that I've got some heady principles about the whole thing, I just tend to (literally) fall asleep playing it, and people get all (understandably) peeved when I do that. You should have seen the bitching that went on in Slavers Exile when that happened on my only visit to the place.

There is a rule about double/triple posting you know. Captain Ryker will blow you out of the sky soon. Bad Klingon!

They do drop quite often i see a ruby or saphire drop every 2-3 runs in FoW. Also kill the djinn and salvage the essence they drop with the superior salvaging kit, and you should be getting 1 gem every 5-6 essences salvaged.

you should be thankful their that low, remember when they both 5k+? Yea I bought vabbian, twice, during that time period.

Ahhhh yes, this is an economic issue that i have been dealing with myself, I have been trying to tell myself the armor looks amazing go ahead and spend the money. Of course thankfully I am only a couple gems short, as I have been doing the quests in the area for those trade contracts and whatnot. Either way, still very expensive armor, the price has come down, but not as precipitously as other armors that require special items for their creation as the gems are not very farmable

This is quite over.