I'm just clearly still missing something; you can't sell any basic ascended mats anyway. Bloodstone Dust is all you get from champ farming, so if you already had that...?
I'm just confused because you said the process pushes you toward (seemingly
only toward) champ farming. Champ farming even for 400 hours will not get you any of either of these mats. Whether or not they "come easy" kinda depends on what you do while playing I guess. I have well over 1000 of each and I really did not specifically "go after" them at all.
To clarify,
Empyreal Fragments come from jumping puzzles/open world chests, guild puzzles/rushes, dungeons/fractals and camps and towers in WvW
Dragonite Ore comes from World Boss chests, guild challenges, and keeps and castles in WvW
Just over the course of playing the game as I do, I've amassed stacks of these to the point where the most appealing thing about leveling my crafting wasn't getting my first ascended weapon, but reclaiming the inventory space taken up by all my mats (I have started to suspect, looking back, that this was intentional).
But if I had
wanted to acquire them at a much faster rate, this area of the game rewards you heavily for having multiple characters:
-
Here's a ludicrous map for farming Empyreal Fragments making 500 per play session quite practical if you have 3 or more high-level characters
Empyreal Fragment dungeon rewards are also not daily-bound, so you could just repeatedly run a rotation of the quickest paths multiple times for 20 per run.
-Dragonite Ore comes in ~20 increments from the dragons, Golem, and Fire Shaman, and a guaranteed 30 from the Orr temples and Karka Queen (lesser from everything else so if speed if the factor, they're not worth it). This is also
character bound, like fragments, so if you have multiple characters, keep your eyes on
a page like this and combined with guesting, it's again totally possible to get 500 within a single play session (15 Orr temple events, or 10 temples plus a handful of others, etc.)
Again I want to stress I'm not
advocating doing it this way (it would bore me quickly), just pointing out that it's quite possible and not particularly difficult to rapidly acquire these materials.
All basic Ascended mats are account bound. RNG being the limiting factor here, definitely makes dark matter the most annoying. I'd just suggest making sure to use a Black Lion kit, and as far as obtaining your exotics, anything from the 180-token level from dungeon vendors (such as helms or greaves) is great (because running them will also have earned you gold and empyreal fragments).
Prices have gone up (and seem to be stabilizing gently now), but even so, this list is a
bit miselading. It certainly looks overwhelming, but discounting the Ectos (which you can obtain in like an hour of doing world bosses, which would also be getting you Dragonite... notice a pattern emerging?
) we're honestly looking at less than 20 gold for this list. And you can mitigate that even further; even outside of gathering yourself, if buying you
should be buying ore rather than ingots and refining yourself, and you can look into
material promotion in the MF which can save you even more- bear in mind that you can do this for
refined materials too, i.e. planks/ingots versus logs/ore.
On this list, the Shards are the only onerous bit: either an open Balthazar temple for Skill Points, a variable amount of Karma for Orr Jewelry Boxes, or Fractal relics. The rest is ultimately pretty trivial, honestly.
Truly, by far far far far the most burdensome part of creating an Ascended weapon is getting the crafting discipline to 500 in the first place. That will take either far more money or far more time than the above. However, it also only needs to be done once per craft, and once reached, another avenue of profit is open to you in selling the refined Ascended mats that people want to make their weapons quicker.
Not just primary and secondary weapons, I want every weapon type each of my character classes can use! I'll just craft one as each character reaches the ascended mats needed per weapon; there's no reason for me to rush. And I think it's this point where we come up against a philosophical distinction...
why do you feel like you have to go out of your way right now? Or maybe, if you feel like you have to go out of your way, why do it at all? I guess there's deciding to get it as quickly as possible, deciding not to put any effort toward it at all, and everything in between. But if you decide you must have it as quickly as possible, I dunno how anything done along that path could be going out of your way.
Honestly, it seems like a lot when you're just looking at the broad view of everything you need to make one weapon, but ultimately given enough time I can already tell they will start to feel pretty trivial to acquire (like all other gear in this game, except Legendaries and the crazier unique Exotics
).
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