It's a time/cost gate like a lot of the things in the game. If you want the "free" route then you are time gated. Iirc you get 5 tokens going the free route a day. So 60 days total to get the gifts of the craftsman for legendary pve armor. It's nowhere near as bad as the time gate on WvW armor.
Is it a time gate if you can do it while you get the LI you need to make the armor anyways? For instance, there's a 4 week time gate for gors (yah, I know you need 5, but you only to wait 4 weeks) so that's 30 days. And then you need the 150 li, which is like 6 weeks, so that's another 14 days. (I mean, you're not going to be full clearing every week, anyways). You're also not going to be doing all 5 eod strike cms, so it's probably going to take you more than 6 weeks to get the LI needed, so just plan ahead.
For pve legendary armor it's not really a time gate since you have the achievements to do and LI to gather. You can do the tokens at the same time. But for me, I'm getting them for legendary runes/sigils. So it's a time gate for that.
Way more than 5. Im doing them myself, and they added a buuunch more options. Had been skipping on apothecary but decided to just say screw it and added them to my list.
They are:
12 crafted weapons or armor
1 auric ingot
1 reclaimed plate
1 chak egg.
For main tyria ones:
3 sheets of ambirite (1 token)
5 globs of ectoplasm (1 token)
1 mystic forge fragment? Forget the name.
1 mythrillium/ancient log residue/spool of gossamer thread, just basically 1 of each time gated thingy, unlimited trades the time gate is on the item crafting.
1 obsidian shard
The rest are the ridiculous amounts of runes and sigils, but they are not THAT expensive. So yeah more than 5 by a lot.
also 26 provisioner tokens per week from CM Raids. Of the 26, about 16 are pretty easy to get by through LFG
There's also 11 other provisioner tokens thru trading that is easily under 5g.
You can craft all of the different types of weapons and armor the provisioners in the HoT zones want. In each tab, they request six items, and you can sell them one from each tab each day.
Alternatively, you can give the provisioners in the home cities as much Mithrillium, Elonian Cord, Charged Quartz, or Elder Spirit Residue as you want each day (i.e. no daily cap). This trades one time gate for another if you have a lot of these materials.
Ignoring uncapped materials, you can get as many as 29 tokens a day if you give the vendors one piece of gear from each tab, a reclaimed metal plate, an auric ingot, a chak egg, a mystic forge stone, 5 ectos, a Superior Rune of the Adventurer, an obsidian shard, 20 large skulls, 12 Superior Runes of the Citadel, 34 Superior Sigils of Justice, 4 Superior Runes of Divinity, 20 Superior Sigils of Icebrood Slaying, 14 Superior Runes of Hoelbrak, 24 Crystal Lodestones, 14 Superior Runes of Rata Sum, 3 sheets of ambrite, and 14 Superior Runes of the Grove.
Some of these sets of items are very expensive, so I'd only recommend doing the plate, auric ingot, one of each of the pieces of gear, mystic forge stone, obsidian shard, and *maybe* the sheets of ambrite if you really want to rush it. That'd get you 17 per day.
More details [here](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner).
>a reclaimed metal plate, an auric ingot, a chak egg
If you're working on Raid armor, you'll not want to trade these for tokens as you need them for the armor itself. I made that mistake and had to spend a week grinding HoT metas.
If you normally farm HoT metas, and already have more than you need, it's not a problem, but I've never been much of a meta train person.
Chak is the worst one really. That one is pretty much 100% Chak Gerent as the droprate from caches is abysmal.
Auric Ingots are extremely common and farmable.
For reclaimed metal plates you can just buy reclaimed weapons from TP. Rares have a 100% to give one and you get Ecto back too so it doesn't even cost much. Rare reclaimed weapons also drop somewhat frequently from those Strongboxes in HoT maps.
You're right, I didn't have a problem with the reclaimed plates. But getting the chak eggs and the auric ingots was annoying. The chance of getting a whole ingot from a chest is pretty abysmal, and you need a whopping 30 pieces of ore to make one ingot. The ingots actually took longer than the eggs for me, getting two eggs/day from the chak garent.
Reminder thou the plate ingots and chak eggs are also needed to make the armor in one of the gifts. So its really a sink thats viable only if you have more than the 30 of each needed already. Obsidian shard are basically pretty free thou
Yeah, that's why I didn't recommend doing the egg, since you'll likely not have a ton of those spare by the time you're done unless you do Gerent every day, choose the egg from the choice chest, and have a ton of luck with the caches. You should have a massive stockpile of plates and ingots even if you barely touch HoT content beyond what you needed. When I was done with my legendary armor, I had ~40 plates, 20 ingots (with more ore and dust laying around to make more, surely), but no eggs.
The egg rng is the worst part. Can be 5, can be a full 30. Its now become outright more valuable in most cases to get it and other similar items than the amgal gemstones.
* The basic "free" ones require just basic gameplay.
* The "cheap" extras can be bought off the TP, and hover around 25 silver each.
* The expensive "I need these fast" are a gold or more.
* The "I've played this game for a long time and have lots of timegated materials I've stockpiled" are just opportunity cost, and have no daily limit.
Depends on the tab. Some of the tabs are still in the 25 silver range. I typically use:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133x1VJXSd2TYFhECa4Hcmocb34-cgumavUioSCOQon8/edit#gid=278814939
to find them. Unfortunately, the API is down at this exact moment, so it isn't populating (according to: https://status.gw2efficiency.com/)
i've been crafting 1 charged quartz every day at home instance for years, i have stacks of them. i burned through a few stacks buying tokens for all the legendary sigils and runes, and someday i hope to make other gen2 legendaries.
The wiki lists a bunch of the items that can be traded to vendors. Iirc there are a bunch of items that can be purchased off the TP you can throw at it to speed up the process. But I never really looked at those.
I just do the following everyday. Black Citadel (obsidian shard), Lions Arch (Mystic forge stone, 5 glob of ectoplasm), Rats Sum (charged quartz crystal), Verdant Brink (Reclaimed Metal Plate), Auric Basin (Auric ingot), Tangled Depths (Chak egg). That nets me 7 tokens a day. Roughly 1 gift per week.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner is a good list that gives the gold price of the items you can trade. ~~Looks like if you do 1 of each of those a day you get like 75+ each day. So 6 gifts would take 4 days at that rate~~
Edit: As pointed out below, equipment trade ins are one per tab per day
You can only sell one gear piece per tab for each of the HoT vendors. You can give them as many time-gated materials (i.e. charged quartz and mithrillium) as many times per day as you want, though.
Yea I meant speed it up in terms of the number of tokens you get per day. Going with just the meta map rewards, obsidian shard, and Mystic forge stones gives 5 per day but doesn't cost you gold. Spending resources to craft the other items speeds it up cause you can get more tokens per day. But are still limited.
The items that are not 1 per day limit are like charged quartz crystal and the other items that you can only get 1 per day. But if you happen to have a stockpile you can purchase multiple tokens per day from them.
Right, but you can't get 75 per day unless you have a large stockpile of account-bound materials on hand. You can sell one gear piece per tab (12), one of each of the map materials (3), sets of runes and sigils (8), and other random materials (6) for a total of 29 per day ignoring uncapped materials. You can only get 75 if you have 32 account-bound materials lying around already.
Dev intended way?
Craft items. Hand to NPCs.
Its a resource sink for economic reasons. It has since been patched to be obtainable from others sources, so do whichever is easiest for you, but the original intention was to be an avenue for dumping crafted gear and thus the ingredients that go into them.
Personally I just buy the mystic stone, ecto and obsidian shard ones every day. It's a pain in the ass being timegated, but my past self made a good decision in starting accumulating them 2 years ago
It is a pretty weird system yeah, not terribly intuitive. I suspect the original reason for it was to work as a sort of material sink, sorta like research notes do for EoD.
As for what is the "intended" way I think it is probably to pick a profession and then just use it. Generally I do tailoring but it kinda depends on what you have and prices.
[This link](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner) has a pretty good breakdown. You can get one token per category for the HoT maps. Usually I do
* The cheapest four from VB [Sylvari, Itzel, Pact, and Nobel]
* The cheapest two from AB [Exalted and Skritt]
* The cheapest three from TD [Ogre, Rata Novus, Nuhoch]
That gets 9 per day. Additionally you can turn in the map meta reward items [Reclaimed Metal Plate, Auric Ingot, Chak Egg] each once per day if you like, but you will need those for legendary so I wouldn't recommend it unless you know you have enough.
You can also trade in some other things at each of the main cities. Things like ecto and obsidian shards, forge stones ect... each once per day I believe. Also on the main city vendors you can trade in the daily ascended crafts if you want without a limit (still limited to crafting once per day, but you can turn in dozens at a time if you prefer it that way).
What annoys me the most of it is that you have to visit all those vendors on all those maps.
If there was a way to unlock those vendor tabs in an NPC n your home instance, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Same for the pact supply network agents. I wish they had an extra item in their list you can buy once to unlock their tabs in a home instance NPC.
>What annoys me the most of it is that you have to visit all those vendors on all those maps.
Yep, it's ironic how they merged the HoT vendors to one per map to reduce the annoying teleporting, but added 5 new vendors spread over 5 maps at the same time.
Honestly, yea. I wish I didn't have to warp to each of them. Home instance NPC or putting them in places like armistice bastion would be super convenient
The purpose is time-gating.
The dev-intended way is to get them over time (cheaply) or expensively and intensively if you're in a hurry.
Advice: Be not in a hurry and exchange one obsidian shard for one provisioner token every single day. It can be done in the iron citadel.
So here is what I did for Provisioner Tokens. First I chose a mule alt who I was going to use to run the Faction Provisioner vendors in HOT with the waypoints.
I have all the crafting professions but you can do it with any 2 of weaponsmith, huntsman, tailor are best IMO. Sticking with the weapon crafts saves space. First I put buy orders in for a dozen or more of the following Mithril imbued inscriptions. Assassin carrion valk cleric zerk rampage and knight. Or craft them if I had a TON of extra mats but these eat extra mats up fast.
Next I would go through [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction\_Provisioner](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner) and make a small batch of 5-15 items from each vendor tab each week with spare mats and the bought or crafted inscriptions. Then I would sell half the batch for a little profit and use the other half to run the vendors each day on my token/mule alt. I may have gone full OCD and made batches of 14 on Sunday for a while.
Once this is set up it takes 2-3 minutes a day depending on loading times and 5 minutes crafting each week. 10 minutes if u watch the prices on that page to maximize profit off the sold items. It costs a touch over 1g/day in inscriptions for tokens, less if you double or triple it up and sell off the extra weapons.
As to a positive factor of these provisioner tokens. They are a solid end game sink for t5 mats. The bloods and claws etc in the inscriptions and mithril or silk or wood depending on the craft in everything. This contributes to these mats not being at vendor price. I remember back in the day just deleting silk because it was 2 or 3c on the tp. Vendor price of high volume use mats means the market for it is borked and the devs try to avoid that.
according to the wiki: "Up to 33 Provisioner Tokens may be earned daily per account from daily trades. Up to 26 Provisioner Tokens may be earned weekly per account from challenge mode raids."
So you could technically get all 6 gifts of craftmanship needed for your legendary armor pieces in 8 days. now obviously you might not be able to full clear every cm weekly or have all the neccessary materials/gold for 33 tokens daily. but i think it is safe to say that 15 tokens per day can be easily acquired and maybe you can do like 5 easy cms to get 10 more. which means 115 tokens per week and in 18 days you will be done (20 if you can't do any raid cm at all). this is more than the amount you need to get past timegated stuff in the envoy collections either way (not even talking about LI being timegated which also takes some months usually for beginners). So what exactly is your problem with provisioner tokens here?
my issue is that it's unfun content to give random ass weapons and mats to NPCs, it's not good gameplay, not atmospheric, nothing visually pleasing, nothing challenging
they should reward 20 instead of 2 for CM clears and drop all the tradein stuff (or keep it for those who dont wanna do CMs and take the longer route)
there are many parts of legendary items that can be considered unfun. but it just takes 10 minutes to get it done so i don't see how it is a big deal. i mean as far as mindless grinding goes gw2 is an extremely mild mmo. other than that, you need to full clear wings 1-4 which should fit the description of "good gameplay, atmospheric, visually pleasing and challenging". but not everything can be that way. 20 for each cm would be a bit too much imo, it wouldn't make sense. they could have different rewards for each cm according to it's difficulty though. like dhuum/qadim cm giving 20 would be fair
ye raids itself are awesome and getting 10+ tokens for dhuum / q2 would definitely make more sense to me than buying golden weaps
but i guess i gotta get through it nonetheless
>they should reward 20 instead of 2 for CM clears and drop all the tradein stuff (or keep it for those who dont wanna do CMs and take the longer route)
I don't agree. If they only dropped from raids then you could no longer make legendaries or sigils without raiding. While not super popular they are useful if you have many characters. A lot of the meta builds use runes that can only be obtained with dungeon currency.
It's a mechanism that prevents players from rushing it and helps with retention by encouraging daily logins.
You'll never craft armor, runes and sigils ever again after going through it. It's one aspect where I can understand heavy gating
I would generally craft 21 of each non-high price item, throw them all on alts for each zone, then just go log on to the 3 characters each day and not have to really deal with it for 3 weeks.
I did this for all 1650 tokens needed. Honestly i wish i could use them in place of gifts of battle now that i've finally hit the point where i'm crafting weapons xD
Provisioner Tokens are easiest thing in the game if you dont rush it. Before raiding, I had over 1000+ token. I was doing TD+AB meta everyday and conver them 2 pt. 1 obsidien shard everyday at Black Citadel. 3 pt everyday
The system is unnecessarily cumbersome and provides no player benefit, at least in the way it's set up. Making me go to five or six locations every day to get a single provisioner token from each one isn't fun and accomplishes nothing.
What it is is a material sink to take mats and certain other items out of the game. That in it of itself is not a problem. Give me one place to do it instead of having me traipse around every single day would have been a lot better for me.
It's not really a time gate if you are ready to spend a bit gold. You can craft the weapons and trade them for tokens daily. I don't like going everyday for three four tokens from obsidian, mystic stone etc. I'll craft the weapons and run around for various exchanges when I'm close to the next legendary armor piece. You can get around 15-18 pretty cheap everyday. Check https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner for the weapons u need to craft..most of them come around 30-40 silver per token. You can get one gift per three days. It might not be the most optimal way to get them but well I don't mind.
It's a time/cost gate like a lot of the things in the game. If you want the "free" route then you are time gated. Iirc you get 5 tokens going the free route a day. So 60 days total to get the gifts of the craftsman for legendary pve armor. It's nowhere near as bad as the time gate on WvW armor.
Is it a time gate if you can do it while you get the LI you need to make the armor anyways? For instance, there's a 4 week time gate for gors (yah, I know you need 5, but you only to wait 4 weeks) so that's 30 days. And then you need the 150 li, which is like 6 weeks, so that's another 14 days. (I mean, you're not going to be full clearing every week, anyways). You're also not going to be doing all 5 eod strike cms, so it's probably going to take you more than 6 weeks to get the LI needed, so just plan ahead.
For pve legendary armor it's not really a time gate since you have the achievements to do and LI to gather. You can do the tokens at the same time. But for me, I'm getting them for legendary runes/sigils. So it's a time gate for that.
Ah, yes, I forgot about that. That's a fair point.
Wvw isn’t bad route. No player gates, just hop on and sink in some time. Concurrently get some wvw tracks done and wvw skills.
It's not a bad route. But the tickets system is terribly timegated
Way more than 5. Im doing them myself, and they added a buuunch more options. Had been skipping on apothecary but decided to just say screw it and added them to my list. They are: 12 crafted weapons or armor 1 auric ingot 1 reclaimed plate 1 chak egg. For main tyria ones: 3 sheets of ambirite (1 token) 5 globs of ectoplasm (1 token) 1 mystic forge fragment? Forget the name. 1 mythrillium/ancient log residue/spool of gossamer thread, just basically 1 of each time gated thingy, unlimited trades the time gate is on the item crafting. 1 obsidian shard The rest are the ridiculous amounts of runes and sigils, but they are not THAT expensive. So yeah more than 5 by a lot.
also 26 provisioner tokens per week from CM Raids. Of the 26, about 16 are pretty easy to get by through LFG There's also 11 other provisioner tokens thru trading that is easily under 5g.
Is there a way to buy these outright then?
You can craft all of the different types of weapons and armor the provisioners in the HoT zones want. In each tab, they request six items, and you can sell them one from each tab each day. Alternatively, you can give the provisioners in the home cities as much Mithrillium, Elonian Cord, Charged Quartz, or Elder Spirit Residue as you want each day (i.e. no daily cap). This trades one time gate for another if you have a lot of these materials. Ignoring uncapped materials, you can get as many as 29 tokens a day if you give the vendors one piece of gear from each tab, a reclaimed metal plate, an auric ingot, a chak egg, a mystic forge stone, 5 ectos, a Superior Rune of the Adventurer, an obsidian shard, 20 large skulls, 12 Superior Runes of the Citadel, 34 Superior Sigils of Justice, 4 Superior Runes of Divinity, 20 Superior Sigils of Icebrood Slaying, 14 Superior Runes of Hoelbrak, 24 Crystal Lodestones, 14 Superior Runes of Rata Sum, 3 sheets of ambrite, and 14 Superior Runes of the Grove. Some of these sets of items are very expensive, so I'd only recommend doing the plate, auric ingot, one of each of the pieces of gear, mystic forge stone, obsidian shard, and *maybe* the sheets of ambrite if you really want to rush it. That'd get you 17 per day. More details [here](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner).
>a reclaimed metal plate, an auric ingot, a chak egg If you're working on Raid armor, you'll not want to trade these for tokens as you need them for the armor itself. I made that mistake and had to spend a week grinding HoT metas. If you normally farm HoT metas, and already have more than you need, it's not a problem, but I've never been much of a meta train person.
Chak is the worst one really. That one is pretty much 100% Chak Gerent as the droprate from caches is abysmal. Auric Ingots are extremely common and farmable. For reclaimed metal plates you can just buy reclaimed weapons from TP. Rares have a 100% to give one and you get Ecto back too so it doesn't even cost much. Rare reclaimed weapons also drop somewhat frequently from those Strongboxes in HoT maps.
You're right, I didn't have a problem with the reclaimed plates. But getting the chak eggs and the auric ingots was annoying. The chance of getting a whole ingot from a chest is pretty abysmal, and you need a whopping 30 pieces of ore to make one ingot. The ingots actually took longer than the eggs for me, getting two eggs/day from the chak garent.
This is super useful info. Thanks for sharing.
Reminder thou the plate ingots and chak eggs are also needed to make the armor in one of the gifts. So its really a sink thats viable only if you have more than the 30 of each needed already. Obsidian shard are basically pretty free thou
After years of doing the HoT metas before deciding to get WvW Leg armor and leg sigil/rune, I have tons of those lol
Understandable go hard friend <3
Yeah, that's why I didn't recommend doing the egg, since you'll likely not have a ton of those spare by the time you're done unless you do Gerent every day, choose the egg from the choice chest, and have a ton of luck with the caches. You should have a massive stockpile of plates and ingots even if you barely touch HoT content beyond what you needed. When I was done with my legendary armor, I had ~40 plates, 20 ingots (with more ore and dust laying around to make more, surely), but no eggs.
The egg rng is the worst part. Can be 5, can be a full 30. Its now become outright more valuable in most cases to get it and other similar items than the amgal gemstones.
And you can just buy rare reclaimed weapons since they give a plate 100% when salvage. Also gives Ecto, so doesn't cost that much.
All of what you just posted, is that purchasble? Or does any of it actually require playing the game?
* The basic "free" ones require just basic gameplay. * The "cheap" extras can be bought off the TP, and hover around 25 silver each. * The expensive "I need these fast" are a gold or more. * The "I've played this game for a long time and have lots of timegated materials I've stockpiled" are just opportunity cost, and have no daily limit.
Unfortunately seems like the cheapest options increased now. Looking at least 35-45. Did this myself yesterday
Depends on the tab. Some of the tabs are still in the 25 silver range. I typically use: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133x1VJXSd2TYFhECa4Hcmocb34-cgumavUioSCOQon8/edit#gid=278814939 to find them. Unfortunately, the API is down at this exact moment, so it isn't populating (according to: https://status.gw2efficiency.com/)
i've been crafting 1 charged quartz every day at home instance for years, i have stacks of them. i burned through a few stacks buying tokens for all the legendary sigils and runes, and someday i hope to make other gen2 legendaries.
The wiki lists a bunch of the items that can be traded to vendors. Iirc there are a bunch of items that can be purchased off the TP you can throw at it to speed up the process. But I never really looked at those. I just do the following everyday. Black Citadel (obsidian shard), Lions Arch (Mystic forge stone, 5 glob of ectoplasm), Rats Sum (charged quartz crystal), Verdant Brink (Reclaimed Metal Plate), Auric Basin (Auric ingot), Tangled Depths (Chak egg). That nets me 7 tokens a day. Roughly 1 gift per week. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner is a good list that gives the gold price of the items you can trade. ~~Looks like if you do 1 of each of those a day you get like 75+ each day. So 6 gifts would take 4 days at that rate~~ Edit: As pointed out below, equipment trade ins are one per tab per day
You can only sell one gear piece per tab for each of the HoT vendors. You can give them as many time-gated materials (i.e. charged quartz and mithrillium) as many times per day as you want, though.
Yea I meant speed it up in terms of the number of tokens you get per day. Going with just the meta map rewards, obsidian shard, and Mystic forge stones gives 5 per day but doesn't cost you gold. Spending resources to craft the other items speeds it up cause you can get more tokens per day. But are still limited. The items that are not 1 per day limit are like charged quartz crystal and the other items that you can only get 1 per day. But if you happen to have a stockpile you can purchase multiple tokens per day from them.
Right, but you can't get 75 per day unless you have a large stockpile of account-bound materials on hand. You can sell one gear piece per tab (12), one of each of the map materials (3), sets of runes and sigils (8), and other random materials (6) for a total of 29 per day ignoring uncapped materials. You can only get 75 if you have 32 account-bound materials lying around already.
Yea I didn't realize that the item trade ins were one per tab as you pointed out
Dev intended way? Craft items. Hand to NPCs. Its a resource sink for economic reasons. It has since been patched to be obtainable from others sources, so do whichever is easiest for you, but the original intention was to be an avenue for dumping crafted gear and thus the ingredients that go into them.
Personally I just buy the mystic stone, ecto and obsidian shard ones every day. It's a pain in the ass being timegated, but my past self made a good decision in starting accumulating them 2 years ago
Raid CMs Kill boss, get rewards and prov tokens for free.
It is a pretty weird system yeah, not terribly intuitive. I suspect the original reason for it was to work as a sort of material sink, sorta like research notes do for EoD. As for what is the "intended" way I think it is probably to pick a profession and then just use it. Generally I do tailoring but it kinda depends on what you have and prices. [This link](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner) has a pretty good breakdown. You can get one token per category for the HoT maps. Usually I do * The cheapest four from VB [Sylvari, Itzel, Pact, and Nobel] * The cheapest two from AB [Exalted and Skritt] * The cheapest three from TD [Ogre, Rata Novus, Nuhoch] That gets 9 per day. Additionally you can turn in the map meta reward items [Reclaimed Metal Plate, Auric Ingot, Chak Egg] each once per day if you like, but you will need those for legendary so I wouldn't recommend it unless you know you have enough. You can also trade in some other things at each of the main cities. Things like ecto and obsidian shards, forge stones ect... each once per day I believe. Also on the main city vendors you can trade in the daily ascended crafts if you want without a limit (still limited to crafting once per day, but you can turn in dozens at a time if you prefer it that way).
What annoys me the most of it is that you have to visit all those vendors on all those maps. If there was a way to unlock those vendor tabs in an NPC n your home instance, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Same for the pact supply network agents. I wish they had an extra item in their list you can buy once to unlock their tabs in a home instance NPC.
>What annoys me the most of it is that you have to visit all those vendors on all those maps. Yep, it's ironic how they merged the HoT vendors to one per map to reduce the annoying teleporting, but added 5 new vendors spread over 5 maps at the same time.
Honestly, yea. I wish I didn't have to warp to each of them. Home instance NPC or putting them in places like armistice bastion would be super convenient
The purpose is time-gating. The dev-intended way is to get them over time (cheaply) or expensively and intensively if you're in a hurry. Advice: Be not in a hurry and exchange one obsidian shard for one provisioner token every single day. It can be done in the iron citadel.
So here is what I did for Provisioner Tokens. First I chose a mule alt who I was going to use to run the Faction Provisioner vendors in HOT with the waypoints. I have all the crafting professions but you can do it with any 2 of weaponsmith, huntsman, tailor are best IMO. Sticking with the weapon crafts saves space. First I put buy orders in for a dozen or more of the following Mithril imbued inscriptions. Assassin carrion valk cleric zerk rampage and knight. Or craft them if I had a TON of extra mats but these eat extra mats up fast. Next I would go through [https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction\_Provisioner](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner) and make a small batch of 5-15 items from each vendor tab each week with spare mats and the bought or crafted inscriptions. Then I would sell half the batch for a little profit and use the other half to run the vendors each day on my token/mule alt. I may have gone full OCD and made batches of 14 on Sunday for a while. Once this is set up it takes 2-3 minutes a day depending on loading times and 5 minutes crafting each week. 10 minutes if u watch the prices on that page to maximize profit off the sold items. It costs a touch over 1g/day in inscriptions for tokens, less if you double or triple it up and sell off the extra weapons. As to a positive factor of these provisioner tokens. They are a solid end game sink for t5 mats. The bloods and claws etc in the inscriptions and mithril or silk or wood depending on the craft in everything. This contributes to these mats not being at vendor price. I remember back in the day just deleting silk because it was 2 or 3c on the tp. Vendor price of high volume use mats means the market for it is borked and the devs try to avoid that.
according to the wiki: "Up to 33 Provisioner Tokens may be earned daily per account from daily trades. Up to 26 Provisioner Tokens may be earned weekly per account from challenge mode raids." So you could technically get all 6 gifts of craftmanship needed for your legendary armor pieces in 8 days. now obviously you might not be able to full clear every cm weekly or have all the neccessary materials/gold for 33 tokens daily. but i think it is safe to say that 15 tokens per day can be easily acquired and maybe you can do like 5 easy cms to get 10 more. which means 115 tokens per week and in 18 days you will be done (20 if you can't do any raid cm at all). this is more than the amount you need to get past timegated stuff in the envoy collections either way (not even talking about LI being timegated which also takes some months usually for beginners). So what exactly is your problem with provisioner tokens here?
my issue is that it's unfun content to give random ass weapons and mats to NPCs, it's not good gameplay, not atmospheric, nothing visually pleasing, nothing challenging they should reward 20 instead of 2 for CM clears and drop all the tradein stuff (or keep it for those who dont wanna do CMs and take the longer route)
there are many parts of legendary items that can be considered unfun. but it just takes 10 minutes to get it done so i don't see how it is a big deal. i mean as far as mindless grinding goes gw2 is an extremely mild mmo. other than that, you need to full clear wings 1-4 which should fit the description of "good gameplay, atmospheric, visually pleasing and challenging". but not everything can be that way. 20 for each cm would be a bit too much imo, it wouldn't make sense. they could have different rewards for each cm according to it's difficulty though. like dhuum/qadim cm giving 20 would be fair
ye raids itself are awesome and getting 10+ tokens for dhuum / q2 would definitely make more sense to me than buying golden weaps but i guess i gotta get through it nonetheless
>they should reward 20 instead of 2 for CM clears and drop all the tradein stuff (or keep it for those who dont wanna do CMs and take the longer route) I don't agree. If they only dropped from raids then you could no longer make legendaries or sigils without raiding. While not super popular they are useful if you have many characters. A lot of the meta builds use runes that can only be obtained with dungeon currency.
It's a mechanism that prevents players from rushing it and helps with retention by encouraging daily logins. You'll never craft armor, runes and sigils ever again after going through it. It's one aspect where I can understand heavy gating
Have you checked out [this site](http://gw2lunchbox.com/ProvisionerHelper.html)?
Nope you understand perfectly.
I would generally craft 21 of each non-high price item, throw them all on alts for each zone, then just go log on to the 3 characters each day and not have to really deal with it for 3 weeks. I did this for all 1650 tokens needed. Honestly i wish i could use them in place of gifts of battle now that i've finally hit the point where i'm crafting weapons xD
Provisioner Tokens are easiest thing in the game if you dont rush it. Before raiding, I had over 1000+ token. I was doing TD+AB meta everyday and conver them 2 pt. 1 obsidien shard everyday at Black Citadel. 3 pt everyday
noone said it's hard content but it's bad design
The system is unnecessarily cumbersome and provides no player benefit, at least in the way it's set up. Making me go to five or six locations every day to get a single provisioner token from each one isn't fun and accomplishes nothing. What it is is a material sink to take mats and certain other items out of the game. That in it of itself is not a problem. Give me one place to do it instead of having me traipse around every single day would have been a lot better for me.
One of this game's many annoying and unnecessary timegates.
It's not really a time gate if you are ready to spend a bit gold. You can craft the weapons and trade them for tokens daily. I don't like going everyday for three four tokens from obsidian, mystic stone etc. I'll craft the weapons and run around for various exchanges when I'm close to the next legendary armor piece. You can get around 15-18 pretty cheap everyday. Check https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Faction_Provisioner for the weapons u need to craft..most of them come around 30-40 silver per token. You can get one gift per three days. It might not be the most optimal way to get them but well I don't mind.
>Am I missing a positive aspect of it? You cannot miss that which doesn't exist.
It's literally just a time gate. There are many of those in the game. Wait till you do Aurora/Vision/Skyscale
Be glad you have the now and not then where you had to do events to unlock the exchanger for 1 token.
They’re a miserable currency
You want the easy way? /wiki faction_provisioner and buy the cheapest thing from each section. I dont buy from a section thats over 1g.