Vendor Pricing Discrepancies

[HakuroDK]

Hey there! Just wanted to start a thread to point out some various pricing discrepancies amongst vendors.

I thought about starting this thread because, in the Alchemist's Guild in Ul'dah, the item "Muddy Water", whose only application to my knowledge is to distill it using Alchemy into "Distilled Water", costs 14 gil. However, when checking the markets, "Distilled Water" costs 3 gil.

Seems marginal for a crafter, but it makes absolutely no sense why muddy water would cost more than its distilled counterpart.

Anyway, feel free to post any other vendor pricing discrepancies.

NOTE: This is only for NPC Vendors who deal in gil, no vendors who deal in tomes/seals, no Market Boards, no player vendors, etc.

LIST OF DISCREPANCIES:

Muddy Water (Alchemist's Guild Supplier, 14 gil) -> Distilled Water (Fridurih (Ul'dah Tradecraft Merchant), 3 gil)

[xPeAcEx]

There are a few like that and have always been. It is because it shouldn't be free to craft yet it shouldn't break you either.

For example, when you first started you had what maybe 10-20k if you're lucky. You'd spam muddy water till level 6 but after that the cost would come from other things.

It is the same with other crafts. Weapon costs 2000 to buy from npc but the mats to craft it cost 3,000. That's why you couldn't really make a profit until you got into non npc crafting mats and recipes.

Furthermore, in the past, certain NPC's would sell things. For example rubber used to only be available in Ul dah and would cost 13g each, you could buy 99 stack and sell it at 5x the price on market board simply because people prefer convenient of mb over traveling to get what they need. NPC in houses fixed that to a degree. Edit now that might NOT seem like much but back then, you found a few good items and stack then and could make 30k a day. That was a lot for the time until people got their crafters higher.

[Fornix]

The distilled water is NQ. The muddy water > distilled water yourself can be a 100% HQ rate and allow for HQ item production at a lower level. The 14g into that is a minimal investment. The main cost of getting the HQ variant is the shard cost.

Another similar example is Sunset Wheat (5 gil) and Sunset Wheat Flour (4 gil). 4 Sunset Wheat + 1 Fire Shard produces 3 Sunset Wheat Flour. Net loss of 8 gil and 1 fire shard if you'd produce NQ Sunset Wheat Flour. But once more, it can be of interest for crafting to produce HQ.