Dark Matter should be returned to gathering points.

[Vaer]

Looking at it a bit closer,

ilvl70 weapon (Morbid Mogblade) Right now it's at 68% and costs 160 gil to repair from vendor.

160gil / 32 = 5gil
5 x 100 = 500gil

Assuming every 1% is a static fee, it's roughly 5 gil per 1% or 500 gil to repair it completely from broken assuming that each 1% is 5 gil all the way down to 0 and it doesn't increase and there isn't a penalty if it's completely broken.

With DM5 at 350gil at NPC, it's still cheaper (around 30% cheaper to repair with DM) and will probably get cheaper if you can get it for a discount from players. Looked at an iLvl52 shield and it's roughly the same 5 gil per 1%.

[Orophin]

I agree.

Dark Matter should still come from Gathering points.

Repairing a set of gear costing 4200gil is also a big issue. That would have been 42,000 gil in 1.0 money - a ridiculous sum.

It was 5000 gil per piece of level 50 gear in 1.0, so it's really not much different doing a repair all. Even now at least it scales based on the percentage of durability.

As far as DM goes, I don't care one way or the other. Right now crafters have the option of buying the DM to repair their own gear or using a repair vendor. I don't know if it needs to be more involved than that. There was obviously a reason why SE removed DM from gathering points.

[Catharsis]

With DM5 at 350gil at NPC, it's still cheaper (around 30% cheaper to repair with DM) <snip>

Except as I said, it's not pragmatic nor practical to enter a dungeon with your weapon or gear at 33% or under, since you can't exactly switch jobs and repair it on the fly (like you could before). This isn't so much an issue for trials, at least. This means that you'll sometimes likely repair damage which is under 350 gil.

More importantly @Orohin: seeing as the Active Help says that you can get dark matter from field activities and this isn't the case, there might not actually be a reason and this might be an oversight either with the Active Help or with the database devs, who may have forgotten to add it to the harvesting list (they might have confused it with Carbonized Matter, which is different). It's entirely possible, isn't it? Oversights do happen. Some confirmation on whether it was intentional or not would be appreciated.

[Vaer]

Stuff

A part of me thinks they would have listed it under known issues, but it has a specific line in the update notes that says it was removed.