They don't drop as much

Nirnhone trait material is a rare drop.

Because the weapon trait nirn thingee drops only in craglorn and quite a lot less often than the armor one.

If you're on PC/NA DM me your @name and I'll send em to you free

Armor version of nirncrux drops about 5 times as often as the weapon version, it's the scarcity driving up its price. On top of that every character can obtain one random nirncruxed item for research, the quest is more likely to roll an armor piece than any weapon. 22 possible armor pieces (shields included) vs. 12 weapons. Nirncruxed items are not just rare, they don't drop at all.

Word of advice for saving money here. If you had researched at least one weapon, you can transmute that type of weapon to nirncruxed, it costs only 50 crystals but doesn't require nirncrux itself. Deconstructing it gives you a 50% chance (slightly more with added CP perk) to get tradeable nirncrux.

The main issue is the trait material, which can only be found in Craglorn as a rare drop from material nodes

The trait mat is a rare drop as a result its expensive on guild stores.

Ask in one of your guilds if anyone is willing to make you the nirnhoned weapons you want for research all you need to provide is the trait mat is most cases. Crafters will ask for the trait mat up front since most people don't hoard the trait mat they sell it.

PC/NA here, I have an exemplary nirnhoned sword rusting away in my bank, neither I nor anyone I know needs it.

DM if interested.

Edit: Deleted, I was mistaken regarding transmutation.

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I would recommend farming materials in Craglorn to get potent nirncrux and then ask a crafter to make items for you to research. This is how I learned the nirnhoned for all items (so I can craft nine trait sets).

Tenthirty2 wrote: »

IMHO, it's greed. Like many things on traders.
It's a rare trait and AFAIK it's almost exclusively only able to be learned by buying gear with the trait.
Sure it can be found in the wild, but like the other poster mentioned, super super rare.
So ppl are going to craft the item with the trait and price it to make some decent gold.

I'm finishing off my main crafter and down to the last few nirnhoned traits, so I feel your pain.
What I did is just bookmarked a bunch of searches on tamrieltradecentre.com and kept watching them every couple days.

You may be able to get lucky and find nirnhoned weaps being sold for a bit cheaper but otherwise yah, your going to have to pay a bit just to buy something your going to decon for the trait learning. If you are in any guilds you may be able to ask guildies if they could craft you the nirnhoned items you need.

I don’t see any justification to call it greed; as you point out, potent nirncrux drops more rarely than fortified. Consequently, it’s expensive for someone still learning crafting, but it doesn’t sell nearly high enough for me to wish to sell rather than keep what I find for my own use. (Which isn’t to say that it should be higher, but rather that I feel the price either reflects or is below the time it takes me to find it. If felt it was going for significantly more, then I would spend timing farming extra to sell!)

I agree on the rarity certainly and that should carry a bit higher price bcuz of it. But my greed comment was more answering OPs original question of why the weapons themselves with nirnhoned, that are posted for sale just for deconning are so expensive.
I mean, 27k or less I felt was a fair price for me but was my top end. 30k and up is a bit too much IMO.
Then I've also seen some nirnhoned weaps going 50k and over just for a decon piece. That feels...waaay overpriced.

But, it's traders and it is what it is. There will be ppl who list things for fair prices and then those who overprice things to the point of being ridiculous.

Tenthirty2 wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I would recommend farming materials in Craglorn to get potent nirncrux and then ask a crafter to make items for you to research. This is how I learned the nirnhoned for all items (so I can craft nine trait sets).

Tenthirty2 wrote: »

IMHO, it's greed. Like many things on traders.
It's a rare trait and AFAIK it's almost exclusively only able to be learned by buying gear with the trait.
Sure it can be found in the wild, but like the other poster mentioned, super super rare.
So ppl are going to craft the item with the trait and price it to make some decent gold.

I'm finishing off my main crafter and down to the last few nirnhoned traits, so I feel your pain.
What I did is just bookmarked a bunch of searches on tamrieltradecentre.com and kept watching them every couple days.

You may be able to get lucky and find nirnhoned weaps being sold for a bit cheaper but otherwise yah, your going to have to pay a bit just to buy something your going to decon for the trait learning. If you are in any guilds you may be able to ask guildies if they could craft you the nirnhoned items you need.

I don’t see any justification to call it greed; as you point out, potent nirncrux drops more rarely than fortified. Consequently, it’s expensive for someone still learning crafting, but it doesn’t sell nearly high enough for me to wish to sell rather than keep what I find for my own use. (Which isn’t to say that it should be higher, but rather that I feel the price either reflects or is below the time it takes me to find it. If felt it was going for significantly more, then I would spend timing farming extra to sell!)

I agree on the rarity certainly and that should carry a bit higher price bcuz of it. But my greed comment was more answering OPs original question of why the weapons themselves with nirnhoned, that are posted for sale just for deconning are so expensive.
I mean, 27k or less I felt was a fair price for me but was my top end. 30k and up is a bit too much IMO.
Then I've also seen some nirnhoned weaps going 50k and over just for a decon piece. That feels...waaay overpriced.

But, it's traders and it is what it is. There will be ppl who list things for fair prices and then those who overprice things to the point of being ridiculous.

Not sure what platform you are on but potent nirn was going for about 10k a while back on my server. It might have gone up or down after the Craglorn event, I haven’t checked.

If you provide that to a crafter you can probably get them to craft a research item for you for free.

K9002 wrote: »

........ Nirncruxed items are not just rare, they don't drop at all.

They drop very often in the newer dlc raids on vet.
Arena weapons also drop nirncruxed ... I had several of them.

Tenthirty2 wrote: »

IMHO, it's greed. Like many things on traders.
snip...

Getting the rare material is quite simple. Just go to Craglorn and gather every clothing, blacksmith, jewelry and woodworking node you can.
Have the patience to get a few of them and then you might not be so quick in calling it "greed"

You get weapon nirncrux in 1 of 500 resource nodes on average and resource nodes are quite sparse in Craglorn, this means you need like 2..3 hours of constant farming to get one weapon trait stone. Demand is high, supply is limited by the drop rate, thus: market prices.

No there is no mafia. Farm Craglorn if you don't want to buy stones and ask friend crafter whom you trust to make you items for research from your hard earned nirncruxes.

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I believe it still costs 50 crystals AND the trait material to transmute. The trait material isn’t required to reconstruct gear (which costs fro 25 to 75 transmute crystals depending on how much of the set you’ve collected) but will only give you the crystals upon deconstruction (I don’t know if there’s additionally a chance of retrieving upgrade materials if you’ve spent them. I believe that’s at least part of the reason reconstructed gear is always marked as such, so that you know what you’ll get back upon deconstruction.

Transmutation doesn't cost any additional trait items. I've done it many times, both before and after the stickerbook system was added. It still works this patch. I've been transmuting jewelry to triune, bloodthirsty and swift without having a single piece of their trait materials in my inventory, craft bag or the bank. BTW, deconstructing jewelry always yields pulverized mats, so the same trick doesn't work for farming the more expensive mats like dawn-prisms.

Milchbart wrote: »

They drop very often in the newer dlc raids on vet.
Arena weapons also drop nirncruxed ... I had several of them.

I stand corrected then. I don't do vet DLC trials and never knew about it. I've done vet arenas though and never looted a nirnhoned weapon, must be bad luck. So it means that these weapons don't drop in the wild anyway and they can't be traded or gifted to newer players, but they can be an additional source of income. I'd say it still takes much more investment to reliably run vet DLC trials or to get quick clears in arenas than it does to either farm nirncrux in Craglorn or to do it through transmutation.

GreenhaloX wrote: »

It's the nature of the beast. Price gouging is a thing in ESO. If you're not overpricing items in the traders to the extreme, then, you're not one of the cool kids. Ha ha

You could argue about price inflation for many other items but nirncrux had been stably remaining in the same price bracket for the past two years. It's quite remarkable because of all the new sources of income being added, such as CP perks. All the while golden quality materials such as dreugh wax more or less doubled in price since the Markarth patch in November last year. It's actually easier now to make money for nirncrux by selling other mats than it was in the past. It's also slightly easier to farm nirncrux from resource nodes in Craglorn because in old CP system the plentiful harvest perk had only 10% chance to work, while now it's nominally 50%. The whole idea of becoming a master crafter is that you either devote some time to it or compensate other people for their time.

Kessra wrote: »

...
Oh, and an other way to obtain nirnhone is to reconstruct items via transmutation crystals and then just deconstruct that item, just in case you have enough of those crystals.

Just want to clarify, that you will want to Transmute a weapon to Nirnhone and then deconstruct it. Reconstructing and then deconstructing only gives you back the Transmute Crystals it cost to Reconstruct the item.