I have noticed several trade skill mats for Gate of Discord crafting either haven't been dropping or aren't available on vendors. When Gates of Discord first unlocked, I was looking to make Velium Gemmed Great Sword for a few baby zerker friends. However I was unable to find any raw shimmering nihilite. Was going to attempt the Help Rilwind quest to unlock GoD JC, but the raw crimson nihilite was also unavailable (the freebie quest worked). Both the raw crimson nihilite and raw shimmering nihilite are intended to be dropped item, however I haven't seen them drop the entire time this expansion has been running on Mangler (They don't show in my advanced loot filter list). When I attempted to set up a buyer for them, they weren't listed as options to buy in the search menu. Recently was going to try to craft the Alchemy thrown item, but the unfired vial sketches were available on the vendors for the listed item. Also most of the Sprig of xxx wasn't available for purchase on the alchemy vendors.
These two items have been discussed extensively by the devs here on the forums. Their conclusions aren't the same as yours (that htey are INTENDED to be dropped.) Try the search function...
There is also Raw Amber Nihilite, Raw Indigo Nihilite, and probably more I've forgotten. Only the raw crimson nihilite is used in a GoD Collect quest, but they're all supposed to be in the global loot tables for every GoD zone. The others, if they dropped, can be converted by NPCs on the ship if you don't want to bother with the GoD Collect or GoD Freebie quests to unlock the recipes. GoD introduced, in Abysmal Sea, a whole set of TS questlines to quickly skillup anything you wanted to 54 as a starting point. These were all superseded by the even easier-to-do TS questlines in Crescent Reach as part of TSS, so nobody bothers with the Abysmal Sea TS quests on a Live server anymore. Devs have forgotten they're actually important on a TLP as soon as GoD launches. From where I sit, this is a long-standing bug. If devs want to argue that some of the near-300-trivial jewelry items that can be made from GoD recipes are OP for the expansion (ignoring the fact they were considered just fine in-era), the solution would be to lock the recipes to a later expansion, not hack the loot tables and interfere with new toons trying to do routine TS progression.
Are those actually in era recipes though? Because the nihilite that currently spawns was NOT in the game on GoD release. Those replaced the existing nihilite items (e.g. pale) that were in on release. If the recipes were added later, that would be why. Looks likes most of the velium gemmed items had stats added/changed later after release as well.
A few recipes and material drops have been renamed, but the newbie TS quests should all be in-era for GoD, that's the whole point. It looks like Ngreth yanked ALL the Raw xxx Nihilite items from the global loot tables for GoD zones on all the TLPs, when only the Raw Pale Nihilite is obsolete given the current recipes being used in the TS quests. This was argued, and I thought concluded, in prior TLP cycles, it just never got fixed. And bear in mind this is only the jewelcraft we're talking about here, I don't even remember what similar problems existed in the other skills' newbie quests. I am not aware of stat changes on any of those higher-end GoD-era jewelry pieces, but as I suggested above: If that is truly an issue, then lock those recipes, not the rudimentary material drops that are used elsewhere.
