I realized I was always answer the same question: “how do you make gold?”, and wanted to share some knowledge, so I decided to make one thorough walkthrough and just direct people here instead.
Section B ) General Tips
1) Almost always buy through buy orders and sell through sell listings. It takes longer, but it saves you gold. Also typically, undercut and overcut by 1c. The only times you don’t want to follow this are when buy order and sell listing are very close together, or the item is overpriced and you would end up relisting it.
2) Grouping several gold-producing methods together makes them more effective. This saves the 15% TP tax and gives you higher profits.
3) For how much gold you have I recommend different proportions of TP investments:
<100g = 100% instant profits (meaning you buy and sell in about a day)
100g – 500g = 90% instant + 10% long-term
500g – 1000g = 75% instant + 25% long-term
1000g – 5000g = 60% instant + 40% long-term
>5000g = ~3000g instant + rest in long-term
I would recommend you always plan to keep at least ~10g+1% on hand. This is a buffer, in case you need to pay listing fees, or relist, or you spot a really good deal, etc.
This is, of course, dependent on your preferences.
Section C) Producing your own gold (farming)
1) Guild Commendations
Guild missions can be done once a week and take about 1-2 hours. Bounty, Rush, Challenge, Puzzle. Total, you get at least 2g, 8 rares, and 6 commendations. The commendations can be turned into Sentinel’s Inscription/Insignia and sold on the TP for ~8g. That’s about 8.3g/hour (@ 40s/ecto).
2) Daily Dungeons
Each dungeon path gives extra loot the first time you do it each day (resets at the daily reset). Easy ones: CoF 1(2), AC 1(3), SE 13, TA UF, CM 3(1), CoE 12, HotW 1, Arah (123). About 5-10g/hour.
Fractals of the Mists has tiers that you can each get daily credit from: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, and 41-50. FotM is better for account-bound loot: ascended items and fractal relics and karma, but it does give decent income as well; about 3-4g/hour.
Edge of the Mists is similar to Fractals in that it’s better for karma and badges, but can also give a decent income, especially if you actually fight the other zergs.
3) World Bosses
Less lucrative than they used to be, but if you hear that one is going on, go there. Can take less than 5 minutes and you get 1+ rare. That’s about 5g/hour (@ 40s/ecto), but obviously can’t be done continuously as there’s not always a world boss going on.
4) Harvesting
Ancient wood and orichalcum are the obvious choices, but there aren’t very many of them. If you do go for these, it’s helpful to use a website such as gw2nodes.com.
There is also Iron ore, Platinum ore, Soft wood, Seasoned wood, Hard wood. Each of these sell for over 1s, and there are hundreds of nodes.
Every now and then someone will realize an event gives better loot when it’s not finished, or can be done quickly/repeatedly, or spawns lots of loot-dropping champions, etc. Just listen to forums, map chat, friends for what the latest one is. Rewards are usually in the 10-50g/hour range. Warning: Anet has banned people for exploiting parts of the game in the past, but the difference between ‘exploit’ and ‘use’ seems to be orders of magnitude. If you run it for an hour then go do other things, you’re probably fine. If you’re farming it 16 hours a day and yelling at people who mess it up, you could be looking at a ban hammer. I don’t recommend abusing these, partly because of the ban potential, but more so because it’s boring.
You get a choice: fast / easy, and low exchange rate or slow / complex and high profits.
The highest g/SP is usually from promoting T1 basic refined materials to T2 (around 1-3g/SP), but it’s very hard to convert lots of SP (to promote 100 stacks (25,000), it takes only 20 SP, and gives about 35 stacks of T2 mats to sell).
There are a lot of Mystic Forge items that use Eldritch Scroll. The non-‘Mystic’ ones usually give about 40s-80s/SP profit.
Making a legendary to sell is another option, but this requires other currencies, so I would only say that gives about 1g/SP (see “Map Completion” below).
2) Karma
Again, fast and inefficient or slow and efficient.
Again; legendaries. Including other currencies, 20-40s/1000 karma (see “Map Completion” below).
Crafting Beaded weapons gives about 20-45s/1000 karma (but take a long time to purchase and sell and require an initial gold investment).
Buying bloodtide linen armor, throwing it in the MF, and salvaging the output gives about 8s/1000 karma (@ 5s/linen scrap), but takes a while to buy and MF (See “TP Trading / Luck Salvaging” below for salvaged material drop rates).
Buying lost orrian jewelry boxes is the easiest and fastest but only gives about 3.5s/1000 karma.
3) Guild Commendations
As mentioned above under “Producing your own gold / Guild Commendations”, Sentinel’s Inscription/Insignia is your only method.
4) Dungeon Tokens
Buying level 68+ rares to salvage for ectos gives about 1s30c / token (@ 40s/ecto).
Buying exotics and salvaging for inscription/insignia gives about 1s20c / token (@ 40s/ecto + 3g/inscription + 1g/DM).
There are also crafting and MF recipes that call for the Gifts or Offerings, you’ll have to explore these to see how well they are doing and what you have available to you for each dungeon; around 1s/token.
5) Map Completion
Can only be used to make a legendary. My order of making a legendary for profit is: make Gift of Mastery, make Gift of Fortune, then decide which legendary will give the most profit, buy precursor and make Gift of Legendary. If you pick the right legendary, you can get upwards of 800-1000g profit.
To decide which one to make, you’ll need to compare the cost of making each one (gw2legendary.com) to the price they sell for (gw2spidy.com). Find the top 5 or so, then hand-calculate the cost (gw2legendary calculates it as if you get a clover every time), then check the past week of sales for those legendaries and see what price they actually sell for. Because map completion is the hardest part for me, I’ll usually make two at a time; I would recommend making two different ones as they are more likely to sell. Take your time when decided which one(s) to make – it could be the difference between 500g and 900g, so spending an hour to do this is definitely worth it.
Almost all limited-time recipes (such as potent potions and Crown Pavilion sigils/runes) are profitable to craft, as not many people can make them.
Usually the intermediate items (components, inscriptions, insignia, etc.) are more profitable than the final item.
A decent resource for this is gw2spidy.com/crafting/3 (and similar pages for the other disciplines). It gives a list, sorted by profit, of everything that discipline can make. I say ‘decent’ because it uses sell listing price alone. Your profits will be a bit higher if you’re willing to wait for buy orders to come in.
Section F) TP Trading
1) Spread
Buy order low, sell listing high. The plan here is, for example, to buy items for 1g and sell them for 2g. I recommend using a website to help you locate where these spreads are, such as gw2tp.com/search (click the ‘+’), and a spreadsheet to keep track of how much you paid and how much you were able to get for it (to see if you should flip it again).
If you see a spread that is too good to be true (such as buy for 10s, sell for 10g), it is. You won’t be able to buy it for that price, and if you somehow do, you won’t be able to sell it for that price.
2) Speculating
The strategy is to buy an item for cheap, wait a few months, sell it for expensive.
Limited-time items are a good bet (Living story, holidays, etc).
Also the black lion specialist weapons (buy items when they cost 1 ticket, sell a few weeks after their price goes up).
Sometimes you can predict when a more common thing will go up due to an update, such as when ascended armor was coming out and people predicted T2-T6 cloth and leather to increase.
Stay current on recent news and general trends. The quicker you respond, the more profits you can make.
Buy level 68+ rare and exotic items, salvage, sell ectos.
It helps to know the drop rates:
Rare with MSK gives 0.875 ecto
Rare with BLSK gives 1.25 ecto
Exotic with MSK gives 1.27 ecto
Exotic with BLSK gives 1.66 ecto
Inscription/Insignia with MSK has 42.55% chance
Inscription/Insignia with BLSK has 60.88% chance.
With the high price to buy gems with gold, BLSK is very rarely worth it. I made a formula for deciding when you should use BLSK:
If 1.41 x socket_sale_price + 2.66 x ecto_sale_price + 1.35 x inscription_sale_price + 5s > price_per_100_gems, use BLSK, otherwise use MSK
For a gem price of 17g / 100 gems and 40s/ecto, that means the socket and inscription combined need to sell for at least 11g73s (after TP tax).
“BLSK” = Black Lion Salvage Kit
“MSK” = Master Salvage Kit or Mystic Salvage Kit. Master is far cheaper (61c vs. ~10s each use). However, you get so many free Mystic Forge Stones from achievement chests that you should use those instead (it’s the best use for them). Free Mystic kit > Master kit >>> paid Mystic kit
For salvaging rares and exotics, I would recommend against using anything less than a master kit, see Luck Salvaging below for reasons
You could make the argument that you could use free BLSK on anything as it didn’t cost you anything, but I still would not recommend it unless you are literally overflowing with BLSK or accumulate far more than you use. Save them for something expensive. My reason is that you get the most profit from using BLSK on the super-expensive items, so to use it on anything less than that is less profit; better to just hold onto it until you have an expensive item to use it on than use it and not have it when you need it. With free BLSK, on a 4g exotic, MSK might give you a 1g profit and BLSK would give a 2g profit, but on a 20g exotic, MSK might give you a 5g loss and BLSK would give a 5g profit.
One method of making gold is to buy rares and salvage them. And easy way to do this is first calculate the minimum price to buy a rare: 40s (sell price of ecto) * 0.85 (TP tax) * 0.875 (ecto drop rate) = 29s75c (max price you should pay per rare). So the lower below 29s75c you spend, the more profit you’ll make. Finding which ones to buy can even be as simple as to go on the TP, search for all rare items, sort by price, buy everything below 29s (buy orders will cost less than buying instantly). I usually consider the basic material and sigil/rune a bonus. On rares, I normally see 1-10s/salvage profit. On exotics, I normally see 10s-1g/salvage profit.
Some items drop expensive sockets. The only way to know which these are is to look at them, maybe write it down. Sometimes the name will have the socket in it, but other times it won’t.
Inscriptions can drop from exotic weapons with the stats of Soldier (Ptv), Rabid (Cprt), Dire (Ctv), Cavalier (Tpf), Sentinel (Vpt), Shaman (Vch), or Magi (Hpv). This includes most named exotics. They do not drop from crafted items (Pearl, Quaggan), or from any of these: Guild Defender, King’s Remembrance, Poyaqui’s Noggin, Occultist Flame, Scepter of the Highborn, Defiant Blaze, Faithful, Monsoon. All dungeon tokens except CoF have exotics that can be salvaged to get inscriptions.
Insignias can drop from exotic weapons with the stats of Soldier (Ptv), Rabid (Cprt), Dire (Ctv), Cavalier (Tpf), Sentinel (Vpt), Shaman (Vch), or Magi (Hpv). This includs named exotics. They do not drop from crafted items (Draconic, Emblazoned, Exalted). All dungeon tokens except CoF have exotics that can be salvaged to get insignias.
When you salvage exotic items, you might get a Glob of Dark Matter. The drop rate from exotics is somewhere around 50% chance to get one (I think it’s a little higher with BLSK than MSK, but I have not done research on these). Globs are worth around 1g/glob. The way to utilize them is to make ascended inscriptions. There are 19 inscriptions, and about 10 of them give about 10-12g profit (~30%). It’s not always the same 10, so check spidy before you make them. It’s better to spread out and make several different ones, but the recipe to make each one costs 21k karma, so don’t spread out too far. Ascended Insignia are not nearly as profitable.
I call it luck salvaging because you will get tons of luck from it (it’s the most profitable way to max your magic find), but really you’re salvaging whites, blues and greens.
The plan is to buy order massive amounts of cheap items and salvage them and sell the basic materials that come out.
This takes a long time to order, a long time to salvage, a long time to organize your bank, a long time to sell, and a long time to consume the luck, but is fairly profitable (up to 1s/item).
It helps to know the average material drop rates:
Long Bow / Short Bow / Staff / Trident = 1.85 wood logs
Scepter / Torch = 1.1 wood logs
Focus = 1 wood log
Hammer / Harpoon Gun / Spear = 0.9 wood logs + 0.9 ore
Axe / Mace / Pistol / Rifle = 0.6 wood logs + 0.6 ore
Shield = 0.5 wood logs + 0.5 ore (sometimes give wood planks)
Greatsword = 1.8 ore
Sword / Dagger / Warhorn = 1.2 ore
heavy coat = 2.45 ore
heavy other armor = 1.35 ore
medium coat = 3.1 leather sections
medium other armor = 2.1 leather sections
back piece = 2 leather sections
light coat = 3.1 cloth scraps
light other armor = 2.1 cloth scraps
Amulet / Ring / Accessory = ?? ore (I haven’t tested this yet)
It’s easiest to search for each item type in a given level range, one at a time. Look up the sell price for each material, figure out the maximum you should pay for each item type, then buy order all the ones cheaper than that.
Some Salvage Kit info:
Crude: 2c/use, ~10% chance of promotion, ~5% chance of socket
Basic/SoM: 3c/use, ~11% chance of promotion, 20% chance of socket (use if socket > 9c)
Fine: 11c/use, ~13% chance of promotion, 40% chance of socket (use if socket > 40c)
Journeyman: 32c/use, ~14% chance of promotion, 60% chance of socket (use if socket >1s)
Master: 61c/use, ~15% chance of promotion, 80% chance of socket (use if socket >1s47c)
Free Mystic: 10c/use, same as Master (use if socket > 12c)
Black Lion: ~2g/use, ~17% chance of promotion, 100% chance of socket (use if socket + inscription/insignia > 70% of price to buy 100 gems ~10g)
5) Bags
A lot of bags (not all) are profitable to buy, open, sell ingredients.
The wiki is decent at giving drop rates, but not great – it’ll at least give you an idea what kind of items to expect from each bag.
Best I can suggest is to try a few hundred of a bag, record how it goes, if it goes well, buy more.
This is fairly time consuming, as ‘profitable’ bags will likely give less than 1s profit per bag.
6) Precursor Crafting
One thing to keep in mind: sample size. It’s only a gamble if you do a statistically insignificant amount of it. With a large enough sample size, you will receive the average.
Find a precursor that sells for a lot, and the items that go into the forge to make it are cheap. Expect to pay a LOT (10,000’s of gold), then sell a lot of precursors. Not all at once, because you can sell the precursors as you make them, but you do need a large initial investment.
Some sources of ingredients: TP, crafting, forging lower tier items.
Don’t blindly throw weapons back into it. Sell the expensive ones on the TP and use that cash to buy more than one cheaper one.
Some numbers I’ve found that other people have reported (reddit’s Nugkill): 1 in 128 attempts produces a precursor from exotics, 1 in 782 attempts produces a precursor from rares – these numbers appear to be constant regardless of which precursor.
Each forging will take the average level of the items thrown in and add 5-12 to that, with a small chance of a lower level. As such, you need to throw in items with an average level of 75 to have the highest chance of a level 80 coming out. Only a level 80 product will have a chance of a precursor.
TLDR: All of these require time and effort; they are complicated and there is no short cut. If you’re not willing to do the necessary work, I recommend you do something more straight forward, such as Champ Train, Dungeons, or World Bosses. Pretty much all the stuff in Section C) Producing your own gold / farming
That’s everything I can think of. If you have find an error or have comments about this, or have suggestions, let me know!
Edit #1 for formating 8/27
Edit #2 to add table of contents and C6 and other editing 8/28
Edit #3 clarified BLSK use formula + which kit to use 9/8
Edit #4 added the investment recommendation amounts 9/21
FGS champ train. Is WP cost included in the gold/hour calculation?
You know, I don’t believe it is. That’s one of the few parts of this that I didn’t directly test myself; I just included it because it’s a viable thing to do. I went off other people’s reports, and I doubt they included WP costs (they probably just counted up their bags and loot). It’s a fairly short distance, but still each jump would cost around 1s50c x 3 WPs = 4s50c. Each lap takes maybe 10 minutes? probably under that. If 6 laps/hour, then WP costs will be 27s. Out of 5g, that’s not a big deal.
As a side note on bags, be prepared to have to refresh your buy orders at least twice a day as competition is (obviously) fierce on the best ones. If you’re trying to get a `hot` bag, don’t be surprised to be outbid by +1c by somebody asking for several thousand of that same bag- who will then be outbid by +1c by somebody else with their own order of several thousand.
Depending on what bags you opened, you can also add value in some cases by doing material upgrades. So if you open 1k Tiny bags and end up with 250 Jute Scraps, you could be better off converting the Jute to Wool and selling the Wool.
If you’re trying to get a `hot` bag, don’t be surprised to be outbid by +1c by somebody asking for several thousand of that same bag- who will then be outbid by +1c by somebody else with their own order of several thousand.
this is true for pretty much every TP Trading strategy. If something is VERY profitable, there will be lots of competition for it, and you will have to refresh buy orders and sell listings a lot. This is why I prefer to stay away from things that are too good to be true – because they usually are, and you’ll end up just getting worried and frustrated.
Sorry if I missed this and it’s already in there, but what I with dungeons, if it’s under level 68 (needed to salvage the rare armors for ecto’s) I save the tokens and turn them into exotic weapons. Get 4 daggers->forge (usually the highest $ 1h weapon). If you have mystic forge stones just get 3 offhands (least expensive weapons token wise)+ 1 stone (since the stone makes the result a random weapon type anyways).
I find fractals to be pretty profitable as well, much like Dungeons and such. I find I get quite a good number of rares/exotics and champs tend to be a common occurrence there as well, also counting Agony drops to boot including the 1g per tier.
That, and its where Magi gear drops for inscriptions.
I already have a bit about converting dungeon tokens to gold, I didn’t add the part about throwing them into the MF, because I wouldn’t recommend it. it only returns about 30c per token (compared to 1s20c for buying and salvaging the exotics instead). It’s only profitable for precursor forging because you pay less for those exotics than you do for exotics that can give inscriptions.
I added FotM to the daily dungeons section.
A useful reference document even for those of us who are GW2 veterans.