Guild Wars 2

What am I missing here?

I’m able to play 2-4hrs each evening (a bit more on weekends) and since starting GW2 (over Thanksgiving weekend) I’ve only managed to earn a few Gold over my traveling and leveling one toon to Lvl80.

After ‘rewarding’ my Lvl80 event with a GS purchase and outfitting my toon with some decent gear I’ve decided I wish to look into other build qualities. I was hoping to not end up purchasing more Gems, however lacking decent skills to ‘farm’ various runs/events for Gold I started looking into the Craft trades to get different gear.

It appears that unless you simply find all the mats needed to create an item to craft its actually cheaper to buy the item itself than craft it from raw mats? If it actually takes days/weeks/months to gather/upgrade/craft all the mats into a useable item my guess is all the gear found on the TP was gathered from ‘drops’ or from BOT farmers?

Like I said on the 1st line – am I missing something here? Does everyone gather/craft from scratch, farm gold or buy gems/gold to get items?

Just wondering.

There are several things at work:

1. The market is cyclical – so the price of various materials rises and falls over time. It’s possible people bought mats when they were low, and are selling finished items now.

2. Some items on the TP are loot drops. Some are from the Mystic Forge

3. Sometimes people sell at a loss for various reasons.

4. You can craft for profit but it requires a lot of care and attention to the market.

There are several threads on this issue, but I’ll sum it up:

1) Crafting rewards XP and several people use crafting as a means with no intention of using the resultant item. Also, some items are crafted simply to level crafting, so again, there is no intention of using the resultant item. These items (lvl 80 rares being a key example) are frequently dumped on the TP to recoup some of the cost from crafting the item in the first place.

2) There are niche markets where the resultant item has greater value than the value of the raw materials, frequently things like Rare Greatswords that get hucked into the Mystic Forge en masse. The margins on these are usually fairly slim unless you work in bulk, it’s not worth doing (I say this as someone who’s crafted 50 rare greatswords in a sitting, just to test the results.) You can scan the TP for such opportunities, but be prepared to do some serious leg work on this approach.

3) The markets with the highest return have a low cycle rate (exotic weapons,) working in these markets requires the patience to sell things at a ‘match lowest seller’ rather than working at a ‘sell to highest buyer’ price.

4) You have to remember that you offer nothing special to the market for being a lvl 400 crafter in any discipline. I don’t say that to be mean…. I just want to underscore that crafters are many, and buyers of crafted goods do not significantly outnumber crafters.

If you want to make money crafting, be prepared to invest in significant volume…. and be patient. It can be done, but it’s not easy.

My suggestion for making money is to play the game you enjoy, and look into dungeons…. try finding groups to learn with, in 2-4 hours of play time, you can do several paths (CoF p1 in 15 minutes with a good team, half an hour to full clear the path.) Dungeon paths can be worth 1g+ in a single path.

Hope that helps, and GL out there!

Thanks for the replies.

I was not really looking to make coin but rather to SAVE coin. After all if its cheaper to simply TP an item rather than level crafting and purchase all the mats – maybe I should be focusing on areas with better drop rates and some dungeon runs.

One of the issues I had with pre-made items is that the Signet/Rune/Stone that comes with many items might not match the ‘build’ I’m going for so when destroying the upgrade item by purchasing and installing one that I’d rather have pushes the total price of purchased gear up rather quickly!

I think I’ll invest in Leather working and Huntsman or Artificer.

If you enjoy crafting and/or the grind that can come with it then get the materials and craft it yourself. Sometimes the journey is the rewarding part (does that sound as corny as I think it does?). However if you just want the gear as cheaply as possible you probably want to by it on the TP. Not only will you probably save money, but even if it is a bit more expensive, the time spent grinding could be spent doing something more fun (and you can sell the mats you get anyway).

Edited: Holy run-on sentence Batman!

It is usually cheaper to craft your own gear. Mainly because the 15% AH tax fee.

laokoko.7403:

It is usually cheaper to craft your own gear. Mainly because the 15% AH tax fee.

Unless I’m wildly off base and have been oblivious, this fee happens when selling, not when buying. Part of it is the ‘listing fee’ to put things up on the TP, and a portion of the actual sale vanishes into the ether of gold sink… so, there’s no disadvantage to buying gear off the TP except that savy sellers may be ‘marking up’ because of the overhead of the fee.

Now, in terms of buying vs crafting just the things you need: This is viable if…

1) You have leveled your crafting anyway (either because you’re a completionist, or you used it to level, whatever)
2) You collect and save mats as a normal part of playing and have a stock pile to use.

Crafting your own gear can be a quick way to get a few pieces of gear in that situation…. in terms of coin saved, it’s only fair to compare buying vs crafting if you decide that you’re going to sell the mats you would have used to craft gear….. if you want the best savings: Sell your mats, buy the gear. If you’re not going to sell the mats though…. then craft the gear.

Personally, on my most recent lvl 80, I geared her out in exotics using entirely dungeon tokens and put the dungeon coin towards jewelry.

Whatever you choose to do, take the path you find most rewarding, there is no right way to gear your character.

MaRko.3165:

One of the issues I had with pre-made items is that the Signet/Rune/Stone that comes with many items might not match the ‘build’ I’m going for so when destroying the upgrade item by purchasing and installing one that I’d rather have pushes the total price of purchased gear up rather quickly!

Sorry for posting twice, but I wanted to address this really quick: Crafted items come with no sigil / rune, so you still have this cost.

OK it’s not an all or nothing when gathering your mats.

Normally I will spend the week doing a few dungeons, some WvW, some dailies, events etc and gather stuff while I’m tootling about.

At the end of the week, like on a lazy Sunday when I have the time I will go craft. Now I can normally craft up some items simply from what I have gathered during the previous week so the cost of that is simply my time (already spent). What you will notice after a while is that you have loads of the base components, wood, leather, ore etc but not enough of the fine items, scales, bloods and suchlike but if a recipe needs say 15xSome tier of fine material you might have 9 of those so you buy the additional 4 from the tp. This keeps the cost of actually crafting the item down and you make more money than you spent on the 4 tier X items you had to buy..
If you have picked up the wrong statted item then sell that crafted gear to finance the gear you actually want. I have found attmempting to target farm a specific fine material to be a huge waste of time (and thus money).

Hope that makes sense.

Kandrick: It seems that crafting might make sense if your able to gather/salvage (from free/drops or cheap items) > 50% of the mats needed to produce what you want.

Have you seen the price of anything Apothecary or that uses Passiflora or Passion flowers? Egads!

Another thing, for items <80, the reason the mats cost more than the finished product is that the difference in cost can be attributed to “cost you pay to level up your crafting”.

Word of advice from someone with a master crafter title. Don’t bother with crafting. It’s a money sink. Buy your gear off the TP. Do however gather every type of metal you encounter in the open world and sell it all on the TP. Dont bother with wood unless its the top tier kind. The rest is dirt cheep. That should cover the costs of your gear and maybe even some spare change. The prices of fine crafting materials is so high at the moment that leveling crafting will cost you more than it will benefit you. Unless you want to create a Legendary weapon ignore the whole crafting money sink. Besides with ascended gear coming out I feel sorry for having wasted my time leveling all those crafts.

Yeah trying to make gold crafting is a big waste of time and gold, you will lose gold on everything you craft.

Last night I was gearing up my newest lvl80, and a 6pc exotic armor set cost about 21g on the TP, so I decided I would craft it instead to save some gold, having all the mats in bank already it would literally cost me nothing, but right before I hit the craft button I decided to check the TP to see how much the mats would sell for, to my surprise all the mats needed to craft that very same armor set would bring me in almost 32g, so thats what I did, sold the mats and bought the armor set while profiting 11g.

So hate to say just sell all your mats and take advantage of all the players who haven’t realized that they are wasting gold crafting.

Actually, the TP WAS a way to earn money … But that was back in september :P
You could craft things for 10s mat price, and sell them for 20s back then …
But right now it’s not worth it at all. Unless you craft your items from mats you found by looting (just for the title), it’s not worth buying/selling.

Kandrick.8054:

OK it’s not an all or nothing when gathering your mats.

Normally I will spend the week doing a few dungeons, some WvW, some dailies, events etc and gather stuff while I’m tootling about.

At the end of the week, like on a lazy Sunday when I have the time I will go craft. Now I can normally craft up some items simply from what I have gathered during the previous week so the cost of that is simply my time (already spent). What you will notice after a while is that you have loads of the base components, wood, leather, ore etc but not enough of the fine items, scales, bloods and suchlike but if a recipe needs say 15xSome tier of fine material you might have 9 of those so you buy the additional 4 from the tp. This keeps the cost of actually crafting the item down and you make more money than you spent on the 4 tier X items you had to buy..
If you have picked up the wrong statted item then sell that crafted gear to finance the gear you actually want. I have found attmempting to target farm a specific fine material to be a huge waste of time (and thus money).

Hope that makes sense.

Ah, the good old I mined it so it’s free approach. Always a pleasure to see.

And no, it does not make sense. Even if you value your time at 0!

Hint: If you could be selling the raw materials for X+n while you can only sell the finished products for X, then you loose money because you crafted.
The only way this makes sense is if you accept to pay n for the XP you get from crafting (or for the crafting skill itself if you need it for something else). So at the latest at lv80 and 400 skill, crafting and selling at X instead of selling raw materials at X+n never makes sense.

You only want to do crafting to level your character. It’s not something you’re going to profit doing in this game.

So the moral of the story is farm for T5 and T6 mats – sell on the TP and use the profits to purchase gear. Wonderful.

I guess there are enough RP’ers and Legendary seekers wanting the high end mats to keep the prices of those items up.

Thanks for the replies.

I wanted to cross link a comment from the GW2 economist…

John Smith.4610:

2. Profit and Loss: There is nothing in our game that doesn’t consistently have places where good profit margins exist, including crafting.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Economy-Statistics/page/4#post1220259

Moral of the story is: Crafting is profitable if you understand how to work in the margins. There are niches and places where you can profit via crafting, and it’s not always max level gear…. but profit via crafting is serious work, and the time spent doing so is an opportunity cost all it’s own. When you start with buy orders for a few thousand of a raw material, and set sell orders for a few dozen rare finished goods…. you can see the return on investment…. but it’s not for the average joe.

However you make your money and gear your character, best wishes to you and GL!

CassieGold.7460:

laokoko.7403:

It is usually cheaper to craft your own gear. Mainly because the 15% AH tax fee.

Unless I’m wildly off base and have been oblivious, this fee happens when selling, not when buying. Part of it is the ‘listing fee’ to put things up on the TP, and a portion of the actual sale vanishes into the ether of gold sink… so, there’s no disadvantage to buying gear off the TP except that savy sellers may be ‘marking up’ because of the overhead of the fee.

What I mean is most seller don’t sell things at material price since they need to pay a tax fee. On top of that they try to make a “slim” profit.

If an item cost 3 gold to craft, the chance you find it for sell for less than 3.45 gold isn’t high. So actually be able to craft an item yourself can save you money. Not necessary make you money, but it does save money.