Guild Wars 2

After quitting the game since September, I’m coming back for the summer, and hopefully the fall, and I’d like to finally start making ascended weapons. I have every craft to 400, but the price on GW2crafts.net is a little rough for me, as I’d like to not spend all my gold just to get it to 500.

So my idea to help counter that is to use the many Black Lion Kits I have lying around to save a lot of money. I plan on getting soldier’s, rabid, magi’s, and shaman’s weapons from dungeon tokens and salvaging them to get the inscription. Then I plan on making all of the weapons to get to 500 or at least 480 or so, but I plan on salvaging each one with a BLK to get the inscription back before crafting a different type of exotic weapon with the same inscription. This process will also generate several dark matter globs as well, which is always a plus. The only problems are that ectoplasm, orichalcum, and ancient wood are lost in each new generation of the inscription, but at least salvaging allows me to maintain some of them.

I will also use a crafting booster to help reduce the costs as well. According to gw2crafts.net, I need 23 weapons to get to 500. I’m not sure by how much the booster would reduce that number. I could also stop at 480 or 490 and just make mithrilium, spirit wood residue and upgrade my heaps of bloodstone and crap like that (so I should stock up on obsidian). With all of this combined, I think it could massively defray the cost of getting to 500 in weapon crafting.

I play mainly ele, as well as necro and mesmer, so I was planning on making a dagger first, followed by an axe for necro and a sword for mesmer. I hope that I won’t have to try this with artificer for a while as I hope that fractal daily runs can provide me with an ascended staff eventually (and scepter later on, which I use infrequently), and I’m slowly making the minstrel so I won’t need an ascended focus anytime soon.

What do you guys think of this process compared to the normal method for people with more gold to burn? I won’t start this for another few hours, so please let me know what you think!

I would start using the dragonite, bloodstone and empyreal frags as soon as it will allow (lvl 450). At 475 they no longer give experience. The crafting booster will cut you down by like 3 – 5 craftings. The BL kit is a pretty good idea, that should cut costs significantly. Wish I had thought of that when I was making my way to 500 in all crafts….

Dragin.3521:

I would start using the dragonite, bloodstone and empyreal frags as soon as it will allow (lvl 450). At 475 they no longer give experience. The crafting booster will cut you down by like 3 – 5 craftings. The BL kit is a pretty good idea, that should cut costs significantly. Wish I had thought of that when I was making my way to 500 in all crafts….

Yeah, I’m surprised that more people don’t talk about it as much. Apparently the BLK only recovers an inscription 61% of time, which is still pretty good. With my calculations, and taking the booster into account, you’d probably need to buy about 8 inscriptions as long as you recover at least half of them. That could make it so you could finish leveling it at roughly 33-44% of the cost.

I’m going to hold off on it for a few weeks though. By checking the TP prices you can buy deldrimor and spiritwood for nearly the same cost as buying the mats and crafting them, so I don’t have the timegated stuff hanging over my head. In the meantime I’m going to continue to use the TP to gain money (I have about 100 gold worth of crap waiting to sell) and I’m just going to keep doing daily fractals so I might be able to get a drop if I’m lucky.

From 400-425 you just refine ori or elder wood. IF you dont have enough, just buy ore and logs, refine and sell.
You can minimize the amount of exotic weapons you have to craft from 425 to 450 by several ways.
Discovering all rare lvl 80 weapons still gives you discovery exp at that stage.
They also sell for a profit, so its a good way to to actually earn some gold while gaining levels instead of spending it (exotic weapons cost way more to craft than they sell for).
With 8 different weapon types you can craft and 9 different inscriptions (10, if you buy sentinel inscriptions on the tp) you are looking at 80 different rare discoveries, depending on how much you already discovered on your way to 400.

Once you discovered all rare recipes, you can craft Sharpening Stones. With Superior Sharpening Stones, you more or less break even and Potent Sharpening Stones actually turn a little profit but those require a recipe sheet that is expensive on the tp.
Some Sigils also can be crafted with breaking even or a little profit but those usually require recipes that arent available anymore (Sigil of Renewal) or need to be bought on the tp for a couple of gold (Sigil of Torment).

Over all, its possible to get to 450 without crafting a single exotic weapon.

At 450, apart from refining ascended mats, your best option are Toxic Sharpening Stones, if you have a surplus of Bloodstone Dust. The recipe costs 14g atm but its well worth it. The Stones give a decent profit and experience compared to refining asc mats.

When ascended crafted came out, I actually made a profit leveling from 400-500 but some strategies i used arent viable anymore.

I also managed to level an alt to lvl 500 in weaponsmith without crafting a single exotic weapon, however, i just did it to see if its possible as it costs a little more gold than what it would have cost to use the crafting guide.

Wanze’s post is pretty much spot on, except that not all rare weapons sell at a profit. They are still a pretty good option if you are happy to list matching the lowest seller, because the losses won’t be very big and it acts as a drain on mithril and elder wood, rather than ori, ancient wood and ectos. Also if Wanze were to tell me that placing sell orders at break even for rares would fill within a week I’d believe him because I don’t know the market well enough to gain say him on that.

Also, BIG WARNING! Salvaging crafted equipment will not yield an insignia or inscription, no matter the stats.

Also, do all your crafting on Friday’s, as you will have the biggest buff from WvW.

Edit: Should have said before reset on Friday.

Thanks for the advice everyone, I didn’t know about the WvW bonus. And Wanze, I follow your advice to the letter when I finally get around to leveling this (maybe this friday perhaps?), since that sounds like it will defray the cost significantly. And cormac, thanks for telling me that crafted stuff won’t yield an inscription, which blows, but I’ll at least be able to use the ones from dungeon exotics to help out with the cost a little bit.

I never thought about dungeon armor insignias for crafting!! Brilliant!