Short version
Karma is currently underused.
Here’s some items and services that could be made purchasable with karma:
- Cultural armors
- Black Lion items
- Waypoint fees
Long version
Let’s face it: karma is a good idea, but it’s currently very underused.
The good thing about karma is that you have to play the game to get it. No trading post shenigans and no gem exchange: it really rewards the time spent ingame.
The bad thing is that currently very few things are worth buying with karma, and most karma merchant just sell a lot of trash that nobody will never ever want.
Things currently worth buying with karma:
- Orr armor (252k karma)
- Cultural weapons (63k karma at tier 3)
- Cooking ingredients (very cheap)
- Some karma armors to transmute (very cheap)
Basically, after getting a set of Orrian armor and maxing cooking, karma just begins to pile up without any real purpose. This has become even easier since the introduction of karma rewards for dailies, dungeon completion and dungeon bosses. In theory cultural weapons could also be interesting, but being only rare quality they are used only for transmutation, and the same skins are also sometime available thought story mode or cheap karma vendors.
Here’s some ideas to make karma a little more useful than it is now. While many of the items proposed can be also bought with gold or gems, they cannot be sold to other players, making sure karma won’t be converted into gold and will not get into the economy circuit.
Cultural armors: With gold already needed for far too many other things, and considering they are just rare quality equipment, very few people are willing to pay 119g for a Tier 3 Cultural Armor. Make them purchasable with either gold or karma: the gold sink loss will be minimal, since I expect few people will ever buy those they way they are now, but will give karma an additional use. Making them cost around 250k like the Orr armors and upgrading stats to exotic (they lack the runes anyway) would also be a good idea. Also, cultural weapons are already sold with karma, why not armors, too?
Black Lion items: They are currently bought with gems, that can be bought with gold or real money. Why not make them available for karma, too? The prices must of course be very high, and not every item should be buyable, but it’s something worth considering.
Waypoint fees: I realize wp are a huge gold sink, so without proper data I don’t know it this is a good idea or threatens to ruin the economy, but using karma for traveling around would be nice.