Guild Wars 2

I have been storing these in the bank ever since I started playing a few months back, and now have 200+ in various denominations. I always assumed it had something to do with crafting (which I don’t do yet), but the wiki says it has to do with “Magic Find” instead?

1) Are the effects temporary, or permanent?
2) Are the effects for all characters on the account, or only the character that consumes it?
3) Based on the answers to 1 and 2, should I just consume all of them as soon as I get them?

Thanks for your help!

They affect your chances of getting better loot from mob drops. “Luck” is account bound, so goes across all characters. Do consume them. You can’t sell them nor can you increase numbers on consumption with boosters. Effects are permanent.

1) permanent
2) accountwide
3) yes

The wiki page isn’t exactly clear, you need to read the pages on Magic Find and the Luck Bar to really understand it.

There’s an attribute called Magic Find which increases your chance of getting rare drops, like higher tier crafting materials. It used to work like any other stat but a while ago they changed it to a single, account bound, bonus and instead of getting it from your equipment you get it from Essences of Luck.

If you look on your achievements tab on the Hero panel there’s a little box on the summary page that lists your account bound stat bonuses (most of which are rewards for getting achievement points). Below it is a bar tracking how much luck you’ve acquired and how much you need for the next 1% magic find.

Every time you consume an Essence of Luck it adds points to that bar, and adds to your Magic Find total. It’s a permanent increase and will affect all characters on your account.

So yes, you should use them all now to get the increased Magic Find, and if you find any others you should consume them right away too.

(Crafting them is just a way of combining them so you don’t have to click each one individually. Artificers, even at level 0, can combine lower tier Essences to make higher tier ones. You don’t get any more, or less, luck points this way but it means they take up less space to store and less clicking to use up.)

Consume them. It doesn’t matter which character you consume them on. The faster you consume them, the better the odds of you getting decent drops.

You can see the bar for this at the top right of your achievements page. You’ll see a yellow bar filling up as you consume them and when it gets to the end, you get another single percent of magic find…account wide. That’s why it doesn’t matter which character you do it on.

Keeping it in your chest is actually costing you money because you’d be getting better drops if you consumed them.

Yea you should use them immediately. They can be used in crafting (kind of) to consolidate smaller denominations into larger ones (for less carpal tunnel inducing click-fests) but in general use them immediately. I’m not sure we’d be able to calculate what the potential loss in drops has been without that MF, but I would venture to guess it is significant enough to warrant a V8 style forehead slap.

If you “eat” them, they make your character and all other characters on your account slightly luckier.

They can be “crafted” into larger denominations for easier eating. You cannot gain or lose quantity by crafting them, it is simply a way to exchange 10 luck pennies for 1 luck dime.

Astralporing.1957:

1) permanent
2) accountwide
3) yes

^^^^^^^ What Astral sez

I might add don’t get overly concern with maxing out MF, IMHO once you reach 100% the returns or ROI don’t add up to the lost revenue of selling or vending the stuff you don’t want.

Danikat.8537:

(…)
(Crafting them is just a way of combining them so you don’t have to click each one individually. Artificers, even at level 0, can combine lower tier Essences to make higher tier ones. You don’t get any more, or less, luck points this way but it means they take up less space to store and less clicking to use up.)

Danikat said it all, just emphasizing this part since it seems that could save you some clicking