Guild Wars 2

My guardian is now level 20. For the most part I just upgrade my gear when something drops that is better than what I have, although I have gotten a few things at Black Lion.

I guess my concern is spending lots of money on something that in several levels/days of play that I’ll outgrow.

while your leveling the best way to get gear is talking to completed heart givers and buying karma gear or simply crafting it (which will also help you level)

At this stage in the game players have inundated the Trading Post with low and mid level gear. Nearly any Blue quality item will sell for the vendor price. This means you can pick up a full set of gear, with weapons, for less than five silver. You’ll pay it back just by taking your next couple blue drops to the vendor. Granted, higher quality gear and upgrade components will run you a little more. But it’s still a screaming deal.

If you desire (especially since you’re on a guardian) you can keep yourself relatively up to date with a mixture of drops, personal story rewards, and karma purchases. On the other hand, a trip to the Trading Post will cost you pocket change for a full upgrade. Neither way is strictly better.

Personally, I’ve picked up a new set at the Trading Post every 10 levels, starting at level 40, with no significant financial drawback.

Craft everything every 5 levels. As long as you gather every node you see, you should have more than enough mats to do this. You don’t have to ‘farm’ mats either. Just gather what you see while levelling. Just pick up the craft for the armor you need and jewelcrafting, since this covers everything besides weapons. You can even pick up your weapon crafting skill as well and just switch out whenever you need to level the other (thats what I did, since the cost for switching crafting proffs is way lower then buying stuff and you get some major extra experience in the process).

Personally, I only got karma gear when I found the skin to be particularly attractive, wear it and save it when I don’t need it anymore for possible future transmutes. Their value stat-wise, is virtually identical to what you can craft. Especially at your level.

Craft, definately craft. I will also say that if you craft Rares (starting at lvl 35) you can usually go 10 levels (almost to the next tier of Rares) before you need to replace your gear. At 45, craft blues, then at 50, get into your next set of crafted rares.

I always try to keep my armor and weapons within 10 levels of my characters.

This has only caused a few trips to Black Lion, as enough decent stuff drops so I can upgrade on the fly. Actually, right after my lvl 50 warrior’s gs reached the end of its usefulness I broke down and bought one, only to have an even better one drop for me before I had a chance to pick it up from the post.

Crafting’s good for mid-later levels when you have access to the nodes in the higher level areas, but I find it hard to keep up with my char’s levels. It’s much more fun to kill stuff than sit at a furnace making bronze ingots.

Buy some blue (fine) quality gear on the TP every ten levels… As Pinder said, the TP has basically everything for you need for just a few coppers per piece… And you can supplement with drops whenever you get some good things.

It’s too difficult to try to keep up with your level by crafting… Crafting costs too much money, which you don’t have at this point.

Save your karma for exotics.

I had no problem with karma supply on my main, even after buying everything I needed from heart NPCs. Less than a month after hitting 80, I easily had enough Karma for a temple god set. If you are concerned about having enough Karma for a temple god set then do this

(1) Dailies. Do your daily reward things. Accumulate jugs of karma. DO NOT SPEND them unless you really need the karma (and you shouldnt really need the karma if you’ve been doing dynamic events anyways).
(2) Monthlies. Do all the monthly reward accomplishments, you get 20 jugs of karma. Again save these up until…
(3) Karma Booster. It’s an item you can get from Black Lion chests. When you get one of these, activate it, then use up all of your accumulated Karma jugs for a 50% (!) boost to incoming Karma.

You will now have enough Karma to easily get a temple god set — with probably a ton of Karma to spare. Don’t worry about karma merchant stuff being expensive since you won’t be on short supply of it once you hit 80.

With respect to crafting: you have to assign some value to the materials used even if you already have them — you always have the option of selling the materials and buying a crafted item.

If you work out the costs, you’ll find you can almost always buy for less than it costs to craft the same thing, particularly if you are patient enough to put in a bid and wait.

Crafting is a mildly fun hobby, but it’s designed to be a black hole to prevent inflation in the game economy — nobody gets out of it what they put in.

Particularly if you level more than one char at a time (that use different types of armor) and share drops you’ll get more than enough to keep them all with their gear within 5 levels.

On a second character (that can leech off the income of the first), definitely buy.

TP stuff is so cheap at lower levels that you can buy at asking prices, and for higher levels you can put in purchase orders at lower prices while your character is still low-level, and the purchase orders will be fulfilled before you get to the level needed to use them.

Plan ahead like that and profit. Save crafting for the end of your levelling so you can get the last several levels in LA and not bore yourself to death in Orr.

Eastwind.7209:

Crafting is a mildly fun hobby, but it’s designed to be a black hole to prevent inflation in the game economy — nobody gets out of it what they put in.

Well, the main advantage of crafting is the XP, but yes it’s also a black hole. I probably spent 4 gold in total prior to Lvl.80 buying mats for cooking and this is with gathering being supplemented in (no straight mat purchases + power leveling). It accelerated me up to Lv.80 when I otherwise might’ve been a 60 or 70 or so but it really hurt my inventory space and extra gold in the meantime (BTW cooking is really hard on your inventory/bank space due to all the ‘intermediate’ level ingredients you need to collect for discovery purposes, i’m talking like 20 to 40 intermediate ingredients, some that are meant to be matched with karma vendor ingredients from zones you havent explored yet).

So if you’re fine with having problems keeping gold until Lvl.80 then by all means take up crafting if you want to level up faster but be prepared to spend coin on the mats you need but don’t want to go out and farm (and farming too much will slow down level progression too).

Do you get out as much as you put in? Well, thats hard to say. I would say yeah it’s worth it for the XP if you do it wisely and sometimes you can craft yourself nice things, but you can also gain those levels the old fashioned way if you don’t want to spend money to ‘unstick’ yourself from crafting with mats you’re no longer collecting (due to them being lower level mats than the areas your exploring)

Hm, that’s weird because I haven’t farmed mats once while levelling. And I was still able to easily craft everything I needed every 5 levels (or 10 for the rares). And don’t forget that gathering also gives experience.

Though, the best part about gathering for me has been the fact that I seemed to be very lucky on herb nodes. I kept getting unidentified dyes from those. =D