Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been playing for a couple of months now. I created 5 characters and have every crafting discipline to 400-500. At this point I’m wondering if I should keep my t1-t5 mats or just sell them on the TP.

Basically is there some point in this horizontal progression that I will need an abundance of T1-T5 mats that it would be more affordable to just keep them?

you can transmute them to upper tier in the mystic forge as well

Ascended mats do use lower end stuff. I keep getting slowed on making Elonian Leather, for instance, due to low supplies of Rugged Leather. Deldrimor Ingots need iron and platinum. Etc.

You say every discipline, does that include Scribe? If so, congrats, I haven’t broken 300 scribe yet despite working on it on and off since HoT launch, since my guild is too tiny to funnel me the mats needed. If not, you’re going to need a ton of copper just to get started on it, and then to make the base kits that go into the lower decorations that go into the higher decorations.

You will use T2-T5 mats for refining ascended mats, for legendary collections, and for a variety of other things. (T1 can generally be promoted to T2, for less than the cost to purchase more.) Lots and lots of the mats.

That said, if you need the space now, that is probably more important than saving up mats for the rainy day.

There are a couple of ways you can deal with excess mats:

• Store them (e.g. on a “mule” toon or a personal guild)
• Sell them for immediate coin
• Sell them for more coin in the long run
• Price them to store rather than sell

The first two situations are obvious I hope. The third one… you price at somewhat higher than the current lowest sale offers (or for bonus coin, you can research the last 4-12 weeks of the price history and list accordingly).

The fourth one is sneaky. Price your mats far, far higher than you can reasonably expect them to sell within the next month or six. For example, for silk scrap, you could list at 1s each, since the price hasn’t broken past 50 copper in the last six months. If it were to sell at 1s, great — big profit. If not, you’ve instead paid 5 copper/unit to store the silk until you need it. Now, that seems like a lot (12.5 silver/stack) for storage. On the other hand, it’s a bargain price to pay for silk when everyone else is paying 40 or 50 copper.

tl;dr only worry about it if you need the space (or immediate coin). If you do need space, consider selling above the WTS prices, either just above or much much higher (for a stealth storage locker).

If you haven’t already, use some gold or achievement gems to get the expanded storage. Even the first level makes a HUGE difference. After that, fill everything up with the refined versions as well as the regular (i.e. 750 ori ingots + 750 raw ori.)

That will get you enough mats to do most things you want, like legendaries or ascended armor and so on. You’d be surprised how many mats of all levels you need for high-end stuff.

Keep if…..
You will need them for future projects. Ascended gear requires lots of t2-t5.
You believe they will get more expensive.
The sell price is too low and it is a waste of effort.

Sell if
You need gold now.
You think it will lose value.
Your run out of space and don’t want to manage them.

If none of the above, do whatever.

Fluffball.8307:

If you haven’t already, use some gold or achievement gems to get the expanded storage. Even the first level makes a HUGE difference.

I disagree, mainly because there are only a couple of materials that pile up in the storage (for most people I guess): Ascended Dust, Crystals and Dragonite Ore and Mithril Ore. And they pile up not only in one stack, but several, so upgrading your material storage would only add a couple of used slots. About 90% of the slots will not exceed 250 items, unless you play for a very long time and never sell anything.

If the stack is cheap, I just sell it, like Large Fangs. Storage is more costly than just buying it back at some point when I need it. I consider the TP storage to rent, even Mithril Ore will be sold in stacks and bought back if I need more than 3 stacks or so (which never happened, despite crafting Lumps of Mithrillium every day).

So the issue for me is more what to do with lots of stacks of the same material, and expanding my own material storage is costly and ineffective to solve that problem. It’s cheaper to expand the bank slots or buy a new character slot, and gives more flexibility. A new character slot costs the same as the storage expander, and you can put a couple of cheap 18 slot bags in it. It has other uses in addition to that.

I believe expanding your mat storage is the worst option to handle inventory.

The benefit of the extended mats storage is that a ton of recipes will take 250 of something, and then unless you’re using bank slots, you’re totally out of the material. Kind of a pain when you need 250 X for a recipe, and then you also need to use X to craft the actual weapon.

Also I used to overflow mats on random things all the time, so it was a QoL for me. You don’t necessarily want 0 large bones, so you’d have to split the stack and try to guesstimate what a good number to sell is based on drop rate.

@Fluffball: Just in time production is the key. I only buy as much as I need when I craft, and crafting items that require 250+ of anything takes a while to craft anyway. If you suddenly need 500 Hardened Leather Sections, you will pay way too much on the TP. It’s better to buy 50 per day over the course of 10 days. For cheap stuff, it doesn’t matter, and that’s why I’m totally fine with having zero Large Bones in my storage. A stack is about 2 gold, so even if I need one at some point, I’ll just buy.

Right now, my material storage has a sell price of more than 500 gold. That’s 500 gold I cannot use for anyhing else, and I have no idea why I keep those garlic heads that are worth 10 gold, I don’t even cook. Need to sell some of that stuff today

I like to keep materials in storage “just in case” but that means “just in case I need to sell a bunch of stuff to make some gold” as much as “just in case I need to craft something with them”.

I’ve never bothered to buy the storage expanders because there’s very few materials I want more than 250 of so it’s not a problem to keep the extras in my bank. I think the only times I’ve needed lots of several different materials I was making a legendary and then I could take my time collecting them because I needed to do lots of other stuff too.

Most of them are just there in case I need them. And then periodically I’ll need more gold quickly and then I sell off all the extras. I have an arbitrary minimum for each material – 50 for cooking materials, 10 for rare materials I don’t use often, 25 for gem stores etc. and if I have anything over that I’ll sell it off.

I’m sure I could make a lot more gold if I bothered to keep track of prices and sell things when the price goes up instead of whenever I want the gold but I can’t be bothered doing that.

I highly recommend promoting mats if there’s not enough of x+1 mats you need, as well as promoting from mats you find abundantly to mats you find scarcely (often true for t3/t4 cloth/leather). Same can be said for components such as blood/totems/etc. Sometimes you can promote from a type that sells horribly to one that sells very well, to make a decent flip, but be careful with this.

Also, yes, you will need a LOT of T2/3/4/5 wood/ingot/cloth/leather if you’re making ascended gear.

I will agree with the “don’t buy all at once” mantra — it’s wiser to accrue mats over time, so you won’t feel as burned on coin, and you can check prices over the days.

Danikat.8537:

I like to keep materials in storage “just in case” but that means “just in case I need to sell a bunch of stuff to make some gold” as much as “just in case I need to craft something with them”.

I’m kicking myself because I shoulda done this. Instead I went on a selling spree last summer, and now I’m hurting for mats that are worth way more than what I sold them for to try and get even one piece of ascended gear.

altermaven.7385:

I highly recommend promoting mats if there’s not enough of x+1 mats you need, as well as promoting from mats you find abundantly to mats you find scarcely (often true for t3/t4 cloth/leather). Same can be said for components such as blood/totems/etc. Sometimes you can promote from a type that sells horribly to one that sells very well, to make a decent flip, but be careful with this.

Also, yes, you will need a LOT of T2/3/4/5 wood/ingot/cloth/leather if you’re making ascended gear.

I will agree with the “don’t buy all at once” mantra — it’s wiser to accrue mats over time, so you won’t feel as burned on coin, and you can check prices over the days.

Yeah I’ve started promoting any mats that aren’t used in ascended crafting. silver. gold, jute, etc…

Crafting ascended consumes an astounding amount of materials. I crafted heavy, medium, and light armor, along with a bunch of weapons and can say that method is by far the most expensive and time consuming.

Look for guides to obtaining ascended gear without crafting.