Guild Wars 2

I have an amulet with an infusion utility socket and I am not sure what infusion to use.
I am a L80 noob doing map completion and daily/monthly tasks. No plans to do any dungeons/fractals/WvW/spvp for a while, but have started to engage champions.

- XP infusion is a non-starter.
- Karmic infusion sounds good, but what do you do with the karmic mountain ?
- Magic find infusion seems a safe bet.
- Gold infusion don’t know.

So what does “gold from monsters” mean and how useful is it for someone like me ?

It means nearly nothing as mobs drop nearly zero in terms of coins. It was a lot more useful back in the day when dungeon bosses dropped gold directly, which was amped by the gold infusion. Now the gold is in chests which your gold find % has zero effect on.

XP infusion is mostly for people very active in using superior blueprints or t5>t6 conversion, but even converting everything I have I still have 500 spare skillpoint scrolls and 700 skill points remaining, so…. I wouldn’t advise it.

Karmic infusion is generally what most players pick.

Magic find infusion has diminishing returns. At the start, +20% magic find is quite a lot. But when you have 200% magic find… an additional +20% doesn’t really change much. Furthermore it does not affect champ chests or world boss chests where the majority of your good loot will come from anyway, so…

As for what use Karma is, it’s mostly used for Obsidian Shards, a requirement for all ascended crafting and legendary crafting. If ‘never’ intending to make any of these, you can convert them to gold by buying Orrian Jewelry Boxes at any Orr karma vendor. Bear in mind that while karma exotic gear may look like a good deal at first, the exotics cannot be salvaged, so any rune you slot inside them is permanently wasted if you should ever decide to upgrade to Ascended. If using an Exotic stopgap before Ascended tier, use Dungeon Token Exotics as those CAN be broken – and thus you can retrieve your runes.

Thanks for the response, gold infusion now off the list. I won’t be doing any crafting for a while, so will probably pick MF to start with, then replace it with karmic when my
MF percent gets higher.

Default answer is MF. +20% MF is always nice, no matter how high your total.

Only get karma if you plan to need a lot of karma (usually only happens if you’re making legendaries).

Karma is difficult (or at least, extremely annoying) to convert to gold, so they MF will generally be more profitable anyway.

The karma conversion rate isn’t anywhere as good as it used to be back in the days of 194% karma bonus. But more than the exchange rate, the most annoying thing about converting karma to gold is the over 9000 clicks you need to make…

I recommend getting the one you have the lowest of otherwise, and the one you benefit from the most.
if you have 300% mf: probably not magic
if you have 6000g in the bank: probably not gold
if you have 9 million karma: probably not karma
if you have 1000 SP: probably not exp
if you do a lot of open-world pve: magic or gold find is good
if you do a lot of dungeons or events: karma is good
if you like to make legendaries: karma or exp is good (depending which you normally get less of)
if you have a hobby of converting SP to gold: exp is good (you can get up to 1-4g/SP)

I see a lot of hate on gold find here. I feel everyone is drastically underestimating how much gold you get from regular mobs. do you know all those whites, blues, and greens, and junk you get from mobs? for nearly every mob you get one of those, there is a mob that drops copper instead. usually around 10c-90c. with gold find, that becomes 12c-1s8c. One of these days I should quantify this number, because it’s not insignificant. less than you get from selling drops, sure, but not nothing.
From a strictly gold-value-based orientation, I would be hard-pressed to tell you which gives you more profit: gold, magic, or exp. I can tell you karma is no where near the running: the exchange rate for karma is just so low that even a 15% boost wouldn’t help much.