Guild Wars 2

It seems to me that if salvage kits are account-bound, gathering tools should be as well. It’s rather annoying to have a half-used copper axe when you’re headed out to the zones that need iron tools. I’d really like to just put the copper tool in my bank and take it out on any character that happens to be heading to a newbie zone. Instead, it’s souldbound to the specific character that bought it. I understand you don’t want to create a market for the gathering tools, but having them be account-bound would satisfy that concern and be slightly more pleasant for players. I’m not sure what downsides there really are for this other than that it would free up a small bit of storage space.

This is especially annoying with the tools that come out of black lion chests. Those are nice tools, so I don’t want to accidentally soul-bind them to my alt who won’t be using them for quite a long time when my main could use them immediately, so I end up swapping characters to my main whenever I get a black lion key. I know that this problem is somewhat ameliorated by being able to use the high-end tools on alts in WvW, but I’m pretty sure you don’t really want me to bring my not-even-slightly-PVP-oriented alt into WvW just to use some black lion gathering tools and then leave. That behavior isn’t particularly helpful toward the WvW PVP efforts and it’s annoying for me as well.