Saving coins in Guild Wars 2

Earning gold is one of my favourite things to do in MMOs. It doesn’t seem to be that easy in Guild Wars 2, however, compared with a few other games I’ve played. With the abundance of armour and weapons dropping, hardly any of them are worth more than 1 copper above the merchant price. But if you want to earn gold in the game, make sure to not sell items for just one copper above merchant price! The Trading Post asks for a 5% fee when you put an item up. After it’s been sold, another 10% from the asking price get deducted making it 15% of the asking price that you’re paying in fees. Anyway, this is for earning gold. But that’s not the only way to get richer in the game. You may also want to save as much of your gold as possible. There are a few easy ways and a few that require more time and research from you. You may not have the patience to do all of them, but fortunately, it’s not required. If your character is the Scrooge McDuck of Tyria, however, you’ll probably want to follow all of those tips. ;)

The obvious tip is: Don’t die! When you die, a part of your armour gets damaged. Once it’s broken, you will not gain the benefits of its stats anymore. On the other hand, it will first be damaged and especially in low levels, you will get new items regularly. So maybe hold off with repairing and only do so when it’s absolutely necessary. Also, once your character is dead, you need to find a waypoint to be resurrected. The cost for a waypoint increases with your level, so it gets more expensive later and you will pay the same amount for a waypoint in a low level area as you would pay for a waypoint in a high level area. What helps is if others revive you as you’ll still have to pay to get your armour repaired, but you won’t have to pay for a waypoint. If nobody revives you, ask nicely. I don’t always see it but the speech bubble of somebody asking is more obvious. I usually always revive others, especially when they’re asking, because it gives me XP and saves them some coins. It’s a win-win for both! ;) Also, if they have more coins, they may want to spend it on stuff on the Trading Post and since I’m regularly selling stuff there, those coins may end up in my own pocket!

With the cost of waypoints scaling in level, you may also want to consider walking instead of teleporting to the nearest village. My level 80 character, standing in Rata Sum would have to pay 3 silver to get to Straits of Devastation. Of course, 3 silver for one teleport isn’t too bad, but if you’re teleporting all of the time, the costs add up quickly. What you can do is look for the nearest city and go there (through Lion’s Arch). It costs a bit more time but saves coins. And if you’re out in the world adventuring and want to return to a city, don’t do it by using a waypoint. Do it by going through the Mists to Lion’s Arch.

When you’re out harvesting, make sure you have the correct harvesting tools with you. You will be able to save a lot if you’re just buying the iron harvesting tools for gathering in the starting areas. On the other hand, bag space is limited and you may not want to clutter your inventory with all the different kinds of harvesting tools. If that’s the case, you may want to consider switching between mithril and orichalcum, at least. The latter are used for gathering everything including the top harvesting nodes, but they cost 4 silver. The mithril ones cost 1 silver 60 copper instead and can be used for gathering everything except the highest gathering nodes. So you’d have three extra items in your inventory, but in the long run, you can save a lot of coins that way.

I had already mentioned the Trading Post above. Let’s get back to that one. As I said above, when selling items, remember that you’ll have to pay 15% as a fee. But what about buying items? I’d suggest using the “custom offer” option as often as possible. In a lot of cases, there’s a difference between the items that people put on the Trading Post for sale and the offers people are willing to pay. Let’s take the example from the screenshot. At that point, you could have bought the “Mini Oakheart” for 14 gold. Or you could have added a custom offer. The highest offer people had made at that point was 10G 25S 2C. That’s a lot less! Of course, it means that you will have to wait until somebody who has that item wants to sell it for that price. On the other hand, you, as the person making that custom offer, do not pay a fee for that! Placing the offer will take the money from you, but you can always go to the “my transaction” tab, click on “Items I’m buying” and remove the offer. This will return the coins to you. Placing offers requires patience. I’ve done it for a starting equipment for my new level 80 character: I’d placed offers last night, went to bed, and this morning, I had all three weapons and the runes I had wanted in the “Pick Up” tab.

Seen in the picture: midnight yew, midnight rust, blue pastel, blue ice and violet ice dyes

While we’re talking about buying: As usual, black and white dyes are very expensive. If you really want to save your coins, you may not want to spend 3 gold (or 2 gold 40 with an offer) on a black dye or close to 2 gold on white. But what about 3 silver for an “ice dye”? Those colours are not really white, but they are rather close. Or try the “midnight dyes” for really dark colours. The dyes used in the picture are “midnight rust”, “midnight yew”, “blue ice”, “blue pastel” and “violet ice dye”. As you can see, the dark colours clearly aren’t black, but especially midnight rust fits so much better to her hair colour than black! ;) Besides, I doubt people can really make out the difference, especially with the light dyes, when you’re rushing past them towards a Risen. ;)

Last but not least, bookahnerk has also found some interesting resources. Coinshaver.com and gw2spidy.com both offer price histories for items. Now, if you want to buy that black dye but aren’t sure if maybe tomorrow, it’ll be sold for 2 gold instead of 3, look at the price history. If it’s been really cheap before and has just climbed up in price, maybe it will be cheaper again later. It’s happened a few times that something was mentioned on Reddit which made the prices go up rapidly.

As I said in the beginning, those are things you can do, but not things you have to do, of course. I just like watching the amount of gold I have go up instead of down and like saving coins whenever possible. But sometimes, spending a few more coins and saving time is a nice trade-off, too. ;)