General Farming Tips

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Twystyd
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General Farming Tips

Postby Twystyd » Thu Nov 08, 2012 9:55 am

General Farming Tips

1. Salvaging and selling
In order to maximize your profits, you need to figure out what's best for selling and what's best for salvaging. In the long run it pays off a lot to follow these tips.

The general rule of thumb for this is: Sell all blue and green items, salvage all white items with crude/basic salvage kits, salvage yellow items with master/mystic salvage kit.

There are some exceptions to this though. Medium Armor salvages into leather which at the time of writing isn't very valuable so it's usually better to sell these whites than to salvage them. Elder wood on the other hand is very valuable so if you have fine/blue items like bows that salvage into wood, it's usually better to salvage them if they vendor for less than 60 copper.
Sometimes green items with desirable stats(like berserker) can be sold for more on the trading post than to a vendor but this is very uncommon.

For Yellow items you always want to check if it sells for a good amount on the trading post, you especially want to check the sigil/rune too, often it's worth it to sell these for 20s if the sigil is terrible and berserker yellows go for over 50s sometimes. But if the sigil is valuable it's usually better to salvage it and sell the sigil and the ecto.

Mystic and Master Salvage Kits are the same in the terms of returns from salvaging, except a Mystic salvage kit has 250 uses. You make the Mystic Salvage kit by combining a Fine+Journeyman+Master salvage kit in the mystic forge together with 3 Mystic Forge Stones from the gem store.
You can also get Black Lion Salvage kits form the gem store as well as from chests and the personal story. I only recommend using them if the sigil or rune sells for more than 6 silver. These are also good for salvaging exotics if they have a valuable rune or sigil on them.

Fine, Journeyman, and master salvage kits are all less cost efficient than Mystic Salvage kits so you shouldn't carry them.

The crude salvage kits are more cost efficient than the basic ones because the chance to get T6 mats is about the same, but crude salvage kits take more inventory space.


2. Magic Find
Many people don't immediately see the benefit of using magic find gear, because you won't notice the difference between a 2% chance and 4% chance without thousands of tests.
Magic find gear doesn't just affect gear, it also affects crafting material drops, including rare materials. All the grey items you see are what you get when you fail on the dice roll for getting a more valuable item.

You'll normally only use magic find gear when running in huge open world groups so your stats don't matter a lot in terms of efficiency, so for this reason I recommend using the cheapest MF gear. You shouldn't be doing anything like WvW or dungeons in this gear... ever. You still need a little bit of damage to get credit for tagging, so use level 80 items, they should only be 2-3 silver each. The prefix on the items defines the stat so it should be for most items the prefix is: explorer's. You can also get "Traveler's" as a prefix if you really want condition damage, but there are no masterwork version of these items so you'll either have to spend a lot more money on rares or settle for fine(blue) items which aren't as effective.

Armor: 6 pieces of "explorer's" masterwork lvl 80 armor. 3% MF each = 18% MF
Runes: 5x Superior Rune of the Pirate 50% MF + 1x Rune of the Traveler/Noble 10%MF = 60% MF
Weapons: Masterwork lvl 80 weapon set. 3% MF
Sigil 1: Superior Sigil of Luck, you can swap to your other weapon once you've built all charges because they stay on you until you reload or get downed even if you unequip the weapon = 15% MF at 25 charges
Sigil 2: Sigil of Flame (superior or major) this is what you use on your weapon swap or 2nd weapon if you are dual wielding, allows you to tag a lot more mobs.

Trinkets: Opal Mithril (ring/amulet/earring) of the explorer. = 30% MF.
You can get 5% more MF if you use exquisite opal jewels, but this will set you back a few gold and isn't worth it.
You can upgrade your back item with an opal orb for an extra 3% MF cheaply, the Halloween book could be a good cheap candidate for this if they fix it so you can upgrade it.

Food: Most of the time you want to use Omnomberry Bars because aside from 30% MF, they also give 40% Gold Find which helps a lot when killing hundreds of mobs while farming. Chocolate Omnomberry Cream is also an option because it gives 40%0 MF but is usually less profitable.

If you use mostly masterwork items the set will only set you back maybe 1-2 gold only. You save money on a lot of the pieces(like the runes) by crafting them or having them crafted by someone else if you buy the base materials off the trading post instead, other times it's cheaper to buy the final item directly.

This gives you a base total of 156% magic find. This can be increased by another 10% from a guild MF banner, and another 10% from the global guild MF boost. Finally you can use a 50% MF booster for a max of 226% MF if you really want to. The booster usually isn't worth it though as you'll probably make a loss buying them.

As a side note, people have reported 6x Super Rune of Scavenging gives a decent increase in money drops, but since these runes are extremely expensive it would take a very long time to break even on them, if you can break even at all, so I don't recommend using them at this point.

3. Diminishing Returns
Diminishing Returns (or DR) means that as long as you keep doing the same thing over and over, the returns or effect for doing it become less and less. For GW2 loot this means once you hit a certain threshold you stop getting loot completely for a while. This is triggered by killing the same time of mob a lot of times within in hour or less, how many kills this is exactly is unknown, but it seems to be tied to the amount of loot you picked up. This is why magic find is even more important because it means that within that loot you got before hitting DR you'll see more green/yellow items and more crafting materials, and less grey/white items.

The way to avoid the DR is pretty simple: kill different types of mobs. If you are doing Orr this is pretty hard because everything there is Risen aside from Elementals which are rare, and Gorillas which only appear in a small part of cursed shore. But usually if you filled up your whole inventory from killing one type of mob you want to kill a different type for a little while, then come back.


Other Tips

Farm in parties.
Whenever you're farming open world content, make sure you do have a full party of 5 killing the same mobs. You'll instantly notice this increases your drops by a lot.

Buy during the night, sell during the day.
If you want to buy something it's best to do it when people to to bed because the prices go down after that. Likewise if you want to sell something do it in the evening or on weekend when people get out of school/work, or better yet during the day on the weekend!

Flip on the TP in your sleep.
Before you go to bed, put up buy orders a couple of copper below the current price. When you wake up, pick up the items and put them back on sale on the trading post at a couple of copper higher than the going price. Collect your profit in the evening and repeat! Make sure there's a good margin on it though, you can make maybe a gold each night doing this if you flip a bunch of stacks each time. It works with pretty much any item that has a small margin but fluctuates in price during the day, crafting materials are pretty good for this. Even a 5 copper margin after the 15% tax between buying and selling still results in 12.5 silver profit per stack. Look for materials that have been stable for a while.

Find ways to make farming more fun for yourself.
I always have a TV show to watch when farming, other people have other things they can do to make the farm less boring. Find something that works for you!

Buy gathering tools for karma.
If you find yourself in Cursed Shore, pick up he Orichalcum Harvesting Sickle for 350 karma in Cae Shadowfain, and the Orichalcum Logging axe for 350 karma in Pentient Camp. Unfortunately the Mining Pick only has the mithril variant available for karma, it's in Malchor's Leap I think.

Place buy orders for everything you want.
If you want something you can probably get it cheapest by putting up a buy order for it. This even applies to the level 11/40/60 manuals that unlock traits, you can get them 20% cheaper using a buy order on the trading post.

Make sure you have enough bag space.
Going to the vendor every 5 minutes seriously cuts into your time spent farming. Time is money so make sure you have plenty of bag space to at least do a full farming circle that leads back to a vendor before your bags are filled.


Check the market trends.
Visit GW2spidey.com and .guildwarstrade.com before making big trades, they can give you a lot of insight in if it's smart to sell something or not.

On to the money making ^_^

Ascalonian Catacombs

One of the easiest ways to make money. Before you go in there are a few things I recommend you to prepare yourself with. The Goal is to do the runs as fast as possible so you can make money in the least amount of time. If you're going to take like 40 minutes to do this dungeon then it kind of stops being easy money and it becomes slow tedious money. First of all optimize your build, you need high damage spammable AoE attacks. Look up builds online if you're not sure how to minmax yourself. Generally speaking you want 1-2 people in the group who can stack a lot of might and someone who can stack a lot of vulnerability.

Before you go, make sure you have Omnomberry Bars, they increase gold drops by 40% and this dungeon is so great because the graveling bosses drop a looot of gold.

Aside from the final graveling boss dropping a lot of money, there are 3 champion gravelings that drop 7 silver each if you have the omnomberry bar buff.

The locations for the champions are:
#1. Walking up and down the stairs on Eastern Chambers
#2. Walking back and forth on the flat hallway in Hall of Stairs
#3. Between the Graveling Tunnels and Western Chambers, on the tunnel side, there is a wall here that opens up on the Hodgins path.

Unfortunately you can't get all 3 on every path, these are the ones you can get on each path.


Hodgins path:
you can pull the one in Hall of Stairs (#2) from the Western Chambers by hugging the gate in the Western Chambers, and using auto-targetting to select it and using a mesmer illusion or ranger pet or something to aggro it. After you get the staff pieces from Hall of Champions you open up a hole to Graveling Tunnels and #3 is right there.

Detha path:
When you clear Flooded Temple you run right into graveling champion #1 in Eastern Chamber, you can get #2 on the way to Hall of Champions

Tzark path:
Kill #1 before going into the Lovers' Crypt and pull #2 through the same way you pull it on the Hodgins path but from the other side. After you kill the final boss go into the Graveling Tunnels and work your way to champion #3 by running all the way to the hole in the wall that opened on the Hodgins path.

If you know how to get 3 gravelings on Hodgins on Detha please post how :)

Usually you make about 90 silver to 1 gold per run and they take 20-30 minutes with a group that knows what they're doing, so it's really great money.

If you do the same path twice in a row, you get a reduced money reward at the end. Also you only get 60 tokens per path once per day, if you do the same path twice in 1 day you get 20 tokens, but you still get the full money reward!
So if you really hate one path but want to run the dungeon for money, you can just alternate 2 paths and get full money rewards each time.

Pros: very quick, very reliable
Cons: requires 5 people
Estimated time to 50s: 20 minutes, and you'll have some money to spare

Gathering/Mining Runs

People used to call them mining runs, but wood is quite valuable now so be sure to gather those nodes as well.

Just go to here.

The maps are being kept up to date by several diligent TL members so the credit goes to them. You can only get gather the nodes for Orichalcum, Ancient Wood, and Omnomberries/Raspberries every 24 hours so make good use of it. A full run of all 3 maps can give you 3-4 Gold.

The downside is that you're running past a lot of Risen mobs which will cripple you, knock you down, pull you back, and generally make you miserable. Bring a lot of mobility skills.

Pros: maps make this really efficient, consistent returns
Cons: I hope you like Risen
Estimated time to 50 silver: 15 minutes

Cursed Shore Karma Train

Also known as "Plinx farming", "Doing Plinx" and "Oh god I hate DR so much". This area is famous for being stocked with players looking for delicious karma. You start northwest of Caer Shadowfain, up the river just past the skill challenge there. From this point there is a chain of 5 events with the end point being an event to kill a Champion Risen Abomination right outside of Caer Shadofain.

Here's a nice map that shows the chain of events here
Posted Image

During this chain, many many many many waves of risen, jellies, tar elementals, and other mobs spawn waiting for you to tag and loot. Not only that, along the path of this chain there are other random events that you can participate in for even more karma, exp, and loots.

Because of the enormous amout of mobs, I usually loot 1 or 2 yellow items for doing the whole chain, and it only takes 20 minutes the whole way through.

Some of the other events to watch out for:
- Kill Veteran Contenders. There's a little arena along the part 2 of the Plinx chain. The objective is to kill 2 veteran contenders that spawn one after the other. However, the 2nd one also spawns a huge mob of risen jesters, and the 3rd one spawns an huuuuge group of Fire Elementals, you can kill these for many ruby crystals and molten cores/lodestones. Just be sure to be ready for them because they usually die instantly from AoE. There's also a Champion event after the 3rd contender so it's 2 event for 1.

- Clear R&D camp of Tar Elementals. Whenever you see the R&D waypoint being contested, run there immediately! There will be waves of 10 Tar Elementals spawning after each other very quickly and you can get a lot of loot here.

- Defend Pentient Camp. Only if you have very good spammable AoE attacks. There will be large waves of invulnerable Risen running towards the camp, but they always instantly die because of all the people camping this the second they stop being invulnerable.

- Defend Shelter's Gate. Much easier to farm because there are way less people camping the spawns for the mobs, I usually get 1-2 yellows from this event alone! It's a bit out of the way but just watch for the event to become contested when you're done with Plinx then run there when you see the white crossed swords.

When farming in Cursed Shore, remember it's extremely important to be in a full party, it gives you much more loot.

Pros: just have to press tab and aoe, can watch tv or do homework while farming, can probably train your pet to do this for you
Cons: super boring
Estimated time to 50 silver: 30 minutes, use all the tips in the first post to maximize profits.

Corrupted Lodestone Farming

This is a very nice way of making money but it's also very inconsistent. You start by teleporting to the Ice Floe Waypoint in Frostgorge Sound. Basically you just go east from the WP until you hit the water, and kill every Icebrood Colossus you see. Then turn around and run back and forth doing this. Sometimes you get 4-5 corrupted lodestones in a single hour, but other times you go an hour without getting any at all, so I only recommend it to diehards. Unfortunately it seems like bots have started farming here so report them when you see them!

*Bonus combo* these mobs drop claw which are used in magic find gear (this is not an efficient way to get magic find gear)

Pros: you can make like 5 gold in 1 hour
Cons: you can make like 5 silver in 1 hour
Estimated time to 50 silver: ?? minutes, it varies a lot but lodestones sell for 75 silver
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Sirion
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Location: Washington D.C.

Postby Sirion » Thu Nov 08, 2012 12:28 pm

My money making techniques are faster, but theirs doesn't require skill points ><
DAoC > WoW
Call me sir.


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