What's the best method to get Gold? I spent some on Black Lion and now I have like 4g. I have many materials but I'm not sure if I should sell them or if I need them.
You need to sit down and make a plan of what you want to accomplish. Take a good look at your characters and the skins they have, and asses if there is some weapons/armor you really want to go for that requires crafting. If such, you best save those materials.
Also, if you have other things you want to accomplish, like getting every crafting profession to 400- A difficult thing to do, refining materials can really help speed up the process. Particularly if your eating crafting foods, using crafting booster and have crafting buff from banner.
There are also the people who hoard mats to get their Ascended armor. You need a lot of specific materials.
It's possible to make money on selling mats, for sure. But prices change constantly, and there are people who play the Trading Post to get rich. They flip, they buy entire stock and sell at higher prices and all kinds oc crazy stuff. So sometimes it's not worth selling something if it's not desired.
But it's also a risk- We don't know the loot table of things in the expansion. What if suddenly Globs of Ectoplasm start dropping like flies and prices go down? Then your stack of 200 of these will make you lose money. Nobody can really say.
Some people make money buy buying skins and just keeping them in their inventory. Then when they become more rare they sell them for a lot more. Popular with Black Lion Weapons. New Black Lion Weapons cost 1 Ticket (1 Lion scraps) and they usually cost around 80-150g for these new skins. But after 3-6 months, you need 3-5 tickets (30-50 scraps) and then the prices skyrocket. So if you then invested and bought some weapons for around 90g, you can make quite a markup.
But to do this effectively you need a understanding of what people find popular. Staff, Greatswords, Shields are often the most popular I find- But I might be projecting.
Fastest way for me to make gold is actually selling my laurels. You get around 40 laurels a month if you log-in every day. If you sell those 40 laurels to a merchant for Tier 6 materials, and sell them, you get around 30-40 gold. At least for me. So that yields some currency.
Another good way is to do dragon chests (you follow the train) and fight all the big bosses once a day- yields a bonus chest. Teq, Destroyer, Shat, Jormy, Jungle Dragon and so on. The rares you get often, you always check if they sell.
If your lucky they have a good rune on them that sells for a lot. Or if you use your Mystic Salvaging Kit you sometimes get 3 Ectoplasm, so that's around 1 gold. Much better than to sell a rare for 25 silver. But sometimes you get nothing but elder wood. That's what we call "pulling an Adriaa".
Another good thing is that doing a dungeon once every day yields a bonus chest too. So you are incentive to play a lot of different stuff. The more you salvage, the more luck% you get which is negligible but still nice. And the more you log-in and the more achievement you collect, the more gold find% you get to your account on all your character. My account has 22% gold find, and when I am representing GAF guild we usually get 10% on top of that, and if you then pick some good food with 20% gold find, then it's beginning to feel like it makes a difference.
But again - It depends on the specifcs on what you're trying to do because money is easily lost, and everything changes. If you're really into WvW you might want to save those hundreds of gold for a commander tag, if you're really fancing an expensive skin that is forged by the mystic forge, well, - then work on the mats first. And specifically those that require you to do specific things like getting 500 tokens from a dungeon, or stuff like that.
Remember - There are other things besides gold. Commendations and Laurels can yield you ascended trinkets, rings, necklace. Honor (WvW) and Karma can give you exotic armor, and doing dungeons can give you exotic unique armors and weapons too. So you don't have to get gold to get ready.
If you do as many Saturday night missions, jumping puzzles, bounties and hunts and dragon boss chests, your chances of getting a ascended weapon also increases, and crafting a ascended weapon is something that can easily cost you more than a thousand gold which is over 100 hours of gameplay I'll say.
So to clarify; Make a clear plan of your goals, and the make a plan of attack from there. Its important your having fun, and better if you earn gold by doing activities you think is fun.
Gold is not something that is easy to get in GW2, but on the bright side, you can earn money by doing almost anything if you play your cards right, and that is really nice.
