Yah Vee Haff Jobz

So you find yourself short on cash. So what do you do? You could sell off all those great items that you have hidden away in your chest, but they look so pretty in there, and you know that you really are just a pack rat at heart. You could run around begging it off of strangers or even guild members, but you know how annoying that is and no one really likes to here a sob story. Or. . . you could go farming!

So what is farming?!?  Farming is basically going out into the world all by yourself or with a group of other players with the express purpose of gaining gold. So how do you go farming. Well just like a farmer you will need a few tools and a fertile area to farm. To be most effective you need to find an area that is well populated with monsters, and monsters that drop items of value. You will need to do it alone or with another person, not a henchman or a hero, and you need as much space as possible to carry all the items dropped.

So lets get prepared. First lets talk about why you would want to do this alone or in a small group of players. Monster killed will 90% of the time drop an item or gold. If you are farming alone then you get everything that is being dropped, if you are going with a guild member or friend then you or the other person(s) will be sure to get all the items and gold dropped. However, if you are running with a henchman or a hero then they will take a portion of the items dropped and you may end up missing out on a high value item, as well as a portion of the gold. If you go alone or with a small group your income from this will be much larger than if you had a henchman or hero with you.

What do you take with you, well for me I take one ID kit, one expert salvage kit, two salvage kits, and maybe 3 keys for the area that I am farming. That is it. You really don’t need anything more, sell off the rest or put it in your chest. The more space you have the more gold you will return with.

So now where do you go, well that is really up to you. You want to pick a location that you can survive in, it really doesn’t do you any good to go somewhere you will constantly die and having your death penalty increasing to the point that you are unable to effectively farm and have to return to town prematurely. The next consideration is to pick a location that has a good number of drops that you can salvage out for high gold. These would include but not be limited to granite slabs, feathers, and iron. You want to avoid areas that have lots of drops that salvage out to wood and bone. As with these items you can not recover the cost of the salvage kit let alone make a profit. We’ll get into that in a little bit.

Ok, now that you are out and about slaying everything in sight, and pickup all the great drops all of a sudden a message appears letting you know that your inventory is full. So what do you do, well, don’t head back to town that is for sure. Now is when we put to use all those ID and salvage kits to use. Step one is to use your regular salvage kit to go through and break down all the white weapons and such into crafting materials. If the items stack (meaning that you can put more than one into a slot) you want to wait to salvage those out til you get back to town. But remember to break down only those things that will give you iron, granite slabs and such. Avoid salvaging out bows and staffs, fetid carapaces and such, especially if you are farming in Ascalon area. Here is why, a bow will give you one wood, wood only sells for 4 gp. A single use of a salvage kit will cost you 4 gp. So it works out to be a wash, best to leave the items as a bow and sell it. The same thing goes for items that salvage out to bone, a single bone sells for 3 gp. So when you salvage out the item and you gain one bone piece you have just lost 1 gp. Basically you need to have a good idea about what the crafting materials are going for, and the best way to do that is to use this sheet here: GW Sales Sheet. So if the material will yield a price higher than 4 it is worth salvaging. There are 2 things to remember when making this decision: 1) That prices on the sheet are for a group of 10, 2) that base price of the item before being salvaged should be less than if you salvaged it, fetid carapace sell for 5 gp each and salvage out to 1 chiten fragment that sells for 5 gp. Better to leave it as a fetid carapace and get a full 5 gp than to salvage and only get 1 gp.

Next you need to go through and ID everything that is colored. Now everything that has the title “Improved Sale Value” on it needs to placed in a safe area where you will not antecedently salvage it out. Next you need to find all of the ones that have the title “Highly Salvageable” on them. Using your normal salvage kit, salvage all of these, it doesn’t matter whether it is a bow or a staff or what ever, just salvage it. The reason for this is that you will get more out of salvaging the item than you could if you just sold the item.

Now you should have a few nice piles of crafting materials, as well as a few piles of stackable items that we will deal with back in town. All that should be left are those items that are colored that do not have the “Improved Sale Value” on them. Take your expert salvage kit and hover over those items that are colored, but DO NOT click on them yet. Look and see if there is an eye that appears next to the little hammer. If there is this means that this item has things like weapons upgrade, runes, and insignias that you can extract. Most of these sell for a minimum of 25 gp or more, I have one that the last time I checked sold for 2300 gp. Now that you have identified which items contain buffs set those aside so that you do not accidentally salvage them.

Now what do we do with the rest of the items? If the sale price of the item is higher than if you were to salvage it out then leave it and sell it when you go back to town. If the item is of lower value then go ahead and salvage it out. Now that you have more empty spots in your inventory continue slaying the monsters and filling your inventory. When you are full again repeat the process above until you are either out of salvage kits or, you have no more room. Though it might be tempting to use up your expert salvage kits to get crafting materials, it usually isn’t a good idea. A single use of an expert salvage kit costs you 16 gp. So it’s not worth it in the least.

So in a nutshell that’s how you do farming, I know it sounds like its a lot of work, but it really isn’t, so now your wondering what is the pay off for all this work, well here is an example of the last farming run that I did. I used 19 IDs, 2 Expert Salvage, 63 Salvage, 0 keys. The total cost for this trip was 379 gp. When I returned to town I had 968 gp. After selling everything but crafting materials runes and such. If I sold the rest for the best possible price I would have an addition 1636 in gp, and if I sold it all for the lowest possible price I would have had an additional 1206 gp. So was it worth it?  Well you tell me. Oh, . . . and this was just in an area of post searing Ascalon.

That’s right there is now a garage sale going on in the Guild Wars thread. Stop by to see if there is anything that you might want, or post some stuff that you want to clear out of your chest.

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