If you have been reading my blog lately, you will have shockingly realized that I am playing an excessive amount of Guild Wars 2 at the moment. I am having a freaking blast but I thought I would talk some about one of the elements that I think scares some folks away… the cash shop. Guild Wars 2 is financed through a combination of “buy the box” expansions and then a slew of “priced to own” cash shop doodads. I personally have zero problem spending money on a game and effectively if I am not paying a subscription for something, it becomes a heck of a lot easier to justify buying items from the cash shop, especially if they improve my overall quality of life. Given that I have been playing Guild Wars 2 for a decade now… I have accumulated quite a few baubles that improve game-play. I thought I would take a moment this morning to talk about the things that I personally find value in from the long list of things available.
Shared Inventory Storage
One of the cool features of Guild Wars 2 is the ability to acquire inventory slots that show up on every single character on your account. These are super useful for storing gadgets that I will get into later as well as any consumables you might like to have access to like teleport to friend or the ever present birthday boosters. I’ve highlighted my shared storage row at the top of my bag in green. Purchased at the cheapest rate you can get 5 slots for 2800 gems which works out to 560 per slot. However like EVERYTHING I am going to talk about today… wait for it to go on sale. The Black Lion store has a somewhat predictable cadence of sales and as such it is certain that ANYTHING you are wanting will eventually go on promotion if you wait it out. Each time you purchase an expansion you get one of these for free.
Permanent Lounge Passes
In Guild Wars 2 there are special “VIP” areas of the game that you gain access to through holding a pass. There are time limited versions of these that are pretty easy to get, but the more interesting variant grants you permanent access to teleport to this location from anywhere in the world. You can check out this run down from the wiki that lists the features that each of them have, but essentially it grants you easy access to banks, vendors, crafting machines, and the market boards. Unfortunately they are not all created equal because Armistice Bastion and Mistlock Sanctuary give you access to a wide variety of teleports as well as the ability to pop right back to the spot that you clicked your pass from. You can get “Lily of the Elon” from purchasing the Deluxe edition of Path of Fire, but I would largely hold out and pick up Mistlock Sanctuary as it seems to be the most compact and useful version. When one of these is available they are 1000 gems, but unfortunately the permanent version of the pass shows up fairly rarely.
Unbreakable Tools
I have to admit two of the most annoying things for me personally when it comes to Guild Wars 2 is the fact that Salvage Kits and Harvesting Tools are a depleting resource. These next two picks fix that, but may not be as big of a deal for you. Unfortunately with the various permanent tool options, they are not account wide which means if you want to actively be using them on all of your characters you have to shell out for MANY sets. They come in really cool cosmetic versions and also these boring plain ones that are a bit cheaper. Again with everything else… wait for them to go on sale.
Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic
You are going to spend an exceptional amount of time salvaging gear for materials. This is just part of the core loop of the game and as a result you are going to go through prodigious amounts of salvage kits. For anything green quality or lower I end up using the lowest kit possible, and with this machine you essentially pay 3 copper to destroy an item, which is a .52 copper savings per item salvaged over just buying kits. The real reason why this is worth it however is that it can be used an unlimited number of times and you never have to worry about restocking ever again. I also have a copy of the Runecrafter’s Salvage-o-Matic because it has a 100% chance of recovering upgrades.
World Boss Portal Device
This is new to my repertoire of baubles, but this item when clicked on gives you a list of every event that is just about to happen and allows you to teleport to the nearest waypoint, even if you have not unlocked it yet. This has been the source of so much joy over the last few nights because it makes running world events super seamless and simple. Money very well spent, and now it lives permanently in my shared storage so all of my characters to access these events.
Those are the items that I have personally found extremely useful. Are there any items that I missed that you personally recommend from the cash shop? Again like I said several times, don’t buy anything until it is on sale. If you are curious what is available at any time, the Wiki seems to keep an updated list.