So here is my attempt to "teach someone to fish" in the world of GW2 crafting.
So flax price is going to change probably very quickly depending on how out of hand it gets and how much hording is going on. AKA flax prices will probably stabilize in a few months to a more agreeable rate. Right now the inflation is due in part to the massive amounts of flax needed for guilds and scribe and how much people are hording on to them for those reasons, just like Fog had mentioned.
One really great way to make some gold alternatively to this is to simply use gw2spidy.com. The idea behind this is you need to factor in crafted and gathered prices to find a cost value in order to determine your profit.
For example let’s take 15 slot darksteel boxes.
- Darksteel Ingot - 6s 38c – This is the TP sell price currently
It takes the following to make one Darksteel Ingot:
- 2 Platinum Ore - 3s 56c
- 1 primordium - 48c
- You have to buy them in stacks of 10 from vendor so the price per 1 was reduced via this formula 10/4s.80c
- You can get them cheaper in smaller quantities from the TP but it’s not that large of a gain
Your total crafted Darksteel Ingot Cost - 4s 04c – This is per ingot! Start to think this way.
- When you simply sell your own gathered goodies to the TP your profit for this will be:
- Profit of 2s 34c per ingot
- Over ten ingots for the Box it would have been: 23s 34c
Now in order to make a box you have to have:
- 10 x Darksteel Ingot’s –
- Crafted cost: 40s 40c
- Trading Post Cost (if you buy them from TP): 60s 38c
- 1 x Major rune of holding – Vendor Cost: 50s
- Total Box Cost:
- Crafted Cost: 90s 40c
- Trading Post Cost: 1g 10s 40c
- Current Trading Post Cost for Box: 1g 49s 30c
With that said you are looking at two potential profits: Crafted and TP
- Crafted\Gathered is: 58s 90c
- Trading Post Purchased: 38s 90c
As you can tell the original price of the Darksteel Ingots sold for 23s 34c and the TP cost of the box was 38s 90c. When you subtract that and find your total profit over each one you only made 15s 56c per box over simply selling the ingots.
When you factor in all of your money gaining efforts you can find out that a lot of money can be earned this way. The biggest downfall for people is not factoring the ACTUAL cost for the materials they have already gathered. Many times people think “oh it doesn’t cost me anything because I gathered it”. Yet it really does because its value has changed from currency to token based and still has a monetary value.
Using the formula and method above you will find out that the crafted and TP based values change drastically from item to item. I've done my research on this and some items the crafted to TP based different is in some cases 400% higher making a 100g item in crafted materials cost upwards of 400g.
However the opposite is also true. In some cases an expensive item can be more expensive on the gathering side. When it comes to certain hides,leathers, and silks you can get more for the base level materials than you could make back by selling a crafted item.
TL:DR: look at what your trying to sell and validate why it's so expensive or why you can make money on it. Listed above is a quick way to make a few gold by simply crafted some bag slot items.
» Edited on: 2015-11-04 12:00:50