GW and gold

hello everyone. I've made a few bad financial moves with my characters, and now I'm quite poor. I've been playing through the story lines, and I am in serious need of cash. I don't have any good weapons or armor, and both of which are very expensive. So my question is, how are some good ways to make money?

I have a level 20 monk/mesmer that has made it to Droks in Prophecies, and a level 20 Dervish/Warrior that has made it to the gate of madness.

I suppose farming would be the way to go from what I've heard, but what do I farm? Where? I've looked up some builds, and it seems most farming builds require an extremely low health and the use of protective spirit, but I'm worried if I set up my armor like this, it will hinder me when I try to progress with the missions and do other things besides farming. Can anyone give me any advice?

#1 You don't need money to progress. Skill > gear
#2 Go check out the extensive farming threads we have on the forums (Use the SEARCH function if you cant find them manually on the forum front page)
#3 There is no #3
#4 Look into collector armor and weapons. Very cheap and max stats.

max armor can be obtained for less than 10k total in droks and even cheaper in consulate if i remember correctly. max armor is max armor. 15k armor is no better than droks armor. or you get get collector armor at no cost, as long as you farm the needed items.

collector weapons with max stats can be optained for free as well. works just as well as golds or greens. just purchase some lower level mods, like +5 armor or +28hp for cheap, and you have a weapons that will work just as well as most any green.

the wiki is your friend...

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Collector

Quest, ID your drops, sell to merchant. You'll make 10k in a few hours, and that's if you just get white drops.

I use collector weapons / armours when i first started out.
yup, those are good. In fact, i used them for approximately 1 year before i treated my self to a 15k armour design.

1. U can try to be a runner. There are always people lookin for runs (eg. LA -> toa / cay) ... and charging 500g - 1k per person is not that much
2. Trader style... I think ... unless u r good in it, u should avoid it.. especially since u mentioned u lost $ from bad investments
3. farming for items

I had the same problem. In the end I saved up a little cash and set up a monk farming build, I had to buy an extra set of armour, but I easily made up the cash I spent on it in a few hours farming. I bought my first ever set of 15k armour about a month later with casual farming a few hours a week.
I don't want to be stinking rich, can't see me ever getting FOW armour, but it's just nice to be able to get some cash when I need it.

I started out using collector weapons or dropped weapons. Had to scrimp and save to get my 1.5K armor from Droks for my main character.

Now have 15K sets on 2-3 characters, using greens or golds on all chars including their heroes.

Basically what the other posters said. Id everything that drops. Keep plonking excess cash into storage. Salvage mods from crap weapons and sell those seperately.

Farm solo if you can for cash/drops......if you cant farm solo then use heroes/henches and go for greens (flag them away after clearing enemies and solo the boss). But farming takes time and patience. Trader approach is generally better.....in any given town, there are desperate sellers or buyers....use that to your advantage, buy low and sell high. I have managed to make quite a lot of money in a couple of hours by trading....you just have to be smart......e.g. generally when you go into the market to sell your green, thats all you want to do. Dont just focus on that only, keep an eye on the spam, pick up bargains, sell them if you can or trade them for better items and sell those instead.....if you do it properly, you can make a LOT of money. Of course, you need a little bit of seed money (or have a couple of greens/gold to your name) to operate that way.........so basically this is after when you have something in the bank i.e between 35-100K.

Good money makers are greens when they are new. For example, I rushed through NF when it came out and sold the end game greens/vabbi greens in the 100K range (under 40K now).

For your characters who are in nightfall, hit all of the treasure chests that are listed on wiki. You get a gold weapon drop from each of them as well as cash which varies from 1 to 4 platinum. Some of the weapons Id out to be somewhat crap but you can replace the mods or use the decent ones on your heroes/chars.

It also helps if you have 2-3 level 20 characters who have access to the full map in multiple campaigns. That way you play with different chars in different locations while doing things like going for protector/cartographer title and the drops are better supposedly. Best of all, it doesnt appear like a grind for money and its not boring. After finishing NF with my ranger who spent time in the realm of torment, started on my Rit who was stuck in Vabbi and she had multiple gold and green drops with full hero/hench teams. Went through 2-3 missions with her and switched to my monk who had the same luck in Kourna. Went back to my warrior in DOA who didnt do as well btw. You get the idea.

And lastly, to farm with your monk using the standard low hp builds, you are right in saying that if you try it by changing your armor, it will hinder you in other areas. Generally monk farmers have different sets of armors i.e. standard PVE armor or farming armor. My monk has her 55hp or 105 hp set with the superior runes/-50hp offhand etc and general PVE sets with different headgear for prot/heal. Since you dont have much money, probably you cant afford to have different sets at this point. Whats worse is that if you set up your current armor that way and you want to revert......you may not be able to salvage the rune (monk superior runes are expensive) or you salvage it but destroy the armor (another 1.5K plus materials). So I would not advise farming with a monk 55/105/130 hp unless you are willing to put off normal gameplay till the time you make back your money and replace everything. The easiest class in this context to farm with is warrior as you can swap around helms only i.e. superior strength/tactics/sword etc without changing the layout of the whole armor.

I see you have a monk. So I'd suggest to go buy the cheapest monk energy armor (around 20g a piece for lvl 15 armor and yes this helps for the farmbuild) either from Shing Jea Monestary in Factions or Kamadan in Elona (for elona you'll have to buy the radiant insignia and those can add up to around 2k500 for 5)

You need 5 monk sup runes (best to have 4 different ones and 1 copy of the cheapest one) = ok this is still a bit costly

And treat this armor set as you farming armor

Get following skill as Mo/Me: Protective Spirit, mending, Healing Breeze, Essence Bond, Balt. Spirit, Blessed Signet, Ancestors Visage, SPELLBREAKER (elite)

ANd you can go duo farm in UW with a necro ... . If you incorp some other dmg skills instead as the visages you be able to solo farm too with it

Plz look at the farming build on how to use this 105 hp build (see 55hp monk build) you can use the -50 hp item from prophecies, but I don't and use a collectors prot offhand with HCT and HSC 20% the weapon I use is an inscrip. sword (dmg doesn't matter and the req neither ) with longer ench mod and +5 unconditional inscription.

So to summarise, I play by these general rules:

1. Don't salvage drops unless you need the crafting materials...it's worth more to sell to the merchant rather than salvage and sell.

2. Research on Guildwiki what collectors items are required for max damage weapons and max armor for, essentially free, armor and weapons.

3. Find a nice farming spot. An often popular one can be Kirin/Undergrowths in Pongmei Valley giving ~1-1.5k/run

4. Find a solo farming build for green weapons. Personally when I get low on cash I wander around and annoy Mr. Scar Eater.

5. If you choose to farm green weapons farm ones which are easily sellable. For instance, although there must be thousands of them out there the Scar Eater still sells fast...other easily farmable weaponssuch as Darkroot's Daggers take forever to sell (from personal experience).

6. Hold back any nice weapons for your heroes so you don't need to buy some specially...My ele runs chests so I tend to keep any crappy max-damage golds/purples for the heroes...

7. Find a service people want. I recently made my Dervish D/A and run to Droks...being a runner can be a popular way of making money.

8. Find one or two usually favourable characters, from a farming point of view, and try to get them as far through each campaign as possible so that if a new farming build comes out you have no problem buying up new skills or capping elites that are further through a game. Popular ones include Warriors, Elementalists, and unfortunately Assassins...Monks are always a classic choice from a farming perspective.

9. Plan ahead. If have a Warrior and you think you may want to start an Elementalist in the near future and you get a nice staff drop for you...keep it. This will save you finding collectors items or buying one later on in the game. This can go too far though...personally I hoard far too much

10. Go through mission and do side-quests...you'll be amazed at how fast the cash rewards from non-prophecies campaigns can mount up.

11. Know the value of your drops. Don't sell the merchant a potentially valuable drop. You can always double check by going to the Price Check forum and starting a thread to ask about your weapon.

12. Learn common trader's tricks and scams. GuildWiki has an extensive section on this here. Check and double check both what they have in their trade window and how much money you have put up in yours.

13. Watch out for freebies. Occaisonally you get some nice players giving away free items. I do from time to time.

14. Plan your builds. If you know what builds you are likely to want to play you will not end up buying skills you don't need which can get costly at 1k per skill.

Hope this helped a bit Good luck.