This brief section of the guide is designed to help you stretch your gold as far as it can go. By being careful with your money, you can save for more expensive items while still equipping your character adequately for the tasks at hand.
6.1 Knowing When To Upgrade
One of the easiest ways to make your gold go as far as it can is to know when to upgrade your equipment. Small upgrades, especially in terms of armor, are usually far more expensive than they are worth.
Prophecies:
●Don’t stress too much over getting all of the armor you can from the Collectors in pre-Searing. It’s a nice bonus, but the meager armor boost won’t help that much and may be a waste of time if you have to go out of your way to collect the items.
●When you get to post-Searing Ascalon City, there will be two armor crafters in the area. Only buy from Corwen, who sells the stronger and more expensive armor of the two.
●Don’t bother buying any more armor until you reach Bergen Hot Springs (in Kryta), and even then, there’s no need to upgrade unless you’re having problems surviving.
●For owners of Factions only: Alternatively, when you reach Lion’s Arch, you can talk to Firstwatch Sergio and complete his “Brother Mhenlo’s Request” quest in order to gain access to the continent of Cantha and the city zone Kaineng Center. In Kaineng, you’ll be able to craft armor that’s just as powerful as the sets you would be able to get in Droknar’s Forge much later. Doing this will provide all of the equipment you need for the rest of the game. For help with affording this expensive armor so early, consider farming the nearby D’Alessio Seaboard mission for materials (see section 2.4) and using the Factions newbie questing trick to gather the gold (see section 3.1).

●When you reach the Henge of Denravi, you’ll probably be tempted to upgrade right away. If possible, wait again; if you can wait two more missions, you’ll be in Amnoon Oasis, which has superior armor.
●When you reach Amnoon Oasis, you’ll probably need to upgrade in order to get through the Crystal Desert missions.
●When you reach Droknar’s Forge, buy the best armor in the game. If you’ve already farmed up over 15k, you could also head to Granite Citadel or Marhan’s Grotto to get a piece of overly expensive but cool-looking armor from there.
Factions:
●Due to the fast-paced nature of the early part of the Factions campaign, you should be able to make it through all of the quests and missions on Shing Jea Island using just your starting armor. Exception: If your profession forces you to fight near the enemies (warrior or assassin, for example), investing in chest and leg armor from Shing Jea Monastery will be worthwhile, since these spots are the most likely to be hit in typical combat situations.
●Once you reach Kaineng Center, you’ll have access to crafters who can make the strongest armor. If you’ve been saving your gold and materials (or if you have a stock of them in storage from one of your Prophecies characters), this will be a good time to get a full set of new armor. Investing in chest, legs, and head armor first is advisable, though you won’t want to leave your hands and feet unprotected for too much longer, either.
●The “fancy” 15k armor from Factions becomes available in the Luxon and Kurzick capital cities, Cavalon and House zu Heltzer, respectively, and can only be purchased if you have become a member of that faction.
6.2 Making The Most Of Kits And Materials
Kit Tips:
●Try to use every charge of each kit. Selling a nearly-depleted kit back to a merchant isn’t cost-effective.

●Late in the PvE Campaigns, avoid buying Superior Identification Kits and especially Superior Salvage Kits. These 100-charge kits are convenient but cost 25% more gold overall than buying their 25-charge counterparts. The wasted 100g or 400g per Superior Kit can add up to dozens of wasted platinum over time.
●Not all dropped items with blue or purple names are actually “unidentified.” Very rarely, such an item will drop without the “unidentified” tag, and using an identification kit will only reveal the item’s value. This is basically a waste of a charge, so make sure the item is actually “unidentified” before using the kit. This happens most commonly in pre-Searing Ascalon.
●In general, save expert salvage kit charges for actual salvage items and low-value metal weapons. Those two types of items have a chance to give rare crafting materials when expert salvaged, and most others do not. There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as the Glowing Hearts dropped by fire imps; these can be expert salvaged to yield “Lump of Charcoal,” a rare material.
●Keep a normal salvage kit on hand for salvaging low-value wooden weapons and other items that are cluttering your inventory.
●If you’re collecting Charr Hides in Ascalon, don’t waste expert salvage charges on them trying to get a “Fur Square.” Due to the low probability of getting a rare material from salvaging, it’s more profitable overall to give four hides to the collector in post-Searing Ascalon City in exchange for a square.
●When upgrading your equipment, don’t forget to expert salvage your old armor to recover runes that were attached to it.
Material Tips:
●Before you begin selling any of your crafting materials to a trader or other players, head to an armorer and familiarize yourself with the common and rare components needed for your profession’s armor. Save those types of materials, since you may need them later.

●If you need rare materials in order to craft a certain piece of armor, one option is to pay an artisan NPC (in both gold and common materials) to make that rare material.

Unfortunately, artisans usually aren’t worth the trouble to find unless the trader price on a rare material you need is extremely high. The two conveniently-located artisans are the ones outside Sardelac Sanitarium and Fort Ranik; the rest are in hard to reach locations.
●Remember the above tips concerning when to upgrade. One of the best ways to save materials is to avoid upgrading armor until you really need it.
6.3 Using Dyes Effectively
●Until you have your class’s strongest armor (from Droknar’s Forge or Kaineng Center), using dyes is typically a waste of money. If you can figure out what color scheme you want to use prior to actually getting the armor, then keep the appropriate dyes in storage and sell the rest to dye traders or other players when prices are up.
●Mixing dyes is usually a waste, mainly because it’s difficult to find anyone who will pay well for a mixed bottle of dye, and the dye traders won’t buy it at all. The colors obtained by mixing dyes are also not always what you’d expect to get from the colors you mixed. Still, if you’d like to give it a try, there are several tables available online that show the results of many dye-mixing combinations. Consulting a chart like the one at the following site (no affiliation to the author) can help you mix dyes more efficiently: http://armageddon.tpon.net/images/guildwars/colors/allcolors.htm
6.4 Being Patient When Buying
This point is well known, but it deserves mention here. Because the price of any item sold to trader NPCs varies depending on how frequently other players have purchased or sold that item using a trader, you can save large amounts of gold by waiting for the price to drop before buying popular items.

If you use the money-making techniques from section 2 while progressing through the storyline, you typically will have enough cash to buy items from traders when you need them, even if their prices are up. But if you plan on saving to buy something wildly expensive (like a Rune of Superior Vigor, a

full set of black dye, or a Guild Hall), you’ll want to cut costs whenever possible. Waiting for prices to fall is one way to do that.