I see a lot of guides popping up which suggest that Rift Hunting is a good method of making gold in the game, but I completely fail to understand this. IMHO it's terribly boring and does not even have a good gold/hour ratio.
My understanding is that the main reason for doing Rifts is to get those Essences which you will need for the new Legendary PvE Armor, i. e. you do the Weekly Rift Hunting Achievements which give you a decent amount of additional higher level Essences (even from Tier 1 Rifts) and that's it.
Doing Tier 1 Rifts without receiving Kryptis Rift Extraction containers has very poor rewards and doing Tier 2 and/or Tier 3 requires very expensive Kryptis Motivation consumables which means you either need to join (leech) a Tier 2|3 Rift Hunting Squad (those appear to be rare) or organize one yourself and try to share the costs. But maybe I'm not quite getting it.
Addition: It appears that the gold making strategy is based on using the Essences you get from your Rift Hunts to craft and then sell Uncommon and Rare Kryptis Motivations on the TP which implies the following to make this actually work:
- You don't need thoses Essences yourself, i. e. you are not interested in the new Open World Legendary Armor which requires a LOT of them.
- There is or rather continues to be a market for those Motivations, i. e. people are willing to buy them to do (additional) T2 and/or T3 Rift Hunts for higher level Essences beyond the 5 x 5 Weekly Rift Hunts which grant them via reward chests.
Here are some gold making alternatives with varying levels of required skill/engagement.
- Fishing
- sell Chunk of Ancient Ambergris
- craft and sell Zephyrite Fish Jerky
- Daily (limited chests) Map Metas
- Dragonfall, not on a fixed schedule, IMHO the best (most fun) map meta in the game
- Istan (Palawadan + Great Hall), every 2 hours, use LFG to check for a squad and join the commander's map instance early
- ...
- Daily Fractals
- Easy Daily Strikes, i. e.
- Shiverpeaks Pass
- Fraenir of Jormag
- Voice of the Fallen and Claw of the Fallen
- Cosmic Observatory
- Other Daily Strikes including Challenge Motes (CM)
- Weekly Raids
- sPvP (Automated Tournaments)
I never understood why ArenaNet decided to lock the convenience of having gear with always selectable stats behind a massive grind for the highest possible gear level. Exotics are good enough for every aspect of the game. The only reason why I "need" ascendend (or legendary) gear is to have infusion slots so I can do higher level fractals. I could not care less about the 10% stat increase or the flashy effects.
The new WvW vendor for (dirt cheap) stat-selectable exotic gear is a weird decision. It's almost like legendary gear regarding stat-selection, because it's so cheap. But it does not have infusion slots, so you cannot use it in higher level fractals. And as a side-efffect it pretty much crashed the market for crafted exotic gear.
By the way: Ascended gear and Agony Resistance were ArenaNet's way of catering to demands for vertical gear progression in the game. Originally Exotic gear was the top tier. They could easily get rid of this infusion nonsense entrirely and still have some sort of progression in fractals by simply giving all characters an Agony Resistance which matches the account's personal fractal level.
Then make Exotic and Ascended Gear stat-selectable (like Legendary is now) and let players choose their gear level (even for high end PvE content):
That's a point of Lazy Peon that I really enjoyed. I don't think that it's as easy as he suggested it, and I consider that it might not even be possible, but the pure concept of completely removing equipment from the game entirely has something to it. For full legendary people, gear already is basically non-existent anymore. Yet we still play, despite being free from the grind.
Because horizontal progression. You don't want to powercreep things, but at the same time, you need to give aomething value so people will grind it. Legendaries are a pure convenience option (ouside of accessories and first weapon due to having effects)
Expric gear has the niche for style, as theyre more reasonable to obtain and have a wider variety of cosmetic options to choose from. IMO it would be more assinine to block most of the games skins if they were ascendant+ as that would arguably be more tedious than a legendary.