#the biggest quick and dirty tip i can give is if you EVER run dragonfall (especially when VM stops being in the hole)

[red-catmander]

Firstly: belated congratulations on having Two Whole hot coal eyes on Jozra now! Secondly: it felt like you managed to get gold enough for that Pristine Dragon's Eye in practically no time... how? How in the world did you collect that kinda sum? Daily grinding, 10 hours a day? It seems so impossible to get any substantial sums on this game without major RNG luck or without treating the game almost like a job, with how diligently one must farm things...

hello! thank you for the congratulations, that's much appreciated!! and that's a very fair question, it's quite a bit of gold, but it wasn't as hard, or time consuming (per play session that is) to collect as you might think! let me break it down a little

so i started really gunning for the pristine eye maybe a few days after the final part of champions came out. that dropped on the 27th april 2021 and i bought the eye around the end of september. for the sake of ease we'll count 'i want that' from may 1st to october 1st. that's five months. and from that, we can figure out how much gold i had to start with. here's the figure from gw2 efficiency

i tend to accrue gold pretty passively and spend it on things i need as i need them, so that's just some walking around money. when pristine eyes first dropped i didn't have a good sense for how much they were going to cost so i was willing to let this be a long, long project

so when i set out to get this i had two things in mind. one, i had to have fun doing what it is i was doing. two, i couldn't possibly spend a silly amount of time per day on a cosmetic video game item. that's just not feasible. so i figured out a system pretty quick!

1) every single time i logged in (which wasn't every day! ever other day at most) i'd do my daily and then i would go to drizzlewood and buy 15 keys. i didn't have to do the meta, i just needed to buy the keys. so when I logged on for the day i'd snoop for a champ run in lfg. if I got one, great, easy money, if not no biggie. the reward tracks are great for putting towards ascended crafting, you get lots of mats for deldrimor ingots and spiritwood planks, so on, and the last part of the frost legion track drops a weapon you can salvage the rune out of from a bl kit. little optimisations like that go a long, long way!

2) I did two full dragonfall runs a week if I was on and a good one was happening. that's killing kralk -> keyfarm -> killing kralk -> refining and selling. that's about two hours at a time per run, so four hours total per week (if I was playing that week). i loooove podcasts, so that was my podcast time! just something I could zone out to and have fun (I worked my way through rex riveter private eye and a relisten of my dad wrote a porno). this was before the volatile magic market tanked via the 'return to' achievements but at the time I could get between 50 - 100 gold per run selling trophy shipments (upgrading t5 to t6 through dust)/leather shipments (crafting timegated mats), selling green unidentified gear and ecto. I'll be very, very conservative and say I made 150 gold per week

so 150 gold over five months, which is 21 weeks. 21*150 = 3150 gold, which is roughly the amount of a pristine eye. i know for a fact I didn't play all those weeks, but I played at a time where the game hurled unbound magic and mystic coins at you so i used those to make up the gap

i hope that answers your question! farming in guild wars has diminishing returns, it's not worth it to do a LOT per session. you can only open a certain amount of chests in df per day, you can only buy so many drizzlewood keys, so on. a little every now and then, with a hefty dose of patience, adds up