Many people in Guild Wars 2 think making money is difficult. Although it can take longer than most other MMO's as farming specific items isn't really a possibility, there are various ways that when used together can yield significant amounts of gold in a very short space of time. Here are my top five.

Gems

It might feel like cheating, but buying and exchanging Gems is unquestionably the quickest method to earn gold in Guild Wars 2. There is no activity you can undertake in game which provides such a fast return of gold. Admittedly this avenue requires you to have disposable income to spend on a video game. At a cost of $10 for 800 Gems, at the current exchange rate (this changes daily) you’d obtain 88 gold. That’s a fair amount of in game currency for very little cost. If you are pursuing the gem exchange route, I’d always recommend that you exchange when a new item hits the Gem store. This tends to result in the price of Gems increasing, so you gain a greater return.

Dungeons

There are a total of 25 dungeon paths in Guild Wars 2, across 8 dungeons. Each dungeon path provides a daily gold reward upon completion. Gold from completing each dungeon path per day varies from 1 gold 5 silver, to 3 gold 55 silver for Arah. In total, it’s possible to earn around 35 gold per day just by running dungeons. Admittedly this is going to take you a fair few hours to do, but with the right group it’s not unreasonable to be able to complete at least 5 dungeon paths within a very short period of time. At 5 gold, excluding the drops you gain from items in the dungeon, you’ll easily earn 35 gold per week for very little effort. If you then use your tokens to obtain rare items that you salage for Ectoplasm, you make even more money.

Liquidate Everything

Most people when leveling up or playing the game right click in their inventory and deposit everything they can. They then stockpile this stuff and do very little with it. If you actually sell it all every few months, it’s a huge chunk of money. Only last week I made over 175 liquidating items I’d sent to storage. Ectoplasm, Lodestones and Tier 5 and 6 materials all sell exceptionally well.

Convert Laurels

Every month you can obtain over 55 Laurels just by logging in. If you exchange these at the Laurel vendor for Heavy Crafting bags and sell what you get out of them, it roughly equates to the same value: 55 gold.

The Silverwastes

You'll only be able to gain access to the Silverwastes if you are level 80 and have reached the point in the Living World story where the map opens up. If you have, earning money from the Silverwastes depends entirely on your ability to run events quickly in order to farm drops and sell them on. All green and blue items you should sell and any rares, you should salvage for Ectoplasm unless the value of selling them on the Trading Post exceeds. There’s no need to actually complete each event and instead you should tag the enemies and then move on. In most cases you’ll earn a silver reward. Try to save all your loot bags and then open them later. If you land lucky on rares and exotic items, you can easily match dungeon income.