Basic Inventory Management
Inventory Overview
Your inventory offers several functions that are important to know about. They can be accessed by selecting the drop-down options icon at the top right of the inventory screen.
Deposit All Materials:
The best thing ever. "Deposit All Materials" button will send all your crafting materials straight to your bank's material storage from wherever you are. This save you inventory space, while making it easy to keep your crafting materials organized. Note: Crafting materials can still be accessed from crafting stations without them needing to be in your personal inventory bags. Best inventory clearing function of all time.
Compact
Shoves everything (except items in hidden bags) toward the left/top. Great for using right after Deposit All Materials.
Show/Hide Rarity:
You can choose to display the rarity of an item in the form of a colored border around the item’s inventory box. Example: a rare item will have a yellow border around its inventory box, while fine and masterwork items will have a blue and green border. Very useful when salvaging.
Highlight New Items:
If you enable “Highlight New Items”, any time that new items enter your inventory they will be displayed with a light highlighting effect.
Show/Hide Bags:
When “show bags” is enabled the items in your inventory will be displayed and separated according to which bag they are in. When bags are set to “hidden” the separators are removed and your items are displayed in one large inventory pool. Either way, your items will not change order. I personally recommend hiding the bags.
Starting Inventory
Account
30 shared bank slots
Crafting Material / Cooking Material / Mini-Pet Storage [You can have 250 of each crafting item stored.]
Per Character
20 slot starter backpack
Four bag slots
You can have up to 5 characters
Bags
Bags provide additional storage ranging from 4 to 32 slots. The Starter Backpack is a default inventory bag that has 20 slots. Bags are not level dependent and can be upgraded immediately. In addition to the Starter Backpack you can equip up to 4 additional bags. You can also purchase additional bag slots through the Gem Store.
Basics
• 4 slot bags can be purchased from vendors for 32 copper
• 8 slot bags can be made by crafters (tailor, leatherworker, armorsmith) with 20 tier 1 materials (jute scrap, rawhide scraps, copper ore)
• Each tier of crafting makes a higher quality bag (10 slots, 12 slots, 14 slots, etc.). In addition to raw materials, these higher level bags require an increasingly expensive vendor item called runes of holding.
• 20 slot bags can be made at max level, and they require a superior rune of holding (10 gold) to make.
Specialty Bags
• All three professions can make invisible bags (which don't show up when selling to merchants)
• Tailors can make 8-20 slot Craftsman's Bags (New crafting materials are placed here first when looting)
• Leatherworkers can make 8-20 slot Oiled Leather Packs (Junk items are placed here first when looting)
• Armorsmiths can make 8-20 slot Reinforced Padded Equipment Boxes (Weapons and Armor Fill this bag First)
How to get by without extra bag slots even if you are a crafter
• Buying salvaging tools should be #1 priority. Even if you don't craft, you will want to mine every ore node / chop down every tree you come across for experience and profit. You can get them in most starting areas off vendors.
• You can buy a crude salvage kit at many renowned heart vendor for a small karma price. Use these kits to break apart trash drops.
• Send any crafting material directly to your bank by right clicking on it and choosing (send to bank)
• You can quickly sell junk items to renowned heart vendors through the sell all junk items button.
• You can post any item you think will sell by directly opening up the trading post.
• You can also mail items directly to an alt from the interface without using a mailbox (bank alt, mule, etc.)
Bank Account
The personal bank account in Guild Wars 2 lets you store any items you want in a separate inventory that is accessible to all characters across your account. Your bank also allows you to store and retrieve crafting materials so that they don’t clog up your inventory. Additional bank space can be purchased from the Gem Store.
Items
Junk
Its only purpose in-game is to sell for coin. Visit any merchant, click SELL tab, and click SELL JUNK at the bottom. CANNOT be salvaged.
Materials
(crafting materials, mats) These are used in crafting recipes as well as some mystic forge recipes. CANNOT be salvaged.
Equipment
(gear) This is anything that can be equipped like weapons and armor and shit. CAN be salvaged into materials. Identify any unidentified gear before selling or salvaging.
Salvaging
Salvaging is the act of turning unused gear and salvage items into crafting mats rather than selling them to merchants or putting them up on the market. To salvage gear or salvage an item, you will need to purchase salvage kits.
Salvage kits come in various grades. Higher grades will have a higher chance to obtain rare materials and retrieve the upgrade component on items. If you just want the raw materials for crafting though, even the most basic salvage kit will do.
Sell or Salvage?
To get the most efficient use out of the items in your inventory it’s important to know exactly which items to sell and which items should be salvaged.
Rules of Thumb
• Use a Basic Salvage Kit to salvage most common items as the more expensive salvage kits are not worth the added cost.
• For Yellow items that are level 68 or higher, check the Trading Post to see if the sell price is greater than the price of Ectoplasm. If the item is more valuable then Ectoplasm alone, sell it. Otherwise, use a Master Salvage Kit to salvage the item in order to increase the chance of getting Ectoplasm.
• Salvage all Blue items except leather armor, because leather crafting materials are not worth much.
The only Green items that should be salvaged is light armor, because cloth crafting materials are the only valuable ones.
• Sell all Greens except light armor to merchants.
• Exotics should be handled on a case-by-case basis. Always consider the value of the upgrades they contain.
Luck
Luck is obtained from salvaging Fine (blue) and Masterwork (green) items. When consumed it increased your account-wide Magic Find which determines your chance at acquiring rarer items from loot.
Ectoplasm
Globs of Ectoplasm are valuable rare crafting materials that are obtained from salvaging rare (yellow) items that are level 68 or higher.
Glob of Dark Matter
Glob of Dark Matter are valuable ascended crafting materials that is obtained from salvaging exotic (orange) items that are level 68 or higher.
Balls of Dark Energy
Ball of Dark Energy are valuable ascended crafting materials that is obtained from salvaging ascended (pink) items.
Stabilizing Matrix
Stabilizing Matrix are valuable ascended crafting materials that is obtained from salvaging ascended (pink) items.
Some photos and information were provided from Guild Wars 2 Wiki
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