Best way to spend karma and unbound magic meaningfull?

Greetings fellow adventurers,

i have tons of karma and unbound magic (thanks to the endless gathering tool for it) in my pocket. Wise uncle Google tells me about buying chests on the LS maps, but his storys are from 2017. So i don't know if i can trust the old mans tales. I want to level up my leatherworking on my new favourite toon and craft 2 ascended armor so i need a lot of leather. Can i get a good amount of it out of these LS boxes? Also i don't really know what i can get for my karma.

All advises are welcome. Ty for taking time to help me out.

Karma can be spent on armor skins from vendors in Orr, purchasing certain materials for legendary crafting like obsidian shards and more importantly food materials. When you complete hearts or quests in Central Tyria (vanilla zones), you can purchase food materials from the quest vendors for an absurdly low amount of karma. That's why the gw2crafts.net guide for cooking shows three lists when you hover over it: no hearts, top 5 hearts and all hearts.

In the Living World maps, I found it best to salvage the salvageable items that drop from mobs or from doing events. They give you the materials you need for leatherworker such as silk scrap, linen scrap etc. For the unbound magic, I would say save it for buying ascended backpacks and trinkets in Bitterfrost Frontier. The reason I say this is because of the fresh winterberries which are the easiest LWS3 currency to get compared to the other currencies like blood rubies, petrified wood and orrian pearls. These currencies have a chance to drop from their nodes whereas fresh winterberries are guaranteed.

Most people who want to convert karma are thinking of gold or materials. There is no really useful conversion into those. Yes, you can waste tons of karma on this, but the returns are terrible.

Karma sees the most use in:

• crafting specific gear (mostly legendary gear)
• acquiring skins
• acquiring minis
• acquiring specific trinkets (ascended backpieces for example in Living World Season 3, Episode 6: Siren's Landing)

In general I would advise to hold on to karma until you can use it for something it is useful for, since some of those karma expenses can get quite costly, and having to grind karma can be a big speed bump. Especially if you converted it into something like a bit of silver/gold earlier.

On Unbound Magic can get used first and foremost to get easy access to ascended gear from Living World Season 3 (if you have the map specific resources, Bloodstone Ruby acquisition rate just got bumped for example and the Winterberry forest gives easy access too). Otherwise use it to upgrade you Living World Season 3 map specific upgrades (if you spend more time on some maps while say doing achievements). Finally if none of those things are of interest, you can purchase Magic Warped-Bundles or Magic Warped-Packages.

I'd poke around in the world and see what karma and unbound magic and heart vendors have before spending any of it. I had a boatload of karma that I was saving up, and a good thing, too, once I decided to fill in some missing mastery points, craft a legendary, and so on. Also, I saw a non-set staff for sale from one heart vendor that cost over 200K karma. Yes, it was a ridiculous amount but as the saying goes, I saw it in the window and just had to have it. No regrets.

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/karma

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5sl7fd/data_a_little_updating_spreadsheet_on_unbound/

I am assuming the UM one is current as they mentioned their spreadsheet pulling from the API.

@Cyninja.2954 said:Most people who want to convert karma are thinking of gold or materials. There is no really useful conversion into those. Yes, you can waste tons of karma on this, but the returns are terrible.

not really. Farm LW maps currency from heart vendors for karma. Use them to get magic, then go to Istan map merchant, buy trophy box, sell items on trading post

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:Most people who want to convert karma are thinking of gold or materials. There is no really useful conversion into those. Yes, you can waste tons of karma on this, but the returns are terrible.

Almost all LW currencies are easier and faster farmed without doing heart quests. Why waste time on heart quests in the first place AND spend karma? :o

Also Istan is VOLATILE MAGIC, TC was asking about UNBOUND MAGIC.

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/karma

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5sl7fd/data_a_little_updating_spreadsheet_on_unbound/

I am assuming the UM one is current as they mentioned their spreadsheet pulling from the API.

Unfortunately no. According to the "Last updated" date it is from June of 2018

Fortunately the wiki also has this covered :Dhttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic-Warped_Bundle/researchhttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Magic-Warped_Packet/research

... unfortunately the sample size could be bigger :(

I usually reserve my karma to get ob shard (you will find yourself burning through a lot of them crafting legendaries) and LW map currencies

Unbounded Magic, I only use them to buy Magic-Warped Bundle from Ember Bay; my own experience it has higher chance for clovers compare to Packs

Are you interested in the cultural weapon skins? The first and second tier weapons are just the skins that drop as loot in the game, but the Tier 3 weapons for each race are unique. Each one costs 63,000 karma, so it will cost almost 6 million karma to unlock them all, if you want to! That's where a lot of my karma ends up.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Peacemaker%27s_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wolfborn_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Adamant_Guard_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Seraph_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warden_weapons

@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:Are you interested in the cultural weapon skins? The first and second tier weapons are just the skins that drop as loot in the game, but the Tier 3 weapons for each race are unique. Each one costs 63,000 karma, so it will cost almost 6 million karma to unlock them all, if you want to! That's where a lot of my karma ends up.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Peacemaker%27s_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wolfborn_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Adamant_Guard_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Seraph_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warden_weapons

Even if you aren't interested in the skins it's useful to get rid of them from the Guaranteed Wardrobe Unlocks

Ty all for your great advices. Seems i will have a lot of things where i can spend my currencys for!

Siren's Landing: the backpacks. They cost karma and orrian pearls (both easy to get) and they are ascended, so you can't have too many of them.

I've been blowing through all my unbound magic on the Bitterfrost Frontier vendor for Ascended rings, trinkets and backpieces for my characters.

@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:Are you interested in the cultural weapon skins? The first and second tier weapons are just the skins that drop as loot in the game, but the Tier 3 weapons for each race are unique. Each one costs 63,000 karma, so it will cost almost 6 million karma to unlock them all, if you want to! That's where a lot of my karma ends up.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Peacemaker%27s_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wolfborn_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Adamant_Guard_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Seraph_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warden_weapons

Isn't there a vendor in Ebonhawk selling cultural skins too?

@Cyninja.2954 said:In general I would advise to hold on to karma until you can use it for something it is useful for,Definitely.No-effort karma→gold conversion is a few silver per thousand karma. The effort to obtain that karma when you need it is considerable.The best karma→gold rates are 20-25s/kiloKarma; that's better, but requires a fair bit of effort to obtain, especially in bulk.

On Unbound Magic can get used first and foremost to get easy access to ascended gear from Living World Season 3 (if you have the map specific resources, Bloodstone Ruby acquisition rate just got bumped for example and the Winterberry forest gives easy access too). Otherwise use it to upgrade you Living World Season 3 map specific upgrades (if you spend more time on some maps while say doing achievements). Finally if none of those things are of interest, you can purchase Magic Warped-Bundles or Magic Warped-Packages.I also recommend saving this until you know for 100% certainty that you have no other uses for it. Like a lot of currencies, it feels like you have too much... except when you have too little, and then it's a major pain to farm on short notice.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pact_Scout%27s_Mapping_Materials

You can buy 6(?) of these per day and use them during map weeks where the bonus is favorable for you. You are looking to have as many scout maps for this as possible. Buying a few and burning them will net you very little profit.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Map_bonus_reward/profit

This list gives you the profits you could (NOTE not guaranteed a 1:1 value) earn through each map for that week.

Other than that you're looking at mostly spending karma for personal use.

if you are after unlocking skings, use this

https://immortius.net.au/wardrobe-unlock-analyser/

change the Display Mode to "Only acquired through Karma"

@Irensaga.6935 said:

@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:Are you interested in the cultural weapon skins? The first and second tier weapons are just the skins that drop as loot in the game, but the Tier 3 weapons for each race are unique. Each one costs 63,000 karma, so it will cost almost 6 million karma to unlock them all, if you want to! That's where a lot of my karma ends up.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Peacemaker%27s_weapons

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wolfborn_weapons

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Adamant_Guard_weapons

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Seraph_weapons

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warden_weapons

Yes, the Ebon Vanguard set.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ebon_Vanguard_weaponsThere are also a couple of skin sets available for karma in Lion's Arch: the pirate skins and the Lionguard skins.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lionguard_weaponshttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pirate_weapons

They are very much less expensive to unlock than the Tier 3 racial skins, though, because if you only want to unlock the skin instead of having the actual weapon, you can buy the 1st-tier 9800 karma version. All three tiers are identical.