Guild Wars 2, This Is An Item Proliferation Intervention

[HappyHubris.1096]

As a returning player, I'm frustrated by how many zone-unique, event-unique, and other niche items are crammed into your inventory. Unless you ruthlessly destroy items and focus on a single type of content and zone of content at a time, your bank and inventory proliferate with single-purpose items.

Just today I picked up the following in a few hours of questing:

• Stone Thumb
• Skritt Contracts
• Delicate Eggs
• Large Delicate Eggs
• Reclaimed Wood Chunks
• Exalted Portal Stone
• Smoked Fish Dinner
• Token of Affection

Can I junk any of the permanent items? No idea, as the game has defined them with White Text. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm currently carry an event invitation, event tokens, several Silverwastes items, Skritt Marks, Fractal special items (e.g. moss), Central Tyria Keys for the next time I do those zones/jumping puzzles, Chunks of Granite, etc. This is on top of the "useful" items like salvage kits, different flavors of food, teleports, etc. I know that when this character goes to POF it'll pick up even more items, too.

My banks is a literal nightmare. Even with a paid Material Storage upgrade I'm overflowing with certain crafting items (especially account bound), that take more and more slots every week. A bunch of gear chests in case I want to gear up alts. Alt gear. Gear for specs that I'm currently not playing. Probably 60 slots of Arenanet items (boosters, cosmetic chests, experience scrolls, etc.). WvW items, recipe books, fractal flasks, and other goodies.

It's borderline oppressive to start a new zone or event and get Yet More Unique Items to shuffle into your inventory. I know that I'm not optimizing my Bank and stash, but time spent on wikis looking up item applicability and shuffling things around is time not spent exploring the world, advancing my story, or interacting with other players.

Please Arenanet, be choosy with future unique items.

P.S. if anyone knows a GW2 Marie Kondo, please PM me their tag! :) <3

[Ayrilana.1396]

You can always use the wiki to look up these items to see their usage and whether you can dispose of them.

[Super Hayes.6890]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:You can always use the wiki to look up these items to see their usage and whether you can dispose of them.

This^^^There really isn't any other way atm.

[Super Hayes.6890]

The crafting material storage expansion was a great buy for me as well. I only brought it up to 500 from the original 250 and haven't had much trouble with crafting material since.

[leila.7962]

Some of the account bound items you have are expected to be used at some point, for example: experience scrolls and boosters. Hoarding them will just occupy a bunch of slots in your bank/bags. I use my experience scrolls to make characters to get the lvl 10 personal story key for example. I use my boosters on a character that I play WvW or when a new mastery is added on the game so I get the exp faster.

If you are having issues with gear you are saving for alts, maybe it is the time to make them!! :smiley: That way they will be equipped on your alts and not in your bank/bags!Recipe books, use them all or sell on TP what you won't use.

And anything that has "trophy" on their description, you can check if it can be sold on TP (some people buy them to speed up the map completion) and if they can't, just trash them after you already completed the heart that requires the item.

[Danikat.8537]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:You can always use the wiki to look up these items to see their usage and whether you can dispose of them.

I agree, this is what I do if I pick up something I'm not sure about.

@"HappyHubris.1096" said:As a returning player, I'm frustrated by how many zone-unique, event-unique, and other niche items are crammed into your inventory. Unless you ruthlessly destroy items and focus on a single type of content and zone of content at a time, your bank and inventory proliferate with single-purpose items.

Just today I picked up the following in a few hours of questing:

• Stone Thumb
• Skritt Contracts
• Delicate Eggs
• Large Delicate Eggs
• Reclaimed Wood Chunks
• Exalted Portal Stone
• Smoked Fish Dinner
• Token of Affection

Can I junk any of the permanent items? No idea, as the game has defined them with White Text. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm currently carry an event invitation, event tokens, several Silverwastes items, Skritt Marks, Fractal special items (e.g. moss), Central Tyria Keys for the next time I do those zones/jumping puzzles, Chunks of Granite, etc. This is on top of the "useful" items like salvage kits, different flavors of food, teleports, etc. I know that when this character goes to POF it'll pick up even more items, too.

My banks is a literal nightmare. Even with a paid Material Storage upgrade I'm overflowing with certain crafting items (especially account bound), that take more and more slots every week. A bunch of gear chests in case I want to gear up alts. Alt gear. Gear for specs that I'm currently not playing. Probably 60 slots of Arenanet items (boosters, cosmetic chests, experience scrolls, etc.). WvW items, recipe books, fractal flasks, and other goodies.

It's borderline oppressive to start a new zone or event and get Yet More Unique Items to shuffle into your inventory. I know that I'm not optimizing my Bank and stash, but time spent on wikis looking up item applicability and shuffling things around is time not spent exploring the world, advancing my story, or interacting with other players.

Please Arenanet, be choosy with future unique items.

P.S. if anyone knows a GW2 Marie Kondo, please PM me their tag! :) <3

The Stone Thumb is used for the Living World episode Rising Flames. I can't remember if it's automatically removed from your inventory when you're finished with it but if not you can just delete it when you finish the episode.

Skritt Worker Contracts are bought from one of the heart NPCs in Ember Bay and used to dig up a skritt stash. They're probably intended to be used right away after you've bought them, and if you don't want to deal with them again all you need to do is avoid buying more.

Delicate eggs and large delicate eggs are obtained from osprey nests and used for the heart Win the favor of the circus. If you've finished the heart you can just delete any you have left over and if you haven't finished it you should give them to the NPC to get credit. (There are quite a few hearts and events which involve collecting and handing over items like this - any left in your inventory when it's over can just be deleted.)

Reclaimed wood chunks are, as their description says, salvage items. Use a salvage kit to turn them into crafting materials which can be instantly deposited to your bank, or sell them on the TP.

The Exalted Portal Stone is the only one I'd keep (and have kept). It lets you replay sections of the Precocious Aurene story step where you play games with the baby dragon. You don't need it (and you can get another one in Tarir if you lose it) but I think it's a fun thing to have.

Smoked fish dinner is a story item, like the stone thumb. If you've finished Precocious Aurene (which you must have to get the portal stone) you can delete it.

Token of Affection is a collection item which can be deleted once it's in the collection - it just appears in your inventory so you know you've got it and the collection is now unlocked.

As for some of the other stuff you mentioned if you're getting so many of an account bound crafting material that it's filling up your storage faster than you can use it why not just delete it? You clearly don't need that much and you can always get it back just as easily as you're getting it now. With gear I think the 'trick' (if you can call it that) is just to be honest with yourself about what will actually be useful and salvage, sell or delete anything else. For example I only keep exotic items if they have selectable stats. If they have a fixed stat combination and I can't use it on a character _right now _I delete it because I can always use one of the selectable ones or craft/buy one. (Anything below exotic only gets kept if a character can use it right now and I get ascended drops so rarely I've never needed a system for them.)

Cosmetics can be stored in the wardrobe and then the actual items can be deleted, unless you have an immediate use for them. (Yes that means you'll be paying a transmutation charge to use it, if you ever do, but those can be obtained for free relatively easily and don't take up bank space.) Boosters you should probably just use, they don't make a massive difference and you could hoard them forever waiting for exactly the right time to use them.

[HappyHubris.1096]

Thank you for the comprehensive reply. I did free up a lot of bank space by leveling a crafter to 500 and converting to bricks/whatever, which helped a lot. I also need to go through my bank and start killing things that aren't clearly useful.

The general complaint still persists, though: there are a lot of unique items shoved at the player that often need wiki decrypting. It would be better to have more thorough tooltips and standardize when possible (e.g. by giving a currency that could be traded to a vendor for item choice instead of a chest, by making zones A + B + C use common zone drop items instead of separate ones, etc). Ideally we'd get some sort of key bag and zone item interface (think crafting bank) that would remove these concerns (think Silverwastes sands/gadgets/shovels or Central Tyria jumping puzzle keys).

[ShadowCatz.8437]

@"HappyHubris.1096" said:Thank you for the comprehensive reply. I did free up a lot of bank space by leveling a crafter to 500 and converting to bricks/whatever, which helped a lot. I also need to go through my bank and start killing things that aren't clearly useful.

The general complaint still persists, though: there are a lot of unique items shoved at the player that often need wiki decrypting. It would be better to have more thorough tooltips and standardize when possible (e.g. by giving a currency that could be traded to a vendor for item choice instead of a chest, by making zones A + B + C use common zone drop items instead of separate ones, etc). Ideally we'd get some sort of key bag and zone item interface (think crafting bank) that would remove these concerns (think Silverwastes sands/gadgets/shovels or Central Tyria jumping puzzle keys).

Honestly I think you need re-think how your suggestion would work if there where more use of a currency item (based on location). We have already basically Unbound Magic and Volatile Magic which cover larger parts of maps, then map based currencies and those currencies based on maps can also be exchanged into other currencies if you look up that on wiki at special NPC vendors.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unbound_Magichttps://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Volatile_Magic

Keys for chest are meant to get people to maps to farm or do events until they can unlock those chests and that way create actives where players go back into content they already have been doing. In some maps it can annoying as you will need stay there for some time to earn enough currencies (like Dry Top's geode and tier connected to make it cheaper to buy items and keys to open chests), but in other maps it happens rather fast and without any change in cost for keys. Instead there is a daily limit for getting keys, if you don't do events which in turn also adds keys or currencies to buy those.

Good investment in this game is increase your bank space (as this increase your account space for transfer/access and storage of items you might want on other character), next is material storage which each increase adds 250 stack increase across all items including some map currencies that doesn't go into your wallet. After that the more expensive upgrade for shared inventory is also useful. In particular if you invest in portals/tomes to jump fast between maps with one of those Lounge Passes. Lounges that have access to craftstation will give you direct access also to your bank and material storage, so it can be good to know that those features reduce the need to destroy items. Almost all vendors (and some repair stations/npc) do also offer "sell all junk" with button press, so you can fast get rid of low priced items that might be not worth to post on Black Lion Trading Post (action house). Use Oiled Packs/Hamaseen Panniers Bags to keep junk items collected in this space on you characters inventory. That way you see fast when it is time visit NPC vendors to make more room. I put a link so you can see what types of bags you can craft, buy or even get for free from doing achievements.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lounge

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bag

Most upgrades in Gem Store related to inventory management have name with "expander" or "expansion" in it. Search on GW2 for those and you should also be able to purchase those over time when there is a sale on those. Shared Inventory are something I would recommend to save up Gems in time for so you can get it while it on sale as it doesn't happen as often as for characters inventory (bag expansion) or bank expansion. Don't forget that Permanent Salvage kits (copper feed o matic or something like that) also compress space as you transform unID items and all of same tier or up to same tier into material which can be disposed from Inventory (look in the upper part of your characters Inventory). Use Invisible bag to store items that you don't want to be Salvaged by accident or to collect stacks of unID until you feel ready to ID them and then salvage or to salvage stacks at once.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Account_upgrades - most upgrades here listed for inventory

To sum it up: I don't see a big problem with how ANet have changed GW2 over the years as for Salvaging and with the tools we have in game it is less a problem over time if you invest Gold or real money into Gems and upgrade your account or character. There are other games like Path of Exiles where itemization can cause real problem if you don't use filters as you pick up items as you inventory are much more limited (it is built different then this game for how inventory work). My point are that; yes, there are items that seem confusing, but you do have access to a rather complete and updated GW2 wiki, there are tools that you also will gain from plying this game or that you buy in game to reduce this issue and when you have played long enough will also a have easier way to know what to keep and what to dump.

[Tom.8029]

Most items you receive as you complete a collection will say, "This item only has value as part of a collection." If it does, you can either sell it at a merchant or destroy it, if it has no vendor value.

[Ashantara.8731]

@"HappyHubris.1096" said:

• Stone Thumb

You need this to finish the part of the story on the Fire Island where you have to reassemble the old contraptions. Don't delete it.

• Skritt Contracts

Can be used to open certain containers on the same island. However, once deleted, you need to pay to re-aquire additional ones.

• Delicate Eggs
• Large Delicate Eggs

For the heart vendor in the southwest. Can always be collected anew. But if you plan to redo heart there for the local currency in the near time, you should keep them to spare yourself time. Not required, though.

• Reclaimed Wood Chunks

Salvage item. So salvage them for materials.

• Exalted Portal Stone

Can be re-acquired, but costs you. You should keep it at least until you are done with the collection at Aurene's first room. Can also be used to play with young Aurene if you are bored. ;)

• Smoked Fish Dinner

On is absolutely required for the story mission, the second one can be fed to young Aurene.

• Token of Affection

"This item only has value as part of a collection."

@Ayrilana.1396 said:You can always use the wiki to look up these items to see their usage and whether you can dispose of them.

This.