There are many things to consider when it comes to inventory management in Guild Wars 2. Which bags should you use? Which items should be salvaged and which should be sold? These inventory management tips will give you a detailed guide to getting the most efficient use out of your personal inventory.

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

One of the handiest functions in the game, the “Deposit All Materials” button will take all of your crafting materials and deposit them straight into your bank’s material storage. This saves you precious inventory space while making it easy to keep your crafting materials organized. Crafting materials can still be accessed from crafting stations without needing to be in your personal inventory bags.

Compact

This is a basic organization feature which moves all items toward the top, filling in blank slots in your inventory.

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. For 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, respectively. This makes it easy to prioritize the items in your inventory at a glance.

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

The inventory screen has the option to show or hide the bag separators. 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.

Bags

Bags provide additional storage ranging from 4 to 20 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.

Acquisition

Bags can be crafted using a Rune of Holding combined with standard crafting materials depending on the crafting profession (i.e. Leatherworker or Tailor). Bags can also be purchased directly from merchants or through the Trading Post. 4 – 10 slot bags are relatively affordable while 12 – 20 slot bags increase exponentially in cost. There are a few ways of obtaining 20 slot bags for cheap, for example, completing the Uncanny Canner and Bandit Weapons Specialist collection achievements. Specialty 20 slot bags can also be purchased by completing Fractals and using Fractal Relics on 20 slot bags.

Special Bags

In addition to the standard inventory bag there are 4 special bags. These special bags each have a specific use and their contents is not affected by sorting. It’s important to note that when your other inventory bags fill up, the overflow items will be placed in any special bags that have space available.

Invisible Bags

Invisible bags are used to store items that you do not want sorted or made visible on a merchant’s selling list. Items in these bags are not affected by the “compact” and “deposit all materials” functions. Things that you always carry around like salvage kits, alternate weapon sets and consumables, are ideal items to store in an invisible bag.

Craftsman’s Bags

Craftsman’s Bags are designed to store crafting materials. With this bag, any time you acquire new crafting materials or upgrades they will be placed into the Craftsman’s Bag first, as long as there is available space.

Equipment Bags

As the name suggests, Equipment Bags are designed to store equipment like weapons and armor. New equipment will be sorted into this bag as long as there is space available.

Oiled Bags

Now here’s a special bag that doesn’t have a self-explanatory name. Oiled Bags are used to store junk items. Junk items gained from loot will be placed in the Oiled Bag to keep them separate from your other inventory items. If you have the “Show Bags” inventory option enabled, you could leave this bag closed and just clean out the bag every now and then by selling all of your junk to a merchant.

Salvaging

Many items can be salvaged in order to obtain crafting material, upgrades, and luck. Items are salvaged by using one of the various Salvage Kits on the item.

Salvage Kits

Salvage Kit	Uses	Rare Materials %	Recover Upgrades %	Cost
Crude Salvage Kit	15	0%	<20%	32 bronze
Basic Salvage Kit	25	10%	20%	88 bronze
Fine Salvage Kit	25	15%	40%	2s 88 bronze
Journeyman Salvage Kit	25	20%	60%	8 silver
Master Salvage Kit	25	25%	80%	15s 36 bronze
Mystic Salvage Kit	250	25%	80%	Mystic Forge
Black Lion Salvage Kit	25	50%	100%	BL Chest

Mystic Salvage Kit

The Mystic Salvage Kit is essentially a 250 use Master Salvage Kit that is obtained from the Mystic Forge. Here is the recipe:

• 1 Fine Salvage Kit
• 1 Journeyman Salvage Kit
• 1 Master Salvage Kit
• 3 Mystic Forge Stones

Black Lion Salvage Kit

Black Lion Salvage Kits are obtained from random Black Lion Chest drops. It has a 100% chance to recover upgrades, making it ideal for salvaging valuable upgraded equipment. They can also be obtained from daily log-in rewards and map completion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inventory Management Tips

• Use the inventory’s search function to filter items.
  • “req” (required) to get salvage kits and salvageable items
  • “rare” (rare) to get all rares
  • “sal” (salvage) to get salvage items
  • “unl” (unlock) to get fine and masterwork items
• Gathering tools can be equipped from the Hero (H) Panel to save time searching through your entire inventory.
• You can access you bank account from the Guild Bank interface and also at Crafting Stations.