Simplified Daily Wintersday Gold Farming Guide

Overview

A Wintersday gold making guide that prioritizes brief daily sessions for maximum profit instead of endless farming. A full run should only take you 6-8 minutes each day. This guide is for those who don't want to spend too much time interacting with the Wintersday event, but still want to get good value out of it.

Buffs & Consumables

Before we could get into the actual farming, we need to stack up all sorts of +Karma buffs.

Karma Booster

This is the most important consumable because it gives us the biggest boost.

The easiest way to obtain the 50% karma boost is to find a in Divinity's Reach with a purple flame - that's the color of karma. Interacting with the bonfire gives you a karma boost.

If a bonfire isn't available, the same buff can be obtained through some other means as well, like the or the , but these are less ideal and harder to come by. The gobbler in particular costs currency to use and relies on gambling, which cuts into your profit margins by a lot, and the booster comes either from the gemstore or as a random drop for the most part.

One reliable way of getting the is to make a new character and level it up to 38 using your birthday scrolls or that are piling up in your bank if you're a PvP/WvW player. The levelup reward for hitting 38 is a karma booster. This is technically free.

The boost from these 3 sources is mutually exclusive, you can't stack them, which is why you should just prioritize the easiest and cheapest method.

Guild Hall Boost

A free 10% karma boost with permanent duration can be obtained through your Guild Hall's tavarn, assuming you have the necessary upgrades. If you don't, just join a guild that does, there should be plenty recruiting in major hubs.

The buff persists even if you leave the guild after having grabbed the buff.

Banners

You should always keep an eye out for 2 banners: and . If you're lucky these should be found in Divinity's Reach near a karma bonfire especially during prime time, but if not, they don't cost much either.

The Spirit banner is only 20 s at the Mystic Forge NPC while the Heroes Banner is a good opportunity to burn through some you may have got from WvW. You'll find the vendor Dugan on WvW maps.

• There are other methods for obtaining the Heroes Banner too, but those are going to cost much more, to the point where it's simply not worth it. Freeloading is optimal.

Consumables

Here we need to fill 2 main categories: food and utility, and then grab some items that stack on top of these.

For food options the best one is or the birthday feast. These are free and give us a 10% Karma boost. If you don't have the blaster, keep an eye out for the feast others might place (or even Ascended feasts if you're level 80).

• Alternatively just grab a from the Trading Post, same buff and extremely cheap.

As for utility, get the from the TP.

Certain other items stack on top of these:

• - definitely get this, it's cheap and offers a big boost. Note that it's only 1 minute duration. You can either use a bunch of them at the same time to stack their duration, or only use 1 at a time right as you're about to open the chest a the end of the Jumping Puzzle (this is a bit more cost effective).

• - use it if you have it, but in this guide we're not going to do the activity that rewards it.

Gift Vendor

This is where you should start your day and dump your karma.

The giftgiver has tiers with a daily limit - every 10 gifts you buy, the next 10 is going to cost more. If your only source of karma is this guide, you're going to get enough gifts for about 35-40 gifts per day. If you're sitting on a huge pile of karma, you can dump way more than that, it's up to you to decide how much you're willing to part with.

Once you're done, look around for any banners or bonfires laying around to get a free refresh before continuing.

Daily Achievements

Doing daily achievements is also worth it for 2 reasons: they give s, and the daily meta achie grants an on every 5th completion.

You can get a bunch of valuable items from both of these, including more s!

We've compiled a list of the easiest dailies below. You need to to 3 achievements a day in order to complete the daily meta achievement.

Yay, Wintersday Presents!

All you have to do is open 4 gifts - these don't have to be the regular s! In fact, they shouldn't be, as your goal is to sell those.

A much more efficient way is to hoard from all the dailies you're doing, and only open them 4 at a time when this daily is available. Since the reward for the daily is another PWG, you basically refund 1/4 whenever you do this.

This is the fastest, lowest effort daily.

Winter Wonderland Winner

We're already doing the JP every day, so this is just a free reward for something we'd do anyway.

You'll get it on your first completion of the Wintersday jumping puzzle.

Wintersday Snowball Slinger

This can be done right outside the jumping puzzle. Just grab up some snowballs and hit others who've also picked one up a few times.

If you're bad at it don't worry, people are usually nice enough to let you finish the daily and hit them if they've frmed their daily on you.

Spreading Wintersday Joy

Simply make a 1 Copper donation to Ho-Ho-Tron. Careful not to donate more, you don't want to accidentally waste gold here!

During prime time or the first days of the event this can actually be a harder and time consuming daily, since the donation bar can fill up in an instant. Outside of those windows, it's one of the easiest by far.

Making Some Wintersday Friends

This can be by simply running a lap around the Crown Pavillion where the festival's located and building 5 snowmen on the snow piles scattered around. Shouldn't take more than a minute with even a basic mount like the Raptor.

Optional: That Wintersday Ring

The Bell Choir isn't for everyone, and you can skip this if you want, but if you manage to complete 1 song (which takes about 1 minute) you get full credit for the daily and then you're free to leave.

If however you need the karma, you could do 2 more songs to get the full daily bonus karma.

Optional: Dashing Through the Snow

The other optional daily is the mount race. Rollerbeetle is recommended, but Raptor is fine too.

This takes a bit longer than the others, but the payoff is often worth it. In fact if you're good enough, you may even want to consider adding this to your daily routine and do it every single day of the event, even when the daily achievement isn't available.

So what does "good enough mean"? If you can finish in 2.5 minutes you get the gold chest, and that's our target. Any slower than this and the rewards struggle to keep up with just 2 runs of the jumping puzzle that could be done in the same timeframe. With the gold chest it's definitely worth doing, and the faster you are the better this gets compared to other activities where your skill might not make things much quicker.

Others

The rest of the dailies are significantly more time consuming - "Saving Wintersday" for instance can take up to 20 minutes in the Infinirarium. We don't recommend doing these if your goal is efficiency, but if you enjoy the festival then go for it.

Once you're done with your dailies, you're ready to mvoe on to the jumping puzzle.

Winter Wonderland

Don't forget to check your food/utility buff durations before heading in! Refresh if it's running out.

This is the bread and butter of the farm. Stacked up on karma consumables, we're going to do at least 3 runs per day taking the Gingerbread route (hardest, but also most rewarding).

Every completion of the JP is going to give us karma and 12 s. The first 3 you do each day yields more karma!

• Every 3rd completion gives us an extra 5 gifts too.

Make sure that is active when opening the chest at the end of the run.

Weekly Achievement

Each completion of the jumping puzzle contributes 10 points towards the weekly meta achievement. You need 200 points to max it out.

3 runs a day for 7 days is 210 points, just over the necessary amount, and you’ll be 1 richer. You basically get this for something you’d already do, as a bonus. Snow Diamonds can sell for more than 10 Gold on the Trading Post, so they're a huge boost to your gold gains.

Daily Haul

If you did all the steps and made proper preparations, your daily haul is going to be:

• ~76-141 s, depending on how much Karma you're spending. This number could be even higher if you've participated in the bell choir or the mount race.
• 1-9 s and with it plenty of chances for rare drops
• Guaranteed progress towards your weekly

All for 5-10 minutes of tasks that hopefully you've enjoyed doing.

Selling on the Trading Post

To conclude the guide, here are a few tips for squeezing even more gold out of your s.

The first and most obvious one is that you should list at a higher price instead of seling it instantly by taking a buy order.

The second tip only works if you're patient and not in immediate need of gold. Gifts always sell at the highest price during the first 1-3 days of the event. If you hold onto your gifts and sell them in bulk at the start of next year's event, you could make up to 50% more profit from this farm. If you do this next year too, eventually you'll catch up to yourself and will have a steady stream of gold every year.