I see a lot of guides popping up which suggest that Rift Hunting is a good method of making gold in the game, but I completely fail to understand this. IMHO it's terribly boring and does not even have a good gold/hour ratio.
My understanding is that the main reason for doing Rifts is to get those Essences which you will need for the new Legendary PvE Armor, i. e. you do the Weekly Rift Hunting Achievements which give you a decent amount of additional higher level Essences (even from Tier 1 Rifts) and that's it.
Doing Tier 1 Rifts without receiving Kryptis Rift Extraction containers has very poor rewards and doing Tier 2 and/or Tier 3 requires very expensive Kryptis Motivation consumables which means you either need to join (leech) a Tier 2|3 Rift Hunting Squad (those appear to be rare) or organize one yourself and try to share the costs. But maybe I'm not quite getting it.
Addition: It appears that the gold making strategy is based on using the Essences you get from your Rift Hunts to craft and then sell Uncommon and Rare Kryptis Motivations on the TP which implies the following to make this actually work:
- You don't need thoses Essences yourself, i. e. you are not interested in the new Open World Legendary Armor which requires a LOT of them.
- There is or rather continues to be a market for those Motivations, i. e. people are willing to buy them to do (additional) T2 and/or T3 Rift Hunts for higher level Essences beyond the 5 x 5 Weekly Rift Hunts which grant them via reward chests.
Here are some gold making alternatives with varying levels of required skill/engagement.
- Fishing
- sell Chunk of Ancient Ambergris
- craft and sell Zephyrite Fish Jerky
- Daily (limited chests) Map Metas
- Dragonfall, not on a fixed schedule, IMHO the best (most fun) map meta in the game
- Istan (Palawadan + Great Hall), every 2 hours, use LFG to check for a squad and join the commander's map instance early
- ...
- Daily Fractals
- Easy Daily Strikes, i. e.
- Shiverpeaks Pass
- Fraenir of Jormag
- Voice of the Fallen and Claw of the Fallen
- Cosmic Observatory
- Other Daily Strikes including Challenge Motes (CM)
- Weekly Raids
- sPvP (Automated Tournaments)
I think demand for legendary armor is high and sustainable enough that the situation may continue pretty much indefinitely. The grind required is huge, and a lot of people are undertaking it with great enthusiasm, and looking at the examples provided by other legendary equipment supports the claim that interest will hang on more or less indefinitely. I'm still constantly running into people who want to do raids to work on that armor or Coalescence, fractals for Ad Infinitum, etc, and those projects have been available for years.
Note that I'm using the word 'may' here because all this is wild speculation about what players will do en masse; it's not a hill I'm going to die on.
I made 7 Amalgarnated Kryptis Essences total from the Essences I more or less grinded only during weekly rift hunts since launch (probably lost about 2 weeks at the start due to vacation and incomplete masteries), so let's say it's 6 per month. You'll need 6 for the Astral Ward Armor and then 12 for each piece of armor, i. e. 6 + 12 x 6 x 3 total (3 years at my speed). It's not quite clear to me which of the essences (Despair, Greed or Triumph) is going to be the bottleneck, because it depends on when you arrive at the rift and how often you bump into higher level ones. So maybe there will be left over Essences (of Despair and/or Greed) which I could use to craft and sell Motivations. Maybe people will still buy them in a few months.
Anyway, I can't see myself doing more than those 5 x 5 rift hunts per week over a longer period of time. Maybe there are people who can stand this and are even willing to buy Uncommon and Rare Motivations for additional T2 and T3 rift hunts. These are your customers when you want to make money from Rift Hunting and already have or don't want (this open world) legendary armor yourself. I'd rather go fishing ...