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)