What the gem store costs, in gold

The gem store is the one shop in this game that takes real money, so it deserves a harder look than a shrug. We measured the whole thing: how many items are on sale, what each corner of it charges, where the discounts are real and where they are theatre, and what all of it costs in gold rather than gems.

For the shorter version, the one that answers whether any of this is worth buying at all, read the gem store in general.

That last part is the bit nobody publishes. A gem tag sits still for years. The gold behind it moves every hour, and the table further down is wired straight into our own price archive, so it is current to the hour rather than to whenever somebody last edited a wiki page.

What is in there

Counted from the current catalogue: 564 items available, of which 81 are discounted at this moment. That is nearly one in seven, and it is the first useful number, because it tells you the store almost always has something on sale. So a sale banner is not news and not a reason to buy. What does follow is the useful half: the one thing you came for will be discounted sooner or later, so there is no reason to pay full price in a hurry.

The split by section is where it gets interesting.

Section	Items	Median price
Style	259	700 gems
Utility	191	1,000 gems
Toys	68	600 gems
Upgrades	45	800 gems

Nearly half the store is looks. Style alone is 259 of 564. Meanwhile Upgrades, the section that holds the slots and tabs and account expansions that change how the game plays, is the smallest of the four at 45 items.

That ratio is the whole store in one line. The part that changes your account is small, cheap and mostly buyable with gold you earned in game. The part ArenaNet wants your money for is the wall of skins, and no amount of gold farming makes a skin appear any other way.

The subsections say the same thing with a straighter face:

• supplies, 65 items
• gathering tools, 61
• town services, 48
• mount and skiff skins, 44
• armour piece skins, 43
• chairs, 32
• outfits, 26
• weapon skins, 26

The store sells more chairs than weapon skins. Fourteen years in, the demand is for things to stand around in more than things to fight with.

The prices in gold

A price written in gems is hard to feel. The table below restates every one of them in gold, at the exchange rate from our latest snapshot.

Two things to hold onto while you read it. First, that is the buy direction, the gold you hand over. Selling gems back pays considerably less, and the gap between the two is ArenaNet’s cut. Second, these are the permanent catalogue prices. Sale prices come and go, and the only honest source for what is discounted today is the store itself.

The discounts are real, just not where you look

The store discounts volume in one currency and refuses to in the other.

The cash bundles have no volume discount at all. Six sizes, from 400 gems for $5 up to 8,000 gems for $100, and every single one is exactly 80 gems per dollar. The euro ladder matches one for one. The $100 pack buys you nothing that five $20 packs would not, other than fewer clicks. Sterling is the lone exception, and it bends the wrong way: the smallest pack at £3.95 is very slightly the best value on the ladder.

The multi-packs inside the store, though, discount properly.

Item	Single	Pack	Per unit	Saving
Shared Inventory Slot	700	2,800 for 5	560	20%
Shared Inventory Slot	700	1,890 for 3	630	10%
Black Lion Chest Key	125	2,100 for 25	84	33%
Mount Adoption License	400	5,100 for 15	340	15%

So the rule of the house is: ArenaNet gives you volume pricing when you pay in gems, never when you pay in dollars. If you are buying five shared slots, buy the five-pack. If you are buying gems for it, buy whatever pack covers the bill.

What to buy, in order

1. Shared Inventory Slots. One inventory square visible to every character on the account at once. Cap is 32, of which 26 are purchased and 6 arrive free with expansions. This is the purchase after which the game feels different, because the trips back to the bank stop.

2. A Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic to live in one of those slots. Unlimited salvage at 3 copper a swing, and it still works in ten years.

3. Bag slots, bank tabs, material storage. You will run out of room in this game forever. More room registers harder than any skin.

4. Templates. Equipment and build template expansions at 500 and 300 gems. Cheap, and they end the ritual of rebuilding a spec by hand every time you switch content.

5. Character slots and unlimited tools. Both are for people who already know they are staying. The tools pay back slowly and the irritation stops the same day.

What to leave on the shelf

Black Lion Chest Keys. A key opens a chest with random contents and no protection against getting the same junk twice. The maths runs against you the way the Mystic Forge does, except with money instead of materials. Keys drop free from the story often enough.

The Instant Level 80 Ticket, at 2,000 gems. Check what that is in gold in the table. You are paying a serious sum to skip content you already own, in a game where levelling is quick anyway and the world you are skipping is the reason people recommend it.

Transmutation Charges at 150 for five. Charges arrive from map completion, achievement chests and PvP and WvW reward tracks. Most people who play normally accumulate them faster than they spend them.

Home instance nodes as an early purchase. The payback runs into years.

Adoption licences are a gacha with a floor

Worth separating from the keys, because the mechanic is different and the difference matters.

A Mount Adoption License hands you a random mount skin from its set, and the game states the rule plainly: every skin you do not already own has an equal chance, and you cannot be given a duplicate. So the whole set has a fixed maximum price rather than an open-ended one, which is exactly what a Black Lion chest refuses to promise.

That is why the 15-licence pack exists at 5,100 gems. It is not a gamble, it is the sticker price of a complete set with a bulk discount attached. Whether a set of mount skins is worth that is your call, and it is a real question rather than a trick.

Where the exchange quietly eats you

If you are converting gold rather than paying cash, two things are worth knowing, and we measured both against the game’s own exchange.

Small conversions lose to rounding. Gems come in whole units, so tiny sums round badly. Ten gold returned 27 gems, working out to 37.03 silver each, while sixty gold ran at 34.68 silver each. That is a 6.8% penalty for converting in dribs.

Round numbers were worse than their neighbours. On 21 August 2026, three identical reads in a row:

• 99 gold returned 286 gems
• 100 gold returned 274 gems
• 101 gold returned 291 gems

Converting exactly 100 gold gave fewer gems than converting 99. The same dip sat on 200 gold and on 1,000 gold, while 50, 250, 500 and 2,000 behaved normally, their neighbours agreeing to within a few tenths of a percent.

Then we measured again eight hours later, and the picture had changed. At 09:15 the same morning, 99 gold returned 282 gems, 100 returned 284, and 101 returned 287. No dip at all, and 200 was clean too. Only the thousand still misbehaved, and by less: 999 gold paid 2,850 gems, 1,000 gold paid 2,827.

So this is not a fixed property of round numbers, and we are not going to pretend otherwise after measuring twice. It is something that happens some of the time, and when it happens it has been worth up to 4%.

The rule that survives both readings is duller and more useful: the quote is the only thing that binds. Before confirming a large conversion, look at what one more gold would buy you. It takes a second, and on one of our two readings it was worth 4%.

The thing that is not for sale

One number here matters more than anything else we counted, and it is a zero.

There is no weapon in it. No armour with stats. No buff that makes your damage larger or your health bar longer. Across 564 items, the count of things that make you stronger in a fight is nil, and that has been the position since launch.

So the usual question gets a dull answer. Nothing on these 564 shelves helps you win a fight. What is for sale is relief from annoyance and a way to look extraordinary, and the game is straight about which of the two it wants real money for. The convenience half is reachable with gold you earned killing things. The wall of skins is not, and never will be.

Plenty of games got that arrangement the other way round.