I myself use party finder for most of my guardian raids / weekly content etc, just to save time and effort - The reason matchmaking can feel so sluggish is there are many people who are running below average engravings/gems/tripods such as 3/2 at 1370 and above, so here is a very cheap way to run 3/3/3 which is enough to run all current content, I would go as far to say that even 3/3 engravings are more than enough for most current content, except possibly Argos P2 which is basically a DPS race.
It’s quite simple really, double equip your purple engravings, class engravings are the easiest. (There have been 30 free purple class selection chests through welcome challenge and daily login at least) This will give you one lvl 3 engraving for free.
(If you have legendary engravings unlocked you may want to mix some things around and run 3/3/3/1 or 3/3/3/2)
Now we move on to your ability stone, just try to cut a rock that gives you roughly 11 or 12 good nodes with minimal negatives, as long as you don’t go over 4 negative nodes you can work around the rock.
Now for your accessories, you will need two slightly expensive accessories, I bought a 3/3 and a 3/1 accessory for as cheap as possible myself, all other accessories can be bought for super cheap being +3 +0 -1
Just use the market filters to your advantage and grab the cheapest you can for now.
Your most expensive accessory will be your 3/3, you don’t need to rush this, spend a week or so combing the market and try to grab one for 2k or less gold.
For your last accessory, if you managed to cut a 12 node-positive rock you can buy a +3 +1 -1 accessory for slightly cheaper, I myself only cut a 11 node rock at the time and had to waste some gold.
So I’m running an 11 node rock, 3 +3 accessories, one +3 +3 and one +3 +2 accessory, I spent roughly 10k gold in total for this before prices crashed super hard, use the market filters to your advantage and grab the more expensive accessories when someone messes up and puts them up for overly cheap.
Now if your wanting to push legendary book engravings to potentially run 3/3/3/3 engravings for Valtan, I personally would wait but there is something you can do to help yourself, simply check the prices of your preferred four lvl 3 engravings and slowly buy gold books for the cheapest of those two.
3k per book is just to expensive
However 700-800g per book is still way to much but much cheaper overall, I just buy heavy armour books whenever they are 700g, I just bought three a few seconds ago.
If you are running 3/3/3 or 3/3/3/3 you just don’t need to be running the two most expensive gold engraving books when the end result is the same and much cheaper overall, and make sure you look up a video about tripods, tripod alarms and how saving and transferring works, it will increase your overall power by a tonne.