While it's true that the blade is all gold, the red gourd is quite confusing, it requires a red elemental stone...
So other than gourd, go with higher base stat, it's ALL gold

As for the gourd, it depends on where you are at your reforging. Specifically, red gourd tend to have higher base random stat, but you can reforge any item with any other item, so the best you can have is a gold with reforged stat from red gourd. If you still have OTHER stuff to reforge first, however, you could put this off and use a red gourd instead, it is POSSIBLE (thou not always) that the extra secondary stat of red gourd makes up for the stat you miss out due to elemental.

Which is why I brought up the reforge progress bit. With perfect reforging, the inherent difference between amber bottle and red gourd is just the 20 base stat, even if you consider the elemental matching pairs that the OTHER tools provide, it's just 24(on average that is, given 11 potential matching pair over 5 stat, roughly 2 each. Perfection would be 5 atk/5 nin/3 life or something like that but that's WAY harder. FYI, I have 10 matching atm, so it's not hard to get a lot of matching, just hard to get perfect ones)

This is more than the 20 that a non-matching elemental would provide, but given that there is roughly 1/3 chance that at least one of the element match, which brings it up to 31.2, one matching amber might be better, if its secondary stat is no worse than the red gourd. Now, generally speaking, the secondary stat will be worse than red gourd, but there is always RNG, which might super high roll the amber bottle into 6 useful stat near their max(for amber bottle) while low rolling all red gourd so each contain some useless stat/missing stat and not a lot of peak. Alternatively, once again, there is reforge. A perfectly reforged amber bottle with just one matching element, which is easy, will be superior to red gourd.

So it differs depend on where a player is.
Thou I guess the short answer is, if you have to ask, probably red gourd. This post was last edited by PraiseLuka at 2017-4-4 12:12

Huh, I never noticed that, amber is 10/8, so 2/2 lower. Thou red gourd does require more exp to level up, so instead of 32/32 difference @17 for both, it's probably more like 22/24 due to amber being a lv higher. That would still beat 2 matching stat, which only gives around 20 more stat.

You are right, practically speaking red gourd is always better (I say practically because there are borerline cases for otherwise, but those are far too rare/unpractical to be considered the norm)