Guild Wars 2

I’m looking for advice on how to deal with green name (masterwork) loot items.

I’ve been selling them on the trading post if there’s a small profit to be had over the standard vendors, but more and more I’m finding that margin is only 10c or so, and I’m beginning to wonder if the time investment is starting to cost more than the potential profit (since a TP sale isn’t guaranteed).

What do you do when you have a bunch of masterwork loot items? Vendor? TP? Salvage?

Mystic Forge, it’s always been a decent source of ectos for me. Either that or selling directly to the vendor. But I guess I’m flawed and like to gamble often (if you consider greens to be a gamble) :P

I usually put them in the Mystic Forge and hope for rare (yellow) items.

With the price of ectos going down – in relation to the vendor price of the greens – will that be still interesting? What’s the “percentage” of getting a rare in the MF (approx, gut feeling)?

I stopped forging masterworks after world events tanked ecto prices. At 80, you only have to sell ~11 masterwork to buy an ecto. I think the chances to forge one are less than 1 in 4 tries, selling to a vendor is guaranteed to get you at least one with the money. It also requires less time and thought to just vendor all your greens and blues too.

Like everything in this game it all comes down to how lucky you feel.

My experience puts the upgrade at 1 in 5 pulls on average. So 16 greens to get a yellow and then hoping the crafting RNG doesn’t wimp out on the ecto roll (using Master). I say 16 because if you crap out the first 4 times you end up with 4 greens to try one more time making 5 pulls of the Mystic slot machine.

hmmmm, I usually MF to get rares to salvage into ecto.
on average, it takes 20 greens to get 1 rare. (4 per attempt * 20% chance to upgrade)
those 20 greens can be worth about 26s to 40s (since the MF will increase the level, you can start with levels <68, which would otherwise sell for less than level 80’s)
so… right now it’s not profitable to be doing this :P I should change my strategy until ecto prices go up.
before I did this, I sold 100% of my greens to merchant. maybe 1% will give more profit on the TP, but that’s hardly worth your time to check. green greatswords are the most likely for the TP to give more than merchant.

I still sell of any greens that are profitable on the TP and use those that aren’t or have no outstanding bids in the MF. And any rare I get I will first check if it’s better to post them on the TP or crack them open for the gooey ectos and rune/sigil inside.

Solo.9027:

I stopped forging masterworks after world events tanked ecto prices. At 80, you only have to sell ~11 masterwork to buy an ecto. I think the chances to forge one are less than 1 in 4 tries, selling to a vendor is guaranteed to get you at least one with the money. It also requires less time and thought to just vendor all your greens and blues too.

Like everything in this game it all comes down to how lucky you feel.

To build on some of the responses after yours, here’s the actual math:

20% “upgrade” rate in the Mystic Forge
16 Masterwork items per rare item (reinvesting “failures” means 16 items gets you 5 attempts)
Master Salvage Kit rate of 0.9ecto/attempt (I’m too lazy to look up our real calculated rate to get closer than this, it’s about 0.9)

So, if ectos sell for 23.1s (current ask) here’s the calculation rate for break even (assuming you’re using the ectos yourself and therefore ignore tax):

23.1s + Y = 16 * X + 15.36s/25

Where X = the value of masterwork items and Y = the value of non-ecto salvage items. (The 15.36s/25 is the value of the salvage kit) If we assume the value of Y is about 3s (just a made up number to account for the sigil/rune and possible T6 common mats) we find the breakeven value to be 1.59s. So, as long as the net sell value of masterwork items is less than 1.59s, it’s more profitable on average to forge them instead of selling.

It’s worth pointing out that some rares are worth more than the ectos that could potentially be salvaged from them. For example, most rare greatswords sell for upwards of 30s each. Therefore, masterwork greatswords used together with only other greatswords are profitable at significantly higher masterwork values than demonstrated above.

You forgot the 0.9 ecto part. You forgot the 15% TP fees.

Also you can eek out a bit more looking at the distribution of sell prices and price both the ectos and sigil/runes at prices well above the highest bid (well ectos are fairly close now but have a huge churn rate on the market).

Still a good overall analysis.

I just vendor them.

Behellagh.1468:

You forgot the 0.9 ecto part. You forgot the 15% TP fees.

Also you can eek out a bit more looking at the distribution of sell prices and price both the ectos and sigil/runes at prices well above the highest bid (well ectos are fairly close now but have a huge churn rate on the market).

Still a good overall analysis.

I did somehow lose my 0.9ecto/salvage part (quick correction makes that 1.45s as the breakeven point). However, I want to emphasize dramatically that I did not forget the TP tax. As I pointed out, these ectos are for personal use and therefore are not subject to tax. This then covers all scenarios for how the masterworks were acquired and removes the extra decision steps for noting whether they could be sold to an NPC instead of over the TP. Alternatively, I could have specified that the masterworks be acquired as drops (instead of being purchased from the TP) in which case if I noted the masterwork value as “gross non-NPC value” instead of net sale value, tax should still not be considered directly in this equation (distributive property tells us that the tax impact will be equal across the input and output excepting for the 0.04s/masterwork worth of salvage kit value).

Taxes are misrepresented on here a lot so I feel it’s important to note that they were no inaccurately ignored in this case. You could squeeze out more value by also forging the sigils/runes from your ecto salvages (assuming that’s an efficient market and therefore the buy prices for those represent a profitable level for the rare-to-exotic upgrade process for sigils/runes, I haven’t done the math).

I appreciate the analysis Syeria.

I would counter your results with the simple fact that selling greens allows you to use that money on many things other than ecto(and relatively immediately because you don’t have to save all that loot between forge visits) and also that RNG is a fickle mistress no matter how much faith we put in that .9 ecto/rare figure I always end up in the .1 that gets silk.

Solo.9027:

I appreciate the analysis Syeria.

I would counter your results with the simple fact that selling greens allows you to use that money on many things other than ecto(and relatively immediately because you don’t have to save all that loot between forge visits) and also that RNG is a fickle mistress no matter how much faith we put in that .9 ecto/rare figure I always end up in the .1 that gets silk.

That comes down to risk aversion preferences and personal want/need. I’m just showing how to calculate the average return on that (albeit randomly forgetting steps in my first go around apparently). One of the wonderful things about the GW2 economy is the option for risk averse people to effectively “outsource” risky behaviors. Don’t want to deal with “RNG” and “luck” with those moldy bags? Someone else is willing to buy them all off you for slightly less than the average return from opening them.