Guild Wars 2

Hi! So I recently hit max MF and have had many people ask me how much I spent while doing so. I didn’t lose anything. I gained around 400g while doing this. How? By listing offers for blues and greens on the tp via orders before I went to bed. I spent about an hour doing this and woke up to 50,000+ luck worth of items in the morning + made a little bit of extra $ on selling the mats.

For the majority of it I bought crafted items since they have a lower NPC value compared to their dropped counterparts (thus lower starting order values) and are made often and in bulk (see “dirty” trick). They also salvage into whatever they were made from and are very easy to calculate the salvage values of.

Non-crafted gear will work as well, however what they produce when salvaged can be mixed at times. For example wool cloth is salvaged from level 16-33 light armor and cotton is from level 31-48 light armor (the wiki will tell you what dropped items salvage into if you look up the scraps/ore). As you can see there is some overlap there. Personally I just avoided the levels that overlapped while buying dropped gear for simplicity’s sake (there was more than enough of the other stuff around anyways).

HOW TO FIND OUT IF YOU SHOULD BUY AND SALVAGE AN ITEM

Boots, Gloves, Legs and shoulders usually yield 1-2 of the salvage item, helms 1-3, metal chests 1-3, cloth chests 3-5, and jewelry 1-2. Personally I didn’t go through and find the exact amount, I just used very rough averages. After a limited test sample, for boots, gloves, legs, jewelry I got about 1.5 per salvage, helms/chests 1.75, cloth chests 4. (If anyone knows the exact amounts please share, these are VERY rough estimates).

For the vast majority I used basic kits (a copper fed kit will save you a lot of running to the npc), but I also used journeyman kits at times (we’ll get into that a little later).

Using that I then went and found items.

Lets look at an example – Carrion Reinforced Scale Helm (masterwork). The current buy order on this is 1.6silver. It salvages into plat which sells for 2.18s each. This is the sort of thing we are looking for. No matter how many it salvages into you’ll make a profit and gain MF. We don’t care about the upgrade (it doesn’t even have one) so just use a basic kit on these.

Jewelry is a bit different because you might care about the upgrade. Lets look at Topaz Gold Earrings of Ravaging (fine). The current order price is 99c. It salvages into gold which is worth 1.09s each. They salvage into 1-2 so they are worth about 1.3 each in salvage mats if you use a basic kit (that includes the tp fees).

The upgrade inside is a topaz lump worth 1.5s each right now (the prices on these lumps do fluctuate quite a bit and this is actually a bit on the low side). I used journeyman kits on these (60% chance to recover upgrades at a cost of .32c each). So on average I got an extra 47c on top of the profit on the gold ore. That might not seem like a lot, but remember you’ll be salvaging a LOT and it adds up. You could also use karma and buy fine salvage kits from the Black Citadel or Hoelbrak (252 karma for 25) but the end gain is about the same either way so I just used journeyman and saved the karma.

TIPS/TRICKS

Use artificer to compact the luck you get, it’ll save you a lot of time.

Maxing your MF takes a while, however reaching 150% MF is pretty fast. To reach 150% MF you only need a total of 496,890 luck Vs. 4,295,450 to reach 300. That’s 11% of the total MF to max it to get 50% of the benefits. Not bad. After 150% the amount of luck you need to gain 1% starts to increase rapidly until you hit 218% when it caps at 30,000 luck per +1% MF. If you plan on maxing it out, I suggest you find a TV series to watch so you don’t go insane with boredom.

MF only helps with drops from kills. If you’re mostly doing things that reward you with a daily chest, I wouldn’t bother going above 150% if you bother with it at all.

Account MF is a long term investment. You will not see a large sudden burst of precursors falling from the sky. You will see a good uptick in the overall quality of loot. If you’re looking for short term gains this is not for you. Instead do flipping/champ farming/dungeon speed clears etc.

Cloth is on the rise and will almost certainly spike again once ascended armor hits. You can take some liberties with the prices on cloth if you don’t mind saving it until that happens and make a bit of extra $/MF.

Make a list of items to check for. For crafted items I mostly went for hard wood items, winged armor, crafted scale armor, dark steel items, acolyte armor, and gold jewelry.

Non-crafted I went for wood/cloth items from levels 21-50 (avoiding the overlaps on cloth since the prices on T2-4 cloth varies quite a lot, T2-4 wood is all worth around the same so I didn’t care) and metal 21-49 (all iron). Once again if you wiki the item it salvages into, it’ll give you a range but keep in mind the higher and lower level ends will be mixed.

While blues don’t always give you luck, don’t just ignore them. I saw a you tube vid that stated you get about 10.5 luck from a blue and 29.3 from a green (on average). Buy orders on blues tend to not be as well monitored by players and tend to be less expensive (thus yield more gold per salvage).

Don’t just blindly list your mats for 1c below the current price. List them 1c under the lowest listing that has a large number on the market. Crafting materials sell very quickly even in high numbers. A stack of something like platinum probably won’t last fifteen mins on the TP. When you right click->sell on tp it won’t show you all the listings. Instead use right click->buy more to see how many are being sold at what price, then right click->sell after.

“Dirty” trick – Go to http://www.gw2crafts.net/ This is a GREAT website for helping people craft for the least amount of coin. However, some people don’t use it properly and just sell to the highest offer (it’s calculated for the “retail” values). They have a tab for fast guides. These are methods which require a bit more gold but are much faster to do. So we already know these players don’t care as much about gold and find time more valuable (and are thus more likely to just dump the items to the highest offer). You can use this to help get a LOT of blues/greens by taking advantage of this. These guides also have you create a lot of each item. For example right now the guide tells us to make 18 Rampager’s Reinforced Scale Helms. Check to see if that item is profitable to salvage then put in a decently large order for it (since you‘ll be getting 18 at a time). The website updates every 30mins and these items change, but if you watch it for a while you’ll see some very common items repeat.

WARNINGS

Prices change. Before you start listing orders just update yourself on the prices of the crafting mats you’re salvaging for.

There are bots on the TP (unfortunately). They are pretty easy to ID though. They will automatically outbid you with a buy order of 20. Why 20? I have no clue, but it’s always 20. There were some nights where I would spend time putting in bids for things such as items that salvage into soft wood (or whatever) then check back in a short while to find them all outbid.

To test to see if it was a bot, I would then pick a single random item out of the large set of items I had previously bid and outbid the bot again. It would find it and then outbid me. Sure a person could have been constantly scrolling through all the soft wood items at 3am server time to find that ONE out of that large set that I had bid on, but I highly doubt it. If you see similar behavior report it and tell them when/where it occurred. Hopefully they’ll deal with it if enough people report them.

I’m more than happy to read any suggestions on things to add/constructive criticism so feel free if you have anything to add to this. J

TLDR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnSvGBnITqc

because you already have the start here, I’ll fill you in on some specifics: (these were averaged over several hundred salvages; around 200-500 each)
bows / staff / trident will give 1.8 wood
scepter / torch will give 1.1 wood
focus will give 1 wood
hammer / harpoon gun / spear will give 1.8 wood or ore
axe / mace / pistol / rifle will give 1.2 wood or ore
dagger / shield will give 1 wood or ore (I believe shield will sometimes give wood planks)
greatsword will give 1.8 ore
sword will give 1.3 ore
dagger / warhorn will give 1 ore
metal coat will give 2.4 ore
metal other armor will give 1.4 ore
leather / cloth coat will give 3.1 material
leather / cloth other armor will give 2.1 material

I’ve done some of the same you describe, except I get bored. it’s so annoying to place 400 buy orders for 90 items each (so I can easily identify which I have already placed bids on), go to sleep, collect items, salvage, collect items, salvage, (repeated 42 times), then refine luck and watch the luck percent go from 161 to 165 (or 169 if masterwork, but then there are fewer items). It takes 4 hours to place buy orders and 2 hours to salvage. Sure, you can make around 1s / item, but 42g for 6 hours of something that is even less stimulating than champ farming puts the sanity in question. I still get bored and do this from time to time.
good to see I had competition
to other people: buy orders on masterwork tend to get outbid quickly. out of 400 masterwork items x 90 ordered each, I would pick up maybe 200 salvageable items. with fine, I would pick up closer to 4000. much more people selling blue than green, and much less people interested in blue than green (because blue gives 1/3 as much luck – but the same profit!) I recommend supplementing fine salvage with ecto salvage:
2000 masterworks = 60,000 luck + 20g
4000 fine = 44,000 luck + 40g. use 40g to buy 135 ecto, salavage with MSK, sell dust = an extra 15,000 luck + 32g (same luck, more profit, takes more time to salvage, but get more for the same amount of buy order placing)

Thanks for the numbers!

How do cloth coats only give 3.1 though? I got between 3-5 each salvage and 4 was the mode. Is that 3.1 from non-crafted armor?

I never bothered with leather, profits were just too low to bother lol.

Yea it can be very boring. I watched a few shows and kinda did the tp/salvaging in the background.

I found that if you list very late at night (3am server time or so) it wouldn’t be outbid for a long time and wind up netting you more items. Some I had very little competition for and gave a LOT of items (Ex. fine quality gold jewelry esp. the earrings) so it depends on what you’re buying and how many others are trying for it. I would wake up and find that the stacks that I had ordered were down by around half on those earrings.

I didn’t spend any of my gold on speeding it up via ectos but that’s a good tip if you’re trying to do it quickly. Thanks

Thanks for this thread! Good information to have.

3.1 is just the average amount of materials obtained from salvaging a coat. specifically:
125 heavy coat = 307 metal ore (2.456 each)
194 medium coat = 578 leather sections (2.979 each)
89 light coat = 298 cloth (3.348 each)
the heavy was clearly a different drop rate. the other 2 were close enough that they looked like they were variations of the same rate (and the other armor’s rates were also very similar), so I averaged them to 3.1. When I picked which of these to salvage, I just searched for armor between level 21 and 60 (T2-T4), ordered by price, found the lowest price of that weight and about all of them below like 1.5s, then counted how many I bought and noticed how many materials I got from them. I didn’t specify between crafted / not crafted as I doubt that would change the drop rate.
however, I did compare a few different fine and masterwork of similar levels and found that there was no appreciable difference in materials salvaged between them.
for everything, I used the unlimited salvage kit. I would prefer crude (for 0% chance to get T5), but it would of added too much time in buying and using them so I just accept that slight loss in profits.

I made a spreadsheet that tied into gw2spidy, does some math, then tells me the highest profitable buy price for each type. basically what you described, but all the equations are done nearly instantly.
To give you an idea, here’s a snippet from right now:
Heavy Armor Coat = 2.4 Ore
Copper 1-20 <1s
Iron 21-33 (3)(3)
Iron 34-48 (3)(3)
Platinum 49-62 (4)(80)
Mithril 63-80 <1s

it looks at the price to buy those materials, not sell them. That’s because I buy so many of them to make a profit on crafting that it’s just easier to think of in this way – as I’m buying them this way for much cheaper than outright.
spreadsheets save a lot of time. I just wish you could search the TP by armor weights. next best thing is the item’s name, which is fairly reliable.
yeah, leather rarely gives a profit. you can guess that just because the lowest 5 pages of armor results are medium weight :P clearly we are not the only 2 buy all the non-medium armors :P currently, the highest leather profitable buy price is (2)(48) for level 49-60 medium coats (rugged leather), which can still be profitable.

Oh ok I see. I was doing mostly acolyte/winged chest armors and they were giving me significantly more and noticed that non-crafted in general gave less for cloth chest armors. Could have just been the RNG at the time, but it seemed that way overall from the times I was actually looking at what I was getting while salvaging. Like… I never got 5 scraps from non-crafted chest armor (that I can remember) but did from crafted chest armor pretty frequently. Not sure if it’s a bug or not or ????

As far as searching by weights you can’t, but as you said there are specific armor names you can search for and are all tied to a specific level range for cloth. Masterworks have different names vs fine. Ex Cabalist/magician are greens Conjurer/magician are blues in the same level range. The two different names go along with different slots (healm/chest etc.) so I just went about it like that.

I didn’t bother using a spreadsheet, I just got a feel for how much things were really worth with some quick math and salvage # guestimations once salvaged and went with that and still came out with a good profit. I may have overpaid on some and not bid on others but overall it evened out and I didn’t care that much as long as my total gold was still going up. Until recently the material prices were very stable as well (the ascended armor datamine is causing cloth to go up now).

It’s kinda funny when I’m looking at the prices of somethings now they are dropping down for a lot of them… guess I caused some inflation when I got more aggressive and was nearing 300% from luck xD

Btw were you the dude I was messing with that was buying the scale helms?

Thanks for the info, Aberrant. I probably still won’t do this as placing all of those buy orders and monitoring prices sounds tedious (plus, I only intend to get to 150% and then stop, and I’m already at 102%), but it’s very charitable of you to share your experience and advice.

Ofc ^^. It wasn’t too bad since I was doing it pretty late night for the vast majority of it. I wasn’t really that hardcore about it all to where I would watch the prices all day long etc. Spent something like 1-1.5h a night listing and a bit in the morning salvaging and compacting all the luck via artificer (but that was at the end when I was doing a TON of buy orders every night). Forgot to add that artificer luck stuff into the post (oops lol).

Yeah, see, 1-1.5 hours is basically my whole gaming time each night. XD If I did that, I’d never get anything else done.

Well… you could do a far smaller set than I did. Just do 65 green scale armor or winged armor or something. Shouldn’t take more than a few mins if you want to. If not np, like I said it’s not for everyone :P

P.S. I’ve had a couple of people blame this for the uptick in cloth prices. /facepalm

or just craft ectos and salvage and you have this mf faster and it dont need hours per day^^ and make the profit when start selling all greens again^^

Romek.4201:

or just craft ectos and salvage and you have this mf faster and it dont need hours per day^^ and make the profit when start selling alle green^^

This is a very fast method of gaining MF but it costs pretty much. I did 4x 250 ecto, i know small sample and the outcome was like this
100E was around 11k luck
100E gave around 7.5G loss after selling dust
with ecto ~30s and dust ~16s

0-300 would cost 2000g+ this way and is not very profitable… i dont wanna know the time it takes to make 2Kg with playing the game on max MF..

so this is a very viable method

naw, I don’t deal much with heavy armor. I only recently even noticed that armor could be profitable for this. I mostly did wood weapons. especially when ascended just came out, every salvage gave about 2s profit. lately, I mainly do weapons and cloth armor (especially coat) when I feel the urge to up my mf.
there is another bug I reported a while ago… some specific bows will give iron ore instead of soft or seasoned wood: hearty, honed, rejuvenating, strong (fine, level 30 and level 45)

Yea some bows still give metal. I reported that as well. Some of the higher bows give plat (but plat is such a narrow level range so I didn’t mess with it other than the 65 crafted scale armor). I did a pretty wide variety of things using gw2crafts to sort of show me what gets produced in bulk and dumped on the tp.

the point is how much gold you get just by selling all your blues and greens to npc/TP per hour?
1g? 2g? + the other loot you will use
how much gold you make with this methode per hour?

so for me sitting 5+ hours per day for this methode is not worth the effort when i can make the %MF faster with ecto salvage + selling the dust in minutes and have faster my max 300 to can sell the blues/greens again

thats 5 hours playtime per day – you get this gold per hour easy when champfarm or make dungeons in same time – dont know when its worth to sit for this down^^

Romek:
5 hours to get maybe 10,000 fine items which give about 100,000 luck and 100g profit.
To get 100,000 luck with ectos, you need 910 ectos and you’ll lose 60g; it’ll take you less than 4 minutes. you could farm 60g in 5 hours. But then there’s that 100g profit you missed out on.
To max out mf with ectos, you’ll spend 12,600g and get back 10,000g for a total cost of 2,600g, this could take as little as 4 hours. If you max it from buying fines, you’ll spend around 6,500g and get back 10,700g for a total profit of 4,200g, but will take you around 200 hours (you can typically buy them for 1.5s and salvage into 3s worth of materials = 1s profit per item)
Of course, this requires already having ~1,000g. And I usually don’t even place as many buy orders as I could. If I had twice the bank, I could buy twice the number of items items and get twice the luck and twice the profit in twice the time! (Didn’t they say something like this in Contact?)
It’s the same as every other choice in life: fast and expensive or slow and cheap

By listing at night before I went to sleep I didn’t spend that much time. I don’t have a clue as to how many hours it all took total as I was doing it while watching shows (and thus didn’t care). I guess I could have champfarmed while watching shows but you gotta pay more attention for that or you’ll miss out on champs and that means I’m not fully watching the show etc. and salvaging is so easy to where I could not miss a thing with either.

If you’re sitting there watching your listings constantly then yea that would take a while and I wouldn’t choose use my time that way.

Like mystic I wasn’t putting up 1k g worth of buy orders a night, probably more like 400g worth at most, but a lot of that was me putting up orders for full stacks of fine gold jewelry etc. which I was getting hundreds of every single night, 60+ for masterwork scale helms (and other items that often show up often on gw2craft’s fast guides).

I’ve gotten several pm’s and letters since I’ve posted this asking for exact items… and I found a copy of a list I made so I’ll post it up.

These are just what I used at the time and they may or may not still be profitable with these items depending on market price changes ( haven’t kept up with salvage prices).

You’ll still need to do the math yourself, but they might be worth checking. Not all of these were not profitable the entire time that I was doing this, but they all were at some point (so they might be again).

Crafted -

65 “Hard” Weapons (Hard wood other than warhorns which give platinum)

65 Platinum Jewelry (Platinum + Ornate Jewel [I NPC-ed the jewels])

65 “Winged” (Green) 55/60 (blue) – Linen scrap

65 “Scale” (Green) 55/60 (blue) – Platinum ore (Since they named a lot of heavy armor “Scale”, there might be a few non-crafted ones mixed in that give iron, but the icons should make it obvious which is which)

65 “Darksteel” (Green) 60/55 (blue) – Platinum ore (some of these yield hard wood or plat @ 50/50 such as axes/hammers/maces/rifles/pistols)

50 Acolyte (Green) 40/45 (blue) – Cotton scrap

40/45 Gold Jewelry (blue) – Gold ore + Lump

35 Student (Green) 25/30 (blue) – Wool scrap

Non-crafted -

These are from the wiki, as you see there is some overlap between the types of materials you get at the upper and lower ends.

If you don’t want to deal with mixed material calculations, just skip the overlapping levels.

Light armors

21-33 – Wool
31-48 – Cotton
46-63 – Linen
61-80 – Silk

(At the time… wool was .5s ea, cotton was 1.6s ea, and linen was .9s ea. Glad I saved a lot of it. ^^)

Focus/Bows/Scepters/Staffs/torch/tridents (wood)

21-33 – Soft
31-48 – Seasoned
46-60 – hard