Guild Wars 2

I’m struggling with leveling my crafting, and hit a wall due to lack of Bone Shard, when I have a ton of Bone Chips. It makes sense to me that small bits of bone could be used in place one larger piece, or could be stuck together into one larger piece.

Obviously this wouldn’t work for all materials – jute doesn’t turn into wool, no matter how much jute you’ve got. But for some common materials, do you think it would be a good idea to turn them into their fine-material equivalent?

It could be a refinement crafting step, just like turning scraps of jute into bolts.

There are a couple of Mystic Forge recipes that can be used to promote materials

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge#Materials

It’s not obvious from the wiki article (although it’s implied): the number of mats you get from the promotion recipe decreases with each step. So T1-T2 has the best yield and T5-T6 has the worst.

I played around with the recipes with very favorable price ratios (e.g. the lower tier item was very cheap and the next tier equivalent was very expensive). And, after all of that, the next time I want to promote a mat, I’m going to sell my stack of the Tier X item on the TP and use the cash to buy the Tier X+1 — that’s just less work for me.

If the price ratios are excellent, you can make some money (or save some, if you are crafting), but it’s a lot of trouble for a relatively small profit margin. Why? well, smart traders know these recipes too, so if the mat prices are out of equilibrium with each other, a lot of people will swoop in to claim the profits, increasing the supply of the T+1 (and depressing prices) and reducing the supply of the T-mat (thus increasing prices), resulting in the new equilibrium.

I’m trying the fine crafting material promotion right now and it won’t accept the recipe….

It’s possible you don’t have the right dust. I know I had to re-read that part about which dust to use several times.