Guild Wars 2

Lately there has been great discussions in my guild if globs of ectoplasmes count as rare crafting materials or not. Since both this forum and reddit are a an absolute pain to search through, I can’t find the answer on my own.

The information we have about it in game is conflicting. The ecto’s are placed in the bank tab of the rare crafting materials. But so are the obsidian shards and the mystic coins. Also, the tooltip displays the name of the glob in orange and thus indicating that it is an exotic. And the ecto is also considered a trophy and a crafting material.

Why does this matter? To know with which salvage kit you can get ecto’s the most sufficient. I they count als rare crafting materials then a master kit has more change then a crude kit. If they are not rare crafting materials there would be no difference. I found two researches, but they have conflicting results:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhUFMgIGLNDMdGtsQmZNcnoxd1lYV2ludU5FMjJhWnc#gid=3

http://de.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10d69g/salvaging_for_ectoplasm_an_analysis/

So what is it now? At this moment it seems like an Platypus (the animal that can be classified as a mammal and as a bird).

PS: when I look up, I kept seeing post about ‘Anet has confirmed that ecto’s don’t depend on salvage level of salvage kits’ or something like that. But there’s never a link to the actuall post. Does it even exist?

Im pretty sure it exists, because Im pretty sure I read the comments that alluded to it not being a rare material. The problem was that it was only “alluded” to, but it was never really officially stated. Im banking on ectos not being a “rare material”, but an entity of its own.

I consistently get a better return of ectos from rares with the BL salvage kit. In my experience it’s no contest.

and on my experience, when i started salvaging rares and exotics with crude salvage kits, at least in the begining, i got more eectos from them than when i used master salvage kits, i so stopped bothering using them

but this is something i dont think we’ll ever agree on from both sides

maybe because random is random.

AW Lore.5682:

and on my experience, when i started salvaging rares and exotics with crude salvage kits, at least in the begining, i got more eectos from them than when i used master salvage kits, i so stopped bothering using them

but this is something i dont think we’ll ever agree on from both sides

maybe because random is random.

How long ago though? You know the master and BL salvage kits used to have the same chance to drop rares and then they boosted the BL salvage kit?

sostronk.8167:

AW Lore.5682:

and on my experience, when i started salvaging rares and exotics with crude salvage kits, at least in the begining, i got more eectos from them than when i used master salvage kits, i so stopped bothering using them

but this is something i dont think we’ll ever agree on from both sides

maybe because random is random.

How long ago though? You know the master and BL salvage kits used to have the same chance to drop rares and then they boosted the BL salvage kit?

Which is, as far as I remember, wrong because there was a display bug but no functionality bug.

They fixed it. Black Lion kits now give more ectos than master/mystic kits. Tested this recently with a reasonable sample size (any number I put here will be disregarded anyway, as there will always be people that say “but you cannot claim this without having at least salvaged over 20 thousand rares while recording the whole thing”).

TL;DR

I’m 100 % positive that Black Lion kits now wield considerably more ectos than rare/master kits, while they wielded the same amount of ectos in the past.
Given that 1 black lion kit is 300 gems (and 300 gems is what, 7g these days?) this fix makes sense.

The only thing the BL Salvage Kit is better for is retrieving Sigils/Runes, as well as having a higher chance to retrieve Gossemer instead of Silk, Ori instead of Mithril etc etc.

Unless they sneak-buffed it to boost sales. Which wouldn’t surprise me.

So, nobody can find more research?

Gold is too precious to just throw around for the sake of science.