Guild Wars 2

<DISCLAIMER, The actual figures in these examples date from ~6 months ago, i finished reaching 300MF around December (2013) somewhere. It should still give you good insight on how to reach max MF in a timely manner though. I post this here since i`ve gotten a great deal of feedback from people asking me to post this guide in public. Hence i do so. Use at own risk>

Some insight on how/why i did it:
How did i do this? – I flipped thousands and thousands of green items into mats on the TP by placing buy orders, selling the materials for either a small net loss, breaking even, or a small net profit.
Where did i do this? – I spend the majority of the time running back and forth in LA between the outfitter at the bank and the TP npc’s.
How long did it take? – I started doing this the moment the MF change went live. So probably 4-5 months now?
Why did i do this? – Not very irrelevant, but i view myself as the most unlucky person ever walked this planet. Without MF i can play this game for 50 years and not see anything valueable drop so i decided to force my luck a bit. Besides that.. I am a maniac and while not an economic mastermind i found a way to do it.

More into detail:
The items i flipped (or not rly flipped, just bought but i like the word) are GREEN ARMOR pieces of all kinds in the lvl33-62 range.

Why just greens?
Blue armor yields bad MF results + has a bad buy/profit ratio. Most blue items are almost as expensive as green items but yield much less materials.

How does this buy/profit stuff works?
The secret is to know what happens when you salvage stuff before even doing it. Green items salvage into 1-3 materials, more often into a single one then 3 at once. But it happens. On average i get 1,5 material from a salvage.
Example: Strong leather gloves. 1s 32c is the top buyorder right now. That means if you buy this item, it will cost you 1s 32c. You need to know what it salvages into. It salvages into Rugged leather section. These go for 98copper right now. I told you 1 item salvages into 1.5~ mats on average so basicly from this item you get 1s 49c back. 20 copper profit. Bingo.

Which salvage kits?
I was stubborn and did it wrong the whole time because i was greedy. I bought Basic salvage kits, which amounts to 88copper per kit. If i had to guess, i probably spend 100-200gold on these kits alone. Yes kitten me.
I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH!!!: IF you plan on actually getting to 300MF, you have to spend money on gems and buy a Copper-fed-salvage-omatic from the TP. (yes it will cost you like 80gold at this gem exchangerate, but it WILL save you money in the end) Not even talking about the quality of life using a single salvage kit instead of filling your bags with kits.

How many items do i need to buy?
kittenLOADS. Some guy did the mat and it appears you will need to buy about 200k items in total. I bought 200k items in total. If you are susceptible to RSI and Arm/wrist injuries… DO NOT DO THIS. I go to the kittening gym everyday, i use powerball on occasion to prevent it. Because you will click millions of time. Millions.

Where do i start?
Depending on how much money you got right now. I started flipping with about 200gold~ and i got about 700-800gold atm. Not every gold of that is made by profit, but also due to finding craploads of rares/exotics that i regularly find. I sell everything i find. Yet some of this gold is from the profit i made by raising my MF.

Lets see. You are poor as kitten and only got 40gold in your bags. What you do is put the filter on Armor/masterwork quality/33-62 level range and hit submit. You will see a list of items that says 1 – 10 of 560. This pool of 560 different green items will become your best friend. First page is kitten because it has cloth items in lvl35-45 range, which salvages into linen cloth. Linen cloth is 7s per piece atm so its much to expensive to flip for you poor lads. Look down the page until you see an item named Berserkers pirate gloves of scavenging. Bid on it, the top buyorder is about 1s49c. It will result in breaking even because the result will be rugged leather. Bid no more then about 22. Once you gain money in the hundreds you can try to bid more. I frequently bought 111 stacks of every item i bought but i could invest a kittenload of money aswell. If you`re poor, start to bid low number stacks. Reason for not rounded numbers like 100 or 20 is purely because of RSI/Injury reasons.

Bid on items like these that will make you break even, or make you a small profit. With such low money, dont bid on items that will make you net loss. You can do that when you can dump 800gold into it and become lazy, like me.

So, how do i make the money?
Obviously, when you salvage the items you buy, you dump it on the TP and sell it as high as the lowest seller. Dont ever sell mats to highest buyer, but that should be common sense.

Fun facts:
- The luck needed for every luck bar increases until 219 MF, after which every luck bar is capped at 30k.
- Total luck required to reach 300 MF is 4295450, yes thats 4million luck kittenes!
- Before my computer crashed i found like 1 exotic every day since i reached 170~ mf until 260~ mf. Lately when i neared 300 MF i find myself finding less exotics :p
- Found 1 underwater precursor so far.
- I spend on average 3hours per session salvaging everything from the TP until the list is empty. (if i let it " sit" for 2 days)
- I spend on average 2 hours placing buyorders for items.
- When i dumped 800gold into the TP, i had 360 buyorders standing for 111 stack PER item. which means i wouldve bought 40k items if absolutely everything got bought. (nigh impossible, ppl always outbid you or ppl simply dont sell those items) but on average i buy 6-7k items when i let it sit for 2 days/2 nights while i made 40k buyorders. So expect to only actually buy 5-10% of the buyorders you actually place.

Also:
Buying ectos goes faster, a lot faster. But as everything in life, Which is fast and good also is very expensive. At the time i raised my MF, for a stack of ectos you paid around 70gold and you only got 35 gold out of it at the TP. Giant loss. Ppl did the math somewhere and it would cost you 13k gold or something to do it with ectos.
In my personal view if you got the money to buy solely ectos on this, you wont need the MF anymore as it will never turn into a profit if you dont play for like 5-10 years.

Enjoy/have fun. Do your advantage with it

Going to say right now that copper salvage o matic will never save you money as it still charges you more per salvage than a crude salvage kit is worth. (unless it got changed)

Could be, its been a while though since i wrote this. But at the time i had some guy doing the math for me.

ArthurDent.9538:

Going to say right now that copper salvage o matic will never save you money as it still charges you more per salvage than a crude salvage kit is worth. (unless it got changed)

Its a quality of life item. The copper salvage kit is not about saving money but time. You never have to visit a vendor to buy salvage kits. You can simiple click the stack of items you want to salvage. If you salvage for profit it saves around 10-15% of your time. Which you can be using to do something else or make more gold.

Sandra Martino.3870:

How does this buy/profit stuff works?
The secret is to know what happens when you salvage stuff before even doing it. Green items salvage into 1-3 materials, more often into a single one then 3 at once. But it happens. On average i get 1,5 material from a salvage.

The rarity of the gear has absolutely NO impact on the average amount of common mats you salvage. It is the type of gear and how much mats are used to craft it that determines how much common mats you salvage off it.

For example chest armor gives you a higher average (up to 5 per salvage) than gloves (up to 3/salvage), the same applies to greatswords compared to swords.
Some weapons that are crafted with wood AND ore also can output both mats, shields for example.

ArthurDent.9538:

Going to say right now that copper salvage o matic will never save you money as it still charges you more per salvage than a crude salvage kit is worth. (unless it got changed)

The Salvage O Matic costs 0.52c less per salvage than the basic kit, which has the same rates of recovering upgrades (20%) and rarer materials (10%).

However, i did some research on the chance to get rarer materials of each kit (ranging from 0-50%) and it is either bugged or the tooltip is misleading and every salvageable item has an internal chance (which i believe to be around 10% for gear, higher for salvage items) to drop a rarer material to which the percentage of the salvage kit is applied.

So if you use a crude kit that usually has 0% to recover a rarer mat, you still get one 10% of the time, if you use a rare or mystic kit, which usually recovers a rarer mat at 25% according to the tooltip, your chance is 12.5%

Ulion.5476:

ArthurDent.9538:

Going to say right now that copper salvage o matic will never save you money as it still charges you more per salvage than a crude salvage kit is worth. (unless it got changed)

Its a quality of life item. The copper salvage kit is not about saving money but time. You never have to visit a vendor to buy salvage kits. You can simiple click the stack of items you want to salvage. If you salvage for profit it saves around 10-15% of your time. Which you can be using to do something else or make more gold.

While the Salvage-o-matic is cheaper than basic salvage kits, it is more expensive that crude salvage kits. Kits and cost per use. . However the basic kits, and the salvage-o-matic, over the crude offer a better chance at higher grade mats and upgrades, as well as more charges, so you can make up the cost difference in the end.

Nice guide. I did it in a very similar manner. Only greens and get the Salvage O Matic. I started making money and was able to hold materials until they showed an increase in price. That lead me to shopping low demand materials that could spike in price. Events & LS seem to cause spikes.

If you can find an armor or weapon that will hold a bid and not get over bid that’s a real treat, it’ll produce way more Essences. I broke my purchases up into 2 groups. Group 1; I’d check every 2 or 3 days and Group 2; I’d check early AM and late PM pulling all bids and giving it a rest for 24 hrs every 3rd day.

If you are working on MF an important fact to remember is that you have the upper hand on the TP. Your goal is essences – you just need to break even.

Again, nice guide.

I just power leveled to 260. Spent about 1000 gold. Don’t think i’ll do the rest with ecto.

I know I can do it through flipping blue and greens, but it’s just not fun. I did do it a bit, but I just don’t want to spend a lot of hours doing it, since people keep over bidding.

If you want to make money, flipping blue is probably better. I’m surprise you said you only flip green Zet, since you say you do it for money now.

Greens have worked for me, I probably ought to give blues a shot. I’ve been chasing higher level materials the last month. Sorting out which items work is hit and miss. Oh and http://www.gw2spidy.com/ is your friend.

Wanze.8410:

Sandra Martino.3870:

How does this buy/profit stuff works?
The secret is to know what happens when you salvage stuff before even doing it. Green items salvage into 1-3 materials, more often into a single one then 3 at once. But it happens. On average i get 1,5 material from a salvage.

The rarity of the gear has absolutely NO impact on the average amount of common mats you salvage. It is the type of gear and how much mats are used to craft it that determines how much common mats you salvage off it.

ya quite honestly reading this thread remind me of people spreading rumors about flying pig mount to sell sprocket.

Blue and green salvage into the same amount of material. So it is usually “cheaper” to salvage blue. But time is money, so if you don’t enjoy spending too much time flipping on TP to level magic find, it’s probably better to flip green.

I honestly don’t know the intention why people spread information on salvaging green. I suppose many people make a living salvaging blue so they want to give mislead information.

Zet.9130:

Greens have worked for me, I probably ought to give blues a shot. I’ve been chasing higher level materials the last month. Sorting out which items work is hit and miss. Oh and http://www.gw2spidy.com/ is your friend.

ya I get it why you want to salvage green, because it is faster.

But you already maxed magic find and you say you are still doing it for money. So why would you only salvage green when blue is cheaper. They give the same amount of crafting material, only the essence is different.

Good guide for those who really want to reach 300% MF. I’m at 158% right now, just through salvaging all blues and greens I’ve gotten. I tend to get at least 1 Rare from drops a day, sometimes more.

Anecdotal evidence from many players indicates that while MF does have a noticeable effect at 100/200/300%, you will still need to kill lots and lots of monsters to really put it to use. If your playstyle does not lend itself to that happening (e.g. you do a lot of dungeon skipping, you mostly PvP, or you World Boss train where there aren’t really a lot of mobs that drop loot), you will not see much benefit to having a high MF%.

interesting guide, i spent the good part of 2 months maximizing my magi find.. i definitely recommend a salvage-o-matic, it’s not the best salvage kit.. pretty sure the best bang for your buck is a mystic salvage kit? if you can afford to forge the stones for it.. i also steared clear of salvaging ectos for luck.. i think with ecto i had in my storage, i salvaged about 6g worth and had 5g returned to me and not nearly enough luck to make it worth the expense.. i only started with i think roughly 65g and 150% magic find.. in the early days i was spending about 80% of my gold and Losing maybe only about 10%, but when i reached the upper level {220mf- and onward} the process became a bit streamlined and i was making 3-6% magic find per day.. sometimes it would take an hour or two just salvaging.. anyway, magic find caps at 300% and i got there using some Achievement Rewards.. if you are on 300% and you have AP magic find added to your account, i’m not exactly sure if that counts toward bonus magi find which is attainable through boosts etc.. i will post an update pic tomorrow when i kill off that last 24k of luck >:\
update
ok, completed luck based magic find cap.. i had about 380g the other night and now, 405g.. that is not all salvaging profit, and i only did about 2% magic find in the past two days.. despite mats or even luck yield, i personally find it easier to focus on blues.. once you get a process going, the math will speak for itself and you don’t need to be rich to start ^^

laokoko.7403:

Wanze.8410:

Sandra Martino.3870:

How does this buy/profit stuff works?
The secret is to know what happens when you salvage stuff before even doing it. Green items salvage into 1-3 materials, more often into a single one then 3 at once. But it happens. On average i get 1,5 material from a salvage.

The rarity of the gear has absolutely NO impact on the average amount of common mats you salvage. It is the type of gear and how much mats are used to craft it that determines how much common mats you salvage off it.

ya quite honestly reading this thread remind me of people spreading rumors about flying pig mount to sell sprocket.

Blue and green salvage into the same amount of material. So it is usually “cheaper” to salvage blue. But time is money, so if you don’t enjoy spending too much time flipping on TP to level magic find, it’s probably better to flip green.

I honestly don’t know the intention why people spread information on salvaging green. I suppose many people make a living salvaging blue so they want to give mislead information.

I have no intentions to mislead anyone or anything, as i said im 300 allready. I just did quick assessment on what i got from salvageing at the time. it turned out i had much more loot from greens, could be pure luck or anything but thats how i did it

Wow this is crazy.. so my silly question is: You get MF Essences for Dailies and Monthlies as well as some achievement tracks… They are account bound so what do you do with them once you are capped? I am in no way rushing to cap my MF, since I don’t really care and I salvage only blues for mats (I sell greens to NPC or TP if they are more than 3 silver). But Even doing that I have over level 200 MF. Is the Essences just something else I have to throw away when I cap? =/

Sandra Martino.3870:

laokoko.7403:

Wanze.8410:

Sandra Martino.3870:

How does this buy/profit stuff works?
The secret is to know what happens when you salvage stuff before even doing it. Green items salvage into 1-3 materials, more often into a single one then 3 at once. But it happens. On average i get 1,5 material from a salvage.

The rarity of the gear has absolutely NO impact on the average amount of common mats you salvage. It is the type of gear and how much mats are used to craft it that determines how much common mats you salvage off it.

ya quite honestly reading this thread remind me of people spreading rumors about flying pig mount to sell sprocket.

Blue and green salvage into the same amount of material. So it is usually “cheaper” to salvage blue. But time is money, so if you don’t enjoy spending too much time flipping on TP to level magic find, it’s probably better to flip green.

I honestly don’t know the intention why people spread information on salvaging green. I suppose many people make a living salvaging blue so they want to give mislead information.

I have no intentions to mislead anyone or anything, as i said im 300 allready. I just did quick assessment on what i got from salvageing at the time. it turned out i had much more loot from greens, could be pure luck or anything but thats how i did it

I made a post in the black lion forum. Im’ sure the pros may be able to answer.

Some fun for those of us in the 300% club.

How many salvages do you have on your account?

Mouse over the “Agent of Entropy” achievement, and it will tell you how many times you completed it. x by 200.

Mine: 615,942

:P

I just salvaged ecto and sold the dust instead. The sheer amount of blues/greens you have to go through to get the 30K luck required for an additional 1% just isn’t worth the time invested in my opinion. Like you said, you could spend anywhere from 3-5 hours a day just placing orders and salvaging items one at a time. With ecto you get multiple stacks of 250 items that can be salvaged in a matter of minutes, at a 1:1 ratio with mystic salvage kits.

Even though you don’t profit with this method, the hours of time you’ve saved yourself can be spent farming for more gold, which more than negates the costs involved, and isn’t that the whole point of maxing magic find? For better returns during farming sessions?

More time spent farming, less time spent salvaging/inventory managing, to me salvaging ecto is the only way to go, but that’s just my opinion.

Thanks for the Guide dude, awesome read

I’m at 105 MF atm, will see if i’m gonna give this a shot!

Thanks!

SHTSKATE dot com.9310:

I just salvaged ecto and sold the dust instead. The sheer amount of blues/greens you have to go through to get the 30K luck required for an additional 1% just isn’t worth the time invested in my opinion. Like you said, you could spend anywhere from 3-5 hours a day just placing orders and salvaging items one at a time. With ecto you get multiple stacks of 250 items that can be salvaged in a matter of minutes, at a 1:1 ratio with mystic salvage kits.

Even though you don’t profit with this method, the hours of time you’ve saved yourself can be spent farming for more gold, which more than negates the costs involved, and isn’t that the whole point of maxing magic find? For better returns during farming sessions?

More time spent farming, less time spent salvaging/inventory managing, to me salvaging ecto is the only way to go, but that’s just my opinion.

It cost over 15 gold per level if you use ecto. I spent in the ball park 1000 gold just to get to 260. And I mix a bit of buying blue and green in between.

I’m pretty sure it is faster if you just spend hours on the trading post listing blue and green item. I just dont’ do it because it is more boring way to play the game.

But another problem is there are much more people doing it now(flipping blue and green), compare to a few month ago.

I dont’ think there is a sure answer. Just try both and see which way you like better.

Firebaall.5127:

Some fun for those of us in the 300% club.

How many salvages do you have on your account?

Mouse over the “Agent of Entropy” achievement, and it will tell you how many times you completed it. x by 200.

Mine: 615,942

:P

Hmm, i seem to have repeated it 836 times. Thats makes 200×836= 167,200 times

Also to the one asking above about luck when capped, im about 144k overcapped. I`d advice to just use up the luck if your capped allready, you never know… some day they might extent the cap :P

Thank for putting this guide on the forum, now i can sell all my greens with a profit in TP.
One step further to a legendary
greetz exp

As for salvage rates of materials:
1.3-2.0 for metal bases armor (1.3 for gloves , 2 for chest, rest inbetween)
1.5-3 for leather and cloth (1.5 for gloves , ~3 for chest)
Color doesnt matter.
Weapons:
the bigger the weapon the more you get (dont know the exact numbers)

As for luck salvage rates:
10 for blues
30 for greens
105 for ectoplasms

I know some very good materials for that, but dont know if I should post it here, because once I post them here they wont be good anymore. (not my problem since i have my 300% but….)

With the informations above you can easily calculate if you make profit salvaging that item, ofc you need to take the 15% TP fee into consideration as well, but lets say by salvaging the right materials you not only make magic find, but more money than most farming trains provide at the moment (speaking in gold/hour).

Ah and you need some endurance … 130k greens …. if you make it fast lets say 10k greens a day still 13 days, and that is if you can hold up the rate of 10k a day (2 hours of only salvaging, 30 min of ordering items)

I found greens a pain in the kitten , due to the sigels and runes. Nothing slowed down my progress more than having to deal with inventory clogging up.

ya , well maxing out your inventory to a certain extent is not a bad thing to do first,
and as already mentioned copper fed salvage o matic helps a lot too.

As for Sigils, they stack up so you just need to calculate 10-15 slots for sigils, and with copper fed.
I had no 20 slot boxes back then but only 15 slot so i had about 120 slots, 15 slots with the daily basic convinience stuff (buff food etc etc).
Back then I had to clear my inventory from runes etc , all ~3k items

Duran.3196:

ya , well maxing out your inventory to a certain extent is not a bad thing to do first,
and as already mentioned copper fed salvage o matic helps a lot too.

As for Sigils, they stack up so you just need to calculate 10-15 slots for sigils, and with copper fed.
I had no 20 slot boxes back then but only 15 slot so i had about 120 slots, 15 slots with the daily basic convinience stuff (buff food etc etc).
Back then I had to clear my inventory from runes etc , all ~3k items

Oooh yea. If you plan on doing this, copper fed salvage-o-matic if your sweet bread and butter. I used to fill up my 150 slots with like 60/150 in kits and had to run to a vendor to sell sigils and vendor mats on the tp every 15-20 minuts. The horror.

Salvaging ECTOs

I use Mystic Salvage Kit, beacause i found that the bette the quility of kit, the more dust i get.

So… imgur.com/a/IlHpT#0

• Bougth 2k ectos for 780g -> Salvaged into 210k luck + 15×250 Crystalline Dust
• Total TP fee for Crystalline Dust was 118g (close to the 15% of 780g)
• Total loss was 110g (that means IF there was no TP fee, i would have 8g profit on salvaging them)

Conclusion:
110g =210k luck
1g = 1910 luck (RNG warning! When salvaging 3 ectos you might end up with much less dust than the average)

^ Can’t imagine any faster way.

Don’t know why anybody would spend that much gold on MF. The drop rates in this game are abysmal. So you’re getting 0.03% chance of dropping something good instead of 0.01%. Big whoop…

so correct my math if i’m wrong but that’s a 15% loss using ecto.. {which i pretty much stated earlier} and 780g for a lousy 7% {levels} of end plateau magic find… easily sustainable if you are running on 100g and you feel like putting the time in to replenish your 15g loss for 1% magic find each day? that’s a minimum of 80 days for the end levels of magic find alone

i can’t imagine any faster way!

Im not aware of the prices right now but when i used to raise my MF dust only returned like 50-60% of the investments.

Could be different now though, cant access gw atm.

Sandra Martino.3870:

IF you plan on actually getting to 300MF, you have to spend money on gems and buy a Copper-fed-salvage-omatic from the TP. (yes it will cost you like 80gold at this gem exchangerate, but it WILL save you money in the end)

It actually won’t save you money over using basic salvage kits.

As you said, a salvage-omatic costs a little over 80 gold, or 800,000 copper; at a savings of 0.52 copper per use over basic salvage kits, you need to use the salvage-omatic over 1.5 million times to recoup the cost of buying it, a fair bit more than the ~200k items salvaged that you need to max magic find.