Guild Wars 2

So I have made public a spreadsheet that tells you what is the maximum price you can pay for a certain armor in order to not lose any money while you’re trying to increase your MF.

On good days I actually used to make 50g from this. I think it is still possible to make around at least 30g daily, but you mustn’t be afrait to post buy orders on hundred of items every day. There might be a lottle bit more competition than a year ago but with this you should know where is the limit for your buy order (usually the buy orders are 1-2 silver below the revenue).

Here is the spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UpPVpbs9ALUA0CtE0_EalqOjNM60D6fqcMXvYCEKFZ4/edit#gid=1810616440

And here is more detailed description on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/38412y/lets_be_done_with_magic_find_increasing_mf/

The trick that some people might forget to increase their income is to transforms those scraps of cloth you will get from salvaging to bolts of cloth at the crafting station, this way you will get a little biit more moneey from each cloth.

I can see this being useful to a new player that wants to get a jump start on MF (get to 100% or even 150%) but beyond that the luck you get from this process will increase your MF at a snails pace…..(still it will most likely yield profits were salvaging ectos will likely NOT).

Brother Grimm.5176:

I can see this being useful to a new player that wants to get a jump start on MF (get to 100% or even 150%) but beyond that the luck you get from this process will increase your MF at a snails pace…..(still it will most likely yield profits were salvaging ectos will likely NOT).

from the profits you could buy ectos or t&t bags…

I recommend stopping sometime before reaching 300%, perhaps at 200 or 250.

• The amount of time spent increases exponentially: research, put in an offer, collect, salvage, reset offers, ….
• The benefits increase linearly (probably): 251% offers the same benefit over 250% as 51% offers over 50%, except that it requires a lot more luck to achieve.
• People who have 300% luck don’t seem very happy about it. They don’t see huge huge gains in loot (which is to be expected). They keep accumulating luck and feel wasteful deleting it.

Regardless, interesting and useful post by the OP for anyone wishing to increase their MF by great or modest amounts.

When I did this I got couple of percentage points every day even when I needed 30 000 Luck per level and getting to 300% took me around month and a half so I think it is still very effective. Of course if you don’t care about MF and don’t want to sink couple of hours every day into this than it is not wort it to you. But if you are sick of dungeons and events this might give you more money for less time, but it is tedious work. However you don’t have to do any boring research.

At 200%+ you need like a gazillion pieces to salvage to get a few percent. Its just painful to do, ugh.

argh, too complicated for me….

SkyShroud.2865:

argh, too complicated for me….

You’re certainly not alone

This is going to come in handy, I’ve been looking for something like this. Now I can confidently place buy orders without guessing at how much salvage I’ll be getting out of it. It’s not something I will be focusing on but I will definitely be adding some of this to my flipping efforts.

magic find?

I suppose you also believe in santa claus and the easter bunny, too?

I did this before the TP changes. I was putting in buy orders daily for the most common blues to salvage. Someone has to do it to use up the surplus. It’s just that it’s WAY to boring for me. I’d rather run around a map than playing “click wars” on the TP.

SkyShroud.2865:

argh, too complicated for me….

While McJAC’s spreadsheet is very precise and complete, I have a smaller and slightly less accurate salvaging spreadsheet that might be easier to understand. …and it does leather too! (Updated every 4 hours IIRC)

I even have a luck grinding spreadsheet, to let you know how much clicking you’re in for. (hint: a lot.)

Salvaging things for luck and money is pretty effective, but it’s really time consuming and wears out your mouse buttons. I actually have a second mouse connected I use just for clicking on essences of luck.

While you do end up making gold at the end of the day, it does take a pretty good amount of investment capital to place all those orders. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 300g-500g in buy orders sitting around, and you better hope you don’t need to pick up anything important while you’re doing this. While I was grinding, It wasn’t uncommon at all for a set of overnight listings to generate over an hour or more just trying to empty the pickup tab.

Needing to bid-war with people for an hour or two to secure that overnight high offer is a pain too. :p

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I recommend stopping sometime before reaching 300%, perhaps at 200 or 250.

This is good advice. I stopped at 270% as at my natural rate of luck acquisition, I should hit 300% in a little over a year or so.

As for MF’s effectiveness, I never used to see dropped rares, maybe one every few weeks. Now that I’m over 300% with minimal buffs, I find about one rare every hour or two just running around doing map completion. Was it worth the dozens of hours salvaging things? Probably not, but I made a bunch of gold doing it anyway, so meh.

McJAC, I took a look at your spreadsheet’s code, and noticed you’re using custom Google Apps Script functions to directly return pricing data from the GW2Spidy API. It’s easy to miss, but custom spreadsheet functions must be deterministic. The price will be fetched the first time the cell loads, but will be cached until you change the item id argument. This means the prices on your sheet will not automatically update as item prices change over time.

I ran into this problem while developing my own sheets and wrote a GW2 API library which will fetch the information into a designated range. Just paste the library key “Mq57i81IlEjI1Kt0fjQAiJVQQbPcGcXLZ” into your sheet’s library list (Script Editor -> Resources menu -> Libraries) and rig it up as described in the documentation, or just copy/paste the source into your own sheet and take a look at one of my spreadsheets I linked in my previous post to see how I have it set-up.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• People who have 300% luck don’t seem very happy about it.

But most of them wouldn’t be happy unless they got a precursor drop at least once a week. So peoples happiness isn’t really the best measure :P

CureForLiving.5360:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• People who have 300% luck don’t seem very happy about it.

But most of them wouldn’t be happy unless they got a precursor drop at least once a week. So peoples happiness isn’t really the best measure :P

They are unhappy not because of the lack of precursors, but because they keep getting essences of luck that are useless to them now.

ZDBioHazard.8246:

SkyShroud.2865:

argh, too complicated for me….

While McJAC’s spreadsheet is very precise and complete, I have a smaller and slightly less accurate salvaging spreadsheet that might be easier to understand. …and it does leather too! (Updated every 4 hours IIRC)

I even have a luck grinding spreadsheet, to let you know how much clicking you’re in for. (hint: a lot.)

Salvaging things for luck and money is pretty effective, but it’s really time consuming and wears out your mouse buttons. I actually have a second mouse connected I use just for clicking on essences of luck.

While you do end up making gold at the end of the day, it does take a pretty good amount of investment capital to place all those orders. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 300g-500g in buy orders sitting around, and you better hope you don’t need to pick up anything important while you’re doing this. While I was grinding, It wasn’t uncommon at all for a set of overnight listings to generate over an hour or more just trying to empty the pickup tab.

Needing to bid-war with people for an hour or two to secure that overnight high offer is a pain too. :p

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I recommend stopping sometime before reaching 300%, perhaps at 200 or 250.

This is good advice. I stopped at 270% as at my natural rate of luck acquisition, I should hit 300% in a little over a year or so.

As for MF’s effectiveness, I never used to see dropped rares, maybe one every few weeks. Now that I’m over 300% with minimal buffs, I find about one rare every hour or two just running around doing map completion. Was it worth the dozens of hours salvaging things? Probably not, but I made a bunch of gold doing it anyway, so meh.

Am I missing something or are you adding the auction fees to the profit instead of subtracting them? (dividing by 85% vs multiplying)

friggarn.5360:

Am I missing something or are you adding the auction fees to the profit instead of subtracting them? (dividing by 85% vs multiplying)

Oh! Good catch. That’s a remnant from when those cells were used to calculate something else before I condensed the sheet. Fixed.

ZDBioHazard.8246:

McJAC, I took a look at your spreadsheet’s code, and noticed you’re using custom Google Apps Script functions to directly return pricing data from the GW2Spidy API. It’s easy to miss, but custom spreadsheet functions must be deterministic. The price will be fetched the first time the cell loads, but will be cached until you change the item id argument. This means the prices on your sheet will not automatically update as item prices change over time.

I ran into this problem while developing my own sheets and wrote a GW2 API library which will fetch the information into a designated range. Just paste the library key “Mq57i81IlEjI1Kt0fjQAiJVQQbPcGcXLZ” into your sheet’s library list (Script Editor -> Resources menu -> Libraries) and rig it up as described in the documentation, or just copy/paste the source into your own sheet and take a look at one of my spreadsheets I linked in my previous post to see how I have it set-up.

Thanks for letting me know. Honestly, I should have changed it probably before making this public, but it was working fine for my needs when I was using it so I didn’t bother. I wasn’t really sure how the updating worked and now I know.

I’m not any good at coding so I used Silveress’s script that I was already familiar with to quickly change it ( http://silveress.tk/34/silveresss-gw2spidy-api-script ). So now it should update prices every 15 minutes. Thanks for sharing your stuff too I know that without people like you, that share their scripts, I wouldn’t be able to make any of these spreadsheets.

The old script was terrible. I was often getting errors when I fetchetd too many prices from spidy, so I had to keep my sheets small. I guess now I can add more stuff to this public spreadsheet…I’ve also worked on salvage rates for medium armor and heavy armor, which I might add. Unfortunatelly, the prices are so low that it’s mostly just a waste of time so even my data are not great…no motivation.

Geneaux.9547:

SkyShroud.2865:

argh, too complicated for me….

You’re certainly not alone

Try to look at the reddit page I tried to explain it in more detail in the comments or you can always ask here or PM me for better explanation. It is not that complicated but I fear that I’m making it way too complicated by mentioning all the exeptions like crafted armor that make understanding it more complicated.

Just search by the level that is in the spreadsheet….use for example something easy like 21-24 (to avoid levels with crafted armor at lvl 20 and 25) and select only Masterwork quality (also dont forget to select only light armor). Now you check the Salvage Prices for levels 21-24 (that would be level range 19-27 in the spreadsheets) and put buy orders that are below the Salvage Price that is mentioned in the spreadsheets because your costs are for how much you will buy it so:

Revenue (Salvage Revenue – column D in the spreadsheet) – Costs (your buy order) = Profit

decasrod.2479:

Thank you for this, I will definitely give this a try later tonight and in the following days.

Some questions:
Maybe you already mentioned this and I missed it, do you base revenue on Sell Instantly prices or listing at current sell orders?

Why are some revenue prices in gray and others in black? Does the color have any meaning?

I’m trying to get as much profit as possible, so everything I buy is through buy orders and if I’m trying to sell my stuff I just undercut the lowest seller. If you see sell orders below the Salvage Revenue price then of course just buy it instantly.

Some numbers are gray because if you use different salvage kit you will get higher revenue. That only matters with armor that drops 2 kinds of cloth. So if you salvage 49-57 it doesn’t matter what salvage kit you use, you will get the same amount of cloth. So I just put there you should use Crude salvage kit by default but I don’t think anybody should bother with Crude salvage kits unless theey release an unlimited one…you will save like 1.5 copper and that is not worth your time.

So if we look at levels 58-63….if you salvage the chest piece with Basic salvage kit you will get more silk instead of linen. When you sell all that material you will get less money than when you salvage the chest with crude salvage kit and sell the material. That is why the price under basic salvage kit is in gray. Obviously I don’t really have enough observations under crude salvage kit at any level. But unless they release an unlimited crude salvage kit I don’t plan to do much about that. I just decided to keep it there in case there are some crazy movements in prices in the future. But as of now even if the number is gray under Basic Salvage Kit I don’t recommend slowing yourself down with salvaging via crude salvage kits for few coppers.

Basically if something is gray there is some other thing that you can do that will give you more money (in black).