Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to post a little bit of advice for anyone considering buying Upgrade Extractors from the Gem Store.

Upgrade extractors are more expensive than almost all upgrades in the game. Crazy as it sounds, in most cases, you are better off destroying upgrades by inserting another and re-buying the destroyed one if you really need it.
When considering if you should buy an upgrade extractor run through a little checklist:
A single upgrade extractor costs 250 gems.
Or if you buy the bulk packs the per extractor cost goes down as low as 200 gems (If you drop a whopping 5000 gems on the 25 pack)
At press time this number of gems could be converted to approximately 32 gold and 24 gold.

1. Is the upgrade account bound? This is really the only important non-math check to make. If it isn’t account bound, move to check #2.
Some of them are and if you REALLY love that upgrade and don’t have any other means of getting it. Then you might want to use an upgrade extractor. Though most of these can be obtained with tokens or other means that often have less value than 32-24 gold.
Keep in mind, upgrades that you buy for Laurels should be calculated in (~1g per Laurel) gold cost most times. Even though laurels are time-gated, they are easily attainable by just logging in.

2. Is the upgrade obtainable for less than 32-24 gold? If the answer is yes, and it will be in most cases, then hit the trading post and place a buy order for the upgrade you wanted to use an extractor on.

If the answer is “NO” in both cases, then congrats you should get yourself an Upgrade Extractor!

Obviously these numbers may fluctuate a bit as the economy ebbs and flows, but just wanted to put this info out there for any of the newer players who may be considering this purchase. Hopefully the price of the extractors will be brought down a bit to be more in-line with upgrade costs.

Happy Adventuring!

Good advice. The extractors should really go down in price. They’re way too expensive to justify the cost most of the time.

About the only good use for them is the higher agony resistance on rings or back items.

Anyone with a brain knows that the Upgrade Extractors are atrociously overpriced and you’re better off simply overwriting the existing item with a new upgrade or salvaging it completely to start over, no offense intended.

I would like to see this particular item brought down in price or, at the very least, offer us an infinite upgrade extractor for a very costly price. It needs to happen, one way or another.

Please ANet take a look at this and tend to it.

obvious u dont have any upgrade components cost 200 to 1000 gold like some of us do.

This has been true since these extractors were released. They seem to have been designed to remove agony infusions, not for any other purpose. In the last two years, the lowest gold-equivalent price of a single extractor (if you buy in bulk) has been 30g; in that same time, there haven’t been any upgrades that cost that much to replace (including account bound ones).

tl;dr don’t buy the upgrade extractors except to remove the most expensive agony infusions.

Zephyra.4709:

Anyone with a brain knows that the Upgrade Extractors are atrociously overpriced and you’re better off simply overwriting the existing item with a new upgrade or salvaging it completely to start over, no offense intended.

It was just that I was trying to say it in a nicer way.
I have seen a few posts asking about them and I wanted to help spread the word for people who don’t live and breath the gems to gold conversion rate.

They are essential for the few truly valuable upgrades.
You would think ANet might want to make something like this more affordable so that there was a financial benefit for using them in more cases. ANet would get some gem income and we could save some gold. But I could see many ways that this could throw parts of the economy out of whack.
I’d imagine it would make many upgrades cheaper. If you could extract them for less than buying new ones, there would be a bit more play in the price. And there would be less turnover in the upgrade market. 5g+ Upgrade drops are some of the few nice drops that we can hope for on a semi-regular basis. I guess it would be a bummer to crash those prices.

Taxidriver.2043:

obvious u dont have any upgrade components cost 200 to 1000 gold like some of us do.

Was this intended for me?
It isn’t obvious at all actually what upgrades I may or may not have by my post.
I stated, in multiple ways, that there are upgrades that are worth more than the converted value of the extractors.

I am really happy for you that you got some awesome upgrades.
Wishing you many more awesome drops!

I’ve always felt upgrade extractors would fit better as a time gated item. Either through laurels or crafting.

I love the idea of them, they open up build experimentation.

I agree we don’t want to destabilize the rune, sigil market. Surely there is a way to implement them without wrecking the market, but still making them useful.

Erron.5327:

Taxidriver.2043:

obvious u dont have any upgrade components cost 200 to 1000 gold like some of us do.

Was this intended for me?
It isn’t obvious at all actually what upgrades I may or may not have by my post.
I stated, in multiple ways, that there are upgrades that are worth more than the converted value of the extractors.

I am really happy for you that you got some awesome upgrades.
Wishing you many more awesome drops!

Sarcasm sign. You’re welcome.

TheDoctor.8437:

I’ve always felt upgrade extractors would fit better as a time gated item. Either through laurels or crafting.

I love the idea of them, they open up build experimentation.

Nice thoughts!
A crafting consumable would be amazing.
A master Jewellery recipe perhaps? Could be a very cool thing indeed.