Guild Wars 2

Hello friends, I used my Silver-fed salvage o-matic on more than 10,000 blues to salvage for luck. This was done on lvl 75-80 blue weapons.
The silver o-matic says 25% of the time it will salvage rarer components (elder wood > ancient wood, mithril ore > orichalcum ore)

Heres the problem. Out of the 10,000 salvages, I found the vast majority of the time after salvaging an inventory (140 units) I would wind up with 10-15 of these rarer finds, with the very rare case of 20.

25% of 140 = 35. So, mostly, I got between 10-15% at best.

So, my question is, is there a reason why my salvaging does not reach anywhere close to the 25% stated? Over 10,000 salvages is quite a significant sample size

I made some research about a year ago into this, the thread should still be somewhere in bltc or crafting forum archives.

What i found is a borked salvage rate just like you mentioned.

It seemed to me that each salvage item has an internal chance of salvaging rarer materials (t6 instead of t5 mats), on which the rate of the salvage kit is applied and it seemed to be around the 10% range. So a crude kit which has zero chance, still gave you t6 mats every 10th try, while the chance to get some with a rare or silver salvage o matic, was 12.5% (10%x125%).
Its either that and working as intended (in which case the tooltip is misleading) or its simply bugged and they didnt get around to fix it.
A couple of months back they fixed the salvage rate of upgrade components, which seemed to be bugged. At least the crude and fine salvage kit slavage upgrade compenents at a higher rate now than before. So i wouldnt be surprised, if the chance ot find rarer mats isnt working as intended either.

Best would have been to keep an exact track of what you salvaged. The problem with “So, mostly, I got between 10-15% at best.” is that it’s a very subjective statement. If you had exact numeric data one could do the math and come to a conclusion.

10,000 salvage are indeed quite significant and should work well as a starting sample size. Also you might have to omit for items that are not able to salvage for rare components.

Finaly, why would you salvage blues with the silver-fed vs the copper-fed? You incure a 57 copper loss on every blue item while you gain a maximum of 15% more rare components. That’s 57 gold loss at 10,000 salvages by higher salavge-o-matic cost. Not sure the rare crafting mats make that up.

rarer = “of higher rarity”

ectos, insignias, anything else of better-than-white rarity that can drop (except luck, i would assume)

using it on greens & blues is a fantastic way to spend 20x more than you need to.

I know it was a pricier method, but it was a spontaneous ‘for science’ moment. Ive got plenty of dough

I know its not precise, but its ok. I only recall 2 set of salvaging that got about 25 ancient or orichalcum. The rest was far lower. 12-15 was quite the average.

All in all, its still far lower than the expected 35/140 salvages. At no point did I ever get 30+.

you’re confusing ‘quality’ with ‘rarity’. most items in the game salvage into one particular tier of mats; only level 75+? i believe? have a chance to salvage to a higher, ie, the topmost tier.

t6 mats aren’t considered to be different rarity from t5 (rarer though they may be). They’re simply higher quality. no salvage kit aids with that (yet, to my knowledge)

now, if you were to buy up aetherized metal salvage and post the rate of charged lodestone return, that would be a very interesting piece of information.

The tooltip has always been misleading and inaccurate. They claim to have fixed the “inaccurate” bit (although my tests show different results); they have never fixed the misleading text.

Instead, I now assume that the tooltip text on salvage kits is wrong and instead look to wiki or reddit for empirical values of what is actually salvaged.