Guild Wars 2

What’s the best thing to do with yellow gear/weapons that none of your characters are ever likely to use?

Sell on trading post it if it’s over ~35s, salvage with yellow kit if under ~35s to get ectoplasm.

You need to check the value of what you’ll get on average from salvaging to know if it’s worth it or not. This is on rares level 68 and above.

Look at the low sell price of ectos. Assume you’ll get 0.825 per master/mystic/silver-fed salvage kit. If you are salvaging rares with runes/sigils, you’ll get 80% of those with the same kit (roughly 2s for a sigil, 3s for a rune). Add those two numbers together and use that as the salvage/no salvage price cutoff.

I use these three links from GW2TP to get the vibe on current prices.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19721-glob-of-ectoplasm
https://www.gw2tp.com/search?name=rune&sort=sell_price&order=1&category=UpgradeComponent&rarity=4
https://www.gw2tp.com/search?name=sigil&sort=sell_price&order=1&category=UpgradeComponent&rarity=4

Note 1: About the last two links, the GW2 forum redirect messes up the rarity and sort order filters so you get all qualities, not just rares and sorted what ever the default order is instead of ascending sell price. You’ll need to set these and select upgrade component as the category.

Note 2: About ectos from rare salvage. I bothered to track the ectos from each salvage a while back and I found that 40% of the time you’ll get 0, 45% of the time you will get 1 and it’s an even split for the remaining 15% between 2 and 3 ectos. That’s how I get my 0.825 ectos per. Others have seen higher returns. But in the end it’s still RNG and we all know that RNG is a harsh mistress. There are times I had barely 0.65 per and other times nearly twice that.

For me, I get a bunch of rare gear and salvage the armors since they are always below the price of one ecto. Then I check the sell price for ectos and add 10 silver. If any weapons sells for that price, I list it. If it doesn’t, I salvage it. A little inexact perhaps but it saves time doing the math and it’s close enough for my uses.