Guild Wars 2

So for example i want to make a gift of fortune and i have lots of t5 mats. Would it be more cost efficient to buy for stacks of Crystalline Dust and convert them or just straight up buying the t6 mats from the tp.

Promoting from t5 to t6 requires 5 crystalline dust a piece as well kitten philosopher’s stones. Promoting incandescent to crystalline is more expensive than stright-out buying the dust itself. Actually having a t6 so the promotion can happen is required.

Take a look at gw2 efficiency’s spirit shard conversion table, then click on the “Fine Crafting Material” link.

You’ll see that (right now) the promotion process results in a profit for all six non-dusty T5→T6. It’s lowest for venom (5s per shard) and best for claws (61s), but always profitable.

Accordingly, that makes it cheaper than selling your T5 and using the funds to buy T6, although it’s substantially more tedious — a stack of T5 converts into a mere seven T6, so you need to convert well over 30 stacks per mat; that’s a lot of clicking.

On the same page, you’ll notice that there are more efficient uses for spirit shards. For example, converting jute to wool is worth about 180 silver/shard (compared to claws, which are about 1/3 as good). So you could sell your T5, promote some jute bolts and bronze ingots and make enough to buy your T6.

tl;dr it’s up to you what’s most efficient in terms of your time, effort, and wealth

• the easiest is selling T5 and buying T6
• buying dust and promoting your own T5 saves money, but costs you the time of 30-40 promotions per stack of T6
• buying other mats and promoting them earns even more money, which might be a good compromise between the speediest and most economically efficient options.

Resources:

• GW2 Efficiency
• GW2 Shinies

The two present that data in different ways; you’ll probably find one easier to use. (There are other websites that do similar things — those two are, imo, best for answering the OP’s question.)

Hmm. You gave me alot of ideas! I was only planning to get a gift of fortune fast but now I’m gonna do this stuff you told me. Tyvm.

In many cases it could be more cost-efficient to straight-out purchase T6 mats, usually the cheaper ones (which means avoiding buying Vials of Powerful Blood and oft times Elaborate Totems as they’re often the most expensive).

Also, I’ll have to give Illconceived Was Na some credit as I didn’t think of that either.

I double down on checking with the shard alchemy portion of gw2shinies to see what’s cheaper.

http://www.gw2shinies.com/shard-alchemy

Also remember that the yield amount spans a range and I’ve seen the yield come up 15-20% short on occasion. For T5 fine to T6 rare mats the average is 6.91 T6 rare yield per 50 T5 fine but costs 1 T6 rare as a catalyst, which you can reuse for each conversion. Their calculations assume sell price for the T6 and buy price for the ingredients.

If you have lots of ectoplasm, a glob of that salvages into 1-5 crystalline dust. Consider that as another source. At ecto’s current prices, that might turn out to be a lot cheaper than straight up buying the dust.

On average you get 1.85 crystalline dust per salvaged ecto.

Behellagh.1468:

On average you get 1.85 crystalline dust per salvaged ecto.

• 1.85 dust/ecto if using a master’s/silver-fed kit.
• 2.0 using BL kit
• 1.62 using basic/copper-fed
  Source

FYI The amount of luck you get is the same, regardless of kit: ~105 pts/ecto ->
i.e. if your Magic Find is >= 218, salvaging a stack of ecto will increase your progress bar by about 0.875.