Guild Wars 2

Karma equipment, particularly the armor, can be great. I’ve got my charr warrior decked out in armor I got from temples on the cursed shore, and I’ve put some good karma armor on my ele.

But when I wanted to upgrade armor for my ele, I realize that there was no way to recover the nice runes I had used to upgrade, since salvage could not be done on the karma items.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think upgrades in karma gear are essentially permanently affixed; you can destroy it by droppign another upgrade on top of it, but you can’t recover the upgrade itself.

I still plan to use karma equipment when it looks good, but I’ll think long and hard about the upgrades I apply.

Well, by upgrade I assume you mean switching to armor with a different stat set so you can just keep the old armor in the bank if you want to go back.

Or what you can do is just a transmutation stone to switch the upgrade to another piece of armor.

I really hate that about karma armor. The only way to deal with it really is to use a Fine transmutation stone. Either you transmute it onto the new armor, keeping your new armor stats and looks and just choosing the upgrade, or if you say need to get a rune off of gloves to use on boots, you can transmute it onto a white gloves, use the look and stat of the white armor and choose the rune as the upgrade, then you can salvage it off. Since it requires the use of a Fine transmutation stone, it’s only worth it if your upgrade is one of those that’s worth quite a few gold, otherwise it’s probably just better to buy a new one.
I hate it though! It seems like such a waste.