Guild Wars 2

G’day guys,

I’m quite new to Guild Wars 2 but loving it so far, I am however a bit confused by this Mystic Forge.

Until now (I’m only level 16 btw) I have been using a basic salvage kit to salvage all of my unwanted equipment that sells for less than 1 silver on the trading post regardless of rarity, but recently I was told by a few people that I should be collecting 4 of the same rarity and putting them into the Forge.

Is this true?
Should I put 4 of the same rarity AND type into the forge together (for example 4 rifles)?
Or is the Forge not worth worrying about until later levels?

Thank you for any help

The mystic forge is called the mystic toilet by the fanbase.
You can put in 4 items of the same rarity and you have a change to recieve an item of higher rarity and more valuable then the 4 you have invested. This change is rather slim and you can also get an item of the same rarity. Today I added 4 green max level armor pieces (all worth between 1-3 silver) and ended up with one green armor pieces. so I basicly went from bout 10 silver to 2 silver.

So basicly don’t touch it unless you know the recipe. A recipe are more complicated combinations but are also items that take a lot of farming and take effort to get. This is indeed done at higher levels.

Don’t worry about forging anything until later levels- specifically, until you can get gear level 68 and above.

The point of forging gears of the same rarity (and sometimes type) is that the MF sometimes returns a piece of gear that’s a higher rarity. There are two applications for this:

-Forging green gear may return a piece of yellow gear. Yellow gear level 68 and above can be salvaged for Globs of Ectoplasm (or ectos), which are needed to craft exotic gear, upgrade certain items, and create legendaries, among other things. Whether you choose to forge your greens or not is up to you- I personally don’t like the chances and prefer to just vendor mine.

-Forging yellow gear may return exotics, and forging yellow gear or exotics may return a precursor weapon. Certain exotic weapons (which are the same as other exotic weapons, but have unique skins) can only be obtained through the MF. Precursor weapons are required to create a legendary and often sell for large amounts of gold.

The chance of upgrading is ~20%, meaning in 1/5 times you throw it in. However, this is probability which means that you are not guaranteed anything. You could throw it in 100 times and get nothing of higher rarity.

However, because when you throw 4 things in, you get one thing back, it only takes (theoretically) 16 items to get 1 item of higher quality because you use all 16 items and gain 4 more items, making the 20 for a theoretical success.