Guild Wars 2

One aspect of this game I’ve never gotten the hang of is salvaging.

I’ve gotten the general idea that more expensive kits give you a higher chance of rare materials, but it’s not worth using high-end kits on low level drops because you’re not going to get anything good from them anyway.

I’ve also seen people say you should only use black lion salvage kits to salvage rares for ectoplasm or to retrieve a rune.

The problem I have is this: How do I know what to salvage and what to sell? In particular how do I decide which rares to salvage and which to sell on the TP where they always go for a fair bit of silver at least.

If anyone could give me a run down of the whole decision making process that would be really helpful. How do you decide what to salvage and what to sell?

Exotic drops (orange):
Many exotic drops have runes and sigils on them that is worth more than the item itself. ALWAYS check to see how much the item, then the sigil/rune is worth. If the sigil/rune is worth more than the item you should use a Black Lions salvage kit to be 100% sure to get the rune/sigil + you get some glob of ectoplasms which will net you some more silver.
Black Lions salvage kit should be obtained trough daily achievement rewards, buying it from the trading post for gems is expensive.

Rares (yellows):
There is a few things you can do with rares and which one you make most money with depends on rng.
1)Weapons can be use in hte mystic forge to create exotic items. There is a 20% chance to do so, and if you get lucky you can get good exotics to precursors.
2) you can salvage the rares with master salvage kit to get glob of ectoplasm which you can sell.
3) sell the rares themselves and make 20-40 silver pr rare ( price depends a lot on the weapon)

I will recommend you to salvage rare armor pieces as they is not worth much on the trading post and is very rarely made into a good exotic.

The runes and sigils you get from salvaging rares is NOT worth using in the mystic forge. you make more money in the long run by selling them on the trading post. I know because I have tried for a period of a month to see what i could get from them in the forge.

Masterwork items ( greens)
Most people use one of two ways to make money of these items. 1) is to sell to an npc and get the value of the items which is between 1.3silver to 2 silver each item.
2) is to use them in the mystic forge to create rare ( yellow) items. same as with rare to exotic, the green to yellow also have 20% chance of upgrading. up to you which one you prefer, however, some people say you make money money by selling to npc vendors as you might get a lot of greens back in the forge. your choice.

Blue and whites:
its up to personal preference what you do with these items. Either you sell them to the npc vendor or salvage them using a basic salvage kit which have a 10% chance for rare items such as orichalcum ores. you also get a lot of mithril, t5 & t6 silk and wood logs.

this is my method:
a: if it is less then yellow I sell it all, the only exception is things that say salvagable item. I store them for when it is daily recycler (and maybe when you play more then me you can use the left-overs for monthly recycler, but i dont get enough for that). This salvage is done with the basic salvage kit. (the crude would be more efficient, but it lacks the amount of uses, taking up more storage slots, since the storage slots also cost money they are actually more expensive).

b: Everything white, blue and green gets sold to the merchant unless im leveling and i can use it on that character.

c: Yellows (rare) below level 65 gets sold to the merchant
d: yellow’s above level 65. I check the price on the tp. if the price is less then 1,5 ecto’s (currently 19 gold so 28.5 gold) I salvage it with a high end salvage kit (see my note later bout wich one).
e: the same should go for orange (exotic) items, but they are always more worth then 1,5 ecto. So you can always sell them on the TP unless… often the sigil or the rune is worth more then the exotic item itself, so check that as well by typing it in manually. If the upgrade is worth more on the tp then the item use a high end salvage kit to get that off and sell it formore value.

Note bout wich high end salvage kit.
obvious black lion kits are better. they have a higher change on getting ecto’s (and the amount) as well as that they have a higher change of getting upgrades off. the stats for upgrades for bl-kit is 100% and for master salvage kit is 80%. The change of getting ecto’s is halfed. taking the difference in account, it os not worth to spend gold on using gems to get the BLC-kits. if you get them (and you get them often) use them as high end kit, if not then just settle with the master kit for the high end salvages.

this method is rather easy, and gives you bout 90% optimal result, off course when getting an orange item you can calculate the risk of loosing money when using a master kit and compare it to the possible profit you can gain with a BL-kit. this takes a high level of math, and even though I am pretty good at math I settle with the 95%.

White: Salvage with a crude/standard salvage kit, especially if they’re metal. Mithril and Orichalcum tend to be worth more than the white’s base cost, so you’ll end up ahead here.

Green, Blue: Sell them. Salvaging them usually isn’t worth it.

Yellow: Salvage with a High End salvage kits. Black Lion Salvage kits can come from daily rewards, which is always nice. You can also get Mystic Salvage Kit if you have 3 Mystic Forge Stones handy.

Orange: 90% of the time, you’re good with selling this on the TP. If the math works out, you can salvage this and the price of Ectos + Rune/Sigil may be worth more, but that doesn’t happen very often.