Guild Wars 2

Salvage Kits: What does the “X% chance of rarer materials” in their description refer to?

Is it items like Globs of Ectoplasm? I’ve always assumed it was because it’s obviously not referring to the chance of salvaging higher tier crafting materials, like the chance of getting t6 cloth/leather/metal as opposed to t5. A BLSK with its 50% would hardly give you a roughly equal amount of t6 and t5 leather if you salvaged a batch of leather armor for some (crazy wasteful) reason.

I’ve looked around the internet and found plenty of GW2 forum and reddit threads on the subject but no clear answer, mostly speculation and data analysis. Even GW2 Wiki doesn’t seem to have a good answer. I’m confused cause after the many years of GW2’s existence it should be pretty clear. The item text reads “X% chance of rarer materials” not “X% increased rate of rarer materials”. The language suggests that the percentage is set, not a modifier on some other hidden value. If it’s the former, then it should be pretty clear cut after years of many people doing their own tests and analyses to see what drop event from salvaging matches up to the stated percentage (by “drop event” I mean the event of say 1-3 Globs of Ectoplasm being salvaged as opposed to none). If it was the latter, then the item text has been somewhat deceptive for years.

Just wondering out of curiosity really. Anyone know? Has there been a dev/Anet response or mention somewhere that I’ve missed?

Have a nice day and happy salvaging!

There aren’t good answers because ANet hasn’t explained it clearly and because we haven’t been able to reverse engineer the meaning, without a lot of caveats.

You’re right that ecto isn’t included in the “higher level materials” (despite it being a higher level material).

What we do know is that controlled tests on salvaging ecto do yield different amounts of crystalline dust (but identical amounts of luck), depending on the kit.
Crude|Basic|Fine|Master|BL: 1.46, 1.62, 1.74, 1.85, 2
That doesn’t seem to correspond to 0, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 50%.

There are other controlled tests that also suggest a difference in material amounts, but again, not in those proportions

I suspect that it works similar to MF:

• There’s a guaranteed base amount of mats that salvage.
• There’s a separate random amount and that’s the part that varies with kit type.

Or it could be similar to how it works for New Year’s envelopes:

• The golden rooster figurine is a potential drop from the Common, Uncommon, and Rare categories.
• If it drops as a Common or Uncommon, you get one.
• If it drops as a Rare drop, there’s a 1/3 chance of getting one & 2/3 to get two.

A +20% chance would make it more likely that you’d get a rare drop (thus making it possible to get two figurines), but you wouldn’t be getting 20% more figurines.

tl;dr those who know aren’t telling us; the rest of us don’t know.

Ectoplasm has a guaranteed chance (not a guaranteed drop) on salvaging a rare/exotic of Lv.68 or higher*. Usually, in terms of salvage some things do occur, such as rares dropping ancient instead of elder logs, and exotics spitting out the inscrption/insignia it was endowed with** — but I seem to only encounter those scenarios with Lv.80 gear.

(*with the exception of crafted leveling equipment, it can drop on the mithril/silk-tier leveling equipment, as output portrays stats higher than equip level; the purpose of such equipment)

(**Somehow chance drops if it’s account-bound or soulbound gear, but only to inscription/insignia pry. I don’t have a stable testing environment so this may be wrong)

Using a better salvage tool increases the chances you get the ecto, as well as the amount obtained. Same thing will occur with prying the inscription/insignia but at a much lower chance.

If the base chance of getting T6 leather from a level 80 pair of gloves is 1%, then a Black Lion Salvage Kit would increase that chance to 1.5% (50%*1=.5 and .5+1=1.5)

That’s what it means when it says “% chance of rarer materials”.

We don’t know what any of the base chances are, so we only know that better kits have higher chances, not whether those higher chances are worth it.