Guild Wars 2

@Anthony

Minipets. Or town clothes.

These are minigames, they’re fun but frivolous. They should give fun but frivolous rewards, IMO.

Carighan.6758:

The Undead-rune is difficult to optimize for (as there is no Power/Toughness/Malice gear)

You can actually get four pieces of Condition Damage / Toughness / Precision gear. You have to cobble it out of the karma vendors out in Orr but with some effort you can do it. You want to buy…

Helms: Dwayna OR Balthazar OR Lyssa
Shoulders: Grenth OR Balthazar
Gloves: Grenth OR Melandru
Legs: Infiltration OR Grenth OR Dwayna OR Balthazar

Unfortunately there is no chest piece or shoes to complete the set. Nor do I think there are any accessories or weapons to match. So… yeah. But hey, it’s a start.

Well, maybe you’re right. You could try a standard phantasm build with berserkers gear and a staff equipped. The issues I foresee with it in a dungeon is, for one, you’re almost completely reliant on your phantasms for damage so in fights where you can’t keep them up due to aggro or AoE issues you’ll do very little damage and, for two, you’re reliant on other people to put conditions up for you. Your staff by itself can keep two conditions on the target, not really enough to write home about here. If your party members don’t have a lot of conditions themselves, or if you’re on a trash pull where mobs don’t last long enough to either get a lot of conditions on them or get all three iWarlocks out on it then your damage significantly suffers.

But, if those are all acceptable risks, then try something like this:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmc0z0MzMnrxmMnbxmaf0pGVMVoca08khA707khA7khS7kiT7khs7kNb70V7ofD8ofY

I put the greatsword as the swap here for AoE pulls, being able to use the iZerker instead of the iWarlock for actual AoE damage. Also, you can swap to the GS when you’ve summoned 3 iWarlocks in a boss fight and are sure they won’t be dying in the next 12 seconds. Might as well squeeze out more autoattack damage than the staff’s pitiful autoattack.

It’s a really focused build, I wouldn’t really use it for anything other than killing bosses in dungeons personally, but I can see how it would be effective for those bosses that iWarlocks can actually survive fighting.

Seasha, I have no pity for that kind of attitude. This entire conversation is about farming two specific events in one zone. You don’t want to change your playstyle to perform well in those two specific events? Then go earn money some other way. Go gather, go play the market, go farm earth elementals for lodestones, maybe do something creative like use your portal to sell runs through the Obsidian Sanctum jumping puzzle, I don’t know, anything. But don’t go cry that you won’t swap weapons for two specific events and expect the game to cater itself towards you.

And no, you don’t need to respec. Just slap a greatsword on and a set of rare explorer’s gear and you’re set. What, you don’t want to spend like three gold on a suit of farming gear? If that’s the case, then honestly you don’t really deserve to farm efficiently in the first place. You’re going to want magic find gear for it anyways, it makes absolutely no sense not to farm without it, so you might as well get the power and precision magic find.

Absolutely, yeah. Condition damage builds are definitely lacking compared to crit damage builds and while warlock is amazing it doesn’t come close to closing the gap. What the staff has, however, that this GS crit damage build doesn’t, is absurd amount of tricks and defensive abilities.

It’s far too easy to hit the condition damage hard cap and only scales with one stat, whereas power/precision/crit damage scale exponentially with each other and every single stat on berserker’s armor increases your damage without a hard cap.

Not to diss the staff, mind you. It’s a fantastic and flexible weapon but in terms of raw damage, no staff build can compare to a crit damage greatsword build. The staff is much more of a wear-the-enemy-down slowly playstyle whereas the greatsword isn’t nearly so subtle.

I honestly don’t understand any of the grousing people have about mesmers and farming DEs. I can deal nearly 10k damage in 3s to all mobs in a tight area if I use my abilities right. Takes more skill than other classes, sure, but Mirror Blade → iZerker → roll for clone → Mind Wrack, maybe follow up with a Mind Stab if necessary and now I’ve more than tagged everything that I just hit. If you can’t tag mobs with that, or even a fraction of it, then the fault is yours, not your class’s. You can’t just wait for the mobs to come to you, you need to know where they spawn and be on them the moment they do.

Sure. Here’s a bog standard no thought involved high DPS greatsword build I use for farming DEs in Orr and can no doubt be adapted to dungeon play.

I’d probably retool a bit and get rid of the mantras for dungeons, but keeping them certainly isn’t that bad of an idea. It is a 16% damage increase, and with three uses a piece they can be incredibly handy once you get used to them. Mantra of Recovery in particular I absolutely love, with the third use of it the healing it grants is fantastic. Mantra of Resolve is amazing for getting yourself out of sticky situations, cleansing immobilize so you can roll away or poison so you can heal efficiently or really whatever you need. Mantra of Pain can be underwhelming, admittedly, but the damage it adds is not trivial — it amounts to 3 to 4k damage with full berserkers and three uses. Not worth recasting in a fight ever, so in long fights I just keep it up for the 4% damage boost, but in a short fight I try to use it as much as I can and recast between fights. Finally, Mantra of Distraction is an instant cast 1s daze, up to three times in a row. Use it as an interrupt, watch the mobs and keep them from casting big, important spells. All in all, while you could probably do better with more situation-tailored utility skills the Mantras make great general purpose spells, especially in a build like this. In my humble opinion, of course.

Here’s the build:
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmz0mMMzohoRmohoRmxx9MaVaqMaqc8kiG707khs7khS7kiT7khs7kNb70V7ofD8ofY

Other thoughts:

- I like Crippling Dissipation (Domination 5) for fighting veterans and champions; you can often get them to attack your clones when you’re far enough away and between this and your berserkers you can keep them indefinitely crippled. Also, when your clones are ‘replaced’ by summoning an additional clone when you already have 3 it actually triggers traits like Crippling Dissipation, so that’s an extra bonus if you don’t want to shatter but keep using Mirror Blade. If you don’t like it, though, then Mental Torment is an excellent alternative.

- Greatsword Training is required, not even a debate.

- Harmonious Mantras and Empowering Mantras are keystones of a mantra build, but if you don’t use mantras replace them with something else, obviously.

- Phantasmal Fury just makes sense, 20% higher crit chance on your berserkers is nothing to sneeze at.

- Deceptive Evasion is amazing, especially when combined with Crippling Dissipation. Shatter fodder or cripple fodder for days.

- Compounding Power is another 9% damage increase if you can keep 3x illusions up.

- I use Sword/Pistol for my second set because I like to swap to it to execute a mob that has gotten close. Swap, stun with Magic Bullet, then Blurred Frenzy for the finish. It’s pretty good in my opinion.

- Time Warp is too awesome to not use, especially in dungeons. I shake my head whenever I dungeon with a mesmer who doesn’t bring it. Do your team a favor and call it out in chat before you use it, though. I shift click it then hit enter, lets them know it’s about to happen so they can look for it.

I personally find greatsword based builds to have the highest damage output in PvE. It might not have the single most powerful phantasm, but neither is it reliant on it for it’s damage so it is still viable in fights where you can’t keep your phantasms up indefinitely.

I would say it’s usually possible to do more damage in a fight with a very specialized build depending on the fight, but as a general purpose weapon the greatsword can’t be beat.

A friend of mine received the light avian shoulderpads during a run with me. If those can drop, anything can.

Elementalists, Smooth Penguin. I wish mesmers had a traited speed buff that they could use, but alas. Elementalists still benefit from the increased speed while in lightning aura trait even when they lose all skills.

Wouldn’t surprise me.

I hate how gung-ho these moderators are. These are similar topics, yes, but not the same. And the fact that there is absolutely no transparency or ability to have any kind of conversation with them makes their stringent actions seem almost fascist. Even though you know they aren’t, the inability to communicate with them makes it feel like that.

Shostie.6435:

Khift.4706:

I’m amazed you managed to find enjoyment out of the constant stream of “charr take off your armor plz” and “[kitten] charr and norn are too huge go somewhere else”.

I’m so amazed I’m incredulous. In fact, I don’t believe you at all.

If all else fails, call your opponent a liar.

That wasn’t happening in my group. Maybe if you stopped complaining so much you’d have more fun and people wouldn’t be angry in your presence.

Oh I believe you believe yourself. But that doesn’t mean it is true. Memory is extremely selective; experiments have been performed that show people can’t even accurately remember something shown them 20 minutes ago. The brain chooses to emphasize minor things, bringing them to the forefront, and constantly makes up details to fill the holes between the seemingly random details it chooses to remember.

In other words, you don’t even really remember what happened earlier this day, let alone when you did the jumping puzzle. When you call it up from memory, all you get is the barebones — everything else is fabricated from whole cloth by your brain. And if you want to prove me wrong? Yeah, it’ll fabricate details to fit that, not a problem at all.

Kaderin.7584:

Khift.4706:

I love the concept of it and don’t regret doing it, but it’s clearly a very flawed execution and would have benefited quite a bit from additional iteration.

Do you refer to the grouping/skill usage or the puzzle itself? If its the later I will have to disagree, the puzzle itself was brilliant and have had absolutely no problems anywhere in it except for the people who say that it has become bugged with subsequent patches

I’m referring to the former, yeah. The puzzle itself is amazing and I love it, but the execution and presentation of it is very lacking. It being a group instance with such a massive amount of people is just not flattering to it.

@Regizer:
“There’s nothing wrong with this puzzle, if anything its more fun to run it with other people. What you are pretty much asking is making it easier, why make it easier when its doable the way it is right now?”

The only difficulty this could remove is fake difficulty. The majority of people still would not be able to do the puzzle — but they’d stop blaming everything else for it, because not it would be clear, and TRUE, that their inability is their fault.

Shostie.6435:

Khift.4706:

Shostie: “I just found a way to deal with it instead of crying on the forums about it.”

Yes, instead you’re crying about other people attempting to improve the game. Certainly you’ve got the moral high ground here.

And to answer you response seriously, if you had no issue with the situation with the wait then you would still have no issue with the situation without it. This change would therefore not impact you at all, and your input therefore has no value.

I would have an issue without because the only way to get rid of the wait would be to make it a solo puzzle. I don’t want it to be a solo puzzle. This game already encourages solo play enough as it is. I actually enjoyed the conversation that was going on with the people in my “group”. That’s something that would be missing if this was a solo run in an MMO.

If you want a solo platform game, there’s always Super Mario.

I’m amazed you managed to find enjoyment out of the constant stream of “charr take off your armor plz” and “[kitten] charr and norn are too huge go somewhere else”.

I’m so amazed I’m incredulous. In fact, I don’t believe you at all.

XiaMae.9874:

I’ve never had a problem with people summoning things, and I’ve gotten disconnected half a dozen times and ended up in different groups of people. If one person doing that is a problem, then relog into a different shard. Then you can make it far enough that if you fail, you have about 5 seconds to breathe/take a sip of water before it restarts.

I simply reported them. Minor as it may be, it’s still blatant griefing and ought to be punished, if only by a slap on the wrist.

I love the concept of it and don’t regret doing it, but it’s clearly a very flawed execution and would have benefited quite a bit from additional iteration.

Shostie: “I just found a way to deal with it instead of crying on the forums about it.”

Yes, instead you’re crying about other people attempting to improve the game. Certainly you’ve got the moral high ground here.

And to answer you response seriously, if you had no issue with the situation with the wait then you would still have no issue with the situation without it. This change would therefore not impact you at all, and your input therefore has no value.

It’s not about the time, Shostie, it’s about how it makes the puzzle an order of magnitude more frustrating. If you knew anything about game design then you’d understand that, but alas you do not.

The fact that the clock tower needs to be a solo instance is incontrovertible.

I love the puzzle itself. I love the appearance, the length, the difficult, the time limit. It’s great. And yes, I’ve even completed it.

What I hate is having to wait 30+ seconds in between attempts because some arsewipe decides to summon an Oakheart every third attempt, blocking everyone’s point of view and causing a dozen people to mess up in the vital opening seconds of the puzzle.

The wait between attempts makes the frustration an order of magnitude worse. If there wasn’t a wait, I would barely be frustrated at all. I screwed up? Welp, I screwed up, lets do it again and do it better. But having to wait 30+ seconds to try again? That just amplifies the frustration to an absurd level. There’s a reason why difficult platformers like I Wanna Be The Guy, Prinny, Super Meat Boy and many others have near instantaneous respawns — the platformer genre has long since learned that the more people wait, the more they dwell on their mistakes and the more frustrated they get — and frustration is the polar opposite of fun. The key to reducing frustration is instantaneous action; never let the player wait long enough to think, instead let them right back at it and channel their anger into their play. Don’t make them stew. The Clock Tower violates that maxim so hard it is not funny.

And the fact that other players can negatively affect my experience both just by being there and also by actively griefing, spawning huge pets like the oakheart or earth elementals to block view, goes directly against Arena Net’s own design goals. Anet went to huge pains to ensure that other players could never impact your enjoyment negatively in the entire rest of the game, but in this puzzle they seem to have completely forgotten about that goal of theirs. People don’t even have to try in order to harm others’ game experience in the Clock Tower. They need only exist.

Make the puzzle a solo instance and remove the wait. That you made a difficult jumping puzzle is amazing, but the blatant disregard of rules of good design is staggering and unacceptable. I know Anet isn’t in the business of making difficult platformers so I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here but to ignore this now that it has been so liberally and clearly stated by nearly everyone on the forums is to almost literally tell your players to, as the kids would say it, go ‘kitt’ themselves.

Frustration is never a good thing in a game. This puzzle can be made less frustrating without making it less difficult — and therefore it should, no, MUST be done.

I turned this on just to see what the difference, not someone who was terribly unhappy with the situation before hand but I still wanted to give it a shot.

I can’t believe I’m even playing the same game any more! This is amazing. Everything, every single thing looks better.

This is fantastic and I love it. I never knew how much FoV affected your view of a game.

I recently tested the Rune of Vampirism on my mesmer; I was considering buying a set of them because I felt like the 4pc set bonus could have a lot of synergy with Mantra of Recovery, especially if you use the Harmonious Mantras trait like I do. It all depended on whether or not the 4pc bonus triggered when readying the mantra — casting Mantra of Recovery — or when using the mantra — casting Power Return.

As it turns it, it doesn’t trigger on either. Confused, I tried my other two healing skills, Ether Feast and Mirror. The set bonus does not trigger on those, either. Even more confused, I gave it one more shot, and this time I actually did manage to get the bonus to trigger — except not by using my healing skill, but by getting hit. The ‘leech’ buff appeared on my bar and indeed my next attack stole 975 health from my target.

Long story short, the 4pc set bonus on Rune of Vampirism triggers on being struck, not on using your healing skill. Whether the description is what needs changed or if the functionality needs changed I can’t say, but the two definitely don’t mesh as they currently are.

If anyone is wondering, I tested this by going to the Heart of the Mists, equipping 6 PvP Superior Runes of Vampirism and then fighting the engineer NPC in the Fallen Halls of Glory.

Also, as an aside, the 6 piece bonus for the Superior Rune of Vampirism does not function at all. It completely fails to proc. Which is a shame, because it seems quite nice.

Aww, I missed the unedited response.

I’m curious about what I assumed that wasn’t true, though. In fact, I can’t even see anything I assumed at all. All I see is law of supply and demand being applied.

Unfortunately for us, Johnson, they didn’t really include even a fraction of the possible stat combinations on gear, yeah. Which is unfortunate; I would kill for a Power/Precision/Vitality alternative to Knight’s gear. And of course of the stat combos that are present almost half of them aren’t even available in PvP — your character, for example, could use the Healing Power / Vitality / Precision stat combo in the Ascalonian / Nightmare / Svanir gear sets.

That said, this is most useful for classes who cannot heal very often. If you’re getting a ton of healing like your build does then toughness is definitely going to outweigh vitality. Fight length also matters; long, drawn out battles like in WvW tend to involve tons of healing so again, toughness reigns supreme. But a relatively quick 1v1 or 2v2 in sPvP? That’s where this would matter.

Johnson.3874:

CrazyGoNuts.9536:

Are you saying without itemizing or traiting for health a thief will only have 1545 health? That doesn’t seem correct.

I think he meant base health without taking in account the “base” vitality of your character. So, if a thief had 0 vitality, he would indeed have 1545 HP. Fortunately, when you play your thief, even without his equipment, you have to add his vitality to get his “real” health.

Or at least that’s how I understand it ^^

Yep, that’s it. Everyone has 916 vitality when naked at level 80. Minus that, each class also has a different base health value — 1545 for thieves.

Don’t worry about the base vitality, it actually fell out of the equation when it cleaned up at the end, same as the base toughness did. Just worry about the base health value.

How practical is it? Hard to say. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that necromancers prefer toughness over vitality, nor that guardians want the opposite. Necromancers have the highest base health in the game, tied with warriors, but the lowest defense from armor because they wear light armor; guardians are the opposite, with the highest base defense and the lowest health. Given the concept of EHP it isn’t a big surprise that necros would prefer toughness and guardians would prefer vitality. And really, that same concept of gearing to cover your weakness continues on with other classes and builds – as a general rule, wear the gear that gives you the greatest balance between health and armor. But if you want to know specifically how to accomplish that? Drop it in the formula. Neat things come out.

For anyone who cares about the math (Warning: Includes calculus):

• The damage formula is pretty simple: Damage = (stuff)/Armor
• Health is simply damage you can take before dying, so set Health – Damage = 0
• Solve for (stuff), (stuff)=Armor * Health
• This is EHP. (stuff) is just damage before considering armor, aka unmitigated damage, so EHP = Armor * Health. Easy.
• Now for the fun part. Armor is actually defense (D) from gear + toughness (T), and also at level 80 you start with 916 toughness, so Armor = 916 + D + T
• The same with Health. Health is actually Base Health (B) + 10 * vitality, and again you start with 916 vitality before gear at level 80. So Health = 9160 + B + 10V
• Now expanded we have EHP = (916 + D + T)(9160 +B + 10V)
• That’s a lot of letters, yes, but only three variables (T, V and EHP). All the others are just constants defined by your class. We still can’t do much with a three variable equation, though, but thankfully T and V have another relationship.
• There are only so many stats you’re willing to put towards increasing your EHP — we’ll call this Stats (S). So, S = T + V. Again, three letters but only two variables — S is a constant set by you. Solve for one variable, let’s do T, T = S – V.
• Drop that into the first equation and you get EHP=(916 + D + S – V)(9160 + B + 10V)
• Now to find the maximum — first take the derivative with respect to V.
• DEHP/DV = (-1)(9160 + B + 10V) + (10)(916 + D + S – V), simplifying to DEHP/DV = -20V – B + 10D + 10S
• Set that equal to 0 and solve for V, yielding:
• V = (10D + 10S – B )/20

Effective Health (henceforth EHP) is a measurement of how much raw, unmitigated damage you can receive before dying. It is an important stat to know and keep in mind when deciding how to gear your character. How it is calculated varies from game to game, but at its simplest it is Health * (1 – %Mitigation) = EHP. Being an old theorycraft buff from a game which shall not be named, the moment I saw how simple GW2’s damage formula was I simply had to get my fingers in there and figure out exactly which ratio of toughness to vitality yields the most EHP possible.

After some work at it, here is the formula I ended up with:

V = (10D + 10S – B) / 20

• V is the optimum amount of ADDITIONAL vitality you should itemize for out of S stats.
• D is your base defense from gear and traits (with level 80 exotics that is 920 for light, 1064 for medium, and 1211 for heavy armor. Add 61 if you use a shield.)
• B is your base health BEFORE vitality is factored into — being again, health from traits plus base health (1545 for elementalists, guardians and thieves, 5922 for mesmers, engineers and rangers and 9212 for warriors and necromancers.)
• S is the amount of stats you’re willing to put toward EHP. This amount is set by you, the user of the formula. If you want to use 1k stats for EHP, then put 1k in for S.

Some notes about the formula:

• This is just a measure of EHP. This doesn’t factor healing or Healing Power in at all. However, you can put it in there if you want — take a rough guesstimate of how much healing you expect to get throughout a fight and add it to B. Let’s say, as a mesmer, I expect to use Ether Feast twice in a fight, I’d just take double what my Ether Feast heals for and add it to B.
• This formula gives you the ideal mix of vitality and toughness that grants you the highest possible EHP. The formula, however, outputs in terms of V, so if you need to get toughness, just take the output and subtract it from S, which is the amount of stat points you’re spending on both toughness and vitality.
• For low quantities of S you will usually get a V which is larger than S. This is okay; all this means is that if it were possible the ideal spread of vitality and toughness actually involves dropping below the base toughness amount, which clearly isn’t possible. The opposite is true if you get a negative V somehow — that means the ideal amount of stats involves so much toughness it’d be best to below minimum V. In either of these cases, just go full toughness or vitality.

So how about some practical results and examples?

Let’s say I’m playing my mesmer, which is almost always true. Let’s say I’m in WvW, running a build with 20 inspiration (vitality and healing power) so I can get that delicious Warden’s Feedback trait as well as 20 points in Chaos (toughness) to get the 20% faster staff skill recharge. Let’s say I expect to cast Ether Feast once before dying, but don’t expect to get any benefit from the additional illusions because those guys have the lifespan of a microbe in WvW. (Also assume no healing power on gear, for simplicity’s sake.) And finally, let’s say that I’m going to itemize my gear so that I’ve put 500 stat points into toughness and vitality — I don’t want to to an undying juggernaut, but I’d like to not explode when someone looks at me either.

So let’s get into the formula. My D is going to be 920 (full cloth exotics) + 200 (from 20 points in Chaos), or 1120. My S is 500, as I set it in the last sentence. My B is going to be 5922 (mesmer base health), plus 2000 (vitality from the Inspiration trait line), plus 5760 (the value of one cast of Ether Feast), or 13682. Now put it together:

V = ( [10 * 1120] + [10 * 500] – 13682) / 20
V = 125.9

Of my 500 stat points, I should make 126 of them vitality and the other 374 points toughness so I have maximum EHP under this scenario. Important — and good to know.

That would definitely describe me, Tyler. I have never swapped realms at all, ever, and as far as I know have never received benefit from my world’s WvW bonuses. Not that my world ever really has any bonuses any more, but last week we actually maxed our entire track out and still nothing, not an ounce of increase anywhere.

Call me a nerd; it’s a true statement. When I was recently given a writing assignment from my entry-level composition class in college to creatively describe a public place my mind immediately jumped to GW2’s lush locales and not long after that settled on Rata Sum. My professor is very relaxed and after asking her about it she gave me her express permission to write about that topic and so off I went to write my paper.

Well, after writing my paper I found that I would really like to know the name of the river underneath the city. Reading through my essay I find myself repeatedly and clumsily using the terms “the river valley” and “the river” and it sticks out like a sore thumb because in the real world a good handful of these instances would include the name of the river — the Tiber river valley, for example. It’s just one of those small details which would be readily available and known to all and therefore since my writing is in an in-universe perspective it feels wrong that I would not call it by it’s name.

So long question short, what is the name of the river running underneath Rata Sum? Does it have an official name? As far as I can tell if it is named that name is never mentioned in-game, although I have not read any of the books released prior to GW2 so perhaps it is mentioned there.

If the river name is not officially known, is there anyone or anywhere on the GW2 team I can email about the question?

Worst comes to worst I can always make up a name, but I’d rather have the real canonical thing if it is even possible.

I have had this exact problem, Akiyl. Good description of it, too. Seems to ‘pick up’ the mouse at random, removing it from it’s prior job of controlling the camera.

Reading this thread makes me wonder if I am playing the same game as everyone else.

I am not what you would call a power user, at least not economy-wise. I sell things, sure. But just what I find. I sell every single thing I find for the best price I can — whether that is sold straight out on the TP, vendored, or salvaged and the materials sold. I don’t play the market at all. I simply sell what I find.

My main character is level 56 and so far I have been able to afford three character slots, four bank tabs and ten mystic forge stones with gold alone. I haven’t spent a dime on the BLTC, I just buy gems with gold and buy the items I want with that.

As far as I’m concerned this economy is doing well. Yes, there are a lot of junk item drops that are falling beneath their price floor, but honestly? That is to be expected. Almost every MMO encounters that issue.

Critter kills count towards the weapon killing blow achievements. Just run around with sword and board forever on your warrior and use 4 on cooldown whenever you see a critter.

Definitely the worst weapon to get the 5k kills on, though, yeah because that is the only damaging shield skill in the game.

The problem, Sarie, is that it is physically impossible to salvage anything other than white materials (excluding the aberrant Glob of Ectoplasm). I have used dozens of Basic Salvage Kits and have never received any material except a white material. Ever. And this experience is shared by every single person I’ve ever broached the topic to. Pennry in this thread is the only person I have ever seen claim to have received a fine/blue materials from salvaging items and I honestly think he simply did not pay attention to his salvages and is mistaken. There are entire studies, such as the one OP did, where people studied what you get when you salvage items — and they never, ever get fine/blue items. Ever.

No matter how you look at this, though, conceptually or numerically, there is just no way this is the intended behavior. As it is the only reason to ever use anything other than crude kits is to salvage ectoplasm. That simply cannot be how they intended the system to function. Maybe these kits are supposed to salvage fine/blue materials. But the cold, hard fact is that they currently cannot under any known circumstances.

So it most likely is a higher tier reward instead of the normal reward you would receive. And interesting that crude kits have an 11% chance of getting that and the master kits only up it by 25% of 11% — i.e. , 13.75% chance of getting a “rarer” material. What a crap deal!

All these numbers strike me as being bugs, to be honest. There is no way this is what they intended when they designed the salvage materials. As it is, unless you’re trying to get a rune out there is no reason to ever use anything except a crude salvage kit.

Thanks for the response and helpful link, Spacerogue.

I have used over a dozen Basic Salvage Kits which purportedly have a “10% chance of rarer materials” when salvaging an item and yet I have seen not a single thing I would consider to be a “rarer material”. At first I thought it would mean blue/fine materials (totems, bloods, claws, etc) or even the yellow/rare materials which very rarely drop otherwise (I’ve only seen three so far), but I have salvaged not a single unit of any of that, ever. Just the standard logs/ore/leather/cloth every single time.

What does it mean by “rarer material”? Does it have stipulations to when you can possibly salvage a “rarer material”, for example you have to salvage a green, yellow or orange item to possibly get a “rarer material”? Alternatively, one person in map chat put forward the hypothesis that “rarer material” meant a higher tier of the same type of material (like getting gold instead of iron on a level 25 metal item). Is that the case?

I would really like to know this because honestly it feels bad to just use nothing but Crude Salvage Kits because I can’t justify spending the additional money for a benefit I’m not certain even exists.