The ruminant tonic should really be added to this list. It’s a level ~200 potion. Ingredients are red meat, water, radiant dust, and rugged leather section. I’m pretty sure I used it to get to from about 200 to 250. It’s a cheap way to level AND you get to turn into a moose (or ram, etc.) – so it’s marginally more useful than the vendor trash you’ll otherwise make.
If Anet repeats its pattern from guild wars 1, there will be plenty of stuff to do for Halloween for lower level characters. In guild wars 1, many of the holiday tokens and goodies dropped in every zone from every monster, and several special events were held in main cities that were easily accessible at relatively low levels.
If you absolutely can’t stand to miss out on any aspect of an event, your safest bet would be to get a character to 80. It is possible that they’ll put some Halloween event content in higher level zones. If they don’t put in any level 80 content for this holiday, then they might do so for future holidays.
Well, the borderlands puzzles are closed, so this is probably the eternal battleground puzzle.
Very cool, congratulations, I hope you enjoy slaughtering your enemies and making a video.
But seriously, spill the beans on the recipe. You got your world first in. Help the rest of us out.
It’s roughly 10 levels. Many people have reported 12 levels, presumably from bonus XP.
@John Smith: Why the huge tax on a good which ANet wants to sell? (Gem transfer tax)
Posted by: Sparkie.3465
They don’t want people speculating in gems (as in, flipping them for a profit) as a way of making gold. This is a tamper-proof measure, at minimum.
Think about it. If you can speculate in the gem market with hope of making a profit, then so can the gold sellers. If you can mess with the gems-to-gold exchange rate, so can the gold farmers.
Who has more money to mess up the gems market? You or the gold sellers?
Gold sellers also have a very high motivation to screw with the gems-to-gold conversion rate in order to make their gold prices more appealing, or to give themselves room to raise their profit margins on each sale.
Why don’t you just list the item for the minimum on your range? A range won’t fix this for you – you’ll be undercut by a tiny margin just the same. It’ll end up being a slightly larger tiny margin if people have to play guessing games, so prices will drop even faster than they currently are.
When you play the trade post, you assume some risk in the listing fee. Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. You’ll have to go for narrower margins on whatever item you’re trying to sell, because from your description it has a greater supply than demand.
There’s an oversight in the way that forum URLs are generated, or an oversight in how the swear filter is implemented.
The URLs for forum threads are generated with the title of the thread. However, the URL is generated before the title is run through the swear filter. This allows for the creation of forum thread URLs with unfiltered profanity.
You should be vendoring the stuff and buying the nicer weapons that you want.
If you put in four items of the same type (like 4 staffs) then you’ll get a random staff. If it’s just 4 random weapons, then you’ll get out a random weapon that has no relation to the weapon types you put it.
The item you get out is usually of higher level than what you put in. It’s usually of the same quality, with a small chance of becoming higher quality.
In the vast majority of cases, doing this with leveling items will lose you money. You may luck out occasionally, but there just aren’t many valuable leveling items out there.
It’s a slightly different case when you use level 80 weapons. With items around level 75 or 80, you get a chance to make exotics that players want and legendary precursors. These can be sold for decent money (or start you on the way to a legendary). If you want the specifics on making these, look them up elsewhere. Expect that with time, the profit margin for many of the exotics will probably drop. I don’t know if this kind of mystic forge use is a net profit or a net loss, so investigate this at your own peril.
You can supplement your badges by doing map completion. They patched it a little while back so that WvW map completion awards some badges. I think it was 10 per map, but it might be 20.
Shaiel, I urge you to get help for your phobia. I have a great deal of sympathy for you. My mother suffers from a fear of heights. She can’t stand being in a 3rd floor apartment, and jump puzzles like the ones in this game would terrify her too.
But please, get help. It’s treatable. Not for the sake of a silly game, but for your own sake. I imagine you’re probably close to my age, so you haven’t really found out the full extent of the things your phobia will cripple you from doing. Watching my mother go through this, I can tell you – it’s terrible, it will have dramatic negative effects on you for the rest of your life, and if it’s left untreated it can gradually get worse.
She can’t visit most of her friends or relatives because of her fear of heights. Much of this comes from a strong fear of getting in an airplane. However, some of it comes from being unable to tolerate hotel rooms on high floors, apartments that are high off the ground, and car rides that go over mountains or too near a cliff. My mother hasn’t been able to visit me in over 10 years because of this.
When we were kids, I hated her phobia with a passion because she wouldn’t let my brother and I do normal things. She couldn’t stand to see either of us climb a tree, or ski, or even visit our grandparents in their high-rise condo, because of her fear of heights.
It’s quite likely you aren’t nearly as extreme about it as my mother – but still, get help. You don’t have to live your life hostage to fear. It will open up so many good parts of life to you.
This is America! Vote with your money. If you like this game, keep playing and throw your time or money at it. If you don’t, go throw your money at a different game.
Comments and opinion polls and Internet rantings are irrelevant. Cash is king!
(1) Stop tailoring.
(2) Sell your cloth. Sell most of your other crafting mats if money is your current concern. While leveling, only craft for the XP.
(3) Do heart points. These are your major source of leveling income.
(4) Don’t teleport everywhere. Walk whenever possible. Remember that you can log out in the field and many zones have crafting areas where you can access your bank as well as trade post NPCs should you need to buy or sell something.
(5) Buy bags, don’t make them. It’s a waste of money to craft them – your crafting materials are worth a lot more than the bags sell for. Side note – all armor-crafters can make bags, and tailors make some of the most expensive ones. Leatherworker makes the cheapest ones, generally.
(6) Do events. You get money for events.
(7) Don’t WvW. The repair costs and blueprint costs are a drain unless you’re in a good, organized group. Once you hit 80, things will change.
(8)Sell unidentified dyes, sigils, and similar frills at the trade post.
(9) Don’t be afraid to buy stuff on the trade post if your gear is getting out-of-date. Killing mobs faster is going to be good for your bottom line, and the blue-quality gear is very cheap. It’s an investment – don’t overdo it, but don’t run around with a weapon that is more than 5 levels out of date.
Your current options for reporting bots are fine for dealing with one or two players, occasionally.
I am running into packs of 5-10 bots at a time. With your current options, I cannot efficiently report those bot groups.
I can’t tell who I’ve already reported and who I haven’t. I’m also not willing to chase them around for several minutes to try to pick out each bot for a report, as if I was playing whack-a-mole.
Please make it easier to report bots. At the very least, it might help to include the character name in your automatic message that thanks me for my report. I don’t have many other suggestions about how you could make this easier for me, but I’d go back to trying to report entire bot packs if you can offer me something that involves less chasing and frantic clicking of bobbing character names that are all alike.
In Guild Wars 1, special event drops were broadly available in all zones and at all levels. I expect that the vast majority of holiday content will be accessible at any level.
However, if you want to be sure you can do absolutely everything, then you ought to get to 80. That’s just common sense. I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if they put some special events in 80 zones as long as there are things for me (not max level) to do. If complete special event participation is your top interest, get something to 80.
How about a “bulk mailing” fee instead?
Apply a charge to mails if you send out more than 10 (or whatever) in an hour.
I just realized that I should also mention something very important about the trade post.
There is a 15% fee for a successful transaction. If you want to profit at all you should be aware of this. When you post an item, there’s an obvious 5% fee for listing the item. When the item is sold, the trade post takes a 10% tax from your profits – and that tax isn’t clearly described in-game yet. So make sure your profit margin accounts for that!
Always multiply your sale price by 0.85 and compare that number to the vendor price before you bother posting stuff.
You don’t use it to sell gear drops that are blue. You can use it so sell some of the better green (leveling) drops. You usually can’t use it to sell leveling yellows, though.
The majority of items you pick up are not something to put on the trade post – they’re cheap crap that no one else wants, either. Take them to an NPC vendor or salvage them as appropriate.
You use the trade post to:
(1) Buy food very cheaply for the XP boost and useful stats. It’s worthwhile to always have an XP boost from food, and there are plenty of foods that sell for 2 cp.
(2) Buy gear cheaply for slots that you’ve had bad luck filling for 5+ levels. Especially accessories.
(3) Sell excess crafting materials – especially cloth, metals, rare herbs, and “fine crafting materials” – those blue-quality teeth and claws and such. Vanilla sells especially well, but other limited materials like strawberries do well, too.
(4) Buy or sell upgrade items. Buy cheap upgrades, sell expensive ones.
(5) Buy bags.
(6) Trade on items that you think you can profit on – this is probably not something you in particular want to do, but it is a viable use for those interested.
Promega is wrong. If you are salvaging a white item and getting out white items, the level of your salvage kit does not matter.
You get exactly the same drop rate on gossamer vs. silk from salvaging rags with a crude kit as you do with a black lion kit. So use the cheaper crude kits!
Salvage kit level might matter for ectos – I have no idea. Salvage kit level does matter for getting out gems and other upgrade components, but that’s spelled out on each kit.
Problem with discovering Chef recipes with jugs of water as an ingredient
in Crafting
Posted by: Sparkie.3465
None of those are “discovery” recipes. You have them by default.
To save you further heartache – you also get all the spices recipes by default, and many (all? don’t remember) the cooking component recipes (blueberry pie filling, wet and dry baker’s mixes, frosting, and so on).
When in doubt, check your known recipes first. Then check the level of the recipe you’re trying to make. That’ll solve most of your cooking discovery problems.
I can’t help but play Devil’s Advocate here.
You’ve framed your argument to focus on low-level items that use vanilla. I assume you mean to say that vanilla is a barrier to leveling cooking. I disagree. There are vanilla-free recipes to circumvent the scarcity issue. Lack of vanilla is not going to prevent anyone from getting to 400 cooking.
I suspect that what you really intend to complain about is the omnomberry bar. I think you’ll have to look at the buff and decide whether it’s worth the 40+ silver. I haven’t gotten to Orr yet, so I don’t know how much money you get from monster drops there. I know that the monsters I fight barely drop any money at all. I have a hard time believing that you kill enough monsters in Orr to make 1 gold without the buff in 30 minutes (not considering gold from magic drops and events – just from monster coin drop!).
If I have guessed correctly, then I would like to steer you towards the Omnomberry Tart. It gives the same 30% magic find bonus but the ingredients look much more reasonable. Omnomberry bars are a gold sink right now – you’ll never make up the price of vanilla with them.
I’ve been unable to do the jumping puzzle in one of the WvW borderlands for a few days.
I have the key parts, I stand at the vault door pushing ‘f’ but the door won’t open. I’m quite sure I have both parts of the key. I’ve done the puzzle in the past successfully.
What am I doing wrong? Have I done something stupid? Is it broken? Am I broken? Does this happen to other people?
The puzzle was suspiciously quiet when I tried to do this earlier, giving me the impression that I’m not the only one having this difficulty, but no one answered me in map chat about it.
I think you misunderstand something.
You can just make the other pieces of the armor set that you like.
If you use the Mystic Forge with the chest piece, then you will be given a recipe, not an armor set. You would need to learn the recipe and use crafting materials to make the rest of the set.
The bug that the wiki is referring to is, specifically, that the box set recipe takes lots more materials than the individual items summed together. The recipe is supposed to take approximately the same amount of materials as crafting a full set individually. I haven’t heard anything about it getting fixed yet.
It would never make sense to use a chest piece to make the box set recipe for a single, personal set of armor. The box sets are meant for people who intend to mass-produce armor, for sale or for their guild mates and friends. You would always be spending more to make the box set once than to make the individual items once – because you have to “buy” the recipe from the forge first.
Yes, there are more recipes.
Some are on Karma vendors around the world. Those make soulbound items that probably aren’t actually useful to you (depending on your level). The official wiki lists several of them, but I don’t think it’s an exhaustive list. Usually, these are on heart NPCs after you complete the heart objectives.
Miyani in Lion’s Arch also sells some (expensive – 10g!) huntsman recipes. These are components to legendary items. I suspect that the gifts produced by these recipes are account-bound, but I do not know for sure whether that is true – I haven’t made any of them.
I just went to uninstall the game, and the uninstall screen asks me to provide feedback with a link to an exit survey.
When I clicked on the link to fill out the survey, the link is broken. My web browser cannot find the server. The link provided goes to http://exitsurvey.guildwars2.com/ which must be out of date.
Not that my feedback would’ve been very helpful. All I would’ve told you is: “The game is distracting me from finishing my thesis. I will likely play again once I finish my doctorate.” See y’all again in a week or two.
I thought you also got guild points for helping folks with personal story, but I admit I haven’t checked.
I am having huge problems with the camera making me motion sick.
Specifically, I have a Charr character and I was trying to do the jumping puzzle “Loreclaw Expanse” in the Plains of Ashford. I had the worst time of it when trying to go back up after falling in the water at the bottom of the puzzle.
Every time my character jumped against a wall, the camera lurches left and right in a way that makes me motion sick. I had to stop playing early for the evening because of it. I did many jumping puzzles prior to the patch that changed the camera, and this is different. The prior motion was annoying and hard to see in, but it didn’t make me sick the way this new camera does.
I do not normally have motion sickness in video games (and I don’t get motion sick often in real life) so this was rather unpleasant.
I have this same problem on my elementalist with exactly the same item. I’m not level 80 yet, so I’ve been transmuting the glacial eye skin onto lower level headpieces with the low level transmutation stone.
My headpiece has the right stats and the right name, but it vanished at some point in the process (possibly when I started using items with an upgrade slot).
The weirdest part of the bug is, I can see the glacial eye model correctly on the preview of my character in the log-in screen. The headpiece doesn’t display in-game or in the hero panel, though.
Yes, I’m quite sure that I have the display box checked.
I’d like to see a mystic forge recipe that allows us to combine the charges on partially used tools. This could apply to salvage kits, axes, mining picks, and/or harvesting sickles.
I envision this recipe as a way to deal with Black Lion tools, like the Black Lion logging axe and Black Lion salvage kit. Right now, those items have 10 to 25 charges on them. They’re really handy if you’re only opening 1 black lion chest. They’re a nuisance if you’re opening ~5 black lion chests in a row. If you could combine identical tools up to some limit (~100), then perhaps less people would end up deleting the axes and sickles.
It’d also be nice to extend this functionality to other salvage kits. I’d limit the possible combined charges to ~75 so that the mystic salvage kit still has its niche. It’d be nice on other tools as well, but those already have 100 charges so there’s not as much room for improvement.
The recipe should be more complicated than simply combining the existing charges on an item. I’d likely make the recipe take 2 identical items with varying charges, X mystic coins in the third slot, and some other component in the 4th slot. This is a convenience, so there should be a cost associated with the recipe. I’d personally make the 4th component vary with tool level or salvage kit type, and choose a crafting component that’s appropriately leveled to the corresponding content. For crude salvage kits, it’d likely be 1 mystic coin and 5 blueberries (walnuts? cinnamon sticks? green wood logs?). For the Black Lion salvage kits, it’d be somewhat more expensive components. Black Lion tool recipes would need to have costs on the low side to encourage use.
Oh goodness gracious. “Unlucky person,” eh? Do you check your horoscope before donning your gear to go adventuring? Consult the tarot? Assess the zone’s feng shui before deciding whether magic find gear is appropriate? I wonder if Anet knew that a simple stat could bring out so much superstitious nonsense.
Look, Foronisus, every bit of information out there on magic find is speculation. No one has sat down and really figured out what it does. The diminishing returns mechanic made it difficult to figure out what it does in the field, which is what most people care about. Only a few tests have been run on other applications, and we can make some educated guesses. Tests done in the field thus far have been little more than superstition, feelings, and anecdotes. I expect that magic find will raise the drop rates of magical armor and magical weapons as you fight monsters. It might raise the drop rates of magical items, like fine crafting materials, but no one knows for certain.
If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that magic find probably has no influence over Black Lion chests or unidentified dyes. Black Lion chests always give you one item from the tonic table, one item from the booster table, and one item from the tools and goodies table. I doubt you can boost your odds of getting a permanent tonic or a permanent black lion trader or whatever from wearing magic find. I also doubt you can boost your odds of getting higher rarity dyes from unidentified dye by wearing magic find gear.
However, that’s speculation, based off of general programming knowledge, some knowledge of how odds and drop tables interact, and a specific interpretation of the word “magic.” I haven’t checked and I can’t make any guarantees.
This is testable for dyes. I’ll happily encourage you to try it out and tell us your results! For Black Lion chests, the drop rates on the rare items are so very low that we’d have an extremely difficult time ever testing this idea out. It’d take a lot of real money, far more than an average player would want to spend.
This is why we need more women in game development. Only men would think it sensible to make hair accessories immutable and makeup permanent, but let me change the dye on my armor at will. I understand the game mechanic perfectly well, but it doesn’t make sense whatsoever. Anet got rid of a lot of other gaming tropes that don’t make sense – here’s hoping they’ll adopt a more sensible policy about hair, makeup, and accessories.
I’d be happy to pay a modest fee for new makeup kits, new hair styles and colors, or new accessories, but they should be easy to swap between.
Hint to the game developers regarding the real world: It takes virtually no effort or expense to change hair accessories or hair style. It takes a modest expense but very little effort to change your makeup or hair color. Dying armor, or even normal clothing, is a difficult and expensive undertaking. That’s why your wife buys you three different colors of shirts instead of hand-dying them for you every morning.
The Fine Salvage Kit (blue-quality, 40% chance of recovering upgrades) is available for 252 karma in Black Citadel on the cultural weaponsmiths near Diessa Gate Waypoint. They also have the crude salvage kits for a bit of karma.
The Norn cultural weaponsmiths also sell the fine salvage kits for karma.
The Asuran, Sylvani, and Human weaponsmiths do not sell any of the fancy salvage kits for karma, only the crude kits.
The glicko ratings are a bit out of whack because of all the server transfers. The 24-hour cooldown has certainly helped, but it hasn’t stopped the transfer problem completely. I can’t blame people who love WvW for transferring to the winning team when it is so easy to do. I think that once they implement transfers as a gem-only or pay-only feature then the Glicko ratings will improve considerably.
As an Ehmry Bay player, I think part of it is that Maguuma pulled their act together considerably from last week, and part of it is the glicko rating issue. We don’t belong in this bracket, and anyone on the server could’ve told you that three weeks ago, but we had once very skewed match-up that bumped us up here for the moment.
The bugs don’t help. I won’t accuse Maguuma of anything, but being unable to capture our own garrison on our borderlands (because of the invulnerable bug) was a huge hit for us. It’s not so much the points issue – it’s the constant drain of manpower as every new batch of players needs to see the bug for themselves before they’ll leave the darned thing alone. Even at the end of the week, it was coming up every 5 minutes in chat. We wouldn’t likely have won without the bug, but it sure put a noticeable damper on participation and captures.
We’ll probably see you again for the next match up, Yaks, so here’s hoping for a closer fight. Good bye (and good riddance), Goons! I hope you give your next opponents just as rough of a time as you gave us.
There are people getting these after the game’s been out for a month, with minimal assistance from others.
<old fart rant begins, banjo plays in background>
Have you played any other MMOs? Most of them restrict the really fancy items to people with enough clout to round up another 10-40 people to help them. Usually you have to convince at least some of those people to wait in line for a mere chance at the coveted rare item. Others who help you won’t get any chance at the item whatsoever – they come along for the fights because they like you or because they’re hoping to get decent scraps that you leave behind in your trail.
The worst part of the legendary grind has a whopping 33% RNG chance. That’s huge. Some of the rarest, sought after items I remember from my WoW days had drop rates of about 1%, ~5 to 25 people you had to compete with to get it, and week-long lockouts to even attempt to obtain it. You could try to get the thing every single week for years and never even see it drop – rare mounts, mainly. For legendary weapons, they never even had the courtesy to offer such weapons to all classes – they’d restrict such things to, say, only warriors and rogues for 6 months, then swap to only offering one for casters for another 6 months.
Whippersnappers!
<sits down in the rocking chair on the porch and shakes her cane angrily>The cap is 5 for most skills. Some have a lower threshold, but it is usually listed on the skill.
This prevents WvW from being dominated too heavily by AoE so people don’t feel overly pigeonholed.
If you want to test it yourself, I suggest you find a big group of low-level stuff. I recall in one of the borderlands WvW maps there is a big cluster of rabbit critters in the northernmost supply camp. I think there are more than 5, simply because I remember blasting them on my elementalist and being a bit surprised that they didn’t all die. I got an achievement for doing lots of damage at once, though.
This also depends heavily on your profession. There are 19 weapon types.
Guardians and warriors can use 11 different weapons each, more than half of the weapon drops they’ll get.
Engineers can use only 4, and I’m sure they feel like they get a lot of extra junk. Elementalists can use 5 and I know it feels like I never get weapons that I can use on mine.
Each profession is balanced around the number and types of weapons they can use. Engineers don’t need as many because they have kits. Elementalists don’t need many weapons because they have elemental attunements instead – each weapon acts as if it were four different weapons.
Sell off the stuff you don’t need to buy stuff you do need. Most leveling gear is very cheap on the trade post. It’s a worthwhile investment to update your gear when it gets 10 levels outdated.
If you use karma to buy your salvage kits, you can make a higher coin profit off of the items that you salvage if they have accessories.
The names of colors in several steps of the character creation are very odd. They all need a re-naming, if you ask me.
I ran into a problem when creating a character (which I reported in more detail at the time) where multiple, distinct colors had identical names. I think I was looking at eye colors, but it’s been a while. Multiple “light greens” and multiple “pale blues” or something similar.
Once you get the hang of the WvW thing, it doesn’t take too long to get the achievement.
The achievement itself doesn’t grant you anything so extreme that you’re missing out on something major. It’s a couple of mystic coins and 3% experience toward your next level. If you don’t like PVP, then it should be easy for you to “make up” the experience and silver you are missing out on by doing your normal activities instead of working on the PVP.
You probably don’t need to check daily. No patches means no major game changes which means no new dyes. If there are any unlisted that exist, the drop rate would have to be at least as bad as 1 in 10 million or so. Probably worse – I don’t have a big handle on the unidentified dye market but I hear it’s one of the fastest in the game.
There are a number of useless listings and entries on the trading post.
Many of the items that turn up in searches are account-bound only. I know they’re there because, at one point, those items weren’t account bound. However, now the phantom items are just making searches unpleasant to sort through. Please clean these out of the trading post so we get better search results. As an example, salvage kits and bulk cooking ingredients are both displayed in the trade post but impossible to actually buy or sell, though those are just the tip of the iceberg.
The other group of entries that I’d be grateful to have out of the way are the below-threshold buy orders (below vendor prices). Why are we even allowed to post such buy orders? They can’t be filled. They just take up space. I imagine most people post them on accident.
It also happens on the “opening” page of the trade post buy tab. The page that lists “most traded” and “most supplied” and that sort of stuff. That page looks like it is days out of date at this point. It’s not as big of a deal, but it’s still annoying.
You don’t need or want people like me, sitting back and waiting for you to capture objectives so I can waltz in and grab the POI. I’m not there helping you, I’m just squatting on a WvW slot that someone else, someone who isn’t being a useless tool, could be using. I’m only there for myself. I don’t care what else happens so long as I get what I came for. If the enemy wants an objective I’ve already been to, they are welcome to it. I’ll even hold the gate open for them.
Too bad no one on the design team had the foresight to realize this would happen when they put PvE objectives into a PvP environment. Though I’m sure they’ll figure out a way soon enough, to auto-kick the chronically disinterested, like myself.
You’re the tiny minority. Most people who want the PVE objectives in PVP do something sane instead of AFKing until they see the point they want open up. Most of us either try to claim the points we need in active PVP, wait for the weekly map shuffles, or transfer to servers where the results are skewed in our favor. What you’re doing is a pure waste of your own time, especially since transfers are free.
How would that help the economy?
Do you mean to say: “Then I could sell my greens to gambling suckers and make more money.”
“The economy” is not synonymous with “my personal bank account,” folks. Learn to play the trading post that is there, not the economy you wish was there.
There are only a very few breathing apparatuses available, mainly from karma vendors. I don’t know if any of the skins vary at all. They tend to have drab colors and I couldn’t see a difference in a quick glance at the ones I’ve used. Maybe you should post a suggestion.
I can tell you definitively that the “rarer materials” does not apply to Basic-rarity salvage. For example, you’ll get just as much gossamer compared to silk with the cheapest salvage kit as you will with the most expensive. Stick to crude kits for this. Use your nice kits for valuable sigils / upgrade components.
I don’t know whether the “rarer materials” applies to ectos, as I’m not quite wealthy enough or high enough level to test that. I’d hope so, but what do I know?
I don’t know what average drop rates people are getting with ectos. If the market has stabilized at about 1 yellow = 1 ecto, then that’s a pretty convincing sign that the drop rate averages out to 1. You could try your luck and hope to get 2-3, or you could play it safe and put the yellow on the trade post. In the long term, your results will be pretty equivalent and I’d do whichever sold faster (likely the ectos).
As to whether you should salvage whites or not, you’ll have to check the trade post. If there are large volumes of whites up there, I’d salvage them myself. If there aren’t, you can probably get a better result by posting them than vendoring them. For low level materials, blues are almost always better to vendor but greens with nice stats are sometimes worthwhile to post on the TP. I’d assume that the market is saturated with greens at 80 and you should vendor them, but I’m not in that market yet.
The mystic forge has several different purposes.
1) Gambling. You can try your luck on getting an upgrade. This can be done with most items – armor, weapons, dyes, upgrade components (like sigils and gems), miniatures. It behaves according to specific rules – but under many circumstances you will lose money.
2) Maintaining certain prices in the economy. There are ways to convert low-level items into higher-level equivalents (green wood into a better type of wood, for example). This sets a price relationship between those two items, to keep certain extremes in check. They’ve also used temporary recipes to remove excessive quantities of items out of the economy.
3) Making legendary weapons (weapons with neat skins and special effects, but relatively normal stats). This takes a great deal of time, gold, and a near-infinite capacity to whine like a kicked dog.
4) Making certain crafting recipes. Many of these overlap with #3, but not all of them. You can craft food tray recipes and armor box recipes in the Mystic Forge. You can also make entertaining cosmetic tonics using the base mystery tonics that are found in Black Lion chests. You can make stronger siege weapon blueprints.
I’m just completely baffled by that fact that I was getting less and less karma (and experience/coin) rewarded for doing events while my first 60 minutes karma booster was still 10 minutes from expiring…
Why are these things even sold if we aren’t allowed to play for 1 hour straight?
Maybe they’re sold in 1 hour increments so you don’t feel like you absolutely must squeeze every last bit of time from them? Maybe they thought this would make more casual players comfortable with them. You know, so you aren’t counting every second of every pee break and cursing every moment of load screen time.
I know I use the trade XP boosters when I’m going to be crafting for a bit, but I’m not waiting until I have 1 full hour of mats pre-planned and ready to just push the button. The 1-hour timer lets me feel like I’m not losing out when I need to run to the Trade Post and back to pick up one more strawberry for that cake, or when I need to run to my guild bank to get some odd component. It makes me feel like I don’t have to mind every single second of my booster, like I would if they were 5-minute or 15-minute increments. If I get 9/10 of the time to do something productive and I didn’t have to sweat the small stuff, I call that a win.
If you’re getting 50 minutes of nonstop karma events in a 60 minute booster, that sounds pretty respectable to me. Means you have a little time to run around to other events, some time to vendor trash, some time to inspect your drops if you get something cool, without watching your booster timer like a hawk.