TL;DR: ecto/ori/goss might not be the rare material; can be explained with a possible bug
My $0.02 about what is a “rare material”:
On a single occasion I recived a refined wood plank from a lvl80 rare, with a BLSK. IIRC it was an elder one, I know, I should’ve made a screenshot
Okay, but why haven’t anyone else reported this? Here’s my theory:
Let’s consider refined as “rare material”, instead of ecto/ori/gossamer/ancient. Refined stuff can be found from centaur supply carts for example, so they can be obtained without TP/crafting. The problem with this is that 25% on a Master/Mystic kit should be plenty to have a visible effect.
But if we happen to apply the % twice, then the 50% (in the case of a BLSK, which is 1 in 2) becomes 0,5% (which is 1 in 2000 salvages). And that’s only when using BLSK, meaning that a Master/Mystic kit would need 5000 salvages to recive a single refined material. The lower tiers would need even more salvages to get any. On top of this, you could get bad RNG, meaning you won’t see one in 10k+ salvages. For the record currently I have 3503 salvages, mostly crude and basic, around 100 master and somewhere around 150 BL.
To put these numbers into a more understandable form, imagine:
- 3 bank tabs full of BLSK (2250 uses)
- 7 full bank tabs of Master kits (5250 uses)
- 20 slot bag full of Mystic kits (5000 uses)
The 3 tabs of BLSK would cost you 27 000 gems (bought at full price, 300/ea, ignoring the cost of the tabs) and the 20 Mystic kits would need Forge Stones for 2700 gems (bought in bulk, 45/ea, 3 needed per kit). Considering that 1g ~ 50 gems nowadays, any of the two is kind of expensive to spend on salvaging.
As for how could this happen:
- Person A is responsible for making the salvage mechanism
- Person B is responsible for giving values to items
- B knows that 50% is mostly used as a multiplication by 0,5, so he gives the BLSK a 0,5 value for rare materials
- A knows that his module will recive a %, so he transforms the value into a % by dividing by 100
- Since the % to number conversion was done twice, instead of dividing by 100, they’ve divided by 10 000
Edit: Dye from salvage https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/Anyone-else-ever-salvaged-items-into-dyes
(edited by shael.8237)