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Runecrafter's Salvage-o-Matic

Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed your holiday festivities and are ready for LS4 E5 - All or Nothing - coming 8 Jan 2019.

One of the advantages of being in a large guild is that you hear things - and we certainly do hear things in Feline Airlines. We were tipped off to a Reddit thread which stated there was this new way of making 900 gold per hour. Naturally, we were interested.

This all started with ArenaNet's quiet introduction of a new salvage toy, the Runecrafter's Salvage-o-matic. 600 gems or roughly 220 gold.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Runecrafter%27s_Salvage-o-Matic

Like the copper and silver-fed versions, this costs 30 copper per use and has a 100% chance to salvage upgrade materials. The reddit thread goes something like this:

  1. Buy stacks of the green version of Unidentified Gear.
  2. Get 1,000% Magic Find.
  3. Open up all the bags and salvage using the rune-salvage
  4. Then sell.
  5. Rinse and repeat until you are bored.

Others have said in the same thread states that the pace is closer to 200-300 gold per hour and not 900. But even so, it is still very respectable.

So is this indeed viable? Is the Runecrafter Salvage-o-matic worth the 600 gems? That's the topic for today.

First off, let's compare this with the other salvage toys:

So the tool one uses to salvage bulk items determines the results. Copper would give 10 tier 6 materials and 20 salvaged runes/sigils. Silver would yield 25 tier 6 and 80 salvaged upgrades and runecrafters 20 tier 6 and a guaranteed rune/sigil salvage. (We are assuming level 80 salvages naturally.)

The reason that is important is because of the new crafting mechanism which uses lucent motes as well as charms and symbols. Some of these charms and symbols approach 2 gold in value so one can see why this can be profitable. Get 100 of these 2 gold charms and you have 170 gold profit - in addition to anything else which you get.

So is this actually viable? We do not speculate on short term profitability. We take a long view approach. We value consistency. That said, lucent motes have plummeted in price. One can buy a stack for under 40 silver.

The same reddit thread also had a mini discussion as to which of these salvage tools should be used. The general consensus was:

There is a minority view which states that the silver should be set aside for the runecrafter as there is a higher chance for better items and a lower cost.

There was also a mini-thread about if you can only get one, which should it be? Again the consensus was the runecrafter as this is a good middle-of-the-road compromise between copper and silver.

So what is the bottom line?

We feel that the gains are exaggerated. Greens do not have a high chance of yielding the good stuff so we would recommend staying with the copper-fed for blues and greens. Yellows typically have a higher value and the choice really comes down to which do you prefer - a better chance at ectoplasms at the expense of a chance at a charm or symbol or even just selling them outright and skip the salvaging thing all together.

If you only can afford one, the copper-fed is still the king.

The runecrafter seems to be better than the silver-fed but like silver-fed, not necessary for players to get. One can always sell off yellows and exotics and use the mystic salvage kit for individual salvage.

Last time we discussed this new toy called the Runecrafer Salvage-o-Matic.and discussed its viability for making 900 gold per hour as some on Reddit claim.

It also occurred to us that we really should do a comparison between the salvage kits. How effective are they really and which of these tools should you invest in? We designed some tests and there were some unexpected results.

For our first test, we salvaged 300 Valuable Metal Scraps - 100 for each of the three (3) infinite salvage kits. As you might expect, the output from each kit was roughly the same - from 121/124 and 131 mithril from copper/Runecrafter and Silver respectively. The orichalcum output was nearly identical - 19/20/19. So when one factors in the cost of each individual salvage, it is clear that the copper-fed salvage-o-matic is the clear winner.

This also totally makes sense. Blues rarely have runes/sigils in them. These metal scraps certainly did not. Any gains from the few "lucky salvages" would easily be swallowed up by the increased cost of salvaging.

For our 2nd test, we opened up 100+ blue/common pieces of unidentified gear and salvaged all blue and green gear using each tool. These results were certainly unexpected.

The total costs of the materials salvaged were 172.34/196.88/220.14 for copper/rune/silver. When you factor the cost of salvaging, the gross gain was 169.34/166.88/160.14. So while copper is the most efficient, it isn't all that great a gain. We theorize that if we had done 100 greens of each, the results would be pretty much equal. In other words, it does not matter which tool you use to salvage greens.

For our 3rd test, we salvaged 50 rares with rune and silver salvage kits. (We didn't think salvaging rares with copper salvage kits would have yielded anything interesting.)

These results confuse us as we got an outlier "lucky salvage". One of the salvage results gave us two (2) charms of brilliance which goes for over 3 gold. With a small sample size of 50 rares, it is difficult to say which tool is better than the other.

If you include this lucky roll in the results, then silver wins out - 905.16 to 651.95. However, if you exclude the outlier, then runecrafter "wins" 651.95 to 570.48.

Even splitting the difference does not give a clear indication of which tool is better. We suspect the runecrafter would be better for rares over the silver but this needs to be confirmed with additional testing.

For our final test, we salvaged 7 exotics per kit. Even with this small sample size, a winner started to show itself. The silver won 200.03 to 119.88. The bulk of this was that the silver gave 4 more ectoplasm than the runecrafter , 10 to 6. So for exotics, we would recommend the silver-fed.

So in conclusion here are our recommendations:

Notes:

For those who wish to look at the detailed results, here is the spreadsheet.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wcj6KI4grDJO2vHQipTn0zdydQLuxpdF

We were definitely surprised by the lack of charms/symbols which were obtained in these tests - only 4. Three of which came from the silver-fed.

2020 Update

Nothing much really has changed.

Bottom Line:

We do not believe there is enough here to make this a viable profit making mechanism.

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