Silver-Fed Salvage-O-Matic now obsolete?

[ArchonWing.9480]

Both salvage kits are for QoL. If you bought them for value, much like every other item on the gem store, you'll probably doing it wrong.

[MithranArkanere.8957]

> @"DaFishBob.6518" said:

> I feel just the opposite, if you want any chance of getting motes, you better bust out that silver fed. Copper fed is incredibly slow for mote salvaging.

 

Indeed. It's quite the contrary.

Now I salvage items without upgrades with copper, and masterwork and higher with silver.

 

I get practically no upgrade materials with copper.

 

Now we just need a 'salvage all items with/witohut upgrades' in the context menu of the kits.

[Ayakaru.6583]

SFSOM was obsolete from the start since its cost was suboptimal.

You literally paid for the convenience of having one kit, and its value would never break even.

Copper fed, and a mystic kit, is the right combination of you care the slightest about efficiency and value

[Rauderi.8706]

I'm drowning in forge stones anyway. Can I sell my Silver Fed to someone else pls?

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

I would like to try to reset people's expectations of what they'll see from salvaging gear. The short version is:

> Don't expect to see any motes, most of the time.

> Definitely don't expect to see symbols|charms regularly.

> The value is over the long term of salvaging repeatedly, across many full inventories. In a single session, you won't see much.

 

****

**Medium Story**

 

* A huge inventory full of gear is unlikely to return many motes using copper-fed and only a few using silver-fed.

* Despite that, the long-term value is currently better than what it used to be, since minor runes|sigils were vendor trash at 16 copper each. That's because of the symbols|charms (despite their low, low drop rates).

* The reason to use silver-fed is for the long term, over dozens and dozens of full inventories, for the chance of getting valuable symbols & charms.

* Currently the most valuable symbols & charms are priced high enough that you hardly need any to pay for the cost of the silver-fed.

 

Silver-fed recovered upgrades four times as often as Copper-fed and the data shows that hasn't changed. The amount of motes that drop from gear is consistent with the amount that drops from salvaging runes & sigils directly, it's just that (a) not all gear has an upgrade and (b) neither kit recovers the upgrade all the time.

 

*****

**Detailed example**

 

Let's take a modestly-realistic example with easy math: salvaging all with a full inventory of 132 slots (seven 20-slot bag with room for 'stuff'). Let's assume 200-400% MF, so that 80% of the gear is masterwork, 20% fine or below. And let's further assume that 95% of the masterwork gear has an upgrade. 95% * 80% * 132 = 100 pieces of masterwork gear, with an upgrade. The copper-fed will recover 20% of the minors & salvage them; the silver-fed will recover 80%. So that's 20 & 80 respectively. On average, that means 0.4 motes while using copper-fed and 3.2 motes from the silver-fed. Using salvage all, the costs are ~4 silver on the copper-fed and 79s from the silver-fed.

 

That sounds like the silver-fed is a waste. And it is, if you all you want are motes. The real value in using silver-fed is that the chance of symbols & charms _from gear_ is 4x as good (from the runes & sigils, the rates are the same; it's because the chance of stealth-recovering the runes|sigils is better). Since the rate is low, it takes 1000s of pieces of gear before you notice a difference. That means a few dozen entirely full inventories.

 

Most players won't salvage the much on most days. Only heavy farmers of Istan or Silverwastes get that much gear (or people who speculate in bags of gear purchased on the TP). So the vast majority of us aren't going to notice that we're getting more coin out of salvaging because we won't see it most of the time. When we do, the spike in value will be big.

 

****

 

To summarize, if you have a lot of space and salvage a full inventory of gear _without sorting_, it will seem like you're not getting any motes from copper-fed, but it will also cost you far more than you earn from the extra motes to use the silver-fed. Accordingly, motes are not the reason to use the silver-fed; it's all about the symbols & charms.

[Solvar.7953]

I only use a silver fed - never bought a copper.

My rationale is that at a 57 copper difference, and cost of copper fed @ 800 gems being 177 gold (if I sold the gems), it means I have to salvage ~30,000 items before having a copper and using it would come out ahead. This ignores the any other costs, like an extra shared inventory slot, lower quality materials from even so-so stuff, etc.

Payback is even longer if you are taking gold to buy the 800 gems.

Though looking at my account now, I've salvage ~42000 items, so I guess it would have been worthwhile. Though hard to say how many of those would have been items I would have used the silver on regardless.

But I also have the convenience on not having to think what salvage kit I'll use.