Time for another monthly update on the cost of legendary items in GW2. (First post here, update here).
Prices have steadily risen since my last look at the end of December. From December 29 to Jan 29th the average cost of crafting a legendary has risen by 170 gold, or just over 5.5 gold per day.
Breaking down legendary weapons by type, I was surprised to find that the ranged weapons (Dreamer, Kudzu, and Predator) have risen in cost faster than the other legendaries, averaging a 240g increase over the past month. Visually, here is the rise in cost of each legendary weapon, excluding vendor materials:
Breaking down legendary weapons by their components, its still clear that - for most legendaries - the precursor is the predominant cost.
Looking across all legendary items, the relatively steady prices across the end of December were driven by a decline in the cost of most components offsetting a rise in the cost of Globs of Ectoplasm. Since then, while the price of globs has fallen, the cost of all other components has steadily risen, leading to an overall surge in prices each week.
Happy hunting!
If you have any other questions, leave a note in the comments / send an email, I'll see what I can find.
Since then, I've continued to track the materials* cost of crafting a legendary weapon using price data from GW2spidy. As I noted in an earlier post, the cost of crafting a legendary rose by an average 9 gold per day in November. In December, while some legendaries rose in cost (Sunrise / Twilight cost another 200g), for others, the price held steady (Quip continues to cost around 600g to craft).
Breaking cost down by component, the difference seems to be the cost of precursors.
For each legendary, the components required to make the gifts have either stabilized or dropped in price (potentially due to ANet increasing the drop rates on many fine crafting materials). However, the precursor weapons have continued to rise in price, continuing to push legendary weapon costs higher.
Using GW2wiz's guides, the price of leveling professions decreased during the first two weeks of December, and then increased over the last two, ending the month at the same cost it started. Most of the change comes from the cost of fine crafting materials.
Of course, I probably shouldn't be using GW2wiz.
I put this into an update on the last post - but just to be clear - ErrantQuest's crafting guides are slightly less expensive to follow. Redditor Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide that searches for the cheapest way to level the profession (again, much cheaper than the outdated guides).
*I'm omitting the vendor cost of a legendary, some 120g in materials.
EDIT: Update 1/2 - instead of using GW2wiz, take a look at ErrantQuest for crafting guides. Much cheaper. For cooking, Xanthic has a dynamic cooking guide (always chooses the cheapest route).
One of my favorite features in GW2 is the ability to level a new alt entirely via crafting. Since each crafting discipline gives around 10 levels of experience, it is possible to level a character to 80 by advancing through each crafting profession. Leveling a new alt takes hours, not days.
In the early days of the game, this was fairly inexpensive. Alternating between crafting, story quests, and hunting down skill points, I was able to level 4 alts to level 80 for about a gold per crafting discipline. Recently, I've become interested in leveling another character via crafting, but wondered how crafting costs have changed since the early weeks.
To track the cost of crafting, I used crafting shopping lists from GW2 wiz and price data from GW2 spidy.
Here is the cost of each crafting discipline over the past few weeks:
Armorsmith, leatherworking, and tailoring have all dramatically increased in price over the past few weeks (and are much more expensive than I'd remembered!). Breaking down each craft by materials cost, the culprit appears to be the fine (blue-quality) crafting materials:
While gatherable components (metal, leather, cloth) have held steady in cost, fine materials (scales, totems, blood,...) have risen at an alarming rate.
The rise in crafting costs is distributed fairly evenly across all tiers of materials, though Tier 5 goods have increased in price more rapidly than Tiers 1-4.
For the curious, over the past week, here are the average prices of leveling each crafting discipline:
On its own, a random number generator is not fair, moral, or kind. It is just random.
Which is probably why RNG makes for such terrible gameplay.
Much of GW2's endgame* focuses on the hunt for cosmetic improvements - legendary items with no stat bonus, but unique skins / animations. To keep these items rare, the precursor weapons to legendary items are low-chance results from mystic forge gambling.
But before the system is thrown into the dustbin of poor implementation, I wanted to take a moment and examine one reason why using RNG to gate progression is a terrible idea: the distribution of cost.
Luck and Cost
Some players get a precursor on their attempt... while others throw thousands of items into the forge with no result. I want to visualize that difference.
From the last post, I have a reasonable expectation that four rare items have a 20% chance of returning an exotic. I'm going to guess that this exotic has either a 1%, 1.3%, 2% or 4% chance of being a precursor. And I'll check three different ways of getting precursors:
Plan 1: crafting rares, selling all exotic outcomes until a precursor is found
Plan 2: crafting rares, reforging all non-precursor exotics
Plan 3: crafting exotics, reforging all non-precursor exotics
Under these conditions, here is the estimated (average) cost of mystic forge gambling (in gold), using greatswords as a baseline, broken down the the chance for an exotic to be the precursor.**
1% 1.3% 2% 4% Plan 1: 210.83 150.80 101.67 51.83 Plan 2: 278.88 210.91 141.47 71.36 Plan 3: 693.11 524.63 346.16 174.87
These averages are (generally) reasonable. Under these assumptions, even at a 1% chance, a precursor is around a 200g investment, making it expensive, but attainable.
There are two things to note.
Crafting exotics to obtain a precursor is three times as expensive as crafting rares. This doesn't necessarily mean that using exotics to obtain precursors is a bad idea. They might have 3x the chance of yielding precursors - its just that nobody has the data to find out. Fortunately, in terms of puzzling out why luck is a bad way to gate progression, this doesn't matter, so I'll focus on plan 1 & 2 from this point on.
Given the current price of precursors... either the precursors are much rarer than I've assumed, or using the mystic forge may be profitable even at current prices.***
Luck and Extreme Outcomes
Average cost isn't the issue. Its the distribution of cost that is the problem.
And that is where luck hurts players.
Here, I've simulated the results of 5000 players using plan 1 to obtain a precursor from the mystic forge, varying the chance that an exotic is a precursor. I've plotted how much the luckiest 10% of players pay for a precursor by gambling, the unluckiest 10%, and two measures of the average player (mean and median).
As precursors become harder to obtain (moving to the left), the average cost of creating a precursor for the unluckiest 10% of players grows exponentially. For example, if an exotic has a 1% chance to be a precursor from the mystic forge, the unluckiest 10% spend an average of just over 800 gold to get a precursor, compared to around 200g for the average player.
And that is the problem with RNG: extreme outcomes.
Extremes are great if you're lucky, but horrible for the person throwing gold away.
A simple fix would be to institute a progressively increasing drop chance once a threshold has been exceeded. Great way to fix the discouraging luck issue.
Legendary design
There are better ways to design legendary journeys.
The problem with RNG is that players don't earn the item. Which cheapens it. And it cheapens the journey. Because there is no journey, just a slot machine. Imagine Arthur winning Excalibur at a casino. Not epic.
* Stuff-to-do at 80.
** The choice of greatswords here doesn't shape the cost much - while the TP cost of precursors varies wildly, most weapons have approximately the same crafting cost. I'm also assuming that exotics are sold to market in Plan 1 for 1g.
*** Of course, if they're rarer, then some of the cheaper precursors are tremendous losses.
As it turns out, the mystic forge is actually the genie Zommoros. Strange new lifeform? Time for the asura to get investigating.*
The mystic forge serves three purposes:
Crafting via recipes. Placing specific combinations of items into the forge will yield a guaranteed result. This includes mystic weapons, some of the coolest exoticskins in-game, and legendaries. Unfortunately, Zommoros doesn't list recipes for the forge. They have to be discovered / looked-up on third-party websites (the wiki).
Upgrades of materials. Common, fine, and rare crafting materials can be promoted into a smaller number of higher tier materials [source].
Gambling. Placing four items into the mystic forge (of the same quality) will give one higher-level item, with chance to improve its rarity.
Fortunately, developer posts have noted that the mystic forge isn't affected by either diminishing returns or magic find. This makes examining these mechanics considerably easier.
I fed 2400 weapons into Zommoros to test out gambling, he gave me the data here.
Level Up!
Placing four items into the mystic forge will yield a higher-level item. How many levels higher?
On average**, the resulting items were 7 levels higher than the input items.
The forge seems to use average item level for determining upgrades. Four same-level (even identical items) had the same average level upgrade as four items of various levels, but the same average item level.
The pattern is the same regardless of input item rarity or level (usual stats-nerds tests applied).
Quality Nice.
Both comments on reddit and the GW2 wiki list a roughly 20% chance of upgrading rarity using the mystic forge. Sounds testable.
While four greens have an approximately 20% chance of yielding yellows, four blues have a 33% chance of yielding a green. (Usual stat nerd tests applied.) While they're included in the plot, since there are no yellow weapons below level 30, green weapons below level 20 have no observed chance of becoming yellow-quality weapons. I therefore excluded them from this analysis.
Take the increased chance of upgrades from blues with a grain of salt. While it is exceptionally unlikely I observed this difference from chance alone, most sources list the 20% upgrade rate as gospel.
Note: the drop-off in level 70+ greens is simply because I didn't record much data there. (Its expensive!)
*Now 100% more ethical. Sorry Malomedies.
**Well, I should say, on median. I - very rarely - obtained dramatically higher level items (up to 50 levels higher than the inputs). I'm guessing these are bugs. The items have no vendor value, and are soulbound on acquire. It looks like the item level of the result was just miscoded. Therefore, I excluded these from the analysis. More data required =D.
This time, I was curious whether magic find affected the chance of getting gems from mining nodes.*
I've seen plenty of questions about magic find and gathering. I've seen speculation on the topic. I've seen assertions given (many assertions). But the wiki isn't much help. And I haven't seen evidence.
So I set about mining.
Every day for the past two weeks, I took each* of my level 80 characters around Tyria gathering orichalcum and any mithril along the way. All characters used orichalcum mining picks and had the guild gathering bonus. One character had 101% MF, the others only had the guild magic find bonus (10%). By the end, I gathered 1027 mithril and 1483 orichalcum.**
While orichalcum nodes have a higher chance of yielding gems than mithril nodes, I see no difference in the chance of getting gems between 10% MF and 101% MF. (For the stats-nerds, checked with a probit.)
Of course... this is a relatively small sample. So how likely is it that magic find affects the chance of getting gems from mining, but I just didn't notice it? (In stats-language, what is the power of the test, given expectations about the size of the effect being studied.)
To check this, I simulated the results of gathering between 70 to 4200 mining nodes (increments of 70), assuming that magic find works multiplicatively. For each simulation, I checked whether I found that magic find had an effect. (I also included differences between node types, and recorded those.)
From the plot, its clear that after around 1500 mining attempts I'm nearly certain to find an effect from magic find, if one exists. At about 2500 mining attempts (the data I've collected), assuming magic find works, I'd have less than a 1% chance of observing no effect.
TLDR: magic find doesn't affect the chance of getting gems while mining.
But, of course, I'll keep gathering data, and check back in if any results listed here change. Because science is the joy of revision.
* Horray for leveling via crafting. I love going from 10 to 70 in like 2 hours.
** Just to be safe, this data excludes any ruined ore / gems from ruined ore. Which is why neither total is divisible by 3.
Many pants were lost in the creation of this post.
I love new MMOs.
Even the most basic systems have new mechanics to puzzle out.
Take salvaging (my currentobsession): I've come to realize that there are so many features of salvaging I don't know a thing about. (And unfortunately the wiki isn't of much use.)
As a result, I've salvaged virtually everything I've looted, and recorded the results. This wasn't enough data, so I started buying hundreds of items from the trading post. This left me with a set of just over 4000 salvaged items (predominantly with Basic Kits).
The number of crafting materials I obtained from each item salvaged:
For everything except chests, light and medium armor give an average of two items when salvaged (chests give three). Heavy armor returns about half the items (one item for everything but chests, two from a chest). Two-handed weapons return more items than one handers, which give about the same as offhand weapons.
I don't find any evidence that the number of crafting items salvaged is influenced by
the level of the item (checked visually and via various stats-nerdsy negative binomial regressions)
the rarity of the item (only enough data to test white vs blue at the moment, checked visually and stats-nerdsy)
How good is the salvaged stuff? Each tier of crafting material is salvageable from a range of just under 20 item levels.*
From the graph, its apparent that only some items have a chance to be salvaged into higher-tier crafting components. For example, while a level 18 item can be salvaged into either T1 or T2 crafting components, I've only ever seen lvl 20 items salvage into T2 crafting components.
The level ranges where I've noticed multiple possible tiers from salvaging are: T1/T2: 13-19 T2/T3: 27-33 T3/T4: 43-49 T4/T5: 57-63 T5/T6: 73+
Excluding T6 materials, I'm getting an approximately 17% chance of getting higher-tier crafting components from salvaging.** The T6 salvage rate seems closer to 10%. I need a bit more data to pin down the chance across tiers / within the level range for each tier.
Important note about salvaging kits: if the bonus percent chance of rarer components from salvaging kits refers to the tier of the crafting material, then using 'better' salvaging kits outside of these level ranges... is probably a waste. (Either the base chance of higher tiers is absurdly low, or it just isn't possible).
I don't find evidence that the tier of the crafting component salvaged is influenced by:
The rarity of the item salvaged. A level 24 item appears to salvage into T2 crafting materials regardless of whether it is blue or white quality. (The probability of salvaging a higher tier also appears approximately equal between the white / blue items.)
The slot of the item (armor / weapon / chest...). More data is needed before this is conclusive, though - I haven't observed some items salvage into the higher tier within some level ranges.
The Unprofitable Salvaging Blues. As noted above, rarity doesn't change the number or tier of crafting items returned or give higher tier materials. As a result, it is often more cost effective to vendor blues and simply buy the desired crafting materials.
Overall, comparing the prices of crafting materials at 11 am on 10/14 to the value of vendoring the item, I lost an average of 7 copper per each blue salvaged, and gained just over 9 copper for each white salvaged (before the AH cut). Factoring in the AH cut, blues were a 12 copper loss to salvage, while whites were a 5 copper gain.
By item level, the level 70-80 blues were the biggest loss to salvage. Middle-level white items were the most profitable.
Next up:
With the basics sorted, the next step is to revisit looking at differences between types of salvaging kits. Unfortunately, this post is getting a bit lengthy, so I'll save more on salvaging kits for a follow-up.
*This graph excludes items salvageable into iron ore, which is both a tier 2 component (as iron) and tier 3 component (refined into steel).
** This is using basic kits. If the chance is multiplicative, this suggests that the salvage rate without kit bonus is around 16%. But that is a topic for another post.
After paying an absurd amount of attention to salvaging rags, something of a consensus has emerged from the official forums, gw2guru, youtube, and reddit on how salvaging kits work. (I'm calling it basic chance theory after Zoodokoo.)
As noted in the reddit thread, one way to account for the minuscule differences in gossamer returns between salvage kits is that instead of increasing the amount of gossamer, the kit modifiers multiplicatively increase the chance for getting gossamer.
So, supposing that gossamer has a base 11% chance of being salvaged from a rag, the chance of getting gossamer with each kit is: Crude: 11% * 1.00 = 11.00% Basic: 11% * 1.10 = 12.10% Fine: 11% * 1.15 = 12.65% Journeyman: 11% * 1.20 = 13.20% Master: 11% * 1.25 = 13.75% As I noted in the reddit thread, this would be entirely consistent with the data I've collected so far.
While it is great to have a theory to test (other than just "everything is consistent with a bug") there are two things that are troubling about this theory. If the theory is correct, then most kits aren't worthwhile (NeckNeckNeck's observation). Supposing gossamer is worth 3.5 silver (350 copper) and silk is worth around 20 copper. So getting 1 gossamer is a gain of about 320 copper. A 1% increase in the chance to salvage gossamer is worth about one hundredth that, or about 3.2 copper. Getting a 1% increase in the chance of getting gossamer compared to crude kits must cost less than 3.2 copper to be worthwhile.
Therefore, assuming the base chance of gossamer is 11%, it is only worthwhile to upgrade to basic kits (for rags).
The bigger trouble is that statistically verifying the theory is going to take absurd amounts of data. The effect sizes here are tiny. As I discussed elsewhere, statistically verifying a tiny effect is tricky business.
Here, I've simulated the results of 1000 different attempts at salvaging 2000 rags, split evenly between crude and mystic kits. For each attempt, I recorded the size of the effect that was estimated and whether it was statistically significant. Sadly, I only find a statistically significant effect 33% of the time. And when I do find an effect, its overestimated.
What does it take to get it right?
Looking at different combinations of kits and sample sizes, its only after 10k salvages, or using absurd amounts of black lion kits, that results can be found reliably and accurately.
I don't even want to think about how much gold that represents. (Dear ANet: can we get a Tyrian NSF going?)
I'm taking a different approach. I've started to collect data on everything I salvage. I'm hoping that I can see a clear pattern where `rare' means 'higher tier of materials'. Hopefully, I'll also find a kind of item with a fairly high chance of being salvaged into the higher tier. This will make for a larger difference between the kits, and therefore something easier to estimate.
I bought 1500 rags from the trading post. Because I apparently have no desire to wear exotics. Ever.
To salvage the rags, I purchased 500 Crude, Basic, and Fine salvage kits. I recorded the number of silk and gossamer from each salvage, and appended this to Signis's data on 500 salvages with Mystic salvage kits.
For reference: Crude kits have no listed chance of giving rare items, a 10% chance for Basic kits, 15% for Fine kits, and 25% for Mystic kits.
As before, I see no effect from the anti-bot code. Salvage away without diminishing returns.
The expected number of silk / gossamer remains the same, whether on the first 100 salvages, or the last 100 salvages.
Visually, here is the average number of silk and gossamer from each salvage, by number of items salvaged:
The average gossamer yield from each kit was:
Crude: 8.6% (1.3%)
Basic: 13.0% (1.5%)
Fine: 12.8% (1.5%)
Mystic: 13.0% (1.5%)
(Standard errors in parenthesis.)
So, while crude kits had an 8.6% chance of gossamer, all other kits had a 13% chance.
While it is always possible that I was exceptionally unlucky with crude kits... it is exceptionally unlikely. The probability that I'd observe gossamer 8.6% of the time, when the true chance was 13%... is about 2%. So possible. But not likely.
This contrasts with the claims in this video of "100% certainty" that crude and mystic have identical salvage rates. Hopefully he'll be willing to share the data, and I can take a look at what is going on.
The crude kits leave me a little baffled. Without them, I'd say that gossamer had a 13% chance of being salvaged from a rag and that kits don't matter. With them... kits matter (at least on the choice of crude vs non-crude). But the rate doesn't match what is listed on the item. Hopefully I can salvage these results over the weekend. I've put in more orders for rags to check whether my crude data is just an unlucky draw, and started to collect other salvageable items to check those too.
TLDR: Salvaging rags with Basic, Fine and Mystic kits has a 13% chance of giving gossamer. Crude kits have an 8% chance. More testing required.
Update: I've done another 500 salvages with crude kits... still at about 8.7%. Now going to check other materials. I've decided to make it clearer that the I'm presenting standard errors of the means here, because otherwise I find +/- ambiguous / unfounded.
TL;DR: The loot obtained from opening bags isn't influenced by either magic find or the anti-bot farming code.
Setup:
In order to obtain a desirable sample size, I grabbed 1000 Bags of Pinched Goods from the Trading Post.
Doing this has one significant drawback. I'm essentially assuming that loot is determined at the time I open the bag, not at the time the bag is generated. I'm really hopeful that ANet decided to save on storage space. [Further testing required... its something I'm working on.]
On the upside, It felt like Asuran Christmas. With fewer explosions.
Controls:
The first set of 500 bags was opened with 0% MF after a day of opening no bags.
The second set of 500 bags was opened with 111% MF 24 hours later. (MF sources: 30 on jewelry, 53 on runes, 18 on gear, 10 from guild bonus)
I stood in the same place without moving on each run.
The bags were opened at 7pm EST 9/26 and 7pm EST 9/27.
Each bag has a chance to contain a gathering tool (ex: axes, mining picks), a cooking item (butter, blueberries, blue meats), white crafting components (cloth/leather), or blue crafting components (claws, totems, etc). In what follows, I'll break those categories down into gathering tools, white crafting materials, and blue crafting materials. I'll note whether the items are cooking components or not.
The Anti-bot Code.
The number of items contained within each bag does not decrease as more bags are opened.
For example, taking a look at the blue line in the center panel, across all 500 bags, if the bag contained butter, it averaged just under 4 butter. This was as true for the first 100 bags as it was the last 500 bags. The order the bag was opened didn't change the amount of loot inside. [For the more stats-minded, the order the bags were opened was not statistically significant across several specifications of negative binomial regressions.]
The chance a bag contains a white vs blue item does not change as more bags are opened. Here, following Lord Signis, I'm taking a look at the change in the probability that an item contains a blue crafting material as the number of bags opens increases. While I had a run of good luck at the beginning, and a spot of rough luck around 250 bags, its fairly clear that the probability of a blue item hovers around 50%.
[Again for the more stats-minded, I confirmed this with a few specifications of probits of blue vs white on order with various controls.]
Based on the the first set of 500 bags, I didn't find any evidence that the anti-bot code changes the rewards from bag opening.
Magic find results. Here, I'm comparing the results of the first 500 bags (discussed above) to a second set of 500 bags I opened under identical conditions, 24 hours later, this time with 111% magic find.
Cooking Materials
0% Magic Find
111% Magic Find
Butter
317
324
Blue
16
18
White
24
23
Non-Cooking Materials
0% Magic Find
111% Magic Find
Blue
224
231
White
259
254
Not only is the difference between the two runs absurdly small, the difference isn't statistically significant. I only obtained seven additional non-crafting blues with 111% magic find - a 3% difference between the two samples, which is well within the margin of error (approximately +/- 4%).
Again, the punchline: the quality and amount of loot from bags isn't affected by either magic find or the anti-bot farming code. Update: dev post - MF only works on kills.
Of course, my gear was utterly terrible. My last ring upgrade was in the mid 50s (and I'm a jeweler!) and my weapons were from the early 70s (and I'm a huntsman!). I had several lvl 60 blues on.
After getting roflstomped by a few dungeons, I realized that this simply wouldn't do.
Gear Basics:
Armor comes in five different rarities: Fine (blue), Masterwork (green), Rare (yellow), Exotic (orange), and Legendary (purple). While exotics and legendaries have the same stats, each of the other tiers gives a stat boost.
But how big of an improvement? I used gw2db to build a set of medium armor with toughness, vitality, and power*:
Moving from fine to exotic gear is a 35% increase in stats on gear.
But characters come with 916 base stat points. This makes moving from fine to exotic gear only a 11% increase in total stats not accounting for traits. Accounting for traits (another 300 of a chosen stat) drops that to about a 9% increase.
In Guild Wars, gear matters, but not for much.
So where to get starter 80 gear? Trading Post: I've had a fair bit of luck getting a full set of Mastercraft (green) gear from the Trading Post for mere coppers above its vendor price. I grabbed a full set of gear with power/toughness/vitality for about 40 silver. [EDIT: if shopping for rares, the difference between lvl 79 and lvl 80 gear is only a couple defense, which is another way to save a bit at the TP.]
Crafters: I'm guessing crafters are the source of all that trading post gear. Once I got my huntsman to 400, I found out that I can craft green gear pretty cheaply. And rare/yellow gear isn't much more expensive to craft. I've been equipping guildmates with some pretty excellent weaponry since then.
I only just realized how important runes are on gear! For example, getting a set of six Superior Runes of the Undead is worth about 165 condition damage and 50 toughness. Tailors, leatherworkers, and armorsmiths can craft runes with other desired stats.
Where not to get starter gear Prestige Gear: Early on, prestige gear was pretty cheap (bug!), so there are a some lingering threads on the internet about them. Nowadays, the cultural and prestige gear are comically expensive. Like over 1g per piece.
Karma/Dungeon Vendors: These are great pieces of gear to work towards, but it takes plenty of time for one upgrade. Karma gear runs 42k karma apiece. It'll take 4-5 exploreable runs for a single piece of dungeon armor. Getting a starter set first made that grind much easier.
*Some pieces with these 3 stats didn't exist, so I extrapolated their values based on comparable gear for ease of explanation. Adding that complexity doesn't alter the basic point that going from blue to exotic gear doesn't add much in the way of stats.
I've been selling augments on the GTN as fast as I can make them, and the profits are absurd. An augment that costs less than 20k credits to craft will easily sell for 60-100k on my server. I'm considering buying the legacy-unlocked neutral GTN...
With 1.2 augments are no longer obtained via slicing missions. Instead, they are crafted by the following professions:
Armormechs: Aim, Cunning, Shield, and Absorb Augments.
Armstechs: Endurance, Surge, Critical, Accuracy, and Power Augments.
Synthweavers: Strength, Willpower, Defense, Alacrity, and Presence Augments.
Getting the Patterns
These patterns are only found with crits of 'Sliced Tech Parts' missions. 95% of the time, these will give to 1-2 schematics, though there is a 5% chance of no pattern on a crit (ht to GnatB on the forums for observing this first).
The patterns teach a premium (green) quality schematic. RE'ing the premium items gives a 20% chance to research a prototype (blue) schematic; the blues have a 20% chance on RE to research a purple (artifact) schematic.
Gathering the Materials
In what follows, I'm going to focus on the top tier of augments (the 22s). While 25s are listed on Torhead, these do not appear to be in game.
In addition to some base components from the appropriate gathering profession (arch for synthweavers or scavenging for armor/armstechs), the blue augments require 4 Subelectronic Data Module and the purple augments require 4 Advanced Neural Augmentors.
The bottleneck for crafting the top-tier augments is the Augmentors. At the moment, these can only be obtained via the 340 mission discovery 'A Test of Intelligence' or crits on the Grade 6 abundant missions Mysterious Funds / Devoted to Duty. I've listed the returns from each mission in the table below:
Blue (reg)
Epic (reg)
Blue (crit)
Epic (crit)
A Test of Intelligence
8
4
10
5
Devoted to Duty
4
0
6
3
Mysterious Funds
4
0
6
3
After running just over 200 of these missions on companions with 10k affection, I'm getting a 20% crit rate.
Since the missions cost 1,780 credits to run, at a 20% crit rate and 3 purples per crit, that is about 1068 credits per purple material, or 4272 credits in slicing materials per purple augment made. Adding the cost of the vendor mats (1600 credits from vendor, 600 credits if gathered via a crewskill) and the AH price of the gathered components (around 500 -1500 per component), that puts each augment at around 9-17k credits to craft.
Given the prices on my server right now (60-100k), that is a phenomenal profit.
What is the catch?
There are two downsides to crafting augments.
The first is time. Each slicing mission takes just over an hour to run. That makes for 7 hours of slicing missions per augment. With only 2 tech parts missions available at any given time (3 with the discovery), this works best with several characters with slicing (or, selling in low volume).
The second downside is that players can recycle their augments, removing them from their gear for 22k credits. Eventually, this may serve to limit the demand for augments.
One more upside
In the near future, the market for augments is likely to grow. Right now, using custom gear with augment slots means losing set bonuses on Columi and Rakatta gear. As more characters acquire Campaign and Black Hole gear, there is no downside to picking up an augment slot for better stats, widening the market.
Happy credit hunting.
NOTE: Take a look at the cost of the [Augmented] custom gear on the GTN - made via crit-crafting an orange item. At least on my server, even the lvl 11 oranges are going for 50-100k if they have an augment slot. (Another remarkable profit - since the items cost ~3-5k to craft each).
I've RE'd a campaign relic. It lists a 20% chance to research a schematic. No luck with the pattern yet, but the RE gave a Synthetic Energy Matrix. The crafted version is rumored to be BOE, but I've yet to see an image of it. Now to go gather another 200 Daily Commendations. #yeahright
Birthright and Inheritance kits (legacy armor) can be found on crits of 340 mission discoveries! So far, I've seen them with Diplomacy, Slicing, and Treasure Hunting... but that is only because I haven't run any Investigation or Underworld Trading missions since the patch.
UPDATE: Oh wow, I just got a Birthright item on a crit of a Grade 6 abundant mission. (My first after running 300 of them.) Woah.
[EDIT 5/7/2012: Patch 1.2.2 corrected this error. See the analysis here.]
Yup, it is time for another slicing post.
It looks like 1.2 had a few undocumented (maybe even unintended) changes to slicing. Over on the forums, a few posters have been noticing some pretty dramatic losses and changes to the grade 5 and 6 missions - particularly the rich missions.
So I returned to my army of slicing alts, and collected data on 400 Grade 5 and 6 slicing lockbox missions with companions at 10k affection, and then compared those results to the data I'd collected before.
From the data, its fairly clear that patch 1.2 didn't change the earnings from Moderate missions. They were profitable before the patch, and remain an excellent source of credits post-patch. Abundant missions had their returns reduced slightly. The most striking change comes from the Rich Grade 5 missions - while still profitable overall, this is because a few high-earnings missions offset the losses from the majority of missions.
These curious results come from the double-RNG nature of slicing returns.
Each lockbox has two attributes that determine its average yield: its level and color. Grade 5 missions can return level 42, 44, 46, and 48 lockboxes. Grade 6 missions always return level 50 lockboxes.
Before 1.2, green lockboxes returned an average of 160% of the credits of their white counterparts. Since 1.2, green lockboxes are worth less than white ones - earning 80% of a white box on average.
Each yield of mission has a different color profile:
*Moderate missions return White lockboxes.
*Abundant missions return Green lockboxes on crits, and White otherwise.
*Rich missions return Blue lockboxes on crits, and Green otherwise.
This helps make sense of the original results. Because White lockboxes were unchanged, Moderate missions were unchanged. Abundant missions were only slightly affected because they only return green lockboxes on crits (15-20% of the time). Meanwhile, Rich missions return green lockboxes on noncrits - now a generally a 1000 credit loss compared to the cost of the mission. They only remain profitable because blue boxes (average 6250 credit return) can offset those losses on a crit.
Overall: all slicing lockbox missions remain profitable in 1.2 (I'd definitely make and sell augments instead... but more on that later). Moderate and abundant missions now have higher earnings than rich-yield missions.
I do find it odd that they'd choose to deliberately target green lockboxes to nerf. Without understanding the reasoning, it feels more like a bug than an intentional change.
[EDIT: caught math error and updated returns for green 42-48 lockboxes.]
Clearing that up poses a bit of a problem. If the speculation is correct that a +2 crit bonus is an additional 2% crit... then that is an extremely small effect. And accurately capturing a small effect with statistics is tricky business.
To show this, I simulated the results of crafting batches of 200, 1000, 1500, and 2000 grey-difficulty items, evenly split across two companions with 10,000 affection (a baseline 20% crit rate). For comparison, one companion did not have a crafting bonus. The other was given either a 2%, a 5%, a 10% or a 20% critical bonus. I did this 1000 times for each possible combination.
Below, I've plotted the distribution of effect sizes that I found, and colored them by whether that effect was estimated to be statistically significant.
To have a reasonable chance of finding a small effect, it takes an absurd amount of crafting. Even after crafting 1500 items (750 on each companion), if a +2 crit bonus gives a 2% increase to the companion crit rate... I'd only have a 15% chance of finding an effect. (Note that there is an at minimum 5% chance of finding a significant result). Even worse: the estimate of that effect would be approximately 3 times the size of the true effect. To have even a 50% chance of finding any effect, I'd have to craft over 5000 items (at 45 seconds per item, that is just over 6 hours of continuous crafting).
Fortunately, there are two ways to improve my odds. First, if I use a companion with 0 affection, then it is easier to distinguish between the baseline chance of a crit (now only 15%) and the companion-specific bonus. Second, since larger effects are easier to find, it helps to focus on a companion with the larger +5 crit bonus. Taking advantage of these two changes improves my chance of finding an effect after crafting 1500 items to 71%.
I focused on two companions: Gault (10k affection, +2 crit biochem) and Jaesa (0 affection, +5 crit synthweaving). Each character had 400 skill in the corresponding profession. I crafted 750 items on each companion. As a baseline, I used companions without a critical bonus in the profession to craft 750 additional items. If +crit bonuses are truly percentage increases, then given the number of items I'm crafting, I should expect to see a bonus with Jaesa but not be able to distinguish Gault from the baseline.
That is exactly what I find. Because the effect is too small to capture with the sample I used, I don't find any effect with Gault (crit percent 20.3% with a baseline chance of 20%). Fortunately, I do find a bonus with Jaesa (crit percent 19.8% with a baseline chance of 15%). This combination of results suggests that the critical crafting bonuses are percentage increases to the companion's crit chance.
TLDR: The companion +crit crafting bonus is a percentage increase to their critical crafting chance.
Many sleen were harmed in the creation of this post.
One of the most persistent questions with reverse engineering is whether it is advantageous to reverse engineer biochem consumables as singles or as stacks.
The difficulty is that reverse engineering is pretty crazy random. Just about everyone has a story about that one schematic it took FOREVER to discover (looking at you, Endowment Nano-Optic Resolve System...), or the one they discovered instantly. Each schematic can only be discovered once, and it isn't clear whether different schematics have different discovery rates, so no one character can easily discover the general trend.
To get a handle on the problem someone would need to learn biochem, craft an item, reverse engineer it in varying stack sizes until a discovery was made, and then drop biochem. Repeatedly.
Which is clearly insane.
...awkward pause...
Over the past few days I learned biochem, crafted Compact Medpacks, reverse engineered them in varying stack sizes until a discovery was made, and then dropped biochem. I did this 75 times.* I used stack sizes of 1, 2, and 5 medpacks.
The results are below:
Stack Size:
1
2
5
REs per discovery:
5.17
2.57
1.53
Items per discovery
5.17
5.14
7.63
N
42
14
19
Larger stacks led to fewer stacks per discovery, but more items used. While it took just over 5 RE attempts of single stacks to discover a schematic, it took me only 1.5 RE attempts of stacks of 5 to get a discovery. The downside: using large stacks consumed more items - in stacks of 5, it took approximately 2.5 more items per discovery.**
The benefit to REing in stacks is that it saves time. The downside is that it'll take (on average) a couple more items to gain the discovery. In a stack, if one item grants a discovery, any items after that item are essentially wasted.
I'm pretty amused by this result. Whether in stacks or singles, it takes about the same time to gain a discovery. Any way you like it, that's an efficient way to learn it.
*Well, I did this 106 times... but apparently there is a bug (feature?) where if someone else crafts the Medpacks for you, there is no chance of a RE discovery. I found this out after ~1500 medpacks were crafted and RE'd. (insert angry grumble here)
** For the stat nerd crew: the differences in means here are statistically significant.
More than a few threads on the SWTOR forums express confusion over how common each mission discovery can be.
To clean up a bit of confusion, I collected data on 300 mission discoveries via slicing. These discoveries are exclusively from the Rank 6 Abundant/Moderate lockbox missions and the Rank 5 Rich lockbox missions. These missions were predominantly run with companions at 10k affection, though I did put the ship droid to work on a few.
Before gathering the data, I'd have sworn that the purple cybertech patterns or the investigation missions were the most common.
I couldn't be more wrong.
One pattern is immediately clear: the gathering mission discoveries (green) are much less common than the pure 'mission' discoveries' (blue).
The gathering crewskill discoveries are about half as likely as the mission crewskill discoveries. Since the pure mission crew skills each have two possible level 340 discoveries, while the gathering skills only have one, this makes some intuitive sense, and would imply that any particular 340 mission has a 7% chance of occurring on a crit.
So is Treasure Hunting the most common discovery (and biochem the least)? Nope - thats just the curse of RNG. Assuming that any gathering mission discovery is equally likely, I'd expect to see that kind of difference or larger about a third of the time. (And about two-thirds of the time within the Mission discoveries.)*
I'm actually struck by how infrequently the Cybertech patterns drop. I'd have sworn that I was swarmed by them (ditto with investigation), but constantly in need of more Treasure Hunting missions. I'm also struck by the frequency of slicing discoveries - another mission I'm always running. Go figure.
*Stats-nerds: Pearson chi-squared test within each group.
Over on the official forums, Georg Zoeller confirmed that we won't be getting a new tier of augments with 1.2. This leaves the current top-tier augments with +28 to a stat as the best in game.
Fantastic news. I can run the 340 slicing missions to stockpile enough augments to cover the slots I know I can crit-craft (helm / chest / legs / weapon) and those I'm hopeful a mechanism will open up for (gloves / boots / belt / wrist). And I can do this without worrying that 1.2 will make them obsolete.
If any item comes up short, this is the current list of which profession crafts each augment:
Armormechs: Aim, Cunning, Shield, and Absorb Augments.
Armstechs: Endurance, Surge, Critical, Accuracy, and Power Augments.
Synthweavers: Strength, Willpower, Defense, Alacrity, and Presence Augments.
For a bonus of between +112 and 224 to a stat of my choosing, on equipment with a wide range of looks, I say that gear is getting nicely buffed next patch.
Getting crits with Crew Skills just seems more and more important.
Not only do most of my slicing profits come from mission discoveries (found on a slicing crit) - but I'm also busy crafting items with augment slots (Rakata relics, lvl 49 implants...) and want some sense of how tough it'll be. And come 1.2, I'll want some critically-crated moddable gear (weapon / vest / legs / helm), for a free augment slot - something that was confirmed in the Guild Summit.
So I was particularly excited to see this post:
Companion affection improves your crafting efficiency and crit chance. (Source)
To take a look at how companion affection influences crew skill crits, I ran just over 1000 slicing missions on characters with 400 slicing, using companions with a wide range of affection. Each point is a slicing mission, color coded by companion. Triangles are crits, circles are not. The red line is the predicted probability of a crit for a given level of affection, and the shaded region is its 95% CI.
In short: companion affection really, really, really makes a difference. While companions with no affection have about a 13% chance of a critical success, companions with 10,000 affection have a 20% chance - even without a bonus.
Curiously, mission yield didn't influence chance of a critical mission. Excluding bountiful missions - I didn't run enough to get a good estimate - all mission yields had approximately the same percentage chance of a crit, whether in the raw data (table below) or included in a logit model (with controls for affection, whether the companion had a critical bonus, and mission yield).
I did notice, however, that running lower-level missions while at 400 slicing (say, the rank 5s) yielded a higher chance of a crit than running the max-level missions (by about 1% - so take this with a mountain of salt).
TLDR: companion affection dramatically improves the chance of getting a critical success on a mission. Yield does not appear to matter. The class of the class of mission may have a (minor) effect.
One thing I should note is that I get ridiculously streaky crits across my companions (if one gains a mission discovery, the others are more likely to than should happen by chance). I'm still unsure whether this is a programming quirk, an artifact of the data, or what.
I was curious about the use of slicing as a source of extra income.
Printing money. What could possibly go wrong?
So I leveled slicing to max on 6 alts, running just over 1400 missions in the process. All these missions were run after the Great Slicing Apocalypse. Because I love data, I kept track of the results and plotted the earnings (reward from box - cost of mission) against the skill level of the character running the mission.
Aside from making a beautiful plot, with data like this peopleget really curious to know which missions earn the 'best' reward.
So between the Class (1-6) and Type (Moderate, Abundant, Bountiful, Rich) of mission, which is best?
[Note: for presentation, I excluded mission failures and truncated results with profits > 2000]
The problem with those kinds of questions is immediately apparent: whatever small differences exist across types, those differences are dwarfed by the huge range in earnings from each box.
For example, while the class 6 'Abundant' missions earn an average of 60 credits more than their 'Moderate' counterparts, this difference is entirely due to the increased chance for high-yield green boxes on Abundant missions. Those higher credit returns more than offset the additional cost for the abundant missions.
But because the returns from green boxes are so variable, even after running ~400 rank 6 missions, that difference isn't statistically significant. (For the stats nerds: two-sample t-test, p=.19).
So while I feel that abundant missions are good returns, I don't have enough data to justify that claim. And I can say even less about the categories where I've run a total of 70 missions.
But what about mission discoveries?
Every slicing mission has a chance to return a discovery on a crit - either a cybertech crafting pattern or a blue/epic mission for another profession. Those discoveries are exceptionally lucrative - the blue Treasure Hunting 340s go for at least 20k on my server's GTN. Thing is, not much increases discovery chance. As far as I can tell, the chance for discoveries is equal across all yields of slicing missions: about 12-17%. (More on this later in a followup post.)
So what to do?
I view crafting systems as a game in themselves, so I typically have between 5-15 companions out on slicing missions. I use them to find mission discoveries, which I send to other companions to run to for materials to finance my little crafting empire (evil laugh here).
But even as a pure moneymaking system, slicing excels. I made an alt on another server, and continually send companions out on slicing missions, selling the discoveries on the AH. At lvl 22, my alt has 30k from missions lockbox profits, and about 200k from selling mission discoveries.
