Promoting Rare Materials

If you have been following my blog, than you know that I have been doing a series of articles on using your skill points to earn gold. I have already discussed promoting fine materials including promoting piles of dust and today I would like to discuss transmuting rare materials.

The Rare Materials

There are a number of different rare crafting materials, 49 in all if we go by the collections tab in the GW2 bank, 106 if we search the trading post for rare crafting mats. Today I will be discussing the rare materials that can be promoted from one tier to the next. These are often called the tiered rare crafting materials and come in eight categories and five tiers much like the fine crafting materials. The categories are; Charged, Corrupted, Crystal, Destroyer, Glacial, Molten, Onyx, and Piles of Essence. Although the Piles of Essence can be promoted, the market is just too saturated with them to currently make a profit plus it is easier to just talk about the other seven. These seven materials all follow a naming convention based on their category and tier. The tiers are named. from one to five, are as follows; Sliver, Fragment, Shard, Core, and Lodestone. So, for example;  Charged Sliver, Charged Fragment, Charged Shard, Charged Core, and Charged Lodestone. The same applies for each category and tier. These rare materials have a number of uses including as components for legendary weapons and awesome looking exotic weapons. Today I will just be talking about promoting them and making money doing it.

The Recipe

The mystic forge recipe for promoting the rare materials involves no luck, and no randomness. You put in two of the lower tier materials, a Bottle of Elonian Wine, a Pile of Dust, and a Crystal and always get one higher tier rare materials out. The tier of dust required is the tier of the rare material you are promoting plus two, so if you are promoting a sliver to a fragment you use Radiant Dust, fragments to shards require Luminous Dust, shards to cores need Incandescent Dust, and finally, cores to lodestones use Crystalline Dust. Otherwise you always need a bottle of Elonian Wine and one Crystal. Thus the generalized formula is,

  2 Tier X Rare Material
+ 1 Tier X+2 Dust
+ 1 Elonian Wine
+ 1 Crystal
= 1 Tier X+1 Material

Simply replace X with the tier of the rare material you are promoting. Place these materials into the mystic forge and out comes one material of the higher tier. It is nice to not have to deal with randomness and because of this I can go straight to calculating our expected profit.

Expected Profit

As I mentioned above, without any randomness we can move straight into calculating our expected returns. Our revenue is the market value of the higher tier materials minus the 15% market fee. Our costs are the price of the dust, the price of two rare materials to promote, and the Elonian Wine. The dust and rare materials can be bought from the auction house or farmed and the Elonian Wine can be bought from Miyani by the Mystic Forge in Lion's Arch for 25 silver 60 copper. This fixed cost is what will determine if a material is worth promoting. We can generalize our profit formula (in silver) as follows;

Profit = (A * 0.85) - (B * 2) - C - 25.6
  where,
    A = price of Tier X+1 Material on Trading Post
    B = price of Tier X Material on Trading Post
    C = price of Tier X+2 Dust on Trading Post

Take for example, promoting Charged Cores into a Charged Lodestone. A Charged Lodestone should sell for 360 silver (A), a Charged Core could be purchased for 145 silver (B), and a Pile of Crystalline Dust could be bought for 5.3 silver (C). If we put these values into the formula we find that currently promoting Charged Cores into Charged Lodestones would not be profitable and we would lose roughly 15 silver per transaction. However, Destroyer Cores can be bought for 35 silver, and Destroyer Lodestones sold for 130 silver. If you do the math there is 10 silver profit to be made there. That may not seem like much but each attempt only takes 3/5ths of a skill point. If you want to use the above formula to calculate profit per skill point simply multiply the result by 1.67. You can also buy input materials when the market is low and sell output materials when the market it high to increase your profits.

Conclusions

At first glance promoting rare materials may not seem as profitable as promoting fine materials, but you have to consider a number of things to come to an equal comparison. Firstly, the fine materials promotion includes and element of change and risk that rare material promotion does not. Secondly, the tier 5 rare materials market is highly volatile as there are not a lot of the materials available for sale. That means you can take advantages in the peaks in the market and act as a stabilizing force to balance out rare material prices and make a profit while doing so.

I hope this discussion and my other discussions on promoting fine materials and piles of dust has helped you make some silver. I plan to continue this series of articles with one of promoting common crafting materials and then a final article bringing together all the knowledge and determining the best way to convert your skill points into silver and gold.