Fine Crafting Materials Revisited

In the past on this blog I have explored the potential profits to be made promoting crafting materials in the Mystic Forge. I have articles discussing the specific promotion of rare materials, fine materials, common materials, and piles of dust. Today, however, I would like to revisit the promotion of fine materials. Originally I had dismissed promoting lower tier fine materials as being unprofitable. Thanks to Egg Baron reader ZoCks this assumption was challenged and I was proven wrong. There are in fact excellent profits to be made promoting some of the lower tiers. Today I will share with you my assumptions, my experiences, and the updates I made to my crafting materials promotion spreadsheet.

My Assumptions

All the fine materials.
Tier 1 at the top row tier 6 in the bottom row.

The main thing that needs to be determined, in order to calculate the profitability of a promotion formula, is the number of materials that the Mystic Forge outputs per promotion done. This is easy for the rare crafting materials which have no random components to the output. You put in the materials and you always get out the same thing. This is different for the fine materials and the common materials. The number of materials returned is different every time. The best that we can hope to accomplish is to determine the average number of materials returned.

Luckily, from my experiences and from what I have read on the GW2 wiki, not every recipe has a different random output. Recipes of a given rarity and tier all seem to output the same number of materials on average. In other words all tier 5 fine crafting materials when promoted will on average yield the same number of tier 6 fine crafting materials. I have not rigorously tested this (although I have tested it to my satisfaction) thus it is an assumption.

I have extended this assumption slightly further when dealing with the additional tiers. It is obvious that there is a discontinuity between promoting from tier 5 to 6 and promoting tier 4 to 5. That is when you promote tier 5 materials into tier 6 materials you do not receive the same number of materials as output when you promote tier 4 materials into tier 5 materials. You will receive more for the tier 4 to 5 promotion. However, when you promote tier 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, or 4 to 5 you seem to receive the same average number of materials as output. Again, I have not rigorously tested this (but, again I have done so to my satisfaction) thus it is another assumption in this process.

My Trials

In order to determine the average number of materials returned when promoting the lower tiers of fine materials I did two promotions. In the first I promoted 3500 Tiny Fangs. In the second I promoted 500 Heavy Bones. Firstly, though for context this is the recipe for a single promotion for fine crafting materials (with the exception of piles of dust).

     50 Tier X Fine Materials

   +  1 Tier X+1 Fine Materials

   +  5 Tier X+1 Dust

   +  X Philosopher Stones

   = a random number of Tier X+1 Fine Materials

Where, X, is the tier of the material you are promoting. Thus, if you were promoting tier 3 materials you would need, 50 tier 3 materials, 1 tier 4 materials, 5 Piles of Luminous Dust (tier 4 dust), and 3 Philosopher Stones.

Here are my results. Firstly, for promoting the Tiny Fangs,

     3500 Tiny Fangs

   +   70 Small Fangs

   +  350 Piles of Shimmering Dust

   +   70 Philosopher Stones

   = 1163 Small Fangs

Removing the Small Fangs used in the formula leaves me with 1093 Small Fangs for 3500 Tiny Fangs. On average I received 15.6 Small Fangs for every 50 Tiny Fangs. This is not to bad and I had profits of about 70 silver per skill point. This is a good baseline for the average number of materials to expect as output. I have rounded this figure down to 15 for use in the spreadsheet. For those interested in the raw numbers here they are (12 9, 15, 9, 9, 25, 15, 19, 16, 11, 10, 25, 27, 16, 16, 15, 13, 11, 16, 9, 12, 38, 10, 15, 8, 10, 11, 24, 32, 15, 16, 9, 20, 26, 16, 22, 18, 14, 17, 14, 14, 12, 13, 13, 22, 37, 15, 9, 22, 12, 12, 12, 16, 11, 9, 33, 35, 14, 26, 28, 9, 13, 24, 15, 21, 13, 15, 12, 17, 14 = 1163)

Next, here are my results for promoting the Heavy Bones,

      500 Heavy Bones

   +   10 Large Bones

   +   50 Piles of Incandescent Dust

   +   40 Philosopher Stones

   =  211 Large Bones

Removing the Large Bone used in the formula leaves me with 201 Large Bones for 500 Heavy Bones. On average I received 20.1 Large Bone for every 50 Heavy Bone. I did not make any profit on this (in fact I lost quite a bit) but I did determine that the average output from this formula is similar enough to the output of the tier 1 to tier 2 formula to make the assumption that you receive the same number of materials when promoting any tier between 1 and 4. This seems to be others experience as well. For those interested in the raw numbers here they are (16, 18, 11, 37, 28, 16, 34, 17, 18, 16 = 211).

Spreadsheet Updates

I have gone ahead and added this information to my spreadsheet. You can now see the potential profits to be made promoting the rest of the tiers of fine crafting materials with the exception of the piles of dust. They have a slightly different formula and different outputs that need to be determined.

You will also notice that I have split the "simple view" up into three different sheets. You will now find the rare materials, common materials, and fine materials on their own spreadsheets. You can access the various spreadsheets using the tabs at the bottom of the screen.

Conclusions

Promoting lower tier crafting materials can be profitable. Right now you can easily make 50 - 80 silver per skill point promoting some of the tier 1 fine materials into tier 2 fine materials. The markets move relatively quickly as well meaning their is room to be made in the margins and you won't be sitting around on your inventory for long.

Again special thanks to ZoCks for pushing me to get this done and for informing me of the profits to begin with. I hope everyone can use this to their advantage. Let me know how you do in the comments.