Guides/Trading Post
Salvage or sell: how to stop losing gold on every drop
Every salvage kit with its exact percentages, what one use costs, and the short rule that decides the fate of each item in your bags.
On this page
Every drop has three fates: sell to players, sell to a vendor, salvage. You make that choice dozens of times a day, and newcomers lose more gold there than anywhere else.
The good news is that the rule is short.
What a salvage kit does
Two numbers, and they are not the same thing:
Chance of rarer materials decides how often an item yields something better than basic cloth.
Chance of recovering upgrades decides how often you get your rune or sigil back instead of dust in its place.
The second number often matters more. A single Superior rune is worth more than the entire pile of materials the item would give.
Every kit
| Kit | Materials | Upgrades | Uses | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 10% | 20% | 25 | 88 copper / 77 karma |
| Fine | 15% | 40% | 25 | 2s 88c / 252 karma |
| Journeyman’s | 20% | 60% | 25 | 8s / 2,800 karma |
| Master’s | 25% | 80% | 25 | 15s 36c / 5,600 karma |
| Mystic | 25% | 80% | 250 | 26s 24c + 3 Mystic Forge Stones |
| Copper-Fed | 10% | 20% | unlimited | 3c per use |
| Runecrafter’s | 20% | 100% | unlimited | 30c per use |
| Silver-Fed | 25% | 80% | unlimited | 60c per use |
| Black Lion | 50% | 100% | 25 | 300 gems / 50 Astral Acclaim |
Which of these are worth owning
Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic is the first gem-store purchase worth making. 3 copper a use, forever. It handles all the junk that used to sit in your bags.
Mystic Salvage Kit is the cheapest way to salvage rares. 250 uses at a price you stop noticing.
Runecrafter’s is the only unlimited kit that returns upgrades every time. Buy it once you are running expensive runes.
Black Lion Salvage Kit belongs to exotics with a costly upgrade inside. Spending one on anything else wastes it.
The rule for deciding
Junk, the grey items, goes to a vendor without thought. That is what it is for.
Blue and green below 80 get salvaged with the cheapest kit. The materials feed crafting, and on the trading post such items sell for pennies.
Rare, the yellow items, is 🔴 the real fork. Rare weapons and armour at level 68 and above can yield Ectoplasm, a workhorse crafting currency. Compare the ecto price with the item price: if the item sells for less than the ecto it should produce, salvage it.
Exotic, the orange items, almost always sells. Exotics are worth far more than their materials. The exception is an expensive rune inside: then a Black Lion kit and the rune comes back.
Ascended is salvaged only with the dedicated kit, and only for Ectoplasm when the piece does not suit you.
About prices
The salvage-or-sell ratio shifts week to week. Ectoplasm rises and falls, and so do materials.
So any article with a fixed answer goes stale. Check the current numbers in the market section rather than memorising them.
Two habits that save the most
Do not hoard junk. Bags stuffed with blue rubbish send you back to town instead of letting you play.
Do not salvage what sells well. Obvious on paper, and still the most common newcomer mistake: salvaging an exotic on autopilot and receiving a lump of ore in place of two gold.