Salvage Questions

I've been playing for a week or so and I've reached Beacon's Perch in Prophecies. I've been salvaging most of the stuff I get, now I have a couple of questions:

1. What do I do with all these crafting materials?

2. Sometimes I get an item that when I try to salvage it, it says "You can only salvage crafting materials with a lesser salvage kit, are you sure you want to do this?" - should I buy an expert salvage kit for these items and would I get better stuff out of it?

If you get a blue, purple, or gold armor piece drop, you want to use an ID kit on it to see what runes/insignias are on it. Some can be very valuable for your personal use (Survivor, Vigor, Vitae, profession runes), while others can be valuable when sold to the Rune Trader NPC. Try to make notes of which runes and insignias are worth more than 200g at the trader -- it can be worth your while to pull them off and sell to him. To pull those items off, you will have to use an Expert (or better) Salvage Kit.

Slightly similar for weapons. You can find useful mods on colored weapon drops, but there are no weapon mod NPC traders, so these are only worth a small amount when sold to an NPC merchant; as far as I remember, only a few inscriptions can fetch good money when traded to players ("Forget Me Not," "Aptitude Not Attitude"). However, they can be worthwhile for your personal use.

As for materials, you can store them in the crafting tab of your vault for when you wish to craft armor, weapons, or consumables. Bone, Iron, Glittering Dust, and Feathers sell very well to players (you can easily trade to people once you hit Lion's Arch). Or you can get slightly less by selling to the Materials/Rare Materials NPC(s).

Regular Salvage Kits will always only get you common materials. Expert Salvage Kits are used to remove mods or have a chance of yielding rare materials.

I would look up the various armors for your profession(s) and note which materials are needed to craft them, then work on collecting them. The wiki will also tell you which items salvage into the materials you are seeking.

In general, I'd say it's a good idea to fill up the materials storage for each common material. Of course, I'm somewhat of a hoarder and have plenty of storage space among mules etc so that's easy for me to recommend!

It's a colored item which you havn't identified (ID) before trying to salvage it. It's generally a good idea to ID every item you get, because even if you just merch it, the price will have gone up netting you some cash just by IDing it before selling (an IDkit costs 4g/use, only the badest white items (like those found in presearing) gain less than +4 gold for IDing, making almost every item worth IDing before selling). You want to ID the colorful items even more as they can hide valuable upgrades. Check in on a rune trader, every rune that costs more than 100g will most likely be worth salvageing and then sold to a runetrader (or use it yourself/your heores) for profit.

There's not much general need for crafting materials except for making armor and consumables. Look up what materials you may need for any armor you may want to get and sell the rest. (You won't be concerned with consumables until you get to EotN.)
Don't bother to salvage things that give materials you don't want/need. The items are usually worth more to the merchant than the materials are.

Yes. You generally get that message when the item has mods, runes, inscriptions, or insignias you may be able to use on your armor or weapons. There are also some items that can salvage into rare crafting materials if you use an Expert (or Superior) salvage kit.

Check on wiki to see what materials an item will salvage into and what mods may be useful to others (if not yourself).

It seems worthwhile to get an ID kit to ID anything that needs identification, since you can almost always sell the ID'd item for more than it cost to ID it.

The Expert Salvage kit, on the other hand, costs 400g if I recall. Does the same logic apply here? Is it always worth buying the expert salvage kits and using them on everything, or do you generally have both and only use the expert after you've identified an item that has mods? What's a good plan for purchasing and using salvage kits?

You generally have both and use the Expert kit only when appropriate.

OK thanks all for the info so far, now I have some more questions to pester you with

I have 40 or so of these blue/purple items, mousing over them shows info like this:



1. I understand that I need to somehow extract the runes/insignia from the items, but how do I do that? Is it part of the salvage process when I use an expert salvage kit on it or what?

2. Once I've managed to do the extraction, can I then use a rune and an insignia on a piece of armour to increase the bonus, or do I have to choose one or the other?

3. In the above screenshot it says "halves casting times of spells". Now I've checked both the runes and insignia wikis, but nowhere is this particular phrase mentioned, so just to give me a starting point, how would I go about identifying and extracting the rune/insignia on this item?

The expert salvage kit will extract runes and so on from items and maybe destroy the item.
Sometimes you can get all the runes inscriptions etc out and then salvage what's left for materials while at other times you get the first rune out and lose the rest its all down to chance.

If you have a an item or armour and you want to be sure of losing nothing you use a perfect salvage kit.
You can also check the trader for the price of what your trying to salvage out.
Some runes are so popular with players the prices has rocketed others can be bought very cheaply.

You can use 1 rune and 1 insignia on each piece of armour but not all of them stack their effects.

ie you can put a + energy or + health on each of your armour pieces and they all add up.
You can put a rune of + to an attribute such as healing but a second + to healing does nothing.
But you could put a + to another attribute

As Quaker said, you keep both on you. Use regular Salvage Kits to get common materials from items that don't have mods or that have mods you don't care about; use Expert Kits when you want mods or are trying for rare materials.

Both kits have a chance of breaking the item. When you want to remove mods from something and not break it, you use a Perfect Salvage Kit (a consumable from Eye of the North).

As for Superior Kits -- don't bother. They act the same as ID Kits and Expert Salvage Kits, respectively, they just have more uses and are generally for people who don't know what to do with their money.

Although that is a colored item, it has no salvageable mods. The inscription is built in and can't be taken off (that's the case with Prophecies/Factions colored items). With weapons, you want to look for three things: Prefix, Suffix, and, in Nightfall/North, Inscription Phrase. If that was an "Insightful Holy Staff of Fortitude," you could take off the staff head and the staff wrapping and put them on another staff. If you got the item in Nightfall, for example, it might be a "Defensive Holy Staff of Enchanting" with the Phrase below, "Aptitude Not Attitude" -- you could take off the head and the wrapping and that inscription off as well. But this does not have a prefix or a suffix, or an inscription phrase, and thus has nothing to take off.

Almost all weapons have a prefix and/or a suffix.
The exceptions are wands, focus items, and shields. In Prophecies and Factions, their mods are built in. In Nightfall and North, they only have suffixes and inscriptions, both of which can be removed.

Similar with armor. Insignias give a prefix, runes give a suffix. Armor does not contain inscriptions. The difference here is that no matter where you obtain an armor drop, if it's colored, it will contain an insignia and/or a rune. Always.

When you use an expert or higher salvage kit on an item, a menu will pop up telling you which mods are available for extraction (it will also give you the option to salvage crafting materials). You pick one and it rips the thing off. The item might break unless you use a perfect kit. If the item doesn't break, you can use the kit again to get other mods off. Once all the mods are removed, additional salvage will only yield crafting materials.

You can put one insignia (prefix) and one rune (suffix) on each of your armor pieces. Bear in mind that profession runes and vigor runes do not stack (so loading up each armor piece with +3 Fire Magic will not give you +15 Fire Magic. It will give you +3 Fire Magic, but the -75 health penalty will stack (-375 HP).

Remember: Runes and insignias are on armor pieces -- never on weapons.
"Halves casting time of spells" is the weapon mod. And as stated above, on this piece it's built in, so you can't get at it. On a Nightfall or North item, it would say "Don't Think Twice."

My last piece of advice: Try to take note of the intensities of mods on the wiki pages for weapon upgrades and inscriptions. Generally, blue and most purple items have non-max mods. Whereas gold (and some purples) usually have max or near-max mods -- those are the ones you want.

For armor, the convention is usually like this:
Blue -- +1 profession runes, vitae, attunement, minor vigor
Purple -- +2 profession runes, common condition-reducers, major vigor
Gold -- +3 profession runes, superior vigor

Insignias don't really follow a color convention, except for Bloodstained (necro) and Sentinel's (warrior), which I think historically are found on gold armor.

Thanks very much for taking the time to write this valuable info, it's becoming clearer now.