My theory on Salvaging Mats

[Azzure]

From the Beta, we know that all items salvage into 1x the corresponding Salvage material (except for a slight chance to get 1x of the next higher quality scrap).

We also know that there is one Salvage Scrap per rarity level (Normal, Magic, Rare, Legendary) per difficulty level. So any magical item the has dropped in normal, no matter what level or act it is, will scrap into Subtle Essence.(or a slight chance to Scrap into a Fallen Tooth.(rare)

My theory is: Higher level items in the same difficulty drop MORE than 1x scrap. So for example, an act 2 magic item in Normal difficulty scraps into 2x Subtle Essence instead of 1. And in Act 3, it scraps into 3x Subtle Essence.

Why do I think this? Because the mats requirements on the later crafts are absolutely massive (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/artisan/blacksmith/recipe/resplendent-valaska). Some rare Crafts cost dozens of rare materials (ie dozens of rare items).

My second piece of evidence is the fact that it would be stupid for a level 1 magic item to salvage into the same value as a level 25 item, or a level 45 item to have the same salvage output as a level 60 item.

What do you guys think?

[Trump]

You're probably right.

[Trump]

On the other hand, to help test your theory, I crafted a pair of "Master Plated Gauntlets" (Req: Level 24) which is probably far past Act 1 and might even be the final part of Normal mode because past that's the highest recipe here.

I salvaged it and got exactly 1 Subtle Essence and 1 Common Scrap.

[AngleWyrm]

There is a problem with the listed prices of crafting: The distribution of required crafting ingredients is not proportional to their scarcity. By the time you have enough legendary scrap, you will probably have hundreds of times the necessary rare scrap and thousands of times the necessary common scrap.

Thus I predict that the price of creating items is going to be overwhelmingly dependent on legendary scraps, with the other required expenses being trivial to the point of meaninglessness.

[viledevil]

I dunno azzure. I think that since it will not take too long to get to the inferno items only type situation and inferno supposedly will have a flat difficulty that the farm easy areas for mats wont really apply.

sure you can grind nightmare for mats but who's going to need nm mats at that point really?

obv this excludes people doing lower content for lower quality mats to sell to noobs.

[Grayson Carlyle]

We'll have to wait until Inferno to see what Inferno does, but I'd have to agree with viledevil. We know for sure that Inferno will be a flat difficulty with flat ilvls. We can surmise from that that the salvaging of items across Inferno will yield a uniform distribution, regardless of where we get the item from.

There are 2 things we don't know about though:
1) Maybe the base salvage on an Inferno item is actually 1-3 pieces of material?
2) Jay said this weekend that there are actually 3 tiers of gear available in Inferno. If each tier is considerably more rare than the last, while having a uniform distribution, then each tier could easily also salvage into appropriately more materials.

So perhaps it won't scale directly with difficult and acts, but each tier of gear (1-16) will provide 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc... of Normal, Nightmare, Hell then finally Inferno quality salvage mats. This will have a huge affect on the profitability of crafting, and it's probably not something that we will know about for sure until we actually play at release.

[Azzure]

I'm very curious on what Jay meant about the 3-tiers of items in Inferno. Was he referring to base items types? (short sword > Gladius > etc) or Legendary's, or just Art wise? Was he referring that each easier difficulty level items can drop in Inferno hence 3 tiers?? (the crappier items). Each one raises questions

[jamesisbest]

I think what Jay was referring to for the "tiers" is the random modifier ranges (1-20 instead of just 1-15) and perhaps the 3rd tier an extra possible modifier (1-6 modifiers normally now 1-7 modifiers).

[Azzure]

On the other hand, to help test your theory, I crafted a pair of "Master Plated Gauntlets" (Req: Level 24) which is probably far past Act 1 and might even be the final part of Normal mode because past that's the highest recipe here.

I salvaged it and got exactly 1 Subtle Essence and 1 Common Scrap.

Hmm this definitely puts in a lot of doubt to my theory being correct. I just find it really silly that Blizzard would allow a level 1 item to have the same salvage value of a level 30 item. Doesn't make much sense.

[Lanthanide]

I'm very curious on what Jay meant about the 3-tiers of items in Inferno. Was he referring to base items types? (short sword > Gladius > etc) or Legendary's, or just Art wise? Was he referring that each easier difficulty level items can drop in Inferno hence 3 tiers?? (the crappier items). Each one raises questions
He was almost certainly referring to the different base types, so short sword -> gladius, etc.

We know there are 18 tiers. If they reserve the top 3 for Nightmare, that gives us 5 tiers each for N/NM/H, which seems reasonable.

It's possible that the Inferno base item types, apart from simply looking cooler, also have access to other modifiers that lower item types simply don't have access to, regardless of their ilvl. Eg if a big boss drops a magic ancient armor and a magic sacred armor, then the max % def bonus possible on the ancient armor might be +150%, but the max possible on the sacred armor might be +200%.

[BohemianStalker]

Hmm this definitely puts in a lot of doubt to my theory being correct. I just find it really silly that Blizzard would allow a level 1 item to have the same salvage value of a level 30 item. Doesn't make much sense.

It actually does.

Normal/Nightmare/ maybe even hell items will be way more cheaper than inferno items. So you are not making much profit even if you would farm lvl 1 items to salvage and make loads of lvl 30 items. Maybe it could be little bit more problematic in hell but I still think it does not matter.

We can presume that in inferno, all items have same level (or around 60) which actually makes sense having exactly same salvaging value. It does not matter where you farm, you are getting same items(in terms of quality and level) and same salvage value. And inferno is the only difficulty that matters. After all this is where you can get the best items. Nobody will propably care about lvl 50 hell sword since you can go to inferno and drop yourself lvl 60 inferno sword.(my guess)

[Autti]

I'm very curious on what Jay meant about the 3-tiers of items in Inferno. Was he referring to base items types? (short sword > Gladius > etc) or Legendary's, or just Art wise? Was he referring that each easier difficulty level items can drop in Inferno hence 3 tiers?? (the crappier items). Each one raises questions

i think it's to do with the fact that there are 3 level 60 requirement items for each slot.