Salvage Items

Module 15 took away the ability to turn gear pieces into Rough Astral Diamonds. While it might not end up being such a big nerf than we all thought, we still have to find others ways how to utilize the surplus gear pieces that we don’t need. We touched on some aspects in other articles on the site already, but want to make this a summary about the options you have. So what do you do with former Salvage in Module 15?

Refining Points

One easy and fast thing to do is turning Salvage into Refining Points. Epic pieces grant 300 and can add up over the course of a few dungeon runs. If you need a couple more, it’s legitimate to turn gear into RPs. I don’t think it’s the best way to utilize Salvage however since RPs shouldn’t really be as much of an issue in the current state of the game. If you can’t profit in any other way however, turning gear into Refining Points at least makes sure you get something out of your loot.

Gold 

It might sound weird since Gold was an afterthought for so many years, but with the emergence of Workshop, selling gear for 1 Gold 60 Silver is nothing to sneeze at. You can farm upwards 20 Gold / day on an endgame toon and keep your Workshops running that way. Just like Refining Points however, I’m not as huge of a fan here. It’s much better utilizing alternate characters and let them run gold producing tasksinstead. You additionally can’t vendor all gear pieces for whatever reason.

Guild Marks

Which brings us to the possibly best way to use your Salvage. Each piece of epic gear lands 162 Guild Marks when donated to the “Surplus Equipment” coffer of Guild Strongholds, 324 during a x2 event. As mentioned in our Astral Diamond Farming Guide, turning Guild Marks into Explorer’s Charts is still the premier way of making Astral Diamonds in this game. So in case you’re looking for a straight replacement for your lost RADs, here you go. It’s by far the best way to invest Salvage in the Mod 15 economic system.

Just like with the other methods, this is not unconditionally great however. Many high-end guilds operate at Guild Coffer caps. It essentially means that you might not be able to dump your gear into the coffer, much less during a x2 event when everyone is trying to do so. Wise guild leaders have also long deactivated alliance donations for Surplus Equipment. So your only chance might be to either sneak an alt into a guild that still has capacity, or use “dummy guilds” to fill coffers. All you need is four friends (or alt accounts) and you can continuously create guilds, fill coffers, delete, and go again. Fittingly, a Rank 1 Guild can take on exactly enough epic gear pieces to max out Guild Marks on a character during a x2 event. It’s 75,000 capacity / 810 per piece (92 epic ones) * 324 Guild Marks = 30,000.

Best Practice

What I would indeed do is dump all epic gear onto alts and try to trade them for Guild Marks during a Double Weekend. “Storage” through additional character slots is cheap, especially if you have the Dragonborn Legend Pack and an extra bag available on each toon. The downside is that you most likely will need to abuse the “grey area” that is dummy guilds. The devs never cared to fix that or said it’s exploiting, but if we learned anything from Huntgate than that you can never be too sure. Maybe you’re lucky enough to be in a guild or alliance where you can still donate Surplus Equipment anyway.

The other options of generating Gold or Refining Points are not as strong, but still offer ways to at least get something out of your gear. Depending on how you farmed in Module 14, the change to Salvage might still be a nerf to you, but it’s not “dead” by any stretch. You just have to alter your approach slightly and will still get plenty ADs out of your surplus epic gear pieces.