Real Life Highscore

A fair few people have been requesting a Guild Wars 2 guide to what they should be salvaging in and with which kits. I have been keen to do this for a while now but there were a few gaps in the community’s knowledge about certain things. Those have now been filled and I present to you my guide to salvaging in Guild Wars 2.

Prefer to watch and listen? Why not check out my video guide to salvaging instead?

Ambiguous & Inaccurate Tooltips on Salvage Kits

“Chance of Rare” seems to actually mean the chance to get the next tier material.

“% chance” doesn’t seem to be a flat chance to receive said rare materials, it may actually be an increase in the base chance. There also seems to be very little difference in the chances despite what the tooltips say. There is no solid confirmation on what this means yet.

Thanks to Inquisitive_Myth for his blog on the subject, check it out for more hard data.

The Different Salvage Kits and When You Should Be Using Them

Crude –  A great starter item but ditch it by the time you are level 10.

Basic – This is the main kit you will be using. Use it to salvage white name gear and salvage scraps.

Black Lion – These should primarily be used to retrieve upgrades from gear though they can be used to salvage from ect0s since they are comparable to the Mystic kits.

Mystic – You will be using these on level 70+ rares to obtain the valuable Ectoplasms. The Mystic kit is created by transmuting a fine, master and journeyman salvage kit in the mystic forge along with three mystic forge stones.

What is Worth Salvaging?

Don’t salvage rares below level 70 or blue/green named items. These will always vendor for more then the value of the materials you gain (except in rare circumstances at lower levels).

Salvage materials and white name gears that provide metal, leather and fabric are the most worthwhile. Wood is rarely worth salvaging (as found in rifles, pistols, bows, shields etc.).

Is Salvaging Affected By Diminishing Returns or Magic Find?

This is actually one of the pieces of information I was waiting on to make this guide. Thanks to Redditor Marko_Oktabyr we now know that they it isn’t. Awesome!

If you have any knowledge or experience to add please feel free to do so in the comments below.

That’s right, I had a huge month on YouTube in September with my views and Adsense revenue soaring up 110%! But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves…

Welcome to my monthly YouTube Earnings and Strategy report where I share the hard numbers of how I am doing with my YouTube career and how I got there. Numbers and strategy are in short supply when it comes to YouTube, people tend to be overly secretive about this sort of stuff. However, if writing on InfoBarrel (a revenue sharing site) has taught me anything it’s that the best way to success is accountability and through helping other people find their own success.

So, continuing in my efforts to bring a bit of translucency to the YouTube scene I present to you my YouTube Earnings and Strategy Report for September!

Here are the hard numbers:
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This image perfectly identifies one of the biggest problems in the video game community right now. Gamers need to realize that games can be enjoyed by many different types of people for many different reasons. 

I find it all too common that gamers latch onto a game, game developer, genre or console and defend it to the ends of the earth, while spending a lot of mental energy bashing all of its competitors. Whether it’s the argument between 2D and 3D fighting games, the siege between Call of Duty and every other FPS, the battle of the MMORPGs or the console wars of the 1990’s, gamers have been at each other’s throats about what part of their video game hobby is the best.

I would suggest a lot of this behavior has to do with the idea that gaming is an investment. We share in a relatively expensive hobby, whether you buy a ~$400 console, a $60 game or an MMO subscription for $14.99 a month. Gaming expenses add up and a lot of the gaming community can’t support buying every console or playing every game that comes out. Therefore, gamers attach themselves to the games, game developers, consoles and genres that they like, in an attempt to validate their investment. When another person suggests that one may have made the wrong investment, one may interpret it as a personal attack and get angry.

Other than that hypothesis, I don’t know anything else about why this behavior has become the norm, but I do know some ways to make sure you don’t become ‘that guy’.

Step 1: Calm down and take a deep breath

Getting angry about video games does absolutely nothing to further the conversation or improve the gaming community. In fact, all it does is make you look silly and pathetic. Instead, recognize that everyone has opinions and they are bound to differ from time to time.

Step 2: Remember, video games are a hobby

If talking or thinking about video games gets you riled up and upset, maybe this isn’t the right hobby for you. If you’re having fun playing games, on the other hand, all is well.

Step 3: Variety doesn’t do the video game community any harm

Just because you don’t like a certain game, developer, console or genre, that doesn’t mean others can’t enjoy it. Variety in video games helps the community expand and breeds competition and therefore innovation. You may like Call of Duty, but if we were only allowed to play FPS made by Activision, creativity in the FPS genre would come to a snail’s crawl.

Step 4: Remember, just because something is popular, that doesn’t mean it is bad

It’s a common habit for gamers to lash out at popular games, like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and League of Legends for being popular and bringing new players into the video game community. This is almost a moot point, though, as popularity basically guarantees that someone enjoys the game and therefore it has fulfilled its purpose.

Step 5: That being said, popularity does not equal quality either

Just because all of your friends, their friends, your mother and your mother’s friends play a game,  that doesn’t mean it is inherently better than other games. It does mean that it is fulfilling its job, but that doesn’t mean that its doing its job more than another game that is less popular. On the contrary, some of the best games in video game history weren’t very popular in their heyday.

At the end of the day, there will still be rivalries between gamers and their games, but I hope intelligent gamers can do their best to maintain composure and keep the ‘nerd rage’ in the video game community to a minimum.

In a recent blog post the Guild Wars 2 team from ArenaNet announced the release of a beta Mac client, which is available to test out right now. You don’t have to buy a new copy of the game either, your account that you bought with the windows version will work exactly the same on the Mac port. 

While this means that Mac users may not have to Bootcamp any more, before you get too excited realize that it is a Cider port rather than a native one. A Cider port is better than a Wine port but not as good as a native port. This means that you might not end up getting as good performance as you do under Bootcamp.
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Blizzard recently released the first of their series of developer blogs in the lead up to Diablo 3’s patch 1.0.5. This first blog covered the planned defensive skill changes. A lot of this looks like nerfs but before you get up in arms, take some time to get it all in perspective. Turns out we are getting an overall survivability buff, not a nerf!

The point of this patch is to make defensive skills less necessary across the board whilst opening up more options for offensive skill sets. By changing the importance of defensive skills many offensive skills are being indirectly buffed.

Just to reiterate in a different way: If you dont change your current defensive build you will be around 20% more survivable than you are now once the patch hits. This gives you room to drop one or two defensive skills or even some gear based mitigation without becoming more easily killed than you were pre-patch.

Class Changes Overview:
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