Alrighty folks, it’s time to talk some basic Mystic Forge crafting. I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 since release and I’ve only now started getting into the wonders that the Mystic Forge can offer. As far as the basics go, I’m going to talk about one extremely useful pattern and then the recipe pattern that can get you end game tier crafting reagents.
Before we even get to the crafting let’s talk about the Mystic Forge a little bit. You can find this bad boy in Lion’s Arch in the middle of the crafting area, between the auction house and bank. I marked the region with an obnoxious red circle and arrow on the map below. How to get to Lion’s Arch? You can teleport there from any race’s capital city via the purple portals (NOT the PvP ones).
Right next to the Mystic Forge is a woman named “Miyani.” You use “Skill Points” as currency with her – so technically there is a set limit to how many you can spend with her. While there are a ton of skill points in the game, don’t be frivolous with these purchases. What you will need to buy from her are “Philosopher Stones” which can be bought 10 at a time per one skill point. What philosopher stones do is allow you to transmute lower level crating material into higher level tiers of the same type.
When using the Mystic Forge, you will see 4 empty boxes that must be filled with specific items which will be forged into the item(s) you desire. Unlike crafting, you can basically throw anything into the Mystic Forge in hope of making something useful. However, unless you have a basic idea of what you’re doing, this will mostly be futile. Let’s start somewhere easy.
Mystic Salvage Kits
In my opinion, these kits open the door to end game crafting. Once you have these kits, you can get the core crafting materials you need for your crafting trait: Gossamer Scraps, Orichalcum Ore, etc. By just doing this transmutation once, you will receive 250 of these kits which will get you well on your way. These kits grant 25% chance to find rarer materials and 80% chance to recover upgrades from items. So you’ll basically want to use these on your level 70+ white items you find.
The recipe for the Mystic Salvage Kit is as follows:
- 25 Fine Salvage Kit
- 25 Journeyman’s Salvage Kit
- 25 Master’s Salvage Kit
- 3 Mystic Forge Stone
All those salvage kits can be bought from any merchant once you’re high level enough. There are even certain merchants across the world that these can be bought for karma if you’re strapped for cash. The Mystic Forge Stones are a bit harder to obtain. You can get these from certain personal story line quests, daily achievements, or bought from the gem store. For ~ 1 gold and 50 silver (the market is always changing) you can buy enough gems to buy three of these from the gem store. While this isn’t ideal, hopefully you get them through luck via daily achievements. You of course can buy gems with cash as well, if that’s your style, 800 gems go for $10 cash.
Higher Tier Crafting Formula
This may seem really complicated but once you get the gist of the system, it’s pretty straight forward; it’s just a lot to take in at first. The purpose of this is to transmute one tier of crafting material into the next tier of crafting material. An example would be to craft silk cloth into gossamer cloth. The payoff is by no means 1:1, it’s actually terrible. The idea behind it is that it is far easier to get silk than it is gossamer. Since you most likely aren’t doing anything with your old silk, why not transmute it up? At least that is my thought process and justification for doing this…
Two things you will always need are 5 philosopher stones (bought from Miyani as previously mentioned) and 5 of the tier of dust you are trying to craft the material to. In the silk to gossamer example, you would need 5 “Piles of Crystalline Dust.”
The other two materials you’ll need are a bunch of the tier item you want to upgrade and one of the tier items you want to upgrade to; a bunch of silk and one gossamer. The only variable in this equation is just how much that ‘bunch’ is. For items like silk and ore (Basic Crafting Materials) it is 250. For items such as Vials of Potent Blood and Large Fangs (Fine Crafting Materials), it is 50.
So let’s look at that equation with all four parts:
- 50 or 250 of the material you want to upgrade
- 1 of the time you want to upgrade to
- 5 dust that is the same tier of the item you want to upgrade to
- 5 Philosopher Stones
For a more specific Basic Crafting Materials example, let’s continue with the silk to gossamer example. It would take 250 Silk Scraps, 1 Gossamer Scrap, 5 Piles of Crystalline Dust, 5 Philosopher Stones. It would look like this.
For an example of Fine Crafting Materials that would take 50 of an item, let’s use Vials of Potent Blood. The recipe would look like this: 50 Vials of Potent Blood, 1 Vial of powerful Blood, 5 Piles of Crystalline Dust, 5 Philosopher Stones.
Like I said before, the outcome of these transitions are random. While I got unlucky on the silk to gossamer transmutation (15) I did pretty well on the potent to powerful blood transmutation (12). Most likely you will only want to do this with end game tier materials since you don’t have infinite skill points to spend on philosopher stones.
While I only showed two examples of this recipe, it can be used for nearly any crafting material. If you aren’t sure if it is 250 or 50 of an item, it will tell you if you put the four items in. At first I only put 50 silk in and in red text it told me it needed 250 before I hit the transmute button. This method is useful if you are trying to make orange level craftable items for your character.
This is only a basic guide to the Mystic Forge. Maybe once we put some more time in Guild Wars 2 and play around a bit more with the Mystic Forge we’ll make a more advanced guide. For now, get those crafting materials and Mystic Salvage Kits made and farm, farm, farm.
