Legendary Relic Farming

After my recent issues (or concerns is probably more accurate) while raiding BG I’ve been taking a closer look at my Warden and trying to make her stronger.  Some of them I posted about the other day but I also wanted to work on my runes for my legendary items.  Luckily I happened to be chatting with an in-game friend about this and he tipped me on to a pretty nice method.  So I’ve spend the past day or so running the numbers and figured I’d post the results I have so far, which do seem to line up with his.

Previously I would save up or buy off the auction hall a bunch of crummy legendary items, equip them, kill a couple mobs, and then deconstruct them at level 2.  This is a pretty effective method but can become quite tedious.  A variation on this theme is to complete a bunch of Mirkwood quests (or the Moria mirror quests) that reward LI experience and in-between turn-ins visit the Relic Master to deconstruct a newly leveled legendary item.  Many of the deconstructs will result in just a couple of Tier 1 relics, but critical results will yield multiple tier 4’s so this can be very effective.

However, with the appearance of skirmishes I thought this might be a nice change of pace to my normal method.  I had assumed bartering for the highest level runic  would grant the best results, however my testing so far is quite the opposite.  I’m not going to claim that I’ve done a statistically valid test here, but my data combined with some others seems to be within the same ballpark so while your results might fluctuate somewhat it should be close, and as you’ll see the difference between tiers is pretty staggering.

I ended up running a bunch of skirmishes and bartered for Tier 1 and Tier 2 runics and then kept track of the results upon their deconstruction and subsequent combination.  That coupled with some spot checks of the higher tiers (I haven’t ground THAT many skirmishes) confirms to me that bartering for Tier 1 runics is by far the best option.  Higher tier runics don’t produce the same quantity output as the Tier 1’s do, basically it is a decreasing scale.  Also, when combining relics the crit percentage is actually quite high and can generate runes two tiers higher which isn’t possible for a runic deconstruction.  The chart below summarizes my data so far:

So the columns are the rune tier, the average number of runes resulting from deconstructing the runic, the average result from my tests using just tier 1 runics, and the skirmish point cost based on these numbers required to match the output from the tier 1’s.  As you can see, Tier 1’s are far and away better then any other option and depending on your luck you can get some really nice results as my first test yielded a tier 7 relic!

The other nice part is that 460 skirmish points is about what I can get from running the Rift skirmish on Tier 2 difficulty (about 30 minutes) after I barter all the special marks and such.  Other skirmishes vary but I can get around that number relatively quickly.

So my daily plan now will be to run the rift skirmish for my runic batch conversions, check the AH for warden items, and run the Mirkwood dailies.  And pretty soon I should have a nice stock of the tier 8’s and 9’s that I’m striving for.