I have commented with some frequency in my GTN Alert videos about the theme across servers that MK-10 Augment Components are more expensive than MK-10 Augment Kits since you need 10 of the former to craft the latter. The normal equilibrium on both The Harbinger and Jedi Covenant occurs with MK-10 Component prices higher than 10% of MK-10 Kit prices. A recent exchange that I had on Twitter with @hadrian9 highlighted the reason for this equilibrium so well that I want to mention it here as well.
The vast majority of the time and cost necessary to craft MK-10 Augment Kits has always been in the crafting and reverse engineering of items to obtain the 10 MK-10 Augment Components needed in the schematic. In that light, it is not surprising that the kit prices would not be a profit margin boost for sellers compared to the components themselves because it is relatively easy to craft the kits once you have the components. The most obvious explanation of the price dislocation observed on the GTN is that the two markets are actually unrelated on the GTN, by which I mean that no one is buying components at equilibrium to craft kits and sell them at equilibrium, but that does not mean that there is no meaning to the price inefficiency in these items.
The initial Twitter question was for the unit cost of MK-10 Augment Kits if all of the green materials are farmed from scavenging nodes on Rishi & Yavin 4. In this case, the materials were being used to craft 168 rating earpieces to reverse engineer for the MK-10 Augment Components. The Vanadium Flux was being purchased from the crafting materials vendor at a cost of 800 credits per unit. The reverse engineering process provides one Vanadium Flux back in addition to the MK-10 Augment Component, so the net unit cost per component is only the 800 credits paid for the lone Vanadium Flux expended in the process.
The schematic for MK-10 Augment Kits requires 10 MK-10 Augment Components, green materials that are being obtained at no cost from scavenging nodes in this example, and 2 blue materials that can always be bought on the GTN at or near the vendor sale price of 165 credits, so I conservatively use 200 credits as the blue material unit cost here. The sum of the input costs gives each MK-10 Augment Kit a unit cost of exactly 10,000 credits.
*Median Low Price for February 2015 through posting date.
Obtaining the Vanadium Flux through running its crew skill mission reduces its unit cost to 210 credits from 800 credits, which would reduce the unit cost of the MK-10 Augment Components by the same amounts and the unit cost of the MK-10 Augment Kits to 2,920 credits from 10,000 credits, as below:
*Median Low Price for February 2015 through posting date.
In summary, you can currently make significant profit margins by obtaining your own Vanadium Flux through crew skill missions, but you still can make very good money even if you buy the Vanadium Flux from the crew skill vendor at a unit cost of 800 credits. In both scenarios, it is not worth the time investment to craft MK-10 Augment Kits for sale on the GTN because your profits will be 20% to 25% higher selling the MK-10 Augment Components without the small additional cost of the blue materials and the time spent crafting the final product. Until the misalignment of these prices is corrected by sellers, you are literally giving away money by crafting the MK-10 Augment Kits for sale instead of farming the MK-10 Augment Components for sale.
If you are gathering your green materials at no cost from scavenging nodes on planets and building your supply of Vanadium Flux via the crew skill missions rather than the vendor, MK-10 Augment Components are some of the most lucrative items I’ve encountered on the GTN currently as a multiple of price. The market price equilibrium seems to indicate that many of the items listed for sale are crafted using the higher cost point for Vanadium Flux though, because under that scenario the price multiple is more aligned to other GTN items in my data. Hopefully you found this information helpful, happy crafting!
*Note: As pointed out by reddit comments, the above values do not account for the critical chance when crafting the MK-10 Augment Kits. The base critical chance is 10% because MK-10 Augment Kits are a hard/orange difficulty craft and I always assume maximum companion affection, which adds 5%. This means that the component to kit ratio is not 10:1 but 10:1.15 and that changes the two tables presented as follows, with changes highlighted in yellow:
The profit gap certainly narrows, but the critical chance does not completely remove the market inefficiency since the kit requires additional time and introduces the variability of the critical results into short-term profits.
*Note (2): I am adding the table that assumes the legacy perk +3 bonus to crafting critical chance in addition to the 15% above for base and affection.
*Note (3): Why not take it the whole way and also show the chart using the optimal 23% critical chance adding a companion with +5 crafting skill critical chance bonus on top of the others above:
– Andrew | SWTOR Economics
SWTOR Economics 
I both love and hate this article. I love it because I think it’s spot on information. I hate it because for all of Rise of the Hutt Cartel and now Shadow of Revan selling these components has been my bread and butter and it will be interesting to see if this information alters pricing, etc. I’m guessing things won’t change too much.
The one thing I haven’t been able to figure out is who is actually buying the components and for what purpose? They have one and only one use and that’s to make the kits, and if you need a kit, it’s cheaper to buy the kit.
Even if the kit is slightly more expensive than the components, it’s worth the 1-2K credits more to save the time from having to wait for the crafting process to finish.
Regarding your point about buying the Vanadium Flux vs. obtaining it from crew skills, I’ve always just gotten via crew skills for the savings, but I recently started purchasing it due to the ridiculous amounts of mats I have gathered from Yavin IV. I find that by only obtaining it from crew skills it creates an unnecessary crafting bottleneck.
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What Darkbrew says: it’s virtually impossible to keep up with the vanadium flux demand through crew skills if you are making these on a large scale.
For the rest: great post, and thanks for bringing this to my attention. If I’m ever going to be desperate for an augmentation kit, I know what to buy. ^^
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The same thing happened with the MK-9’s pre 3.0. I never understood why the kits were selling for less then the mats required to make them. I eventually just ended up selling the mats and only crafted the kits for my own use.
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Using the correct companion adds another 5%, and having the correct character perks is another 3%
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Yes, both are true. The balance I’m trying to strike is whether to assume only optimal critical chance or the assumed universal critical chance. I’m interested in which everyone prefers and am open to either going forward.
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Personally, I’d like to see you add in the 3% extra crit chance from legacy perks since if people are crafting for profit, they should universally be buying that extra crit chance.
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Ask and you shall receive, adding another addendum with the 18% and 23% crit chance versions of the chart momentarily.
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Honestly, I don’t agree with the underlying assumption here of zero cost green mats. By your logic then, selling the zero-cost mats directly on the GTN yields an infinite Price/Cost multiple. I would think a comparison of the GTN selling price of the green mats vs the Aug Components is more relevant.
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The free green mats were mostly to answer the original question based on that premise on Twitter, but you’re point is very good that the more broadly valid metric should incorporate that opportunity cost of not selling the green mats.
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Many crafters will optimize crit chance when crafting expensive items. Whether aug kits are expensive probably varies with the crafter. A bulk crafter might use many companions because using only one comp is too slow. You should probably still include the buyable character perks in the equation, because if you do any serious crafting, they will quickly pay off.
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The market price is also an indication that the sell-side is dominated by optimized crafters, because that is the critical chance that aligns the component and kit prices to fully price in the critical chance of additional kits. I think the discussion surrounding this article has swayed my thought process to using the optimized critical chance for crafted items at least, but I will probably only include base and affection when modeling mission yield critical chance still since it seems implausible to only run the optimized companion on the Rich Yield mission, there’s too much profit to be had by running non-optimized companions and Bountiful Yield missions.
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Yes, that would make sense. You would put your best companion on the rich mission, but still run the bountiful (and maybe even abundant) mission as well.
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I believe the reason kit components are selling for more is because crafters want to buy them based on criticla chance assumption. A full suit of augments will likely yield at least one critical hit. Essentially a free augment. If it costs 42k to make an augmentkit with the components, and you only need to craft 13 augment kits (the 14th being the assumed critical), then you’re spending 560k on your whole suit. If you just bought the kits, it would cost 612.5k based on the data given above. That’s a difference of 52.5k, which translates to roughly a free augment. Taking critical into account, it can be a pretty lucrative venture to just craft the kits like this, and sell them to people (like the many above) who don’t see the point in buying components.
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I think after all of the follow up conversation that the critical chance is fully priced into the kit GTN price based on the component GTN price and if the two deviate there are many highly-informed people to step in and buy up under-priced listings. My brain is a bit twisted up at this point though, so that might not be expressed in the best way possible!
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Good stuff, thanks for putting this together it’s a fun read!
Both things people said are true: First Vanadium Flux is impossible to keep up with large scale demand. I have 18 level 55+ toons (6-7 with Scavenging) and I can’t keep close to demand making MK-10 Components. I run 1 toon making kits green items for components whenever I am on but use others if I have time to right click mindlessly 🙂 Another point that rings true is my personal demand of what I need to stock determines what my big (+3, +5) crit companions are working on. That all depends on the ticket price obviously but generally speaking. Enhancements > Barrels > Relics > Augments > MK-10 Kits
I personally only run Aug Kits on my Guardian with Kira and Ship Droid with +5 Synthweaving Crit or Vanguard with Tano. On average I get 12 every 10 I make, so the law of averages holds true.
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On the German T3-M4 (PVE)-Server I see quite often or most of the time the 10*MK-10 Components beeing cheaper than the Kit by about 5 to 10% – but not always. So Merkel-Economics seems to be a bit different 🙂
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