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