According to the wiki, if you forge exotics they need to have an average level of 75 or higher for a chance of getting a precursor. Neither of those methods ensures a precursor. The wiki's text is out of date. It used to be thought (with reason) that the average level has to be 75. But I've found that 74 works too; I've never gotten a sub L80 rare from forging and the exotic rate for exotic 80s is the same as using L75 gear. It could take an astronomical amount of time or gold, or you might never get one. That's an incorrect restatement of the statistical data that we have. There's an astronomical chance that you might never get one; the people who forge precursors "for a living" have enormous amounts of evidence that it happens eventually. It's fair to say that you might spend more than you save if you don't forge very many; it's not correct to say The law of large numbers says otherwise. It's not guaranteed that you get an average number of precursors, but if you forge enough, a finite amount far below "astronomical," you will get them. Putting some numbers on this and assuming the rates haven't changed from 1:143 exotic tries... forging 1000 times means a 99.9% chance you'll get at least one precursor. With 1500 forges, it's 99.99% chance. At 2000 forges, the chances are astronomical that you won't get any precursors. For rares (again assuming the 'true' rate is 1:860 as the original data shows), it takes 6000 forges to have a 99.9% chance to get at least 1. At 8000, it's 99.99%. And by 12000 forges, the chances are astronomical that you won't get any.Are you saying 74 works for exotics or for rares? The output level works differently for exotics and sub-exotics, according to the wiki. It says that you need average of L75 when doing exotics, for sub exotics the output level is 3-12 levels higher that the average level of the inputs. Based on the info on the wiki you could get a precursor by forging 4 rares with an average level of 68 or higher. Your post also implies that each item needs to be L74 or higher which is not accurate. One of the items I forged to get my precursor was level 71. For exotics, one item could be as low as 60 if the other three are 80 (based on needing average of 75). I've seen at least as high as +10 on a rare to exotic upgrade in the forge. I did 4x L60 rares and got L70 exotic. Nobody's questioning the math. 99.9% or 99.99% is indeed a very high chance of getting a precursor but it's not a guarantee. No number of random results "ensures" a specific outcome. Yes, with enough rolls you'd have an astronomically high chance of getting at getting a precursor and an astronomically low chance of not getting one but it's not "ensured." There's also the cost of doing that many rolls. You'd need 4501 exotics to do 1,500 tries in the forge. It's hard to say how much that would cost but it is definitely extremely high. If you want the staff precursor you'd need to spend at least 1.1 to 1.3 gold each on exotic staves. Also the supply of staves at that price is low so you'll quickly start having to pay more and more the more you buy on the TP. Or your going to wait a very long time for that many buy orders to be filled. If we say 2 gold per staff on averate, which is probably a very low estimate, you'd need to spend 9,000 gold to do your 1,500 rolls in the forge. That's to maybe get a precursor that you could just instant buy on the TP for about 510 gold or try to buy for a lower offer (highest buy is currently about 440 gold). Another note: the forge doesn't care how many times any individual poked the forge button. Individual results will vary, probably a lot. Over the last 3 or 4 years or more I've done less than 25 exotic forge rolls that could have given a precursor. I got very lucky, which means there are over 1,475 other peoples rolls that didn't get a precursor, based on the averages.