Olympian Bonds, Forgemarks and Ichor Motes
The nine-piece Olympian Bond set from $1 to $1,000, how Forgemarks are earned only by salvaging and why recipes cost millions of them, and the Ichor Mote - the material on every gear recipe that is sized in hours of play.
Olympian Bonds
Every bond reward in the game - vote store, boxes, the daily ladder, the battle pass, the store - hands out one set:
A bond claims its face value toward your donator rank, so a $1,000 bond is the Legend rank and the Void Sanctum in one item.
Forgemarks
Forgemarks come only from the Crucible and the four raid keys - never from monster drops, so they cannot be farmed without playing. The Crucible values salvage by an item's gear score and the rarity of its rarest drop source: a 1/512 drop is worth about 8.6x a common one of the same stats, a 1/65,536 drop 18x. Rare drops are therefore worth a lot of marks, and recipe costs are sized to match:
| Recipe tier | Forgemarks |
|---|---|
| Hoplite gear | 2.5M |
| Hero set | 3.5 - 7.5M |
| Slayer helm rungs | 2.5M - 25M |
| Zeus' Stormseal | 30M |
Ranked salvage pays 30-50% of what a craft costs, so salvaging your last tier funds most of the next.
Ichor Motes - the time gate
Ichor Mote is on every one of the sixty gear recipes on the Forge. It drops at roughly 1 in 100 kills in endgame zones before drop rate, plus superiors and boxes, and recipe costs are sized in hours of instanced farming - the Hero set is 1,250-3,000 motes a slot, three to seven hours - so the top of the Forge is paced by time in the zones, not by cash.
Dracma Dracma from every kill and action, 
Titan Core Titan Cores from raid keys, the box ladder and 56 boss tables, and 
Ember of Hephaestus Embers of Hephaestus charged automatically by tier. All five are explained, with every source, on the Forge guide.