Unpopular Opinion: Should we really buy precursors?

[Commandant Alexei.2486]

By this, I mean, it really seems like the game encourages you to do so, which, is a good business model, don't get me wrong. However, I have to say, especially to those of you that have multiple legendaries, props to you guys, you either have a heck of a lot of time and dedication, or deep wallets. In the end, for instance, to craft dusk, it would take a minimum (a shear minimum) of 120 days to make it, and that's just the time required to make the deldrimor steel ingots you'll need. That's not including the 13000+ mithril ores, or the exorbitant amount of other materials that you'll need, as well as thousands of currencies in the other maps for moving it along. So, at that point, the only way to speed things up would be to spend gold on these materials. Well, that's a whopping 500+ gold from the trading post. Which, to make gold, we have to farm anyway, so why not just farm the materials, right? It just feels like my choice is to either turn myself into a fleshy bot and farm either gold or all the materials, or hack up quite a hefty sum in gems to then purchase gold to purchase either the materials or the precursor outright. I understand the difficulty is what gives it value, but damn, my character is now 2,130 days old and I still don't have a legendary, even though I've thought I was always working on it in my down time (I have everything except the precursor, as I have dumped thousands of weapons into the mystic toilet before the precursor crafting was added). I think it takes less time to achieve GWAMM in GW1 than it does a single legendary in GW2, which again, I'm astounded by those of you that have multiple legendaries. You're paragons to me. So, what all do you think? Should it be as ridiculously expensive in time and/or money to add value? Do you think any changes should be made?

 

tl:dr precursors are massive investments of time or money, be it gold or gems. what are your opinions on the matter?

[Tasida.4085]

When titles started in GW 1 you couldn't BUY every title. Some took ages to complete (for GWAMM), but that was in 09/10 or so. I'm a gen 2 legend snob (putting everything into a legend w/o an easy way) is more rewarding for myself but the farming is worth it especially since it's an excellent income. I get a pre from farming I usually craft the item then sell on TP. I don't think changes should be made. People should have to do some work to earn a legend be it working for cash/gems with CC or earning gold/gems in game. It's simple, you want an item, then working for it is the way to go. Farm Istan (pres do indeed drop there) a few hours a day a couple of times a week. It will be worth the rewards and then you can make your legend.

[Commandant Alexei.2486]

Trust me, I do understand the value from having something that is difficult to obtain, otherwise if everyone had it, it would be worthless, right? But on what pedestal is it placed? Perhaps it's a matter of perspective that is a problem. I viewed legendaries, since there are so many of them, and the game encourages you to make multiple, that they were of a similar idea to that of GW1 with prestige armors, possibly of the Vabbian and Obsidian armors. Yet, even those I feel take a lot less time, as I got obsidian armor purely by farming in less than a month. Even excluding the forced timegates, legendaries will take even more time for just one of them. I've played since the headstart and have never seen a precursor for myself. So, I guess the pedestal to place legendaries on would be that of like a ferrari?

 

Also, when said that people should work for legendaries, using their money to buy them, this was my inital thought:

https://gizmodo.com/congratulations-to-ea-games-for-posting-the-most-hated-1820391000

 

[Seera.5916]

Or realize that legendary weapons aren't meant to be something earned quickly and that the ideal progression is to work on the precursor collection at the same time as everything else. 120 days if you assume perfect acquisition of materials needed for the time gated materials isn't that long in the scheme of legendary creation.

 

It does/did put those of us who were working towards everything but the precursor from before the crafting one was an option at a bit of a problem as we hit that time gate.

 

I totally get how you feel. It's even more frustrating when you hit one of the bugged collection items. Get so close and then stopped by a bug. I'd rather hit a time gate than a bug that prevents the collection item from being able to drop.

[Vayne.8563]

You can't buy every title in Guild Wars 2 either, and you could buy most titles in Guild Wars 1, since people were able to pay for runs. Using GWAMM as an example is a poor one because it's a title made of of other titles, many of which could be bought.

 

People farm gold in this game quite easily. If you're willing to farm gold you could have a precursor, any percursor on the TP in a week or two. I'm not willing to farm hard core, so it'll take me longer. But it's not an issue in my opinion.

[Aerinndis.2730]

I went years without a precursor drop. I earned the gold in the game and bought the cheaper ones as I went. It still takes a lot of effort to make them into a Legendary Weapon if you are grinding the materials so you still are putting a lot of effort even if you purchased the precursor. You grind for the gold to get it and then are grinding for the materials... I have also crafted a couple which I found very satisfying but also a lot of work and effort. I value every precursor and legendary weapon no matter how I got it because it did take a lot of work to get them. I baby-stepped my way with most of them and I am still doing that with the ones I got via the TP when they were cheaper. If you have the resources to outright buy the legendary and/or the materials to make one then you are lucky. I enjoy the effort I put into getting each one done.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

I think every precursor you make should have an extra account wide perk added to your account. Mystic Chromatic Ooze is a great example. Something for every one since there is no journeys being developed for them anymore.

[crepuscular.9047]

I started few months before HoT came out, and started crafting pre-cursors and legendaries, with average bout 3-4 hours play a day, have 9 of set 1, 3 of set 2 completed, and at the last stage of completing HOPE and also finished precursor for Chuka and Champawat.

 

If you had clocked up 2,130 days, not sure why you are complaining about time-gated materials? you should be crafting all the time-gate materials everyday, as they do sell for a profit even not using it

[Vavume.8065]

> @"Commandant Alexei.2486" said:

> tl:dr precursors are massive investments of time or money, be it gold or gems. what are your opinions on the matter?

 

Your post reminds me of how things felt in 2012, at that time precursors were a massive investment, now not so much.

[Malafaia.8903]

I don't buy precursors. Tbh i think the pre crafting is the best part on crafting a legendary.

[OrbitalButt.5708]

I think people should buy my precursors, along with every other thing I'm selling. I also think I deserve enormous wealth for my wonderful personality and extremely good posts

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

> @"Commandant Alexei.2486" said:

> Should it be as ridiculously expensive in time and/or money to add value? Do you think any changes should be made?

>

> tl:dr precursors are massive investments of time or money, be it gold or gems. what are your opinions on the matter?

 

I won't say that changes should or shouldn't be made, because first we have to agree on what the issue is. And I don't think price is an issue at all, nor am I quite sure why the OP thinks it is.

 

Legendaries are intended to sink gold from the economy, to keep us busy, and to give us a sense that we earned something, somehow. If you like questing, the collection method is great; if you don't, you can buy the precursor directly for Gen1, nearly directly for Gen2.1 (and for Gen 2.0, there's no way to bypass the collections).

 

Ultimately the price isn't "ridiculous", it's just high enough that these aren't easily bought without dedicating some time & attention.

 

 

[joneirikb.7506]

It really depends on your perspective. I'm just going to give an alternative way of thinking here, and a different way to value time:

 

I admit that I'm not in the target audience here, since I haven't found a single legendary I'm interested in (think they all look dumb personally, my taste).

 

But when talking about legendary crafting with a few others, I ended up looking at how much work it would have been, since I already had the gift of exploration and battle at the time. And came to the conclusion that the fastest way for me to get a legendary, and with the least boredom/annoyance/frustration due to my complete hate for grinding. Would be to work about 2 days at work, and convert the money I earn to gems, convert to gold, and buy the legendary straight off the TP.

 

Or basically one day of overtime.

 

If I wanted a Legendary, that is how I would have done it. Faster, less frustrating, less boring, and I can keep the game a place to do things I find is fun. I certainly know this isn't for everyone, and a lot of people would hate this method, but I'm trying to put into perspective how much time/work people invest into a single legendary (120 days just for one time gated material, for eks), compared to working 2 normal work days, or 1 Saturday overtime.

[Knighthonor.4061]

> @"Commandant Alexei.2486" said:

> By this, I mean, it really seems like the game encourages you to do so, which, is a good business model, don't get me wrong. However, I have to say, especially to those of you that have multiple legendaries, props to you guys, you either have a heck of a lot of time and dedication, or deep wallets. In the end, for instance, to craft dusk, it would take a minimum (a shear minimum) of 120 days to make it, and that's just the time required to make the deldrimor steel ingots you'll need. That's not including the 13000+ mithril ores, or the exorbitant amount of other materials that you'll need, as well as thousands of currencies in the other maps for moving it along. So, at that point, the only way to speed things up would be to spend gold on these materials. Well, that's a whopping 500+ gold from the trading post. Which, to make gold, we have to farm anyway, so why not just farm the materials, right? It just feels like my choice is to either turn myself into a fleshy bot and farm either gold or all the materials, or hack up quite a hefty sum in gems to then purchase gold to purchase either the materials or the precursor outright. I understand the difficulty is what gives it value, but kitten, my character is now 2,130 days old and I still don't have a legendary, even though I've thought I was always working on it in my down time (I have everything except the precursor, as I have dumped thousands of weapons into the mystic toilet before the precursor crafting was added). I think it takes less time to achieve GWAMM in GW1 than it does a single legendary in GW2, which again, I'm astounded by those of you that have multiple legendaries. You're paragons to me. So, what all do you think? Should it be as ridiculously expensive in time and/or money to add value? Do you think any changes should be made?

>

> tl:dr precursors are massive investments of time or money, be it gold or gems. what are your opinions on the matter?

 

I am mad right now because I put in a lot of time grinding out the 3 tier of the Legendary Crafting, as well as a lot of Money to Gold transfer to buy the mats I needed to craft what I thought was a legendary. The Legendary crafting only allow you to make precursors. For the amount of Money I spent on mats, I could have easily bought a few Precursors. In fact if I saved, I could have just bought the legendary off the market. The Crafting stuff in the game is not fun and not enjoyable. I honestly believe its just straight up better to just buy it. crafting it cost more. Its stupid really. Because the crafting in this game dont really provide many good cool looking skins period beside legendary.

[Aulendur.4036]

> @"Knighthonor.4061" said:

> > @"Commandant Alexei.2486" said:

> > By this, I mean, it really seems like the game encourages you to do so, which, is a good business model, don't get me wrong. However, I have to say, especially to those of you that have multiple legendaries, props to you guys, you either have a heck of a lot of time and dedication, or deep wallets. In the end, for instance, to craft dusk, it would take a minimum (a shear minimum) of 120 days to make it, and that's just the time required to make the deldrimor steel ingots you'll need. That's not including the 13000+ mithril ores, or the exorbitant amount of other materials that you'll need, as well as thousands of currencies in the other maps for moving it along. So, at that point, the only way to speed things up would be to spend gold on these materials. Well, that's a whopping 500+ gold from the trading post. Which, to make gold, we have to farm anyway, so why not just farm the materials, right? It just feels like my choice is to either turn myself into a fleshy bot and farm either gold or all the materials, or hack up quite a hefty sum in gems to then purchase gold to purchase either the materials or the precursor outright. I understand the difficulty is what gives it value, but kitten, my character is now 2,130 days old and I still don't have a legendary, even though I've thought I was always working on it in my down time (I have everything except the precursor, as I have dumped thousands of weapons into the mystic toilet before the precursor crafting was added). I think it takes less time to achieve GWAMM in GW1 than it does a single legendary in GW2, which again, I'm astounded by those of you that have multiple legendaries. You're paragons to me. So, what all do you think? Should it be as ridiculously expensive in time and/or money to add value? Do you think any changes should be made?

> >

> > tl:dr precursors are massive investments of time or money, be it gold or gems. what are your opinions on the matter?

>

> I am mad right now because I put in a lot of time grinding out the 3 tier of the Legendary Crafting, as well as a lot of Money to Gold transfer to buy the mats I needed to craft what I thought was a legendary. The Legendary crafting only allow you to make precursors. For the amount of Money I spent on mats, I could have easily bought a few Precursors. In fact if I saved, I could have just bought the legendary off the market. The Crafting stuff in the game is not fun and not enjoyable. I honestly believe its just straight up better to just buy it. crafting it cost more. Its stupid really. Because the crafting in this game dont really provide many good cool looking skins period beside legendary.

 

I don't know which Precursor you crafted and when but last time I checked, the price differences depended on the Legendary! Some precursors are cheaper when directly bought, some others are cheaper when crafted.

[Carighan.6758]

Uh, I remember buying Carcharias for 26g, so it was quite alright :grin:

 

That being said, I don't really see the problem. Drops **are** limited, and it is all paid with ingame currency anyhow.

[Feanor.2358]

> @"Commandant Alexei.2486" said:

> tl:dr precursors are massive investments of time or money, be it gold or gems. what are your opinions on the matter?

 

Nah, not really. In my experience people who struggle to get the gold simply spend too much elsewhere. The game throws a lot of gold at your face, as long as you focus that into one project it's not hard to actually finish it. Back when I started Nevermore I had 100g in wallet, nothing much in bank and Amalgamated Gemstones were 3g apiece. I didn't spend a single gem on it and all the farming I did was joining some metas when I felt like it and doing some daily fractals. Just have patience and keep your spending in check.

[Stalkingwolf.6035]

i finished Auroa which was pretty simple and a lot of fun.

Then i finished Astralaria Pre Cursor IV and the required gold to finish the legendary is a bit pain. Mystic coins and Amalgamated Gemstone are pure fun killer.

 

then i thought "i have Sunrise, so lets build Twilight to build Eternity". i looked at the Collections and couldnt stop laughing. as you said, the required time to build daily and needed mithril is complete overkill. so again farm gold to buy the pre and then build Twilight. Again a lot of coins but no Amalgamated Gemstones.

 

i'm playing since beta with some breaks. i got 1 pre Spark which is only 433g (minus taxes) worth. Dusk cost 760g.

so currently i dont know if i will finish another legendary, maybe if it is designed like the Aurora collection

[Stinger.4120]

We're have not problem with precursors as for PvE players. Most problem with "Gift of Battle" - WvW part to craft legends.

[ProtoGunner.4953]

I am on my 8th or so legendary (Binding of Ipos) and the fact that they a) made those new ones without _any_ collection/achievements and the other fact that they based the material list on merely momentary un-elusive guesses from the trading post 'balancing' is just very disappointing. Yeah: just make them take out the mithril an let us farm/produce a ridiculous amount of it. Very, very lackluster and not in the vein of a true AAA title. A fun fact is that the amount of available mithril on the TP didn't go down, no it has risen significantly:

 

[https://gw2spidy.com/item/19700](https://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19700 "https://gw2spidy.com/item/19700")

[Remus Darkblight.1673]

The only problem I have with any of the top end items is the time gated stuff. I would like to be able to farm as much as I like for as long as I like and not have to think about getting to a crafting station once per day for weeks on end. I can see how it might encourage logins but I don't like feeling that I must login or forever extend the completion date. Other than this I have no issues personally with legendaries being expensive or taking time, just not artificially inflated time gates.

[Rasimir.6239]

If you have played for a long time and have trouble coming up with the resources to craft any legendary, may I ask what you have been doing with the materials and gold you've gathered during your playtime?

 

Personally I'm at the age where I'm playing this game purely to enjoy myself. I used to farm in other games, many years ago, but now I've come to the conclusion that my time is too precious to me to spend my entertainment with things I don't enjoy. I've dabbled in pretty much every corner of this game during the five-and-a-half years I've been playing, but only to the point where I was having fun, never with the main purpose to farm anything specific. I also don't enjoy playing the trading post, so most of the materials I gather end up in my material storage rather than being turned into gold right away.

 

That said, I've managed to casually gather four legendary items on my account, one backpiece (fractal, which I had been playing quite frequently after HoT release but have since had to stop for personal/health reasons) and three weapons (Kudzu because I enjoyed the precursor collections, the Minstrel because it was the only weapon I really wanted and the only pre I ever dropped, and just recently Nevermore because I had started the precursor journey two years ago to grab the 2nd level skin for one of my characters). With all four items I found that I had accumulated almost all of the resources needed just from my casual, "inefficient" gameplay. The biggest problem turned out to be the amalgamated gemstones for Nevermore as I don't particularly enjoy playing meta events and world bosses and hadn't gotten many of those before.

 

If you don't want to gold-farm, don't. Just play the game whichever way you enjoy and avoid spending a lot of of gold/resources, and you'll have enough to grab your precursor soon. There's no hurry, it's not like this game invalidates equipment with each update :) .

[Khisanth.2948]

If you have been playing since headstart then what the hell have you been wasting all your gold and materials on for this to be an issue? Especially mithril which is one of the cheapest thing in the game.

 

Forget 5 years. Just one year of login rewards and dailies would cover most of the things needed.

730g from dailies - 341g for gift of might and magic(get the clovers from login rewards and ectos should be easily covered by regular play) leaves you with 405g

405g-246g for gift of twilight leaves you with 159g

This leaves you 276g short but over the course of a year this can be covered by doing whatever to get you an extra 76 silvers per day. In reality it is less because some of the cost of the gift of might and magic can be covered by laurels and you'll be getting some from drops and whatnot

[Turkeyspit.3965]

I'm not in love with any of the flashy skins for any of the existing legendaries, and the ones I do like are hardly worth the effort in obtaining, so no interest in crafting any legendaries for me.

 

I have a friend who lists T5 mats on the TP pretty much daily, along with ecto and has even sold a a few pre-cursors. The gold he got in return went to buy skins or gems for mount adoption licenses, etc. Sounds like a win-win to me: players grinding legendaries can get mats faster if they have the coin, and players who have no interest in legendaries can still profit from obtaining crafting mats.

 

 

[Danikat.8537]

I like that we have options. If someone thinks that it's better to farm gold or convert gems to buy the precursor or the finished legendary than that's their choice and I'm happy they can pick a method which suits them. Having done it both ways (bought 1 precursor, made 2) I'd never buy one again because I found farming gold a lot more frustrating compared to doing the collection. Admittedly I bought one back in the 'bad old days' when precursor crafting was a distant rumour and the prices were constantly rising - so you were chasing a moving target and taking a break from farming meant falling behind. It's probably different now prices are much lower and kept down by the option to craft them (not to mention gold is easier to make). But even so I prefer doing the collections.

 

(I am however jealous of these people who apparently can take as much overtime as they want, whenever they want, for extra money. My current job doesn't offer overtime, if I work extra days I get an extra day off instead. When I did work jobs with overtime it was up to the manager to decide how many hours were available and everyone wanted them so it was divided up between us, you could refuse it but you couldn't take extra.)

 

I can't remember how long it took me to make a precursor (longer than 120 days I assume) but I definitely didn't find the time-gated materials to be a problem. When I'm making a legendary I start by making a list of everything I'll need and what step it's for, so I can plan ahead. I started making the time-gated materials as soon as I had enough of the base mats instead of waiting until I was on that step, and when I got to a point where I couldn't complete the step I was on until I'd made more time-gates mats I knew what I'd need in future and could work on that at the same time.

 

I do have mixed feelings about buying a finished legendary. I don't think it affects me - I make legendaries because I like them, so I don't care if some random might think I bought it any more than I care if they're impressed I've got it. But I feel like it could devalue it for the owner. Part of what I like is the memory of making them and the anticipation of being nearly finished and the excitement of seeing each step done. I feel like even if you work extra hours at your job to afford it there's too much of a disconnect between the process and the finished product, and it loses that sense of achievement.

 

But that's for them to decide. Since I'm hoping to sell a legendary soon I can hardly complain (for all I know my future customer is reading this topic!) I just don't think I'd ever want to do it myself.