Why Guild Wars 2's Legendaries Aren't Legendary
By Date: 02-26-2013 Views:
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When it comes to MMORPG's, they always have an end-goal. This often changes as the game goes on and expands, but there's always something you're striving to get or achieve. In Guild Wars 2(GW2)'s case, this is the Legendary weapons. One thing GW2 has done well is keeping things equal between those that are casual and those that are hardcore, in that Legendary weapons aren't any better than Exotic weapons that can be found elsewhere. Regardless, there's a problem with the Legendaries as well: they just simply aren't legendary.
When we're looking at what they should be, there are a few qualifications that come to mind:
They should require significant knowledge of the game
They should be difficult to obtain
They should require the help of other players
The interesting thing to note here is that none of these are true in GW2. Let's take a look at why this is true, but first let us look at how they are made. To do this, let's look at a chart showing all of the ingredients for the legendary dagger, the Incinerator.
While this isn't a comprehensive listing of the recipe and all that goes into it, the important thing does show: the only things you can't buy from other players are the Badges of Honor, 100% World Completion, Karma and the Skill Points. Most of these you'll be knocking out as you're playing the game anyways though. And even if you had none of the account-bound items yet, it wouldn't take too long to get them.
Buying Weapons
While obtaining the Legendaries yourself isn't that difficult, there's an easier way to speed it up: purchase things on your own. One of the most common things players will purchase are the precursors (in the recipe above that would be the Spark). Essentially these are Exotic weapons that are used in the creation of their higher-ranked forms. At the time of this writing they are in the hundreds of gold, but if you are able to farm the rest of the materials and things on your own this is still somewhat cheap. But this leads us on to the biggest problem here...
You can buy the Legendary weapons that others have already crafted! Yes, you heard that right. Instead of spending any time at all earning your weapon, you can just flat out purchase it off other players or via the Black Lion Trading Company. The cost of these is usually about 5 times that of the precursors, but regardless, the option is still there.
Why Aren't They Legendary?
If you've been following along, there are actually two major reasons as to why these weapons shouldn't be classified as being Legendary:
You can farm everything that's needed on your own, with no outside help at all;
You can purchase the whole weapon from other players (or just parts, if you're into building it yourself);
Concluding Thoughts
Legendary weapons wouldn't be so bothersome if it weren't for their overall goal: to show achievements. The issue here is that you need absolutely no achievements other than enough real-life cash in order to obtain them. It's hard to tell exactly what the idea was behind allowing them to be bought and sold in the first place, but it would appear it's related to the Gem store (as players will undoubtedly purchase Gems to get their weapons). Hopefully there's a higher tier later that doesn't suffer from this problem.
It's also worth noting that if you break down the entire cost of the Legendaries (there's a lot involved, and many recipes), the cost of making them on your own actually makes them more expensive than buying the things whole! You would actually be better off selling the materials needed to craft one, and then use the gold you got from that to purchase one outright. Not to mention there would be a lot of saved time trying to organize materials, ensure that everything is crafted properly, etc. And all this does is further stress the fact that these are not truly legendary.
