A little background:
I am a crafter at heart. I enjoy taking raw materials and refining them. I enjoy working with my hands. I love the process of creating things. I always have. When video games presented the ability to make things that would help your character progress, I jumped on it. Vanguard introduced me to crafting that I would consider a little more complex, and from then on I was hooked on virtual crafting. When I look at a game like that, one of the first things I want to know is how to gather and can I gain an advantage through crafting.
It was a multi-part journey. Each of the 3 parts had it’s own psychological/emotion reward. The feeling of accomplishment. From the gathering of the materials, to refining and assembling them, to receiving the final product, a virtual labor of love. You put time into it, and the result shows the value of that time.
Guild Wars 2
When I started GW2, I was somewhat disheartened at the simplicity of the crafting, and the lack of random chance involved with the results, but the recipe system made sense, and raw materials presented themselves, at the time, at a good pace. Unfortunately, after discovering the ultimate recipe, that being that all 6 tiers of crafting were just repeats of the previous levels using higher value material, it got boring really quick, but as I learned there were other items that could be crafted via the mystic forge, and I also started very quickly to look into the legendary weapons.
The process of crafting a legendary was daunting. I’d never seen such rediculous amounts of material required for a single item, and there were things required that involved aspects of games that I’d never cared to participate in (namely PvP and Dungeons).
Overall though, I saw it as doable. I even, at the time, set aside the issue of how precursors were obtained. Foolishly, at the start, I believed there was a chance at getting one as a drop. That faded quite quickly.
Then I stared playing the game more seriously. From there I started to learn the dark down sides of crafting a legendary. Anet had made it obscenely difficult to get the required materials in what appeared to be purely a move to get people to buy gems>gold to purchase. Calculations and tests were done. By April of 2013, I knew full well how long it would take me to gather the required T6 materials via general PvE play when taking into account my 2 to 3 hours a day play time combined with the limitations of Diminishing Returns and only 3 zones where T6 mats drop. 4 years if I played daily. Just for the T6 materials. Not including the orbs I needed, which drop far less. Coupled with precursors that only drop at about the same rate people win the lottery in real life, I just about gave up on crafting an legendary at all.
By the time this all set in, however, I had gotten my map completion, as well as the gift of battle. Standing in the way was the Gift of fortune, the Precursor, and the Gift of the Unicorn (which I had nearly completed).
I chose to make an attempt to get my T6 materials gathered for the Gift of Fortune. This quickly became a monotonous grind. I had, at this point, a bit of a dark epiphany. Tainted heavily with regret and emptyness. The end game for crafting in GW2 is not about crafting. It’s not about anything legendary. It’s about grinding gold.
Because no matter how much time you care to put in the game, spending 4 years grinding out T6 mats in the same 3 zones, at half hour per day segments, in the long run, your time put into crafting nets you nothing special. Because the guy with mommy’s credit card in your guild bought his legendary off the trading post before you even knew what one was.
That’s the saddest part about legendary weapons. They aren’t worthy of being crafted at all because in the long run, they are not legendary at all. They are just a skin. There is no joy in crafting something that others just buy off the market.
In the end, after half a year of farming, I had enough gold to buy 80% of the T6 mats I needed, along with the orbs for the gift. It nearly made me sick to my stomach to face the fact that the actual crafting path for these things, as designed, was just grinding gold.
Today, I put in an order, and recieved, The Lover. The last piece of the legendary. I received The Dreamer from the mystic forge, and … felt nothing. No sense of accomplishment. No sense that I had crafted something worthwhile. It was just a skin.
Worse, in the back of my mind, I hear the employees of anet whispering “sucker”.