Guild Wars 2

One major issue with Precursor crafting is Anet will be setting the market for the value of each precursor, based on the crafting recipes they implement.

Someone looking to craft Dusk should expect a huge grind that will take a lot of time and effort (and that’s perfectly understandable), but someone making The Bard should definitely not be subjected to the same grind since the current demand for The Bard is significantly lower than Dusk.

As of this posting The Bard is selling for 90g on the TP whereas Dusk is selling for 900g.

Nobody is sure if Anet is happy with the current precursor prices, so they may intentionally bring down the price of Dusk and other high-priced precursors, but bring up the prices of the cheaper ones like The Bard is tougher because if you make it too hard and expensive to craft The Bard, people will just buy it from the TP instead.

I think it’s important to make the crafting take a certain amount of time, just to provide a sense of accomplishment, but you can’t include too much monetary cost simply because of the huge discrepancy in price on the TP.

This is why I am suggesting the following:

1. Every Precursor should require the player to obtain all the dungeons Gifts, the Fractals Gift, and the WvW Gift. Allows for grind and a process that takes time, but involves no actual gold cost to the player.

- Gift of Ascalon and Gift of Baelfire should give you the “Gift of Flame”
– Gift of the Forgeman and Gift of Sanctuary should give you the “Gift of Ice”
– Gift of of the Nobleman, Gift of Thorns, and Gift of Knowledge should give you the “Gift of Excess”
– Gift of Zhaitan, Gift of Battle, and Gift of Ascension should give you the ’Gift of the Soldier"
* Putting all 4 of these newly created Gifts together should give you the “Gift of the Slayer”

2. Each precursor will have it’s own special Gift. ie “Gift of Dusk”, “Gift of Spark”, “Gift of The Lover”, etc. This is what allows for each precursor to cost whatever the developers want it to. Legendary crafting already has this step and precursor crafting should as well.

3a. Ascended weapon based on what you’re making. I like this idea in principle, however…. If you factor in the cost of leveling up crafting in a given discipline, it may no longer make sense. For example, The Bard can be bought from the TP for 90g. Making the ascended focus requires level 500 Artificing and it takes approximately 140g to craft Artificing from 0-500, plus then you’d still have to actually make the ascended focus. This presents a problem.

3b. Craftable exotic weapon that only needs level 400 crafting. They would have to introduce new weapons, recipes, etc for this, but it does make sense. This also lets them control the price of the precursor even further.

Once all this is done you should have to buy the necessary Precursor Crafting recipes and end up with:

1 Gift of the Slayer
1 Gift of Dusk
1 Crafted Exotic Greatsword

= Dusk

Thoughts?

So basically a big dungeon grind?

No thanks.

The “journey” to crafting a Precursor will be a much bigger task than just running Dungeons. I anticipate that it’ll be cheaper to just buy one from the TP, than to make one.

If it ends up being cheaper to buy a precursor than to craft one, Anet will have missed the mark on this entirely. The entire point of this should be to offer a time investment alternative to the straight up gold/rng grind that currently dominates precursor aquisition. It makes no sense to introduce precursor crafting if its just a bunch of kitten you can buy off the tp and combine together, unless this route ends up being dirt cheap (which we all know it wouldn’t be, and SHOULDN’T be).

It needs to be a quest of some kind, where time and effort are the dominant resource requirement. Some straight gold investment should be expected and would be reasonable, but all gold would defeat the purpose. Something along the lines of the personal story, but hopefully more interesting.

Also, (as much as I would love it to be) it won’t be a pure dungeon grind. Just imagine the QQ’ing….

i like the idea of adding dungeoning to the mix

to me it be more like this
both ascended parts for the weapon, gift requiring dungeoning and mystic forging or regular crafting, and 1-3 vision crystals

There needs to be something to limit the number of precursors made just as there is for the number of legendary weapons you can make… like one/two per personal story completion.

There also needs to be some gold sink involved. 500 crafting required + dark matter.

Dark matter makes a lot of sense imo. Instead of tossing things into the forge for a tiny chance, you get far more regular progress towards what you want. In addition to this it’ll help boost exotic prices back up a bit (they are too low now due to ascended crafting).

It’s been mentioned on countless other precursor crafting-related threads already. Make them account-bound, and the market isn’t affected in any way (asides demand on resources to craft presursors).

Job done.

I despair when I see that people want precursors to become another legendary. By the time I get to needing my precursor, I`ve already done the dungeon grind and materials collection thing at least once. I shouldn’t have to do the gifts twice, I`d like to do something different. I don’t mind it being involved or time consuming, but as was said above, if it is actually easier to just buy a precursor, then the point has been missed.

It’s one part of the legendary, its not half of one or a legendary in itself.

Tentonhammr.7849:

If it ends up being cheaper to buy a precursor than to craft one, Anet will have missed the mark on this entirely. The entire point of this should be to offer a time investment alternative to the straight up gold/rng grind that currently dominates precursor aquisition. It makes no sense to introduce precursor crafting if its just a bunch of kitten you can buy off the tp and combine together, unless this route ends up being dirt cheap (which we all know it wouldn’t be, and SHOULDN’T be).

It needs to be a quest of some kind, where time and effort are the dominant resource requirement. Some straight gold investment should be expected and would be reasonable, but all gold would defeat the purpose. Something along the lines of the personal story, but hopefully more interesting.

Also, (as much as I would love it to be) it won’t be a pure dungeon grind. Just imagine the QQ’ing….

Precursors aren’t meant to be easy to get. So if it weren’t cheaper just to buy one from the TP, then that means it wouldn’t be done right.

or they can do it the cheap but time consuming way and make them account bound (if you craft them). Tat way you dont upset the prices at all

Chokolata.1870:

or they can do it the cheap but time consuming way and make them account bound (if you craft them). Tat way you dont upset the prices at all

And there are already account bound weapons/armor/trinkets in the game, namely the ascended ones. Add a means to unlock stats on an item and allow us to use fully unlocked ascended items as a precursors. The unlocking part can be a scavenger hunt or it can require crafting. Or it can be something totally different. Get creative here!