Guild Wars 2

Legendaries are probably one of the coolest aspects of the game. Not only are they crazy difficult to acquire, like some of the titles in gw1, but they are also massive currency sinks (for those who didn’t notice), which helps keep endgame-players from racking up stacks of unbelievable wealth. In that regard, they are strokes of genius from Arena Net’s standpoint.

But there is one issue with them: they aren’t equal.
Here’s why.

Every character has the opportunity to make 2, count em, 2 legendary weapons, one for each of the gifts of discovery they receive upon map completion.

For the sake of addressing the bigger issue, I will first only look at those who can switch weapons-all 6 professions not engineer or elementalist. These proffesions have 2 weapon sets, each capable of being one 2-handed weapon or two 1-handed weapons, as well as having two 2-handed aquatic weapons. This means that the average player has 4-6 weapons in use at a time. The thing is, there is a HUGE difference between the players with 4 and 6 weapons when it comes to legendary weapons. Money, materials, karma, everything else aside, each 100% map completion (no easy task) is 2 weapons. This makes 2-handed weapons 1.5x (2x excluding aquatic) more valuable than a 1-handed weapon because it brings you that much closer to being “fully legendary”.

BUT WAIT. It gets better. If you happen to be an engineer or elementalist, and if you happen to prefer your 2-handed weapon better than any of your other few choices (like many of those professions I know do), then you can become “fully legendary” with no additional playthroughs.

TL:DR 1-handed weapons are less valuable legendaries because they “fill” more of you with legendary-ness than alternatives.

Please discuss!

Legendaries should really just be a transmutation thing. Like the HoM rewards are. Either with at least 2 uses, but more practically, infinite uses.

This at least solves one of the problems, that is that 1h weapons would require twice as much everything in order to be fully legendaried out as compared to 2h weapons.

Gift of Exploration is account bound, one character can have as many legendaries as they want.

Yes, but Xemos, you must re-do 100% map completion. That is what I am looking at: 1 playthough vs 2 vs 3

Personally, I play so casually on my character that by the time I would actually acquire my first legendary I would have 2 or 3 alts with 100% map completion anyway. It may be more “efficient” with 2 handed weapons, but for players that play multiple alts equally this really isn’t an issue. I’m probably going to do the 100% map completion on my alts and use their karma/gold to help my main get his legendary.

I also view one handed legendary weapons differently. Being able to equip two legendary weapons at the same time gives me the opportunity to feel doubly awesome then if I had just a two-handed weapon.

I do think that one-handed weapons that have the potential of being duel-wielded should come in sets of two, but that’s just me not wanting to do the work again for the same skin.

Yeah, there’s an idea: what if getting a legendary simply unlocked the skin? You craft a consumable which just gives an account-wide access to the legendary weapons. That would be nice. =P

Doombringer Thor.5649:

Yeah, there’s an idea: what if getting a legendary simply unlocked the skin? You craft a consumable which just gives an account-wide access to the legendary weapons. That would be nice. =P

Rocking the starting area at level 3 with my Predator.