Guild Wars 2

I am crafting my legendary, and the only component I’m really missing is the precursor. I’m going for Bolt, so with Zap going from 1000g – 1400g on the TP, I really would like to find a different alternative. Which would be the ‘best’ in your humble opinion?

1. Farm the necessary gold (with the amount of time it would take, the price may inflate more.)

2. Gamble the Mystic Forge? I’ve heard it averages to a total of 600g, almost half the price of the precursor itself – pretty tempting. And I have 100+ Mystic Forge stones saved in my storage.
—Exotics are a better choice than rares, so:
a. Craft a bunch of exotic swords to feed to the MF
b. Buy the swords off the TP myself
c. Nevermind focusing on swords, and get whatever ends up being the cheapest exotic and dump it in. If I get a different precursor, sell that and farm the difference.

3. Wait for Anet to implement precursor crafting? Whenever that will be?

1. Is reliable, as you will have to reach it eventually.
2. Is still gambling
a. People are still selling exotics at a loss on the TP to level their proffessions to 500.
b. Faster, so probably the best.
c. Probably not a good idea, but it could work.
3. In the meantime you can play some Half-Life 3.

I would definately use up any Mystic Stones that you have for gambling for precursors throwing them into the forge with 3 exotics.
Keep in mind though, that even if you throw in 3 swords with a mystic stone, the weapon output is random, so you can end up with a sword, a hammer or a spear.
But once you get a precursor, you can sell it and use the gold towards buying zap.
So if you decide to use mf stones with exotics, go with the cheapest weapons you can get on buy order on the tp, no matter which kind of weapon it is.

Also, many named exotic weapons are very close in price to the cheapest ones on the tp and throwing them into the forge, unlocks their skin for your wardrobe. So if you are interested in expanding your wardrobe options, they are worth a look.

If you decide to gamble, the best advice anyone can ever give you is to choose an amount of gold you are willing to lose and not go over it.

Treating the Mystic forge as anything other than the games biggest gold sink is folly and leads to nothing but rage (anger, not the precursor).

If you come away from the forge upset, you threw in more than you were prepared to give up.

Margins on precursor forging are…not good, to say the least. If you run the entire value chain yourself (buy materials via buy order, craft all your own rare swords, sell all exotics) then you’d expect to spend ~1600 gold crafting the rares, recovering ~650 from selling the non-Zap exotics, leaving you with a Zap for a smooth…950 gold. There are a few tricks you ckittene to squeeze a bit more profit out of it that I will not go into here, but suffice to say that unless you have several thousand gold that you are willing to risk in the forge, it is not a good idea to be fishing for precursors in today’s market.

I would suggest saving up the money and eventually buying the precursor outright via buy order. If precursor crafting is introduced before then, great! You have a bunch of wealth saved up.

It is a fair fear that the price of a precursor will spike even higher in the future, inflating away the value of your gold reserves. If you do not expect to farm it up quickly, I would suggest saving some portion of your money in T5 fine and T6 fine materials. These have two useful properties. First, the price of high demand precursors is very closely linked to the price of T5 fine materials; T6 fine materials tend to be linked to T5 materials as well, so they all tend to move in price together. If you store your wealth in T5 materials instead of gold, you will be well insulated against changes in the price of a precursor.

The other advantage fine materials is that they can be acquired without losing a ton of money to TP fees via buying bags. For well over a year, the buy price of heavy moldy bags as closely tracked the average sell value of the materials inside of them, plus or minus a couple coppers. That is, buying a bunch of HMBs and selling the contents will generally have you breaking even. This makes them a great avenue for turning your gold into materials for storage as a hedge against inflation – you get an even mix of materials to hedge your bets, and you can always get your money back out.

It also conveniently turns your money into stacks of materials, such that you aren’t staring at a big pile of gold that is oh so tempting to spend on an impulse.

So save and hedge. Avoid the forge. You’ll get there eventually!

Here’s my advice for targeting a specific precursor:
Run dungeons to save up the gold to buy it.
While running dungeons, spend the tokens on exotic dungeon weapons and throw them into the Mystic Forge.
One of two things will happen:
1. You will get lucky with the Mystic Forge and get your Precursor.
2. You will not get lucky, but will save up the gold to buy the Precursor.

Your best bet is to buy it. The forge has been extremely lucky for some and a heartbreaker for others. I have had immense luck with it and I still tell people not to do it. If for the sake of forging you want to try it, do as the above said. Set aside a set amount your willing to lose and forge some swords. Craft them, buy them, whatever it is you are going to do. I recommend crafting swords. Pulling a pre from the forge is a great feeling. If at the end of the day you really wanna buy Zap hit me up in game.

I found myself to be fairly lucky when it comes to the forge: upgrading mats from T5-T6, I got double the value back. Also got all my Mystic Clovers with a surplus left over. I don’t know if that luck can carry on to precursor fishing, but I’m really the kind of person that wants to see solid investments, and the forge is quite risky.

Thanks for the advice. I’ll farm the gold, but drop a large portion of them in mat investment (never a good idea to dump it all into one type of investment). Meanwhile I’ll flush down dungeon weapons and see what comes of it. Wish me luck – I’ll need it!

I wish you all the luck I can!

Arikyali.5804:

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3. Wait for Anet to implement precursor crafting? Whenever that will be?

I doubt you will EVER be able to craft the current precursors….they will be new ones.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Arikyali.5804:

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3. Wait for Anet to implement precursor crafting? Whenever that will be?

I doubt you will EVER be able to craft the current precursors….they will be new ones.

Good for me. I dislike most of the current legendaries. I hope they add a Greatsword legendary that doesn’t look like a surfboard :/