Guild Wars 2

While taking a break from studying, I was thinking about Legendaries and the fact that I, a regular player, would have a really hard time getting one and would be bored during half of the activities to get the materials.

Other players who are able to play the market and are more hardcore sometimes already have three and can buy two more from the Trading Post if they wanted to.

The last thing I considered is that fact that I’m hearing a lot of complains about the fact that getting a Legendary should involve a real, epic adventure; and not a grinding-fest.

That’s why I evaluated the whole system, marked what didn’t work for me and introduces elements that would make it more fun and adventures.

Let’s start with the current situation:

http://i.imgur.com/f7vmS.png

I think we are all familiar with the system and the complexity of it.
Now, I don’t hate a complex system and it can be used to make it feel like you are not performing a task, but like you are making it an incomprehensible, unexpected adventure. In this case however, it’s just plain complex and reasonably boring.

PROBLEMS

I started marking what didn’t like and ended up with this:

http://i.imgur.com/7J6aN.png

The Gift of Might and Gift of Magic are just a grinding-fest. All you have to do is kill mobs and collect the loot. It has nothing to do with might, magic or adventure; but is more about doing a boring, repetitive task.

The same applies for the Globs of Ectoplasm, the Precursor -which is too hard to find-, the Dungeon and Resource Gift -like Gift of Light- and the Resource Gift -like Gift of Energy-.

I also don’t like the entire idea of Mystic Clovers and the Gift of Fortune; it’s just about grinding in the end, not luck.

I do like two concepts that have to be changed to work:

• The Gift of Battle and The Dungeon Gift are about adventures in WvW and Dungeons. The problem is that they require too many tokens and end up being about grinding instead of adventure
• The Icy Runestones requires the defeat of the Claw of Jormag, which is about adventure; but the Runestones themselves require too much gold for any normal player. If the adventure itself is more time-consuming, than the grinding for gold can be eliminated

Now, I don’t entirely hate everything about the system.

I like the idea of the Mystic Coins because, without the Trading Post, it requires you to complete daily and monthly achievements, thus requires you to play daily or intensively. This ensures that the players try to play the game daily and populate the game, even if it is just for a little while.

The Gift of Exploration requires you to travel the entire continent of Tyria, which can be a real adventure. This is one of the thing I want to achieve with my Legendary system: that it becomes an adventure.
The same applies for the Obsidian Shard: you either have to complete the meta-event or complete the Fractals, which is also an adventure. The Karma cost of them isn’t ridiculously high and can easily be collected with the daily and monthly Jugs of Karma and by completing enough Dynamic Events.

The Bloodstone Shard can be obtained reasonably easy, especially when you have to achieve Map Completion.

Let’s recapitulate:

PARTS THAT I DISLIKE AND WANT TO CHANGE

• Grinding
  • Gift of Might
  • Gift of Magic
  • Globs of Ectoplasm
  • Precursor
  • Dungeon and Resource Gift
  • Resource Gift
• Random luck (and indirect grinding)
  • Mystic Clovers
  • Gift of Fortune

PARTS I LIKE BUT REQUIRE A CHANCE

• Requires adventure, but also gold- and token-grinding
  • Gift of Battle
  • Dungeon Gift
  • Icy Runestones

PARTS I LIKE

• Daily participation
  • Mystic Coins
• Adventure
  • Gift of Exploration
  • Obsidian Shards
  • Bloodstone Shard

SOLUTIONS

And now for my solution:

http://i.imgur.com/iligU.png

There are 6 aspects that I’d like to chance, some of which are new concepts (which are marked in green):

• Precursor
• Icy Runestones
• Resource Gift -> Gift of Champions
• Dungeon and Resource Gift -> Gift of Adventure
• Gift of Battle
• Gift of Fortune -> Book of Your Legend

Precursor

The Precursor is too hard to obtain for any normal player, and almost doesn’t require any adventure.

That’s why I’d like to introduce a second way of obtaining the Precursor: the Gift of “Precursor”.

To obtain the Gift of “Precursor”, you have to collect four items:

• Mysterious Shaft; which can be found at a random player-specific location in the Straits of Devastation
• Mysterious Head; which can be found at a random player-specific location in Malchor’s Leap
• Mysterious Energy; which can be found at a random player-specific location in Cursed Shore
• Mysterious Transfixer of “Precursor”; which can be crafted form Orichalcum, Ancient Planks and a small amount of Lodestones and which determines the Precursor you receive

The location where you can find the three pieces differ for each player and resets every 4 months, thus changing locations and granting you the opportunity to collect them again.

When you have the four pieces, you can combine them in the Mystic Forge to receive your Precursor.

By doing this, Orr becomes more populated an players will be randomly crossing Orr and, hopefully, complete Dynamic Events while being there; thus reviving the player-dead Orr.

Icy Runestones

The Icy Runestones are too expensive, so I’d like to lower the price to 50 gold for 100 Runestones. This way, they are more affordable for average players.

Resource Gift -> Gift of Champions

The Resource Gift is pure grinding, so I’d like to replace that with a new concept: the Gift of Champions.

The Gift of Champions can be obtained by combining 4 elements by crafting them with any 400 crafting profession.

The four elements are:

• Crystal of the Shatterer: a 35% chance drop from The Shatterer
• Meat of Tequatl The Sunless: a 35% chance drop from Tequatl The Sunless
• Claw of The Claw of Jormag: a 35% chance drop from the Claw of Jormag
• Energy of the Start: a 35% chance drop from any starter zone champion, like the Shadow Behemoth or the Fire Elemental

This way, you have to complete an adventure to defeat the Dragon Champions of Tyria and have to populate the starter zones to obtain the last element.

Dungeon and Resource Gift -> Gift of Adventure

The Dungeon gift was, in my opinion, a great idea. The only problem was that it required too many tokens from one dungeon and thus required too much grinding.

The Dungeon and Resource Gift wasn’t a great idea because of the many very rare resources that are required.

That’s why I’d like to replace the 3 types of resources with 3 types of other dungeon tokens and make the players go through not one (dungeon) adventure, but 4.

I’d also like to lower the required amount of tokens required for a gift to 180.
This would require 3 explorable dungeon runs of a dungeon to collect a gift; which gives players another motivation to try out the 3 different paths of an explorable dungeon.

Gift of Battle

The Gift of Battle itself is a great concept and lures players to World versus World. The problem is that it’s more a grind in WvW and it’s jumping puzzles than an adventure.

That’s why, firstly, I’d like to change the amount of Badges required for the Gift of Battle and make them more likely to drop, as following:

• WvW kills: stays the same
• Jumping puzzle: lower the rate to 1-3 in the Borderlands and 3-6 in the Eternal Battlegrounds
• Capturing towers: introduce a rate of 0-2 per captured tower
• Capturing keeps: increase the rate to 1-4 per captured keep
• Capturing Stonemist Castle: increase the rate to 3-6 per captured Castle

To compensate for the lower Badge-requirement, I’d also like to introduce 2 new collectables that are required for the Gift of Battle:

• Mist Blades: 100% chance drop from a Keep Lord. 12 are required per Gift and requires players to capture 12 keeps, or each keep in WvW once.
• Stonemist Blades: 100% chance drop from a Stonemist Lord. 3 are required per Gift and requires players to capture Stonemist Castle 3 times

By lowering the rate of Badges required and introducing two new collectables, players are going to run around the Mists, capture objectives and undertake an adventure; and thus populate WvW.

These collectables are combined in the Mystic Forge to create the Gift of Battle.

Gift of Fortune → Book of Your Legend

I want to get rid of the entire concept of the Gift of Fortune because too much of it isn’t working, in my opinion.

That’s why I’d like to introduce the new “Book of Your Legend”. This requires players you to complete 20 events, of which only 5 may be repeated, in all the zones of Kryta, Ascalon, Shiverpeak Mountains and Maguuma Jungle:

• Chapter of Kryta; which requires you to to complete 20 events, which 5 may be repeated, in each zone of Kryta
• Chapter of Ascalon; which requires you to to complete 20 events, which 5 may be repeated, in each zone of Ascalon
• Chapter of Maguuma Jungle, which requires you to to complete 20 events, which 5 may be repeated, in each zone of Maguuma Jungle
• Chapter of the Shiverpeaks, which requires you to to complete 20 events, which 5 may be repeated, in each zone of Shiverpeaks

Completing a zone unlocks an achievement which rewards you with the Chapter of that zone. The Chapters make the player explore all the zones and participate in as many events as possible, thus reviving dead zones and helping players with harder events.

These chapters can be combined in the Mystic Forge to create the Pages of Your Legend.

You also need the Cover of your Legend to make the Book of Your Legend. This Cover of your Legend can be “bought” with 900 ArenaNet achievement Points (and giving them a purpose). 900 points can be obtained by completing 100 daily quests.

But there are also other ways to obtain these Points: by completing achievements. This is easier in the beginning of the game, and thus makes it harder and harder to obtain a Cover of Your Legend and make a legendary the longer you play the game.

This is only my opinion and I am just a regular guy, so I don’t know anything about wether this is possible to code.

And I wouldn’t put this online if I didn’t want it to be criticized

Reading through this, I’m seeing:

• Free precursor once every 4 months for every player
• Other requirements lowered significantly

The end result? Well, if the free precursors are not at least account bound, that’s not going to be too happy, as the early adapters will benefit tremendously. The overall reductions that you suggested would make Legendaries overall less Legendary in the sense that it’d be much easier to get it. After all, you lowered the requirements or introduced additional ways to go about most of the stuff.

Also, by pretty much revamping the whole system this late into the game, you would incur a massive kittenstorm from the playerbase. The players who got their Legendary before the update will rage, the players who bought some stuff that your update made obsolete will rage. The only people happy will be the ones who are currently saving for a Legendary.

You do get credit for making a suggestion that is better than pretty much all the other Legendary-related suggestions.