I believe that the mechanisms available to obtain a precursor weapon are broken. The Legendary process has one element that requires Luck – the gift of Luck – and does not need a second.
The problem with precursor weapons is compounded by the fact that the TP market for them is being heavily controlled and manipulated to keep the price ridiculously high.
This situation has been allowed to develop by ANet due to their blunders in allowing bugged crafting recipes into the game and their decision to not take any action against those who exploited those bugs.
Most people who are playing GW2 now have reached level 80 and have full exotic gear and therefore they are looking at creating a Legendary as the only remaining goal in the game, until the first major content expansion is released.
The process of creating a Legendary should be hard and time consuming, but it should not be one that can be exploited by a small group of individuals to the detriment of the rest of the community.
ANet needs to do something about this and I think the simplest solution is to implement a Mystic Forge recipe that guarantees a precursor weapon. The recipe should use a new item (call it “Legendary Essence”) which is available for purchase for gold, karma, fractal / dungeon / WvW tokens, or laurels. The other ingredients should be standard stuff – 250 Globs plus two others that are specific to the type of precursor required.
Most importantly the resulting precursor should be soulbound to the character that creates it. I would go so far as to say that ALL precursors that come out of the Mystic Forge should be soulbound. World drop precursors should remain soulbound on use to allow those lucky enough to get one to profit from it.
What to do about existing precursors? Nothing. As much as it would please me to see them all become soulbound overnight (and imagine the MF exploiters looking at their stacks of dusk and dawn and crying) it isn’t necessary. If there is a guaranteed recipe then it fixes the price – nobody will pay 650 gold if they can craft it for 200 – and the market will have to adjust to match.
Market traders will whine but tbh they’ve had a good long run exploiting this so screw ‘em.
Now that the Scavenger Hunt idea has been abandoned, I’m sure a lot of people will be praying that the new way of obtaining precursors does NOT involve Laurels.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/250635-wheres-the-scavenger-hunt-post/
colin johanssonWe are [..] adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.
(edited by Svarty.8019)
Laurels would not be my preferred currency either, but I proposed that the new item should be available through multiple vendors for any and all of the in-game currencies – hell they could even add it to the gem store as well.
Now that the Scavenger Hunt idea has been abandoned, I’m sure a lot of people will be praying that the new way of obtaining precursors does NOT involve Laurels.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/250635-wheres-the-scavenger-hunt-post/colin johanssonWe are [..] adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.
don’t spread false information – it’s not being abandoned. It’s a work in progress but it takes time to design such a system.
I want to solo a dragon in a one player dungeon for my precursor. I want it to be a really hard and fun fight. And I want the title dragon slayer after killing it.
Now that the Scavenger Hunt idea has been abandoned, I’m sure a lot of people will be praying that the new way of obtaining precursors does NOT involve Laurels.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/250635-wheres-the-scavenger-hunt-post/colin johanssonWe are [..] adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.
don’t spread false information – it’s not being abandoned. It’s a work in progress but it takes time to design such a system.
Please read the linked text
We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt
Now that the Scavenger Hunt idea has been abandoned, I’m sure a lot of people will be praying that the new way of obtaining precursors does NOT involve Laurels.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/250635-wheres-the-scavenger-hunt-post/colin johanssonWe are [..] adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.
don’t spread false information – it’s not being abandoned. It’s a work in progress but it takes time to design such a system.
Please read the linked text
We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt
There is a difference between building and designing. Next time dont’ nit pick statements to suit your viewpoint.
“We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt, this is something we want to do in the future and we’re in the midst of designing how this would function, but no one is actively building this feature and you should not expect in the Jan/Feb/March releases at this point.”
Building = coding
Designing = planning it out
Don’t expect it to be built without the design being complete.
The use of the word “would” suggests that it’s still a looong way away, if ever.
I’d be surprised if ANet impliments a scavenger hunt before summertime. Honestly i think they are just saying this to apease the masses and get people to shut up. They don’t give any kind of a timeframe for this, just leave it very vague. They don’t even say if it will be this year or not. If you ask me, i think they just want to milk the gems/TP for precursors as long as they can till they see drops in population, then they will release it.
Don’t expect it to be built without the design being complete.
The use of the word “would” suggests that it’s still a looong way away, if ever.
Exactly – they didn’t ABANDON it. It’s just going to take time to plan out the whole system
I’ve been giving this some more thought and it occurred to me that they could simply drop the requirement for a specific weapon (the current precursors) and replace it with any exotic weapon.
If they did this it would be simple to have the resulting Legendary retain the stats from the exotic weapon, solving the problems with transmuting the current legendary weapons.
The current recipes already have specific gifts and runes for specific legendary weapons so they wouldn’t need to change any other elements.
I imagine people who already own legendary weapons might be a bit annoyed to have missed out on the opportunity to choose the stats on their weapon but that could be solved by adding a transmutation recipe – throw your legendary plus an exotic with the stats you want plus a “Gift of Transmutation” into the forge and get back your legendary with the stats from the exotic. The “Gift of Transmutation” could be sent to each player who has a legendary via in game mail or put up on the gem store for a limited time for free.
The only down side to this idea is it means one less hoop to jump through to get a legendary but I don’t think removing a requirement that can be achieved by using real money to be much of a problem.
At the moment there are only a few requirements in the legendary recipe that you even have to leave Lions Arch to obtain, and if you are willing to spend enough real money there are none, so this change would not make the process significantly easier and would make it more straightforward and resolve two issues.
If they had wanted to make legendries truly challenging they would have made all the unique ingredients at least account bound and would not have allowed them to be traded at all – then a player who wanted a legendary would have had to work for it and not just buy it.
Now that the Scavenger Hunt idea has been abandoned, I’m sure a lot of people will be praying that the new way of obtaining precursors does NOT involve Laurels.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/250635-wheres-the-scavenger-hunt-post/colin johanssonWe are [..] adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.
I’m so glad they posted this important status update on the official forums rather than a fan site. Posting it on a fan site would only work to obfuscate the situation.
Now that the Scavenger Hunt idea has been abandoned, I’m sure a lot of people will be praying that the new way of obtaining precursors does NOT involve Laurels.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/250635-wheres-the-scavenger-hunt-post/colin johanssonWe are [..] adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.
we’ll try and find some other places to add a chance to get them
Anyway, at the OP: this idea is decent, just a pity you wasted your time typing it up. This issue is so far under the rug, its not even funny.
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