Guild Wars 2

While I know it’s a decent ways off for me to get any kind of legendary item, a thought crossed my mind now that we can share them among characters, one that will be particularly problematic if/when we finally get legendary armour. Namely, the problem with runes/sigils and the fact legendaries can swap their stat spreads at will.

To clarify, I’ll point to the legendary sceptre, Meteorlogicus. For a Guardian, the sceptre is a pure damage weapon, so it’s great as a Berserker setup, where you can crank out as much damage as possible, and to this end you might use a Superior Sigil of Force or Night. However, using a sceptre on a Necromancer, you would want it to be Dire or Rabid, as for them a sceptre is a condition damage weapon. Swapping the stat spread is easy, however then the issue of your sigil comes into play. You might prefer a Superior Sigil of Malice or Bursting instead of the ones you’d use on a Guardian. This will run you quite a bit of gold just to swap the sigils, so suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a good prospect to share a legendary among characters unless its current sigils work for them, leaving it a more attractive option to not use your legendary, and just use an exotic sceptre for your Necro.

The issue will be even more pronounced if/when legendary armour comes out. Runes can get VERY expensive, and unless you’re only using full Zerker with Scholar/Strength runes, you will likely at some point want to swap the stats just to experiment with differing builds or just to have fun. Heck, you’d likely want to swap to Soldier/Knight/Dire for WvW purposes, but then you have to pay loads of gold just to swap out your rune set. Again, you could just get exotics of the appropriate stat spread, but that’s ignoring one of the coolest features introduced on legendary gear, the stat swapping.

About the only idea I’ve gotten to fix this is to just allow a right-click option on legendary items only to remove the sigil/rune currently in it. As far as the full freedom to swap them, I’d personally also suggest that changing the skin of a legendary item shouldn’t cost any transmutation charges as well (if I want to use cultural skins on my armour, for example). But that’s merely an aesthetic issue for way down the line. The main point of this post is to point out an issue that exists with legendary gear, and their design of being freely changeable to whatever the player wants them to be.

That’s all I have to say on the subject, so what do you guys think? Am I thinking too much about something that’s not really a problem?

For a lot of the stuff recently made account bound I still can’t really use it, if I made it, on more than one character because I use a lot of racial armor. Sure, I could just make those parts again and then still swap them about, but then that’s an extra helm for my charr and chest, shoulders, and pants for my norn. Legendary weapons I can mostly use a little easier because I predominantly use crit in all of my builds, but you still would eventually hit a problem. It would be nice if they added an addendum to legendary items that allowed free removal of upgrades and swapping of skins, but I don’t think it will ever happen. I’ve said it before, but its a matter of getting an inch, and taking a mile. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but it most likely will never happen.

This been posted on the forum numerous times in the last year. Most of the time the idea put forward was to rick put all the sigil you want in your legendary to unlock them. Once you unlocked them into your legendary, then you could swap between them like you can with the stats currently. This may or may not be added to the game at some point in the future, no comments from Anet on that.

Ironically, since the QoL update changes, you could argue that this problem has been greatly reduced. Seems to me that for armour there are quite few options and that Runes of Strength are the end all solution.

But indeed, it would be nice if Legendary weapons allow for swappable updates, or at least free removal.

Swappable updates and free removal don’t really seem like an option they’d be willing to put in for legendary weapons( gear) but an alternative is at hand.

A sigil library for each legendary weapon. You can have one or two ( depending on the weapon type – 1 or 2 handed) sigils active with the rest of them inactive.
You can only activate sigils that you have applied to that weapon.
Once applied the sigils are bound to it forever, but cannot be removed.

This would in my opinion be a great feature.

You would still have to invest into getting those upgrades, but once you had them they’d be forever yours and you could swap freely between them.

I totally agree with you. I use “The bifrost” (legendary staff) on both my necromancer and guardian, and this is really a big problem for me. I use condi sigils with my dire(ctv) necromancer, and use tanky sigils with my ptv tank guardian. It’s a problem since we can’t really use them as account bound. (Unless we buy expensive sigils again everytime we give them to our another character) Legendaries have swappable stat feature, this makes them really different from ascendeds on account bound status. That means sigils need to be swappable to use with these different stat combos too. Also they are 10-15x more pricey than ascended weapons.

I have 2 alternative suggestions for that, for a constructive comment.

• Please let us remove and keep sigils from legendary weapons on demand for free. Sigils may become account bound after removed from legendary weapon, to prevent re-selling and to be fair for the tp market.
• Or let us choose a list of sigils from a menu and use them on legendary weapon for free. (Like pvp build’s sigil selection system and like legendary weapons’ stat selection menu)

I think these changes would make legendaries very viable and functional considering their ultra-high cost. (and going higher everyday due to inflation)

I agree, having a legendary “eat” a rune/sigil to add it to a list of available runes/sigils could also be a good alternative.

Kamui.3150:

I agree, having a legendary “eat” a rune/sigil to add it to a list of available runes/sigils could also be a good alternative.

If they could also eat a transmutation charge to always have a skin available (not so much for weapons, but definitely for armor when it finally rears its head) I will be all for both.

Evans.6347:

Ironically, since the QoL update changes, you could argue that this problem has been greatly reduced. Seems to me that for armour there are quite few options and that Runes of Strength are the end all solution.

Not at all. Strength are nice if you want to stack might and you’re pretty much alone to do so, but if you don’t give much might, then Scholar is still the best DPS options, while Ruby Orbs stay the cheap alternative for people with low budget. And that only take into account PvE, in PvP the options are LARGE. Anyway, we are far from having legendary armor (if ever). Its true that the QoL Updates reduced this problem since there is a lot less weapons swapping after reach 25 stacks of bloodlust, but still the problem is still there.

Had offered this suggestion a long time ago. I believe I got somewhere about 800 replies? Yeah, no red post as expected.

It’d be nice but I imagine it’s on the bottom of Anet’s to do list.

Freely interchanging runes/sigils is already supported in PvP mode but I have no idea how much effort it will take to move it over to PvE legendaries.

Now, to the next point whether it is a problem or not. Personally, I share sets of armors and weapons between all classes and I have no problem.

It will heavily depend on the content you play. If you dungeon alot it’s not a problem at all. All classes use the same sigils(force/night/bloodlust/perception/+10% slaying).
The number of viable runes are also the similar(scholar/strength/ranger).

If you like to WvW then I can see it being a nuisance when you are switching between zerging and roaming/small ops. But then again it’s a PITA to switch stats and runes vs just switching gear(example: zerging with soldier/knights+melandru switching to condi roaming/small ops rabid/dire+condi runes etc.).

Or you could just get weapons for all of your characters, then paste the legendary skin on to the weapon with a Transmutation Charge. Legendary skins for all, at no extra cost.

It’s not the skin that’s the subject here. It’s the feature of legendaries where one legendary is equal to having a weapon of that type in every stat spread at ascended power for every character. But you still need to swap sigils occasionally to get maximum effect from your new stat spread.