Guild Wars 2

Blaine Tog.8304:

Totally fine, except the choices should be between spending more money and spending more time. The way ANet has it set up right now is just poor game design.

And here’s why: is anyone else familiar with the project management triangle? The idea is that between getting something done quickly, cheaply, or well, you’ll only ever get to choose two of those at most. In other words, “Fast, Cheap, Good: pick two.”

Now regardless of how you go about it, the resulting precursor is going to have to have an identical level of quality, as we’re trying to fulfill a specific recipe. This means one of our choices is made for us: regardless of how you get there, it has to be “Good.” This leaves us with one choice remaining, and it’s between Fast and Cheap… except that’s now what we’re seeing. Instead, the choice is between “Fast, Cheap, and Good” and “Slow, Expensive, and Good.” And that’s just bananas.

That’s because if they did it any other way, they risked destroying the precursor market which they said they did not want to do.

And precursors currently aren’t cheap so one of the choices isn’t “Fast, Cheap, and Good”. The difference between making your own and getting it off of the TP aren’t different enough to call one expensive and the other cheap. One is just really expensive and the other is very expensive.

How about making crafted precursors account bound and deleting them from all loot tables? The ones on the TP are going to go up in price and there you have it now crafting is cheaper.-

Seera.5916:

That’s because if they did it any other way, they risked destroying the precursor market which they said they did not want to do.

Which is fine, but you can do that without setting the price tag cartoonishly high. Make the tasks you have to complete first difficult and time-consuming enough and plenty of people would happily spend an extra 200-300 gold to avoid them. Others would be happy to spend the time, and ANet will have engineered a rational choice.

Seera.5916:

And precursors currently aren’t cheap so one of the choices isn’t “Fast, Cheap, and Good”.

Cheap compared to the other option. This point is purely semantic.

Daharahj.1325:

How about making crafted precursors account bound and deleting them from all loot tables? The ones on the TP are going to go up in price and there you have it now crafting is cheaper.-

If that ends up happening, if TP prices do go up, then precursor crafting will have been an outright disservice to the players.

I wonder, has anyone tallied up the cost of waypointing to each of the places we need to go to with each of the collections? I mean sure, you can run each place, but how many of us do that? I doubt its much, but I don’t think anyones thought about that additional cost.

They’re not even that impressive any more tbh. First time I saw them years ago I was like holy kitten what the kitten is that weapon! Fast forward to now and like literally every other GS user has a one of the two traily swords.

Actually I am enjoying the process so far. I have so many mats saved up I’m doing pretty good, though donating all my Mithril to my guild did slow me down a bit lol. Honestly the only thing slowing me down at this point is the WvW and PvP token because I don’t do either of those often.

Anyway, buying something off the TP is just totally meh to me. I mean that’s how I got my precuser for my first Legendary (because I never did get a single one of any type through playing) but this feels far more satisfying to me. And I play GW2 for various experiences not to have tons of gold so meh

Precursor crafting — don’t be in a rush to do it, unless you care more about the journey and less about the costs.

Moonlite.9561:

TL;dR: Monetary cost and opportunity cost of legendary crafting feature far exceeds the cost of just buying the precursor off the TP.

Depends on (a) the precursor, (b) when you acquired the mats, (c.) when you want to make the legendary, and (d) if you care about maximizing monetary efficiency or maximizing ‘fun’ (and therefore, what constitutes ‘fun’ for you).

It should be no surprise that the prices for monetized items that go into precursor collections have spiked relative to pre-HoT days. It should also come as no surprise that precursor prices have tanked since launch. (We saw early signs of both every time ANet posted an official announcement about precursor ‘crafting’ details.)

Accordingly, if you compare “today’s” collection costs versus precursor costs, you’re going to find it’s very competitive, especially if you take “opportunity costs” into account. If you instead compare the same inputs using say last year’s prices, you’ll find that collecting is cheaper.

The markets are going to take another month or three to come to a new equilibrium, when people stop panicking about being ‘first’ or getting scribe to 400 or all the other collections that also use the same mats. When more and more people are starting to do their daily ascended refinement. When demand finally starts to return to something closer to pre-HoT and supply probably ends up above its old status quo.

I predict that — at that point — collections will be cheaper, perhaps substantially so.

More importantly, the point is:
Precursor crafting — don’t be in a rush to do it, unless you care more about the journey and less about the costs.

Should have involved some actual quests, honestly (same for the elite specs). Something where you actually have to visit areas relevant to Gwen and talk to Logan/her ghost/etc. for Love of an Ascalonian Girl for instance.

Would have obviously required more development effort, but it would also be something worthwhile added to the game rather than… what we got.

I hoard plain and simple – made Juggernaut, Incinerator and Bolt in the last two weeks – total cost, around 330g out of pocket, for all 3, and 300g was for the Icy Runestones, rest was to get the final Silver Doubloons I didn’t already have, from hoarding and gathering.

If you want to buy every single item – sure, it costs more. If you’ve hoarded nothing, sure it costs more. If you want to make it in one day, sure it costs more.

But if you have tons of mats saved up from roaming around pointlessly, then it isn’t the end of world people claim it to be…and yes, since release of the time gated mats, I make them all almost every single day, hence why I have hundreds of each…but when you want free/cheap items later on, you work early on – simple really.

Hell I love the precursor crafting – although after 3, it hit me hard in Mith…but regardless…still cheap and easy…

with regards to precursor crafting, if you talk about the gold cost, it is always more practical to just buy the old legendary precursor from the TP. however, if you love the adventure, and don’t mind spending gold a little less than buying them direct from TP, then it is worth it.

Wanze.8410:

If it was considerably cheaper, everybody would just buy deldrimor ingots form the tp and sell the dusk they get until deldrimor got so expensive and dusk so cheap that it isnt profitable anymore.

It was implemented as a long term goal and more than a third of the crafting cost goes towards circumnavigating the daily timegate on deldrimor.
If you craft them yourself for the next 3 months, you only pay 633g, if you get all mats on current buy orders.

This is exactly why crafted precursors should be untradable.

Donnu why Anet think it otherwise…

Draknar.5748:

ITT: People that honestly thought that legendary crafting “journey” meant they would simply get a list of items, go to TP to buy them, and it would be cheaper than buying a precursor off the bat.

The legendary crafting gives you a long term goal to work towards. You can make all of those deldrimor ingots on your own, for FAR less than 9-10g if you farm the materials yourself. That’s the point.

If you were planning to shortcut by using the TP, then take the ultimate shortcut of buying the precursor from the get-go. If you aren’t interested in speed and want to do it over time slowly for far less than buying on TP, then do legendary crafting and gather the mats yourself.

It’s really that simple. Don’t listen to OP, he doesn’t understand what the point of the crafting is.

You don’t understand what you’re talking about too.

If you want Dawn, you can gather materials yourself and make your own time-gated Deldrimor Steel Ingot too.

But here’s the difference, you can craft around 70% of the Deldrimor Steel Ingot required for the precursor crafting, then SELL THEM ALL ON TP, and then BUY DAWN right off TP.

You saved like 20 hours of scavenge hunting, and use LESS MATERIALS than if you craft the precursor yourself, this is the problem.

The core problem is Anet screwed up and let crafted precursor tradalbe, that everyone is BASING the material cost on Dusk or other high-end precursors. The ironic part is all the other precursors are using that same material too, so each precursors is competing the market and pay for the same material cost that’d have gone into Dusk, making all the other precursor crafting more expensive than they should, making the entire crafting pointless.

I doubt you’d understand my point since most people who defend this are those rich people who got everything off TP and don’t care about anything else. They’d stay irrational for eternity because they’re too rich to bother about the opportunity cost.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Precursor crafting — don’t be in a rush to do it, unless you care more about the journey and less about the costs.

Moonlite.9561:

TL;dR: Monetary cost and opportunity cost of legendary crafting feature far exceeds the cost of just buying the precursor off the TP.

Depends on (a) the precursor, (b) when you acquired the mats, (c.) when you want to make the legendary, and (d) if you care about maximizing monetary efficiency or maximizing ‘fun’ (and therefore, what constitutes ‘fun’ for you).

It should be no surprise that the prices for monetized items that go into precursor collections have spiked relative to pre-HoT days. It should also come as no surprise that precursor prices have tanked since launch. (We saw early signs of both every time ANet posted an official announcement about precursor ‘crafting’ details.)

Accordingly, if you compare “today’s” collection costs versus precursor costs, you’re going to find it’s very competitive, especially if you take “opportunity costs” into account. If you instead compare the same inputs using say last year’s prices, you’ll find that collecting is cheaper.

The markets are going to take another month or three to come to a new equilibrium, when people stop panicking about being ‘first’ or getting scribe to 400 or all the other collections that also use the same mats. When more and more people are starting to do their daily ascended refinement. When demand finally starts to return to something closer to pre-HoT and supply probably ends up above its old status quo.

I predict that — at that point — collections will be cheaper, perhaps substantially so.

---

More importantly, the point is:
Precursor crafting — don’t be in a rush to do it, unless you care more about the journey and less about the costs.

Good news to you, new legendary weapons would be coming every 3 months.

Legendary Armors are coming soon too.

They’d eat the same: 80 Spirit Wood this, 100 Deldrimor that, 80 Elonian this, 80 Bolt of Damask that, etc etc.

So the market will get spiked up yet again.

It’d take years for the market to reach to a reasonable equilibrium if Anet choose to not change anything. (like the supply of low-teir mats, or decreases the component requirement per craft, etc)

And please stop lying about the “journey” thing. I crafted my own Bolt a few weeks ago (thanks to bug stucking me for a month, or it should have be done way earlier), there’s no journey. What I spend the most time on is mining those iron ores.
It’s just a grocery list of chores + endless mining, nothing else.

And one more thing, what is so bad about precursors on TP getting cheaper because of Precursor crafting? I thought Anet cut the reward of all contents to create deflation, so people have less gold and things got cheaper right? So how come only make it half true, that things are getting increasingly more expensive while all the rewards are gutted? If they gut the reward , they should try to lower the price level too.
What’s so bad about Precursor worth like half of the current price? Many things dropped in price because of the decrease of supply of money (bl skins especially), so why not let precursor drop then? Back then precursors worth only 50~100g too, and you don’t see anyone complain about it right? In fact their price are being inflated way too much than it really worth.

Dogg.2581:

I hoard plain and simple – made Juggernaut, Incinerator and Bolt in the last two weeks – total cost, around 330g out of pocket, for all 3, and 300g was for the Icy Runestones, rest was to get the final Silver Doubloons I didn’t already have, from hoarding and gathering.

If you want to buy every single item – sure, it costs more. If you’ve hoarded nothing, sure it costs more. If you want to make it in one day, sure it costs more.

But if you have tons of mats saved up from roaming around pointlessly, then it isn’t the end of world people claim it to be…and yes, since release of the time gated mats, I make them all almost every single day, hence why I have hundreds of each…but when you want free/cheap items later on, you work early on – simple really.

Hell I love the precursor crafting – although after 3, it hit me hard in Mith…but regardless…still cheap and easy…

I’m not meaning to invalidate your perspective when I say this (yours is one of the kinds of experiences that will be had with the system) but if you came to the game later at all, or didn’t stick around for most of it, then there is an endless stream of things to spend gold on and it’s not all that easy to hoard mass amounts of stuff unless you either have the RL money to buy space expansions from the store or you were around when the gold to gem conversion was cake and you stocked up on gems easily.

It’s hard to deny the disadvantages people face in this game if they weren’t around for stuff that happened earlier in the game’s life. I know that’s not unique to GW2, but I’m also not convinced that the gap is as bad in most other games. Especially considering that GW2 was never a sub game, so most of the advantages people got were merely by paying box cost and being part of the game (e.g. it’s not like some games, where you had to sub earlier in the game’s life and then later didn’t).

Gear treadmill games do have one advantage to them: Due to the “resetting” of power level, it’s generally not that difficult to catch up if you hit the game at the right time. GW2 has no such resets that I can think of, which of course doesn’t matter if all you care about is stats, but matters quite a bit if you care about having the overall most appealing items in the game.

To those of you saying that precursor crafting is more expensive in terms of gold cost, you’re doing it wrong.

The cost to craft a deldrimor ingot is about 4 gold. Yes, I know it’s time gated, but I’m only talking monetary cost right now. If you take your time and actually do the crafting part yourself instead of just buying all of the materials off the TP, you save a ton of money. It’s not hard to get the mats for an ingot either. I found that 30 min/day of hitting all of the rich iron and plat nodes got me more than enough ore to craft an ingot per day, plus enough to stockpile and send to my wife so she could craft one a day for me as well. Then I send the excess ore that I still had leftover to guildies who generously crafted me a few ingots, and this was enough so that last week I was able to finally get Sunrise.

In total I think I spent about 300 g, and that’s only because I got impatient and started buying iron and plat ore directly from the TP instead of mining it. I never bought a single deldrimor ingot.

I also found the scavenger hunt fun, as it took me places I hadn’t visited in a long time. So complain about it if you want, but for many people precursor crafting is a fun and worthwhile experience and, for me at least, a much cheaper way of getting a precursor.

I’m doing the crafting because I don’t have +700gold to make rich a lucky guy.

I don’t play to give money to some other person.

The time gated parts are annoying but at leat I have the mats so I still don’t intend to sell my mats to make rich another player and I’ll wait a month.

Aomine.5012:

Wanze.8410:

If it was considerably cheaper, everybody would just buy deldrimor ingots form the tp and sell the dusk they get until deldrimor got so expensive and dusk so cheap that it isnt profitable anymore.

It was implemented as a long term goal and more than a third of the crafting cost goes towards circumnavigating the daily timegate on deldrimor.
If you craft them yourself for the next 3 months, you only pay 633g, if you get all mats on current buy orders.

This is exactly why crafted precursors should be untradable.

Donnu why Anet think it otherwise…

The ones for new legendaries will be.

There’s no point in really doing that for the original ones since the other methods with unlimited times you can repeat it give tradeable versions. The market isn’t going to be destroyed by the few people who decide to sell off the version they got from the precursor collection.

azizul.8469:

with regards to precursor crafting, if you talk about the gold cost, it is always more practical to just buy the old legendary precursor from the TP. however, if you love the adventure, and don’t mind spending gold a little less than buying them direct from TP, then it is worth it.

You can buy them off the TP and have the exact same adventures anyway. Imagine that.

Manasa Devi.7958:

azizul.8469:

with regards to precursor crafting, if you talk about the gold cost, it is always more practical to just buy the old legendary precursor from the TP. however, if you love the adventure, and don’t mind spending gold a little less than buying them direct from TP, then it is worth it.

You can buy them off the TP and have the exact same adventures anyway. Imagine that.

not really…

Sure you can. What can’t you do, you think?

The scavenger hunt part is … fun. Not super great, but fun. I would actually like something like that as “weekly”, where you get such tasks randomly assigned for some reward.

The crafting part on the other hand is plain stupid, boring and frustrating. The time I would have to invest to gather all this crap would probably better invested in … ANYTHING else that is actually fun. Why the heck has there to be “content” that is simply not fun?

Seera.5916:

That’s because if they did it any other way, they risked destroying the precursor market which they said they did not want to do.

And that’s precisely the problem, Anet cares more about the sanctity of their pixel weapon economy than whether their players are actually having fun.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Seera.5916:

That’s because if they did it any other way, they risked destroying the precursor market which they said they did not want to do.

And that’s precisely the problem, Anet cares more about the sanctity of their pixel weapon economy than whether their players are actually having fun.

+1.

The old precursors were like 50~100g back then anyway.
Why’s it suddenly “destroyed” when they becomes cheaper again?
Why Anet only want product to rise in price and not other way round?

Ceesa.1350:

To those of you saying that precursor crafting is more expensive in terms of gold cost, you’re doing it wrong.

The cost to craft a deldrimor ingot is about 4 gold. Yes, I know it’s time gated, but I’m only talking monetary cost right now. If you take your time and actually do the crafting part yourself instead of just buying all of the materials off the TP, you save a ton of money.

You clearly haven’t read the thread. Yes, we know crafting the mats is cheaper than buying them off the TP. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that you could’ve crafted the mats, then sold them on the TP, bought a precursor with the proceeds, and ended up with more gold than if you’d crafted the thing.

This has been mentioned repeatedly.

Ceesa.1350:

To those of you saying that precursor crafting is more expensive in terms of gold cost, you’re doing it wrong.

The cost to craft a deldrimor ingot is about 4 gold. Yes, I know it’s time gated, but I’m only talking monetary cost right now. If you take your time and actually do the crafting part yourself instead of just buying all of the materials off the TP, you save a ton of money. It’s not hard to get the mats for an ingot either. I found that 30 min/day of hitting all of the rich iron and plat nodes got me more than enough ore to craft an ingot per day, plus enough to stockpile and send to my wife so she could craft one a day for me as well. Then I send the excess ore that I still had leftover to guildies who generously crafted me a few ingots, and this was enough so that last week I was able to finally get Sunrise.

In total I think I spent about 300 g, and that’s only because I got impatient and started buying iron and plat ore directly from the TP instead of mining it. I never bought a single deldrimor ingot.

I also found the scavenger hunt fun, as it took me places I hadn’t visited in a long time. So complain about it if you want, but for many people precursor crafting is a fun and worthwhile experience and, for me at least, a much cheaper way of getting a precursor.

Or you could wait through the timegates, make your ingots, sell them, buy the precursor off the TP, and probably still have some extra money. Doing all the gathering and ingot crafting isn’t really saving any money. It’s using up more time, in addition to costing the same amount of money. Every ingot you use is the same as spending its current TP value.

In considering making Meteorlogicus, I took a look at Storm’s collection and found that I’d need close to the same value in ascended mats to craft it versus buying. No matter how I went about it, I was going to be out 400-ish gold. Even if I gathered all the mats myself, and waited out the timegates, that is still 400g worth of mats I could sell. Plus all the time spent doing that, which could have been used for something more productive.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Ceesa.1350:

To those of you saying that precursor crafting is more expensive in terms of gold cost, you’re doing it wrong.

The cost to craft a deldrimor ingot is about 4 gold. Yes, I know it’s time gated, but I’m only talking monetary cost right now. If you take your time and actually do the crafting part yourself instead of just buying all of the materials off the TP, you save a ton of money.

You clearly haven’t read the thread. Yes, we know crafting the mats is cheaper than buying them off the TP. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that you could’ve crafted the mats, then sold them on the TP, bought a precursor with the proceeds, and ended up with more gold than if you’d crafted the thing.

This has been mentioned repeatedly.

Sooooooooo

You are complaining about how I (and others) choose to do a legendary? That we are not doing it the way you feel is best? Too bad. I will do the legendary how I feel like. If I want to craft everything without selling all my mats and just buying the precursor then I will do that and you can’t do anything about it. I am over 18 and I will do it how I want.

PyrateSilly.4710:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Ceesa.1350:

To those of you saying that precursor crafting is more expensive in terms of gold cost, you’re doing it wrong.

The cost to craft a deldrimor ingot is about 4 gold. Yes, I know it’s time gated, but I’m only talking monetary cost right now. If you take your time and actually do the crafting part yourself instead of just buying all of the materials off the TP, you save a ton of money.

You clearly haven’t read the thread. Yes, we know crafting the mats is cheaper than buying them off the TP. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that you could’ve crafted the mats, then sold them on the TP, bought a precursor with the proceeds, and ended up with more gold than if you’d crafted the thing.

This has been mentioned repeatedly.

Sooooooooo

You are complaining about how I (and others) choose to do a legendary? That we are not doing it the way you feel is best? Too bad. I will do the legendary how I feel like. If I want to craft everything without selling all my mats and just buying the precursor then I will do that and you can’t do anything about it. I am over 18 and I will do it how I want.

I’m complaining that ANet has designed a system that shorts you, that takes your time and money and doesn’t give you a fair amount back. If you want to waste your own money and time, I’m not going to stop you. If you’ve decided that the warm fuzzies you feel from crafting a precursor (even though it’s unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming) is what you’re after, go right ahead. I’m not actually criticizing you. This is a game, and you should play it in whatever way makes you most happy. That’s the only metric that ultimately matters for any given player.

But ANet has dropped the ball here. ANet has badly miscalculated, and people like you are the ones who are paying the price — literally. ANet has installed what amounts to a noob trap and if you jump in knowing that, then that’s fine for you but it’s just further indictment of ANet’s mistake, particularly since a bunch of other, less-savvy players are probably diligently working on their precursor not knowing that it’s wildly inefficient, blindly trusting that ANet was trying to help out those who can’t put together massive sums of money even though they’ll end up needing far more money than before. There’s no reason ANet couldn’t have designed a system that doesn’t place a negative value on your time. In a game genre that places a huge emphasis on extrinsic rewards, it’s absurd that this particular system would effectively charge you to play it.

PyrateSilly.4710:

Blaine Tog.8304:

Ceesa.1350:

To those of you saying that precursor crafting is more expensive in terms of gold cost, you’re doing it wrong.

The cost to craft a deldrimor ingot is about 4 gold. Yes, I know it’s time gated, but I’m only talking monetary cost right now. If you take your time and actually do the crafting part yourself instead of just buying all of the materials off the TP, you save a ton of money.

You clearly haven’t read the thread. Yes, we know crafting the mats is cheaper than buying them off the TP. That isn’t the issue. The issue is that you could’ve crafted the mats, then sold them on the TP, bought a precursor with the proceeds, and ended up with more gold than if you’d crafted the thing.

This has been mentioned repeatedly.

Sooooooooo

You are complaining about how I (and others) choose to do a legendary? That we are not doing it the way you feel is best? Too bad. I will do the legendary how I feel like. If I want to craft everything without selling all my mats and just buying the precursor then I will do that and you can’t do anything about it. I am over 18 and I will do it how I want.

Of course we’re all free to obtain them in any way we see fit. But it’s not a matter of someone feeling that one way is best. It’s matter of (at least with some precursors) buying them having a serious advantage over crafting. No matter how you obtain the materials for crafting, the fact is that you are inputting x amount of gold (via mats) into crafting. If x value exceeds the price of the precursor on the TP, then you’re just throwing away money/time/effort.

I do actually like some of the scavenger hunts. They can be more interesting than just throwing gold at it. But the crafting aspect of the ‘journey’ makes the rest of it a waste. There isn’t really any reason to do it, other than simply going through the effort to be able to say “I did this”.

mrstealth.6701:

I do actually like some of the scavenger hunts. They can be more interesting than just throwing gold at it. But the crafting aspect of the ‘journey’ makes the rest of it a waste. There isn’t really any reason to do it, other than simply going through the effort to be able to say “I did this”.

Maybe I picked a precursor (Dawn) that’s not representative of the average experience, but the tier 1 hunt was in fact dreadfully boring.

Seera.5916:

And maybe he’s just fine with doing that. Everything has an opportunity cost. Maybe he’s just fine giving up the opportunity cost that comes with not selling the mats and comes from not buying the precursor straight out. I know I am.

Please point out to me where I made any sort of judgment on that person’s play style? I only corrected the notion that they are getting their precursor for free as that’s blatantly false. Otherwise I made no other comments, so I’m not sure why you felt the need to tell me this.

PyrateSilly.4710:

Sooooooooo

You are complaining about how I (and others) choose to do a legendary? That we are not doing it the way you feel is best? Too bad. I will do the legendary how I feel like. If I want to craft everything without selling all my mats and just buying the precursor then I will do that and you can’t do anything about it. I am over 18 and I will do it how I want.

Literally no one has made any comment on the way you play. (seriously, what’s up with the incredible defensiveness in response to slights that aren’t even there? No one cares that you’re a woman. No one cares that you’re over 18. And for kitten’s sake, yes you can play how you want And no, no one wants to do anything about that! ) What people are doing is correcting yours and others’ lack of basic economic knowledge and spreading misinformation that somehow your precursor suddenly becomes “free” just because you gathered the mats.

You can get the mats however you please. I’m one that prefers to gather them myself as well. But I’m not going to go off spouting that obtaining one in that manner has made it free.

Lothirieth.3408:

Seera.5916:

And maybe he’s just fine with doing that. Everything has an opportunity cost. Maybe he’s just fine giving up the opportunity cost that comes with not selling the mats and comes from not buying the precursor straight out. I know I am.

Please point out to me where I made any sort of judgment on that person’s play style? I only corrected the notion that they are getting their precursor for free as that’s blatantly false. Otherwise I made no other comments, so I’m not sure why you felt the need to tell me this.

Please point out where PyrateSilly said he wanted it for free.

He said he wasn’t going to pay for it and was collecting the mats to build one himself. Which clearly told me, he wasn’t looking for ANet to add them to the log in rewards.

As for your, comment, since I didn’t view him as asking for precursors to be free, that you overlooked that he may have been aware that if he used the mats to make the precursor that he couldn’t sell the mats for money.

Just because a person complains about the method ANet put into place for the precursors doesn’t mean they want it for free.

The biggest mistakes with item design in this game, is they are by and large designed for the purpose of the economy, and not designed as products that make sense. The crafting part of your process is 100% driven by economy concerns at the point in time they were designed.

This tends to make them very functionally imbalanced more often than not.

the legendary journey specifically should NOT have been designed primarily around economic concerns. It should have been designed primarily around strong gameplay incentives. The gold methods for obtaining legendaries can be designed around economy, but the effort methods should be designed differently.

items design guys, its not about balancing an equation, its about creating a relationship thats enjoyable or logical to deal with.

If i have country that over produces jello, I could require people to make their houses out of a jello based material that takes much longer to create, and requires 2000 cubic feet of jello per 1 foot of the new material, and outlaw use of wood/metal/sheetrock in houses.

Sure it helps deal with jello based economy issues, but it really makes creating a house suck.
It creates jobs! gives jello more value!
And makes creating a house a huge costly, unsatistfying time consuming hassle.

the house is an analogy for precursors btw

well you just have to know which one is worth crafting, which one is worth buying… some of these precursor crafting are nonsense …

Aomine.5012:

It’d take years for the market to reach to a reasonable equilibrium if Anet choose to not change anything. (like the supply of low-teir mats, or decreases the component requirement per craft, etc)

That theory isn’t consistent with the markets in this game. There are always minor perturbations that help drive things up (or down). Massive disruptions are infrequent and only happen with massive patches. HoT introduced huge demand for time-gated materials; people are only now realizing that they can make money off that, and thus the supply is slowly growing again.

Still, we won’t really know until it happens.

Aomine.5012:

And please stop lying about the “journey” thing. I crafted my own Bolt a few weeks ago (thanks to bug stucking me for a month, or it should have be done way earlier), there’s no journey. What I spend the most time on is mining those iron ores.
It’s just a grocery list of chores + endless mining, nothing else.

Why is someone “lying” if they point out that everyone has fun in different ways? I know a lot of people who love the journey — it’s been close to what they wanted originally, being able to build it themselves, unlocking new skins along the way. Accordingly, for them, it’s been fun.

I get that it’s not your cup of tea, which is why I conditionally agreed: don’t be in a rush to do precursor crafting; those who are don’t seem to be enjoying it.

In particular, those for whom cost is a major factor, should do the math first to find out if selling the time-gated materials is enough to buy the precursors on the TP, which are still a relative bargain compared to pre-HoT.

Too many wordy posts. So I’m just going to share my thoughts. This is not more costly than buying the precursor for some if not all. I have been working on bifrost. And it has cost me just less than 400g about a third of the cost to buy the precursor from the TP. Not to mention the fact that with 3+ years (early access to present) and some 3,000 hours of game play and I have yet to even see a precursor drop or personally know someone who has gotten one as a drop, this is by far much faster. With just over 2 weeks and I’ve got my precursor. In fact total cost to complete bifrost will be almost a tenth of the cost to buy it off the TP. And this is with the over-inflated prices of the materials needed due to the fact that the market hasn’t even began to settle due to the massive increase in demand. I don’t expect we will see that happen for about 5 months. Which is about how long it took for the prices to settle from the last massive surge in demand. I figure based on price history this to be about half the current market prices.

Jia Shen.4217:

Too many wordy posts. So I’m just going to share my thoughts. This is not more costly than buying the precursor for some if not all. I have been working on bifrost. And it has cost me just less than 400g about a third of the cost to buy the precursor from the TP. Not to mention the fact that with 3+ years (early access to present) and some 3,000 hours of game play and I have yet to even see a precursor drop or personally know someone who has gotten one as a drop, this is by far much faster. With just over 2 weeks and I’ve got my precursor. In fact total cost to complete bifrost will be almost a tenth of the cost to buy it off the TP. And this is with the over-inflated prices of the materials needed due to the fact that the market hasn’t even began to settle due to the massive increase in demand. I don’t expect we will see that happen for about 5 months. Which is about how long it took for the prices to settle from the last massive surge in demand. I figure based on price history this to be about half the current market prices.

not sure how you calculate it. i think you did not take take into account the materials you already have into the total cost. you may have accumulated the materials long long time ago, but, when calculating the cost, you have to calculate it at the value of the materials the time the precursor is crafted.

according to this site, the total cost to craft The Legend is 1000g : https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/30698-The-Bifrost

The a legendary item is literally just something for bragging rights; statistically its no different than an ascended counterpart either than you can freely change your stats on it; which you’d probably just change the weapon all together. I don’t see a problem with it.

iZallen.9074:

The a legendary item is literally just something for bragging rights; statistically its no different than an ascended counterpart either than you can freely change your stats on it; which you’d probably just change the weapon all together. I don’t see a problem with it.

^~^ this….exactly this. I was looking into crafting a legendary a while ago then I got an ascended recipe for a longbow I can use on my Ranger with the same stats. It did not cost even half as much as the first tier in the legendary crafting chain….and I have a nice longbow to use now.

So, stopped at that. If I get drops for my collections, that is ok by me. However, I am not spending enormous amounts of my limited supply of gold on mats to craft something just to the 1st tier, when I can get a finished product with the same stats at less. AND less time and frustration.

The problem is what it’s always been with Legendaries: there’s nothing legendary about acquiring them. “How’d you come by that amazing sword, fellow adventurer?” “Why, I crafted a crap ton of other swords and various other menial tasks, and by golly, eventually it was mine?”

Arenanet has done a great job of keeping the fun out of the Legendary system, when the impression from their own media release on what players should expect emphasized that questing—implied as new quests, not grinding old ones—would be the means of achievement.

It’s a bad system. A time gate is fine if there’s an adventure that comes along with it.

Prototypemind.4026:

It’s a bad system. A time gate is fine if there’s an adventure that comes along with it.

Time Gates are NEVER OK. Its lazy design. Why are you time gating items? To make the game artificially longer. Its poor design. This isn’t a Zynga game! Or is it?

For those saying we can only complain and not providing a solution, let me quote myself from another post:

jeezlaweez.6810:

The problem was, is, and always will be:
You can still buy precursors and legendaries.

That being said: This is not a Journey, providing that Arenanet entered this business to work, not only to make money, and expect deliver a AAA MMO Game, not an indie, and therefor this company has lots of employees we don’t even see their names appearing.

What a Journey is:

1st step: train your mastery to unlock the merchant that sells a book. This book, when used, opens a chat window, where you read an introduction for that weapon lore. After reading it, your Story Journal is updated, creating an entrance called “Legendary Journey: [name of precursor] Act 1”.

2nd step: play through 14 chapters of this Act 1, all time gated, you can only do one per day. Those chapters act as lore-telling, and as challenges you overcome to understand the weapon you are trying to make. This will be instanced when needed to prevent attrocities like “has to fail Dwayna’s Temple so we can get it back for an item”. It’s a personal journey.

3rd step: Completing this Act 1, you’ll have the recipe for the Precursor Tier 1. From now on, you can either:
- replay the Act 1, for achievements. Each achievement gives crafting components for the precursor [No more time-gated]
- farm the crafting components, if you don’t want to do it again.
- farm gold and buy the components, if you don’t want to craft them/time-gated.

4th step: finishing the Precursor Tier 1, you have to train your mastery (if not trained already) to open the 2nd Book, repeating the process.

The precursor should be acc bound when T3 is finished. It was a personal journey.

There you go: a Journey, with options, that won’t break the market.

The Nevermore, HOPE and Astralaria (and so on) would benefit a LOT by this system, for example, but this would be awesome for the others.

Ah, just one thing: other games already do that for Top-Tier weapons. It’s fun, it’s content, it’s lore. It’s a Journey.

Death Aggro.9602:

Prototypemind.4026:

It’s a bad system. A time gate is fine if there’s an adventure that comes along with it.

Time Gates are NEVER OK. Its lazy design. Why are you time gating items? To make the game artificially longer. Its poor design. This isn’t a Zynga game! Or is it?

lol, you realize this game has been turning into farmville with large mats cost and time gates lol.

You login for daily rewards.

You plant your tree the way anet way you to do for laudrels.

You save money for either ascended or legendary.

Hmm perhaps a dragon or two that you will pluck and sprout.

Don’t do it. And don’t cry or complain about it either. You don’t want them that bad.

-Decide buying a precursor is too expensive
-Proceed to buy EVEN MORE GOLD’S worth of crafting goods instead of actually crafting them
-Complain on the forums
-???
-Get mocked for being selectively lazy

Kheo.2504:

-Decide buying a precursor is too expensive
-Proceed to buy EVEN MORE GOLD’S worth of crafting goods instead of actually crafting them
-Complain on the forums
-???
-Get mocked for being selectively lazy

Sure, some posters are rude and calling folks names, but the point remains: to ‘afford’ a fancy skin with changeable stats, one needs to be willing to spend on items, spend on mats, or put in the time to avoid spending. And any market costs vary wildly, depending on when someone wants to spend; those who insist on buying now pay a premium.

And not everyone is interested or willing to do that, in which case, of course they shouldn’t craft. And as usual, the markets are most expensive when new collections and new shinies are introduced, so of course these collections are more expensive than the old items for the moment.

The difference with the collections is that you can farm as little as you like as often or as slowly as you like, whereas the precursor cost forces you to save up a moving target of coin and spend it all at once.

So it’s all dependent on the resources and interests of the potential legendary owner. And each person needs to decide for themselves.

tl;dr it is bad advice to tell everyone not to craft their precursor, even though that’s the best advice for some players.

ferdi.1452:

Precursor crafting is fun until you get to the actual crafting part.

These were my findings. Instead of being “collect and do many things”, its “collect and do many things….then pay out a massive amount on the trade post”.

Seeing as it has that, you may as well just go to the trade post and cut out all the other nonsense.