Guild Wars 2

Assumptions
- You just bought the game so you don’t have money, and have a lvl 1 main
- T/P is as is, i.e. a lot more efficient than when it started
- There’s no rich ori node to take advantaged of or other exploits that are fixed so far
- There’s the DR that potentially has a chance to put a curse on your character
- Precursors are valued over 600g + 75g/month conservative assumption on inflation
- You do not care about anything else in the game but to craft your legendary
- You play 5 hours per day
- You don’t have the top way of earning money, if it’s over 20% faster than the second way, as it will be nerfed probably before you can craft your legendary.

And please try to be as fair as possible, maybe I do have a slight negative tone. I do not suggest legendaries should be easy to get, but I do feel whoever got them so far has endured less of a torture than whoever is looking to get by a considerable amount. I am not looking to craft one myself unless the fair looking time period turns out to be reasonable here, for my own playing style and hours.

-Join a guild and get in goods with people
-Nag guildie for mats / farm yourself (takes twice as long if you wanna do it on your own, but that would be dumb as you don’t have to be. Plenty of current legendary holders were supported by their guilds)

-Have guildie portal you for jumping puzzle medals
-Save up all your jug of liquid karma and get a lot of karma booster (1 or 2 week worth + monthly)
Drop orichalcum recipe into forge

nag guildie for mats some more

Get lucky with Precursor / save up / borrow money from friend (I’ve seen people dropping 4 yellow into forge and get a dusk. Now does this happens often? No. But it does happen.)

farm some more if you happen to not get enough magic clover
Realistically speaking you should be able to get one within 1~2 month. (twice as long if you are doing it on your own)

Now the time it takes really wouldn’t be that long – the problem is getting there. Plenty of people have given up before they even start (myself included) not because the list of requirements is ridiculous, but because getting them is boring as hell.

It’s the same 6 month back. It’ll be the same 6 month from now on unless they specifically patch it to require less mats.

Good luck

There are a few thing’s that can either speed up or slow down the process of getting your desired legendary; the main points being:

]- Are you doing it, for the most part, by yourself (like me?) If so, be prepared to farm your butt off.
– Since you’re going to be doing most of the gathering by yourself, you can do it a couple of ways. Farm and make gold, and purchase the mats. This, in my opinion, is the fastest and easier way. Run around Orr, Malchors, lvl 80 zones, dungeons, FoTM, etc, and sell what you don’t need.

In the beginning this was a heck of a lot cheaper. Then it started to get really expensive. Lodestones, ectos, and T6 prices started to go through the roof. After the bot ban back on Jan 28(I think), the prices sky rocketed again. I think they have started to go down, but I have no checked on them.

The other way is to farm the mats yourself. This will be a long and tedious road to follow. Not undoable. I tried doing this at first, but gave up after realizing it would just take too long to acquire 250 of the T6 mats, 100 onyx lodestones, 500 ecto’s, etc. (I actually got around 300 or so ecto’s that I salvaged myself..)

]- If you’re with a group of friends or helpful guild/friends that will donate/help acquire mats this process can go by swiftly, literally within a month. The only time consuming part about any of it would be getting the badges of honor. The jumping puzzles, depending on your server, are easy to navigate. I only have about 250 badges. My reason for not having those complete is its horribly boring having to do 70+ WvW jumping puzzles to get 500 badges of honor.

Precursor, like you said, will be 500g+, unless you get extremely lucky on a drop or from the mystic forge (thank the gods for my dusk ), or the devs implement something in the near future. Karma… just do events, monthly, dailies etc like the above poster has stated.

In the end, if you have spare cash and don’t mind spending it on gems, you could always convert Gems to —> gold. The exchange rate is horrible though. I think I have some like 2800 gems and last I checked I would have gotten 45gold maybe? Gah. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist of it. Good luck.

Many thanks for the responses. I do feel things have gotten more difficult, especially with DR and the inflation. Having few people to help you I guess mitigates DR issue as you have more man-hours before DR and there will be less chance for a cursed/permaDR account, which I had for about 3 weeks in Jan.

Also, if you’re going to have bunch of people helping you, it seems it’s more efficient&fun to have 6-10 people play the game with a bigger emphasis on earning gold and them just donating the gold to you.

I guess I’ll leave the venture aside. It would have been worth a little more if the items were account bound, as I do like having alts. Game is a lot of fun without the legendary, and I can live with not being able to experience 100% of this massive game.

It also seems like even if I triple the 700 hours I put into the game so far, with the inflation and all, if I play it the way I like, which is all aspects of the game at random times, I wont get there.

If I deleted my account today and started a new one and my sole objective was to acquire a legendary, I could probably have it in about 3-4 weeks playing around 60 hours a week. So about 240 hours of game time. Except, most people play the game for fun and pick their stuff up slowly along the way. Plus if your new to the game and don’t know what we know, it would obviously take longer.

In your case your saying 5 hours per day or 35 hours per week, so that would make around 6-7 weeks.

Thats about what it would take me. Im sure there are others who would be much quicker. Im not the best "TP profiteer and that has alot to do with getting what you need. Or at least, it certainly makes it easier.

Naturally, this depends on the legendary you’re after. A quick glance at my spreadsheet tells me that…

-The cheapest legendary (Minstrel) will cost you about 695 gold to make.
-The most expensive legendary (sunrise) will cost you about 1491 gold to make.
-Add about another 20 gold spent towards maxing the required crafts

You can fairly easily make 10-15 gold if you farm Cursed Shore for 5 hours per day, so the Gold component for a legendary should take about 48 to 152 days, not counting in precursor inflation.

Fully exploring the world (and, as such, also getting to level 80) depends mostly on how efficient the player is, but 2-3 weeks seems like a safe assumption (not counting WvW exploration, you would probably be finishing that during the grind for gold).

Can’t say much about Badges of Honor, since I’m not familiar with WvW. Perhaps a week for 500 of those?

The required karma would come along with the farming for gold.

Same with the dungeon tokens, as dungeons give a respectable amount of money as well (500 tokens isn’t really a grand amount either).

So altogether that is… between 69 and 180 days?

Thanks again, nowitsawns calculation is roughly what I got to initially, excluding inflation. sostronk has a point that you can potentially make money faster in T/P as you can somewhat scale it better than grinding through Orr.
Btw i never had a run that gave me 10-15g, my friends always did. I used to get 3-4g over 5 hours while they’d get 12-14 a day for couple of weeks, so I dropped doing that. maybe my DR curse is off now and i should try it again. That’s another thread’s topic though.