Guild Wars 2

Question: How would you choose to implement a new tier of armour and weapons that are designed to be rare enough to cause excitement for a long period of time, while being available to all regardless of play time?

tl;dr My answer: Create skill based scavenger hunts to collect key fragment designs which enable you to craft a key to either a) get into a mini-dungeon and defeat a boss for a chance at the super rare set b) craft a key to open a special chest at dungeon/world boss locations which has a chance to contain the special set.

Long version:
So with all the talk on Legendaries no longer being special due to the ease of gain, ive been trying to think of ways to implement a new tier into GW2 that would be special and in my opinion that special should come not only from the looks, but from its rarity. The buzz around the Final Rest staff shows that many agree with me.

So, thinking of ways to implement a system where a set could stay rare is an issue. My suggestion is to introduce a NPC that gives a daily clue to find another NPC. This clue would be different for each player that talks to the NPC , a different clue per map in the game. This second NPC could give a clue as to what is needed to be done on the current map, maybe even giving a shopping list of items he/she needs. Killing a specific mob/boss, completing a puzzle (jumping plus you could introduce mini puzzles such as placing rocks on certain pressure pads, pulling levers based on a cave drawing etc), animal tracking and whatever else you can think of. Once 75% of the items are gathered you exchange for a key fragment design (maybe) and you can do this once per day/week/whatever. Once a certain number of designs are found you can craft (400 crafting needed?) the key which is then used to get into a mini-dungeon with 4 others to fight a mob boss that then has a chance to drop a random part of that rare set (akin to ascended rings). You could even give the current world bosses or dungeon bosses their own sets (id love a corrupted set of armour from the Claw of Jormag!).

All of this would:

1) Encourage more people to travel out into the world, including home cities.
2) Encourage people to chat more because some people are too lazy to follow clues themselves and would rather ask
3) Wouldnt fall foul of lore as you could give it a story
4) Wouldnt cause an issue with those that can only log in infrequently as they would still be able to get the items
5) Would mean there was a skill based way to acquire items (for once!)
6) Would encourage the killing of champions, veterans and world bosses
7) Would create a new mini-dungeon per ‘super-rare’ set, new puzzles for groups and individuals to do and you could use it to encourage open world cooperation.

In time people would gain these sets so the key would be not only to make things as challenging as possible over a fairly long time period(weeks maybe?), but also to release new sets at a time where the previous set is still considered rare.