Guild Wars 2

When ascended weapons came out, and Legendary weapons were upgraded to ascended stats, Legendaries were also given the ability to swap stats out of combat to any existing combination. This was to increase their utility, and hopefully their desirability to the player population. The idea was that if you had a legendary, it could potentially save you the trouble of carrying around multiple copies of a weapon with different stats and sigils.

This sounds great on paper, but a pretty important aspect of stat swapping was overlooked: the sigil(s) on the weapon. These remained as before: the only way to use a different sigil in your legendary was to overwrite an existing one, losing the existing one in the process. Since this could get pretty expensive pretty quickly, the best option remained keeping multiple copies of a weapon in inventory, so most of the utility aspect of legendary weapons were lost.

This has not been much of an issue up till this point because bluntly condition damage oriented builds have been extremely sub par outside of small scale PvP, and healing builds have frankly not been needed. So the default for most players has been to go with power oriented sigils.

The situation is changing though with Tuesday’s release. The new trait system combined with the condition damage rework means that condition damage and support healer builds are now going to be a lot stronger, so people will probably try experimenting with such builds to see how effective they are now. In order for Legendaries to fully realize their promised utility, we need a way to hot-swap sigils (and runes if Legendary armor is ever introduced).

Here is a proposal of how to do so.

At the expansion announcement event at PAX, I believe that Colin mentioned how Anet planned on making a lot of use of the collection system in the future. Specifically, using it as the method for Precursor crafting. Well, why not use it here for sigils and runes of the completed Legendary? Each legendary weapon and armor piece could have an associated collection of sigils/runes respectively… if you have added a sigil to a weapon’s collection in consumes said rune, but the rune then becomes available to choose from a drop down menu similar to the sPvP build menu under the same conditions as you could change the item’s stats. You could even use this as a chance to remedy the achievement point vs cost disparity of Legendary weapons vs most other collection achievements.

A foreseeable issue is that there would only be one collection for each legendary weapon, but it is possible to have multiple copies of an individual weapon. My proposed solution to that is a legendary weapon collection would apply to every existing duplicate Legendary on the account.

Comments?

Actually the reason they changed it is that before then it was pretty much standard practice for people to make a legendary and then immediately transmute it’s skin onto another exotic weapon in order to get the stats they wanted.

Since ascended was deliberately designed to be much more time consuming and expensive to made (it was described as an intermediate step between exotics and legendaries) that was no longer seen as a practical option, so stat swapping was added as an alternative.

I think Anet still intended most people to choose one stat combination for their legendary and stick with it, not keep changing depending on what they were doing.

Danikat.8537:

Actually the reason they changed it is that before then it was pretty much standard practice for people to make a legendary and then immediately transmute it’s skin onto another exotic weapon in order to get the stats they wanted.

Since ascended was deliberately designed to be much more time consuming and expensive to made (it was described as an intermediate step between exotics and legendaries) that was no longer seen as a practical option, so stat swapping was added as an alternative.

I think Anet still intended most people to choose one stat combination for their legendary and stick with it, not keep changing depending on what they were doing.

I’m pretty sure that if you were correct about Anet intending choice of stats for a Legendary to be a one shot choice it actually would have been a one shot choice, like all the other items in the game that actually are one time choices.

Since that isn’t the case, and the Ready Up that previewed the legendaries made a point of swapping the weapon stats more than once, that you are incorrect on this.

I support this suggestion of a “sigil library”, like every time it comes up. Which happened frequently since the stats swap was introduced.

Unfortunately we got never blessed with any kind of official reaction.

Won’t a Sigil and Rune Library devalue Sigils and Runes even more then they already are?

Considering you can easily make every useful ascended weapon stat combo for much less that a legendary, ascended is a much better value and has more utility because you can slot each weapon individually with sigils that revolve around weapon stat and use.

Roundabout.1752:

Won’t a Sigil and Rune Library devalue Sigils and Runes even more then they already are?

I don’t think so, you would use/consume just as many sigils, merely on one legendary weapon instead of on several ascended ones.

I completely agree with OPs suggestion, and how this is a serious issue if nothing is done.