Guild Wars 2

gotta get up for work in 4 hours, but i wanted to share my joy with the community.
details(if you want to know how a casual completed it) to come tomorrow. for now, i’ll leave you with these…

Congratulations, kiba! I love that skin. Enjoy!

Congratulations!

On to the next journey

Gratz. Bit envious here but still GRATZ!

Great job! I don’t think I have that kind of patience

Sexy shield!!! I just made my hawt item the other day!! Congrats man that thing looks wicked!!

NICE! Congrats!

Nice. Now I am starting to want a legendary. o_0

I’ll be keeping my eye out for this thread. I don’t have the grindy patience for this sorta thing. So I’d love to know how you did this.

Well done, congrats

Congrats, kiba!

Something to be proud of, love that shield

Kiba from GW1? Nice shield..

Congratulations. We, of the yet to have succeeded salute you.

thank you, all, for the well-wishes.

first off, i’m going to posit that i play on average 24 hours a week. i don’t know if this technically falls into the time spent for a casual, but irl, i have many obligations that do not allow me to play for a whole day(with 1 exception). my understanding is that a hardcore player is closer to 10-16 hours a day.

there are two things that kept me on my path. those are gambling and grinding. i do not like gambling and i do not like grinding. i didn’t gamble outside of the clover recipe and i did not grind for anything. i’ve heard that gw2 as a whole is a grind. well, so is life. an umbrella statement isn’t enough proof. there was no grinding, i repeat. as far as gold is concerned, i will explain what i did at the end of the post.

that aside, here was the process i followed:
• precursor
o the chosen- bought outright with gold from over a month of playing. i spent 125g on it the day the karka event happened…realizing too late that my buy order for 125g was about double what it was selling for after the precursor dump. i was at work and unaware anything had happened. was i upset? maybe. did i get over it? certainly.

• gift of the flameseeker prophecies
o gift of metal- harvested all myself. took about 2 weeks.

o gift of history- harvested all myself with exception to the lodestones. i bought the cores with buy orders and combined them myself into lodestones to save on gold. did this in 1 sitting while running dungeons.

o 100 icy runestones- clearing out jormag once a day and spending the coin i generated during the day to buy as many as i could. the corrupted champs dropped many rares and very infrequently exotics. i also have ZERO magic find.

o super sigil of battle- needs no explanation.

• gift of mastery
o gift of exploration- needs no explanation. 2 zones in 3 hours was my average time. as for wvw, i was fortunate to be on devona’s rest, where we have control of most of the borderlands and the eb. i was able to 100% wvw in 1 sitting.

o gift of battle- running the jumping puzzles in wvw as well as contributing to my server’s success helped me gain the 500 badges. about 60% came from puzzles and the rest from looting. this took me about 15 days.

o bloodstone shard- getting to 80 and world completion will net you more than the 200 skill points necessary.

o 250 obsidian shards- karma gained from wvw objectives and the daily jugs. it was only painful waiting for the temple of balthazar to not bug.

• gift of fortune
o 250 ecto- this one was a little more difficult. i salvaged every exotic i gained and the rest were bought from the tp. remember, i don’t gamble. this took 7 days.

o 77 clovers- this one was the kicker. i don’t like to gamble unless i have to. i know this has been a source of frustration for many legendary chasers, but it has to be done. there were a couple steps i took to ensure maximum efficiency. first off, the rate of getting a clover is 1/3, that is well-known. whether you’re using the 1 or 10 recipe it doesn’t matter. i did many 1 recipes until i failed about 18 in a row. after that i decided to save myself from carpal tunnel and used the 10 recipe until i hit 70+. when i finally landed at 74, in order to NOT overspend karma on shards that would not be used for awhile(ever?), i bought sets of 3 shards with fractal relics and finally inched my way to 77. i actually ended up at 78 since i had 1 shard left over. this took me 7 days as well.

o gift of might- about half of these came from clover fails. the other half came from fractal runs and bought from the tp.

o gift of magic- see above.
as far as generic gifts, that’s it. from there, i specialized in tailoring and armorsmith for the gifts of metal and history.

if i could have changed the order of gift acquisition, i would have. the gift of fortune, specifically the clovers should be done first. the reason is that you never know when the temple of balthazar will open and overspending karma on shards is not efficient. the fact is, once you get the 77 clovers, any leftover shards will contribute to the 250 you need for the gift of mastery. with the introduction of jugs of karma from daily and monthly achievements, getting the 1 million+ karma was inevitable.

as far as earning gold is concerned, from getting my gift of ascalon, i learned how fast the gold can stack up from doing the 3 daily runs that takes less than an hour if you have a good group. i usually earned 4-5g per set of 3 runs. i also gained much coin from doing fractals from selling every rare i could. i did not salvage anything because again, i don’t gamble. i know for a fact that i would sell my rares and in return, buy the materials i would need from the tp. i’ve heard the argument that if you must buy mats from the tp, the legendary is worth LESS. let me dispel that right now. the fact that you played the game and sold your rewards in order to get the items you needed doesn’t make the achievement any less. if you earned it, you earned it. never once did i dabble in any exploits nor try to corner a market in the tp. if you are efficient, you can make your money work for you. using gw2spidy, i was able to find which markets were more liquid than others and after some research, markets with a good return on investment. that way, i could make my money work for me, while i was out in the open world doing other things. it was not uncommon for me to end a 3 hour session with 10-15g banked. using my intuition from previous events, i knew it would be profitable to monitor the market a bit more on the days when an event was scheduled. but i never babysat the tp. whenever i wasn’t doing anything or waiting for a group to form for a dungeon, i would be roaming the 80 zones mining mithril and ori. from southsun alone i can get 1.4-6g daily from the ori nodes. i have 3 80’s, so those of you with more can get even more gold. it takes me about 10 minutes per southsun run.

finally, i want to say that earning my legendary has truly helped me to understand the game(not yet mastered, but i’m on my way) on a whole different level and appreciate the things i never would have tried nor attempted to do. as i’ve said, i don’t grind. if i didn’t feel like doing my daily southsun run, i would skip it. if i didn’t feel like wvw, i would do something else. the open world has so much to do that i was never at a loss to find something worthwhile. i’m now working on my next goal, which is finding an appropriate skin for a sword/scepter to match the shield.

thanks, anet for making a wonderful game and continuing to develop it. i also want to thank my 1 other guildmate(guild of 2 members) for constantly encouraging me. he was 99g from his zap as of last night, so it’s my turn to cheer him on.

good luck to all legendary chasers! if a casual like me can get 1, so can anyone else!

one last thing about gold, since it is such a sensitive subject.

i learned how to make gold MUCH faster near the end of my journey. after spending months not knowing what i wanted to do, i decided to focus on a legendary and here is the result. the first month of playing i saved every copper until i had 150g. in comparison, i could earn 375g in a month in present time.

and no, i am not kiba from gw1, but from d2.