Guild Wars 2

Are the new legendaries harder to get than the old ones? Sorry, I’m not 100% sure about how crafting legendaries works after HoT release.

I will preface this by stating that I have not created a Legendary in any manner. However I have been looking into them and talking to people. It seems to me that the original way of creating a Legendary depended a lot on getting a Precursor which is very random unless I guess you were to buy one.

The new HoT Legendaries have you crafting a Precursor which is more guaranteed but also more expense and work than just having one drop for you. And since you can’t just buy a Precursor to use for the HoT Legendaries you definitely have to do the work. After the Precursor I’m not sure if the two methods are similar or if one is more work / cost.

The precursors for the new legendaries can only be obtained via the collection method; the original ones either via collections or without.

For the originals, purchasing a precursor is a lot faster (sometimes costing less in gold, sometimes more, although that depends on how you value your time). People who don’t mind taking their time (and enjoy scavenger hunts) prefer it.

So the new legendaries are, theoretically, the same difficulty as the originals (although some people might like some collections more than others).

The only one I’ve made is HOPE, one of the new ones. It didn’t need full world exploration, just all the HoT maps. On the other hand it required maxing out all the non-raid HoT masteries, doubles of some mats Gifts, and no chance at all to get the precursor by any means other than a mats and time intensive scavenger hunt. Plus 250 crystalline ingots … /shudders … at least now there are more sources of amalgamated gemstones including from completing HoT metas so you can farm those up without using up several years worth of orb gathering.

The old ones also now offer scavenger hunt methods of making a precursor rather than relying on RNG, albeit you can only do that once per legendary. You definitely feel you’ve “earned” your legendary after going through that.

I have a friend who’s made several legendaries and her comments indicate that she’s finding making Astralaria a bit more daunting than she did Bifrost. So I suppose the old ones remain a shade easier than the new.

The old legendaries are a ton easier to get. Currently have 7 old and 1 new. Most of the old ones are also a lot cheaper. Some of the old precursors are super cheap too if its not one of the more popular ones.

Also HoT legendaries have to be earned. They are account bound. The old ones can literally be bought with enough gems to gold.

Making HoT’ maps was a pleasure for me. And it is easier than making the Gift of Exploration.
I made Nevermore (~3000g) but the journey is very interesting and I enjoyed very much.
With old legendaries you have not fun and you just collect gold. Making every map is boring and only very brave player could make old legendary.

I just started Astralaria only to notice there are a lot of tedious time-gated steps preventing me from proceeding in the collection. This was for collection 1 of 4, only to read reports of more time gating to come including charged quartz.

Having made Nevermore and a few old legendarys, I’d say the are very similar really. The collections for HoT precursors could be compared to the amount of effort it takes to get world completion. Although, if you have the gold to buy your way through the HoT collections, it can be much quicker to make a HoT legendary.

New generation legendary weapons are more time consuming to attain.

Since HoT I have crafted Rodgort and Chuka and Champawat through the precursor crafting method.

The new generation ones are by far and away more time consuming and require larger number of mats. For starters, the new precursors are ascended and require a lot more ascended materials. There are also more requirements for doing pvp and wvw with the new ones as well, plus you need 250 amalgamated gemstones which is an additional sink.

I will say though, that collection 1,3 and 4 of Chuka and Champawat were fantastic to play through. The collections were really well thought out, with a strong story and some engaging subcollections. Rodgort was fun, yet much more basic in comparison (although going round burning stuff in collection 3 was amusing!).

I know I am comparing 1hand to 2hand, but from what I am seeing of a guildies Astralaria grind, the new ones still definitely take a lot longer than the old ones from a standing start. Difficulty wise there isn’t a lot of difference.

More time consuming than the old ones and more expensive as well. I’d estimate I spent like 4000(ish??) crafting Astralia, plus dozens of hours of farming.

The HoT legendaries were both more expensive (overall) and more time consuming than the ‘older’ ones. But, other than the crafting of silly amounts of mats, Astralaria was generally a fun scavenger hunt.

New ones are harder. Since you have to do collection to make it, you can’t craft 2. (make the first one sell it for gold to make 2nd and still have gold left over. I’m still living off my first twilight sold for funds.) I’ve made another twilight and Legendary Torch still have over 2kgold.

Old way is better. Luck or gold grind for precursor, but not double the T6 mats for gifts of might and magic, thats just stupid.

Donari.5237:

The only one I’ve made is HOPE, one of the new ones. It didn’t need full world exploration, just all the HoT maps. On the other hand it required maxing out all the non-raid HoT masteries, doubles of some mats Gifts, and no chance at all to get the precursor by any means other than a mats and time intensive scavenger hunt. Plus 250 crystalline ingots … /shudders … at least now there are more sources of amalgamated gemstones including from completing HoT metas so you can farm those up without using up several years worth of orb gathering.

The old ones also now offer scavenger hunt methods of making a precursor rather than relying on RNG, albeit you can only do that once per legendary. You definitely feel you’ve “earned” your legendary after going through that.

I have a friend who’s made several legendaries and her comments indicate that she’s finding making Astralaria a bit more daunting than she did Bifrost. So I suppose the old ones remain a shade easier than the new.

The differences are mostly a matter of luck … I happened to show up at exactly the right time for a bunch of events for Astralaria so it wasn’t much of an issue but otherwise it could have been a whole lot of sitting around waiting for events to start.

Fluffball.8307:

More time consuming than the old ones and more expensive as well. I’d estimate I spent like 4000(ish??) crafting Astralia, plus dozens of hours of farming.

Pretty sure none of the new legendaries ever reached 4k. Except maybe C&C, I never checked the price for that because of how disappointing it looks.

New legendaries cost between 2.6k-2.8k to craft at the moment. About the same as the higher end old legendarys.

I think people are under estimating just how long it takes to get a gift of exploration when making an old legendary.

Khisanth.2948:

Pretty sure none of the new legendaries ever reached 4k. Except maybe C&C, I never checked the price for that because of how disappointing it looks.

I can’t remember the exact amount I had, but I started with enough money to buy a legendary off the TP, and wound up running out of money. Part of it was that I didn’t look at all the steps before hand and just started buying mats off the TP rather than making them myself. I thought I had way more than enough money and was horrified at the final cost. I’m sure you can make Astralia for relatively cheap if you gather 100% of the mats and time gated stuff yourself, however I wound up in the 3 or 4k range.

I had also sold off hundreds of mystic coins since I had planned on never making another legendary, that didn’t help…

Fluffball.8307:

Khisanth.2948:

Pretty sure none of the new legendaries ever reached 4k. Except maybe C&C, I never checked the price for that because of how disappointing it looks.

I can’t remember the exact amount I had, but I started with enough money to buy a legendary off the TP, and wound up running out of money. Part of it was that I didn’t look at all the steps before hand and just started buying mats off the TP rather than making them myself. I thought I had way more than enough money and was horrified at the final cost. I’m sure you can make Astralia for relatively cheap if you gather 100% of the mats and time gated stuff yourself, however I wound up in the 3 or 4k range.

I had also sold off hundreds of mystic coins since I had planned on never making another legendary, that didn’t help…

The prices I am referring to is based on the tally from gw2bltc.com. That assumes buying everything buyable.

I didn’t see you quote a price, just saying it wasn’t 4k. While I have no doubt you can make Astralaria for far less than 4k, I spent at least over 3k making it. I did it wrong, but that’s what just what happened. I had basically none of what I needed when I started.

Edit: Out of curiosity I looked up some posts from when I was making it. The total price of the mats and recipes was 3.2k, and I did a lot of “buy now” in the beginner before I realized it wasn’t going to cost like 1.5k. So ya, I wound up pretty close to 4k.