Guild Wars 2

Assume someone were starting from scratch and didn’t intend to farm any of the materials needed for a Legendary weapon. Would it be cheaper to purchase the precursor and materials or just buy the Legendary outright? Note, I’ve neither the materials to craft nor the gold to purchase a Legendary; I ask solely out of curiosity.

100% cheaper to buy materials, as a lot of the work for your legendary comes from things unable to buy, For example; Karma/Badges/exploration/crafting(effort behind it)/200+skillpoints

I did a quick and dirty calculation for one of the legendaries and came up with the account bound components adding about 646G. It’s probably less for the less popular legendaries, but it’s likely still a significant chunk of cash. I took it from the perspective of how much you would make over just selling all the components. It would be a bit different looking at it from the “what if I bought all the components to make it?” angle because you could use buy orders to get a lot of components slightly cheaper than the going price.

Pandemoniac.4739:

My back of the napkin calculations indicate that if you got a lucky drop of the precursor The Colossus, you could take your skill points/laurels/dungeon tokens/karma and turn it into 760G by crafting the legendary the Juggernaut. Edit – Actually I forgot to take out the 15% of the sale for the precursor, materials and legendary, so only about 646G instead of the 760G

If you sold the lucky drop, it would be worth about 700G. If you sold all of the materials that can be sold instead of using them to make the legendary, it would be about 840G. If you made the legendary, it’s going for about 2300G right now. It’s just a ballpark estimate – markets change and I don’t have the data to make a super accurate guess.

you should do these calculations for the legendary you have in mind.
when I started collecting for Kudzu, I calculated that it would cost ~1200g to buy everything needed to make it, then all the SP and karma and w/e. or could just buy it for 1500g.
of course, it’s cheaper if you find a lot of the things.
I decided to make it because it would give me a better sense of accomplishment.
unless someone looking to sell their legendary makes a horrible mistake, you won’t be able to buy it for cheaper than it costs to make. Only question is how much more expensive is it?