Guild Wars 2

Hi, my name is Hope. So, i’ll start this off by saying my question is for the more experienced players who have actually obtained a precursor or 2. I’ve been with anet since i was 10 years old, guild wars factions being my first ever RPG being a kid. Guild wars 2 being released, you can bet i was on it, and i’ve stuck with it, going on and off. With the background story down, i’ll finally get to the point of this post.

How do you get a precursor?
I bought a bunch of lvl 80 rares and tried mystic forging that.
I bought around 100 exotic for 300g and tried the mystic forge.
started playing a lot of fractals (102 missions done)
played months of WvW at one point.

All of these methods are what i have done over the course of 2 and a half years, but i haven’t had any luck receiving it. I feel that it shouldn’t be this hard getting a precursor. Guild mates are posting their collections, so I’m honestly left to believe that I’m doing something wrong, and they’re doing everything right. So, how do you guys get precursors? Tell some stories of your own on how you got yours, or the best way to get a precursor to date. I would love to hear everyone’s opinion or story.

1st mistake: trying mystic toilet
2nd mistake: trying mystic toilet again

I bought mine off tp because rng hates me. Best was to obtain one is from tp. Saving gold and buying.

It’s all about rng. I know people who got 3-5 precursors off sw, world bosses, pvp, killing a moa and so on. In 2 something years i found out that mystic forge is a mistake and i have to buy everything off tp. That’s my 2c.

Save up your gold and buy the precursor you want off of the Trading Post.

Or

Wait for the Heart of Thorns release and do the new Precursor Crafting Mastery.

Using the forge is what you do when you have lots of gold to waste on gambling.

I have obtained 3 Precursors so far. The first (which became my Legendary) came from a random Mystic Forge attempt (I was not trying to get one, just unlocking skins). The second came from a random Champion Bag which I then sold. The third also came from a random forge attempt while unlocking skins (currently sitting in my bank while I decide what to do with it).

You’ll notice that none of these were planned for. I was in the process of saving up gold, not spending it on Mystic Forge attempts.

I’ve got 2 from the Forge and bought 2. At the moment the most reliable method to get one is to buy it. But you’re in luck! Very shortly the most reliable way to get one will be to finish the collection for it -
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-legendary-journey/

I got 11 precursors in mystic toilet in january.

And between now and then I have spent almost 1000g trying to get one more and get nothing, rng god has abandoned me

Either farm the gold and buy direct or just wait until one drops for you (we all have dreams….). That’s always been my philosophy on Precursors. To be honest, I don’t see a Legendary I want bad enough to do that much farming, so here I am with Exotic Armor an a few Ascended weapons…..

Now after yesterday’s Blog (on Precursor crafting via Masteries in HoT), I will most likely alter my view of them as an unattainable item I would be better off to forget exists….

If you want to get your own precursor before the HoT expansion is out (with the new legendary-related collections/treasure hunt) then my strong recommendation is:

Put in a buy order for whatever you can afford today. Any time your wallet can afford it, drop that offer and create a new one that’s 20-30g higher. Eventually, someone will accept an offer. Everyone I know who uses this technique has gotten their precursor for well below the going rate at the time.

This does a couple of things, mostly psychological (the greatest obstacle to acquiring a precursor now):

• It hides your money, so you don’t accidentally spend it on impulse purchases or the latest cool skin.
• It keeps you from checking the TP every day. You’ll only check when your wallet starts to build up.
• It allows you to notice your progress towards your goal, matching your experience with accumulating T6 mats and lodestones (if needed). Each time you look, you’ll have made a good chunk of progress.
• It keeps you from obsessing over the magnitude of the goal. In perspective, a precursor is never more than 3/5 of the total cost of a legendary (and it’s less than 40% for more than half of them). However, since you never see the total cost of any single “gift,” those always seem less daunting, even though many are worth 100s of gold, too.

The only people who save money by forging for precursors are the 1/10% who are extremely lucky or the small group of people that invest 1,000s of gold on a regular basis; the law of large numbers works for them, but work against those of us unwilling to risk that much.

I just saved up and bought it. It took me almost 7 months because I can’t play for hours every day and didn’t want to spend the time I did have farming, but I got it.

Now I’ve almost completed my legendary (I need about 400 T6 mats and I’m done).

Hey guys, thanks a bunch for the reply’s. It’s really helped me out and judging from the votes it seems that I have been doing just about everything wrong. I guess it really didn’t help how i was going for Dusk, the most expensive one lol. Still, i’ll strive to achieve this for it’s my favorite. Thanks again guys for the honest reply’s. I’ll be trying out a few of the methods you guys have given me when i build up the motivation to try again!

Bolt: Saved for 7 months, finished just before the game hit 1 year old. Things were cheaper then, but gold was also much harder to get.

Bifrost: Saved for 5 months. At this time, I was finally comfortable with running dungeon trains and had a lot easier time getting gold.

Kamohoali’i Kotaki: At this point, I had been saving a lot of coin from continuing dungeon trains and mat runs, so the holdup was getting enough guild/friends to run the required number of Arah’s (since that dungeon I will not PUG).

Bought all three precursors.

The mystic forge is pure RNG, so for every person who gets lucky and beats the 0.3% or so rate from rares; many others need the statistically predicted number of tries or more. Ever since world bosses granted the guaranteed rare, I’ve been saving up and tossing the weapons into the forge (averaging 1-2 flushes a day), and after over a year and a half, finally had one come out of the forge (from two spears, a torch, and warhorn; got the scepter). That’s slightly worse than average return rates.

I agree with the above posters, it’s safer to save up the coin, or wait for whenever Heart of Thorns releases to see what’s required to do the collections. At least those are guaranteed returns.

Hope.5036:

Hey guys, thanks a bunch for the reply’s. It’s really helped me out and judging from the votes it seems that I have been doing just about everything wrong. I guess it really didn’t help how i was going for Dusk, the most expensive one lol. Still, i’ll strive to achieve this for it’s my favorite. Thanks again guys for the honest reply’s. I’ll be trying out a few of the methods you guys have given me when i build up the motivation to try again!

Good luck, Hope.

(Feel free to PM me in-game if you have questions or want a reminder of some of the ideas people covered here. It’s a long journey to build a legendary; you needn’t walk it alone.)

Hi Hope, I’m one of those who managed to get a precursor from MF, but it was a complete fluke, totally unplanned. I’m a GW1 and GW2 veteran and just dumped in 4 random rares and – presto! First time ever, hasn’t happened since.

As you may have figured out the only sure-fire way to get a precursor right now is to buy it off TP. But, if, like me, you fancy a gamble every now and then you could spread your chances a bit. I currently do the following:
- Salvage all fine armour of all rarities except exotics (the resell prices on TP are too good to pass up)
- Dump all other level 80 greens into MF in the hope of a rare
- Sell any rares I get if the price is 30 silver or more on TP
- Rares that sell for under 30 silver I dump into MF for a chance at an exotic or precursor

I would never, ever take the gamble with 4 exotics, it’s just not worth it. Bear in mind, the method I’m using is not the best chance or most effective – far from it!

It’s just my way of finding the balance between a reasonably steady gold income and soothing the gambling bug.

Hi there Hope!

The only way to ever get a precursor with a 100% chance is to just grit your teeth, save the gold, and buy it off the TP. People with multiple precursors are just very lucky with the mystic toilet or they buy them off the market or they are just uncannily lucky with drops. Its all random except the buying part. The best way to get a precursor in my opinion is to find the best gold farming methods that work for you and just farm, farm, farm, farm, farm and maybe one will drop along the way.

If you get rares while you are farming you can always give the mystic toliet a flush if you’re feeling lucky otherwise I would salvage the cheap ones and sell the more expensive ones.

In my own experience, I have gotten 3 precursors playing for 3 years or so. 1 was a random lucky drop from an underwater mob in Southsun. 1 was me dumping about 300 gold into the TP with rare great swords and mystic forge stones (highly unrecommended because its not a guarantee)The last was a Valentine’s day gift.

Subnote: Also, in the expansion, there will be different ways to make precursors as well. So I would also read up on that.

it took me 11 months to craft the predator.
that was before pres got expensive, but the hunter was the last component that i bought for 420g (when gems to gold was like 3g-5g / 100 and not our current typical 12-16g, for reference. 420g was a lot of buying power.)

then 6 months later i made frenzy, again the time consumption was largely due to me being unwilling to farm farm farm to get/buy the t6 mats, this time the pre was only 40g (and i bought it before it doubled to 80 lol). admittedly the pres price was an important factor in my decision to make frenzy.

with the announcement for HoT i decided to make juggernaut, and now i have relatively more assets to liquidate so i finished all but world completion and the pre in a week, then my friend found a colossus and sold it to me… and i finished jugs a mere month after deciding to make it, to my great surprise.

note that the common thread for all 3 of these stories is… i bought the pres. its the most certain way of getting what you want.

ive pulled pres out of the forge before. i burned 130g ish to get both dawn and dusk, and i had plans to burn around 800g on the forge in that run. after i sold them, i kept going… and i ended up with about 2kg instead of 3kg and no more pres. that doesnt sound like the kind of experience you can afford to have, and its the kind of experience that gets complained about a lot. and its definitely not something i would try to do if i actually wanted to get hold of a pre to use.

One other note:

If you do want to continue to use the forge, run dungeons.

You get gold for the dungeons (which you should save so that you can buy Dawn) but you also get tokens. These tokens can be traded in for Exotic Weapons, which you can then throw into the Mystic Forge. If you get lucky, you’ll get your precursor without having to spend any money. If you don’t get lucky, you’ll still eventually get the gold you need and can buy the precursor.

It’s kind of a win-win

How I did it:
Farm, farm, farm for Legendary.
Give up, since I saw no way for me to be able to hold on to 800 gold for Dawn.
Sell everything.
End up with 500 gold.
Throw 200 into the Mystic Forge (by buying rare greatswords) after a friend got Dusk from Tequatl.
Get nothing except: 3 times Dhuumseal, 1 of which I kept.
Determined to burn all of my resources I scratched together 3 exotic greatswords from dungeon tokens.
Throw them in + the one Dhuumseal I kept
= Dawn

What I recommend: Run dungeons, gather tokens + gold, use the tokens for exotic greatswords (or whichever weapon you need) -> try the mystic forge
Or just farm and gather all the money to buy it, which is what most of my friends did.

Edit: And don’t forget your daily prayer to RNGesus

Wow, a lot of reply’s! Adding onto my list of methods, got a nice solid plan going on now. I want to say thank you again for all of the posts. I never knew about half of these paths people take to acquire their pres so I really do appreciate you guys sharing me your “secrets”. Thank you guys again, this has been awesome. Any new methods or story’s are always welcomed!

Always glad to help.

If you’re not fond of dungeons or fractals (like me), you could also do a round of World Boss events. Nowadays, each World Boss chest gives at least guaranteed rare item (sometimes, very rarely, an exotic).

The Silverwastes is the highest yielding farming area right now, as I understand it. If you’re looking to do some serious stocking up on gold.

Good luck!

Hey guys. Just wanted to make a quick post for you all. I’ve been following all the advice you gave me and it’s honestly made the game feel a lot more enjoyable. I took the hint you all left me, and decided for the precursor to come to me. so with that in mind, i started building ascended armor for my class. on top of this, i’ve been keeping up with fractals and dungeons, world boss train, and any other time i can put into the game, i grab myself a few flower seeds from the Vine wrath in SW. This method has seemed to work best for me, for I’m literally earning gold in every way possible, without any loss. On top of this, I tried out one of the guys advices earlier (sorry for no proper credit) where any tier 5 materials i get, i put in the mystic toilet for a chance at exotics, to sell for more gold. This afternoon I converted my tier 5 materials into some rare greatswords to make a few bucks for my ascended shoulders.
I really want to thank everyone for all the advice. It’s been outstanding the number of people who lent me a helping hand. I highly suggest this thread to anyone who’s on the same road to learning how to make/buy a precursor. I owe you guys a lot. with this said, I’ll leave the bottom picture to close out my post.

That is awesome to see, and yes I do that as well, all my large bones go into making carrion krait slayers and that is the ONLY time i ever touch the mystic forge to gamble!!

So happy for you since I have never had a precursor myself. Its unfortunate that hard work doesn’t always pay off in the end in this game… in fact I hate it so freaking much. They replaced grinding in mmos with RNG which is so not cool.

Forge Forge Forge Forge. GZGZGZ

Hope.5036:

Hey guys. Just wanted to make a quick post for you all. I’ve been following all the advice you gave me and it’s honestly made the game feel a lot more enjoyable. I took the hint you all left me, and decided for the precursor to come to me. so with that in mind, i started building ascended armor for my class. on top of this, i’ve been keeping up with fractals and dungeons, world boss train, and any other time i can put into the game, i grab myself a few flower seeds from the Vine wrath in SW. This method has seemed to work best for me, for I’m literally earning gold in every way possible, without any loss. On top of this, I tried out one of the guys advices earlier (sorry for no proper credit) where any tier 5 materials i get, i put in the mystic toilet for a chance at exotics, to sell for more gold. This afternoon I converted my tier 5 materials into some rare greatswords to make a few bucks for my ascended shoulders.
I really want to thank everyone for all the advice. It’s been outstanding the number of people who lent me a helping hand. I highly suggest this thread to anyone who’s on the same road to learning how to make/buy a precursor. I owe you guys a lot. with this said, I’ll leave the bottom picture to close out my post.

Gz, yesterday I got Dawn and The Colossus From 50 gold to ~1300 Its my 19th I think, stopped counting.

Today i made some rares from my t5 mats, made around 15 rares and had 8 mf stones. Got precursor for torch lvl 80 exotic scepter and lvl 75 shield. Not trying to sound ingratefull but since it’s my first precursor ever i was hoping for something more flashyer money wise. But gz me. Now i need 900 more gold to craft myself immobulus.