Guild Wars 2

The current system for obtaining legendary weapons doesn’t feel very legendary at all. It’s basically a massive timesink requiring farming the TP or farming other things for endless hours in order to craft a legendary weapon. The worst part are the precursors which you are forced to obtain either through total rng or through buying one off the TP with their steadily rising prices as people continue to manipulate the market.

Now compare this to Everquest. In the first expansion of EQ, each class had access to a quest for an epic weapon. The weapons had a unique look and effects and often the best stats that made them well worth the effort to obtain. The quest to obtain this weapon would require a large amount of effort and no small amount of time to complete. It spanned the entire world and sometimes even extra planar areas, and often the quest was started very early in your career. It was something you worked for from a low level all the way up to your max level. It required the movements of entire guilds to complete and got whole communities involved. When a player finally completed their epic quest, everybody knew it and you were proud to show it off because it was a major accomplishment.

The best part of these quests were the story behind each of them. Rather than buying your weapon off of an auction house, you got invested in the story behind obtaining it. My personal favorite was the paladin. Your holy blade could only be obtained after cleansing a cursed weapon and redeeming the soul of a fallen paladin. Your reward was the holy sword, Fiery Defender, a flaming greatsword that fit the theme of the class perfectly and was instantly recognizable.

Other good examples were the rangers Swiftwind and Earthcaller which involved cleansing the world of the corruption brought on by an evil god or the shadow knight’s Innoruuk’s Curse which has you corrupting the holy blades of the paladin class. Sounds pretty legendary, right?

After a time, these weapons became obsolete as new content with stronger items were released. The exception being weapons like the bards singing short sword and the clerics resurrect mace which always served a purpose. Everquest’s answer to this was to release epic weapons 2.0. These were new epic quests that not only required the same amount of incredible effort, but they also required your original epic weapons. Again, your investment of time and work paid off.

This is how you do legendary “right”. These weapons should have stories. Make them drop off of specific high level bosses or tie them to long quest chains that would take you around the world. Heck, you could even use them to get people back into the dungeons you lovingly designed.

As it stands, legendaries are just a legendary pita. Am I alone in my thinking?

No you are not. I loved the epic feel of Everquest’s way of obtaining the legendary. It was no easy goal to obtain these weapons, and once obtained it felt so EPIC that it molds that moment into your memory. The quests themselves were truly legendary, and the outcome was always glorious.

Mordimus.3452:

No you are not. I loved the epic feel of Everquest’s way of obtaining the legendary. It was no easy goal to obtain these weapons, and once obtained it felt so EPIC that it molds that moment into your memory. The quests themselves were truly legendary, and the outcome was always glorious.

I’m glad I’m not the only one!

I was thinking of a few ideas for some truly legendary weapons. I would leave the exact stats to better minds than my own, but I had some thoughts on some cool effects.

Final Hour – Dagger
Quest: A long quest to unravel a plot behind political assassinations aimed at the factions top leaders.
Stats: Power, precision, condition damage.
Effect: Master poisoner – Applied poison also grants an additional effect based on a targets conditions. For example: Bleeds do 30% more damage, cripple effect has 40% greater slow, burning does an additional 3% of the targets maximum hp per second., blindness causes the target to miss an additional attack, ect.

Sanguine Blade – Sword
Quest: A demonic cult is threatening to destroy all of tyria!
Stats: Power, precision, condition damage.
Effect: Vampiric blade- bleeds applied while this weapon is wielded heal the player for 10% of the damage dealt.

The Wall – Shield
Quest: The exploration of the ruins of an ancient order of guardians reveals a dormant evil that could awaken at any time.
Stats: Vitality, toughness, Boon duration
Effect: Legendary defender- blocking with this shield grants protection, retaliation, and regeneration to friendly targets within x distance.

Dark Whisper: Scepter
Quest: An ancient orrian cult holds the secrets to untold power for the person willing to solve the mysteries of the past.
Stats: Vitality, power, condition damage.
Effect: Grenth’s dark blessing – Allows the wielder of this weapon to exceed the maximum condition limit on a target. (a necro could apply additional bleeds past the 25 limit on a target, but only the wielder of the weapons bleeds would actually exceed the limit.)

While I never played Everquest, I do agree with what you said about legendaries. They aren’t an actual achievement of skill, its just a matter of who has the most gold, the most luck, and the most time to farm.

Totally in agreement:

Current Legendaries are nothing but Resource Grinds with No Story making them just fancy Exotics.

Legendaries should have a Story (tie in a few quests into the process that tell the story), require you to Achieve things (so substitute some of the resource grind for Achievements) and reduce the Resource Grind.

Although I would prefer a massive quest chain that would take months to complete.

Precisely for this reason I do not feel the need to get a legendary weapon. They have no history, no one knows where they come from, why they have that name, no missions, dynamic events or whatever to get the precursors. It’s just constant farming items in one area to make it.
I do not know if it should be the same as in EQ. But they have to improve a lot the way to get precursor / legendary weapons.

hopefully the precursor scavenge hunt will take some of elements discussed here (I’ve never player everquest or done a legendary there, but sure seems awesome!)

Legendaries in GW2 are just fancy weapon skins, they are no more powerful than any other level 80 exotic. Their purpose seems to me to keep those who want to grind busy, while those who don’t want to grind can avoid it and still have equipment as powerful as anyone else.
If you made them quest rewards, then you would have to find something else for the grinders to do…..

Completely in agreement. Legendaries don’t seem worth it here. The pure amount of grind and RNG you need to do is just not worth it for a fancy weapon skin no better than my Ghastly Greatsword, and especially for a weapon that doesn’t even -feel- Legendary.

I played a Cleric in EQ1 for 7 years, and when I finished my Epic Mace quest I was so happy with it, all other weapons (including the Screaming Mace for thoe EQ1 vets who might remember) were inferior. Then I quested for my Epic Shield, and my Cleric felt “complete” when I finished that.

My point is that Legendary Weapons in GW2 seem to be an afterthought, along the lines that maybe Anet simply said “Let’s put cool skins in the game” rather than “Let’s give players an opportunity to truly make their character stand out, and feel like they’ve really accomplished something”.

Some of the blame lends from MMOs like WoW for the “dumbing down” and devaluation of gear in regards to things we can/should look towards when we “hit the endgame”.

The rest of the blame can probably be steered towards the players themselves, who have decided that story and lore mean nothing in a game, that it’s now all about mindlessly “farming loot”.

Suggest something that takes time and involves logical story to root the item in the game’s world, and you get guffaws and criticism/insults from the lemming majority who are angry that you dared to upset their repetitive, boring hamster wheel.

Nidome.1365:

Legendaries in GW2 are just fancy weapon skins, they are no more powerful than any other level 80 exotic. Their purpose seems to me to keep those who want to grind busy, while those who don’t want to grind can avoid it and still have equipment as powerful as anyone else.
If you made them quest rewards, then you would have to find something else for the grinders to do…..

But that’s EXACTLY what Anet should do imo.

We all know that if you put in a feature, that feature needs to be balanced between the grinders/non-grinders respectively.

And where the hell did this whole “If so-and-so has X level of power, then I’m entitled to it too without effort!!” attitude come from? i COULD say WoW again, but looking closely, Blizzard’s a drop in the bucket in comparison to how pervasive this new entitled attitude seems to be. And there’s a good chunk of players OF WoW that have pined for story-based epic/legendary weapon/armor questlines, but Blizzard ignores them, all so they can continue to feed the hamster wheel.

Even WoW can’t entirely be blamed. They had the right idea for a few of these weapons. Thunderfury was a good example or even the staff from the original nax and shadowmourne. Even the warglaives were cool. There wasn’t a quest behind them, but they only dropped from the guy that actually used them. While those weapons got progressively easier to obtain as the game continued on, they at least had a cool story behind them.

Don’t hate on my because I mention WoW. I’m 30 years old. I have my own place. lol However WoW was the first MMO I played. I think even their weapon grinds in vanilla were pretty good compared to GW2.

The priest chain to get the Anathema/Benediction. The hunter quest to get Rhok’delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers. There were some others but I can’t remember them.

Even if WoW is watered down and generic now. It used to have those good epic moments when it first came out.

I’ve been turned off the legendary grind in GW2. I currently have about 400,000 karma and I continue to do the meaningless repetitive events in Orr… Why? Not sure really. Trying to validate my reasons for playing and acting like there is something to do I guess.

This game desperately needs something to do at the end game still. And FotM doesn’t cut it. I can’t put my finger on what it needs but what it doesn’t need is a theme park ride through the same dungeons over and over. This “living, breathing world” needs some air pumped in to it lungs. It feels like an endless loop of reruns to me. More events. More challenging open world bosses. It needs a meta game built into the open world where we can actually affect things instead of waiting 15 minutes for things to reset and doing the same event again.

They would have to change the legendary’s so they don’t suck. at BEST they are only like 2-3% better than a 2g exotic.

I agree that getting a legendary weapon should involve actual skill, instead of just a lot of time/grind.

Methal.9045:

They would have to change the legendary’s so they don’t suck. at BEST they are only like 2-3% better than a 2g exotic.

Which is why I thought of special effects only found on the weapons. The base stats could be the same, but the special effects in addition to the unique skins could be the appeal.

Everquest 2 had heritage quests that rewarded special items. I think they were similar to the quests this topic is about. Each one would take a long time to do, covered many smaller quests and sometimes even a raid like event, and you couldn’t do it alone unless you were massively over-leveled and very patient.

I love the idea of making a legendary quest to get a legendary weapon…a lot better then buying it off the trading post and saying ZOMG!!!11!1! look what i have!!

Gaining a legendary should involve a legendary quest line….not buying it off the TP or grinding the same dungeon for months.

If there is some grinding thats fine…just spread it out in locations and at least do waht some other MMOs do…mask the grind with a purpose or a story…like faction grinding in GW1 which gave new abilities and so on.

OMG YES.

+1+1+1+1+1+1…

Nidome.1365:

Legendaries in GW2 are just fancy weapon skins, they are no more powerful than any other level 80 exotic. Their purpose seems to me to keep those who want to grind busy, while those who don’t want to grind can avoid it and still have equipment as powerful as anyone else.
If you made them quest rewards, then you would have to find something else for the grinders to do…..

That is why the Epic quest should not be for Legendaries, but for Precursers, like was suggested here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Precursors-should-EQ1-Epic-Quest/first#post1407251

You can go through youre epic quest to get the precurser, then you can stop, or if you really care about the grind you can finish it for the actual Legendary.