Guild Wars 2

I’m talking about the collections for the base legendaries of the game. What purpose do they serve?
- They certainly aren’t enjoyable, unless repeating content you’ve already done often many times is your thing there’s nothing new for you to do. And the content they require you to repeat for completion can be extremely finnicky, you often have to wait hours for a specific event to pop just so you can get that single part of the collection.
- They are horrendously expensive to grind out, often costing far more gold than just buying one from the TP.
- They’ve added next to nothing to the lore of these weapons, not a shred of story about them has been added in any meaningful way.

In my person experience making Dawn, nothing about building the precursor through the collection system has given me an emotional connection to my weapon.
Nothing about it has made me feel compelled or intrigued or even curious about the next step, mostly due to the next step always consisting of repeated content or dumping gold.
And most importantly, nothing about this system has made me feel proud of, satisfied, or rewarded with what I’ve accomplished. It has only made me hate the weapon and myself for wasting a collosal amount of my gold and time on it.

So what purpose does it serve?
Why would someone want to grind old content and dump mountains of gold when they could farm the gold to just buy one for much less time and cost?
You can repeat old content any time you like, why would you willingly waste your time doing so when you can do recent/more enjoyable content for better rewards and thus the same result?

When I first heard about the change, I had thought the purpose of adding these collections was to make precursors more obtainable.
They are more obtainable, yes, but only because the TP price has dropped due to people being dumb enough to do the collections in the first place. If they wanted to achieve that result they could’ve just increased the droprates. If they wanted to add content to the game which made acquiring a precursor a more personal and compelling experience, then they have failed miserably by adding no new content or story to these weapons, merely a structure by which you repeat old content.

tldr; precursor collections for base game legendaries add no new content to the game and cost more to complete than buying from the trading post.
So why would any player be it casual, hardcore, veteran, or newbie want grind one out?