The biggest problem here is the Mystic Forge. People put a great deal of money into it and get very little in return. It is a losing game and it feels like a losing game.
If Anet is convinced that a RNG is the best method for keeping Legendaries rare (and clearly they are, because the MF exists), then they need to hide the RNG aspect behind something that actually feels like an accomplishment.
The rarest of the rare weapons and armor in GW and, in fact, almost any other MMORPG you’d care to name are obtained by defeating very powerful opponents or accomplishing very difficult feats of gameplay AND being lucky. You went and killed Mallyx or Kael’Thas or Stormy Knight because you were guaranteed to make some progress toward getting some sort of reward AND you had a chance of getting something super-rare. Even if you got no reward, you at least had some fun trying. In most cases the odds of getting rare drops from these and other bosses is extremely low, AND the boss is very hard just to get to, much less defeat. But you don’t see the sort of absolutely hopelessness that I’m seeing regarding the Precursors because the RNG is hidden behind a layer of fun.
The MF is the absolute opposite of fun. The MF is the RNG in its purest form. There’s hope, repeatedly shattered. That’s it. It’s frustrating, and failures result in NOTHING, not even a sense of accomplishment. If you actually get your Precursor, any sense of achievement is completely overshadowed by the sheer relief that you don’t have to use the MF any more.
That is not how it should be.
Leave the chance of getting Legendary precursors in the MF. That’s fine, but it should an alternative method of getting it, not the sole method. The other alternative should be a difficult boss, or rare DE.
Guild Wars itself had a superior method of getting rare gear. Want a Rotwing bow? GO KILL ROTWING! I killed Rotwing dozens of times and never got a Rotwing bow, but I still had fun trying, and with the loot I got from those fights I was actually able to buy a Rotwing bow from another player. It’s still just as much of a RNG but it’s much less psychologically demoralizing than pitching expensive items down the toilet of the MF.
Incidentally, this would be a great way (and a great time!) to reintroduce named bosses back into GW2. Forget this “Champion/Veteran whatever” stuff, give us back Molotov Rocktail and the Scar Eater and Rendabi Deatheater! Get a named boss that spawns at the end of an event chain, and give him a chance of dropping a Legendary precursor!
In fact… you might even be able to get high-level players back into the low and mid-level maps this way. If you are level 80, and you help defeat a low-level boss like the Shadow Behemoth, YOU have an (extremely low) chance of getting, say, Dusk as a chest reward.
These are just examples and obviously a fair amount of tweaking and math needs to be done before bosses can start dropping Precursors, but are there any fundamental problems with this concept?
tl;dr Arenanet should give us alternatives to the MF for obtaining Legendary precursors because the MF is a demoralizing pure RNG. I suggest the reintroduction of GW-style super-difficult named bosses and give them extremely low chances of dropping Legendary precursors in order to restore fun and player populations to low and mid-level areas.