[Legendary Trinket Effects Update]

Hello Tyrians,

When we released the Legendary Armory feature on July 13, one of the top pieces of feedback we heard was for the ability to hide the visual effects of the legendary trinkets Aurora, Vision, and Coalescence. At that time we unfortunately didn’t have the dev bandwidth available to tackle the request. The work that we’d need to do to make the visual effects toggleable was a non-trivial effort. We were (and still are) hard at work on the End of Dragons expansion.

Since then, a member of our engineering team identified a new approach to the stacking buff problem we previously explained that would not add technical or design debt (bookah speak: the idea that doing the seemingly simple solution now, will cost us much more time later than the simple solution saved us to begin with), and after some iteration and refactoring, we landed on a satisfactory implementation. Add a healthy portion of testing, bake for 3-4 weeks in our release pipeline (the average time from the moment something is finished and ok-ed to be released, to actually being in a release) and you end up with a checkbox on more of your legendary trinkets on November 9th.

Once the build is live tomorrow, Aurora, Vision, and Coalescence will each have a new checkbox when equipped. From the player perspective, these checkboxes will add or remove their contribution to the stack that determines which effect will be displayed on your character, or none at all, if that is your thing.

[Legendary Armory: Follow up clarifications]

I'd like highlight a key word from this clarification post, we are removing the ACQUISITION of slumbering trinkets not the use of them. They can still be used in the existing recipe that upgrades it to the awakened version (for anyone impatient for the vendor) and they can still be used exactly as they are now (prior to July 13th) in multiple equipment templates on the same character.

Slumbering trinkets are not being removed from the game, just being phased out because they were a work around to a larger task that we have now done the work for. They should not be the way of the future and adding more of them (or any recipe that uses a legendary to craft another legendary) is just adding more tech and design debt that will ultimately slow us down in the long run.

[Legendary Armory: Follow up clarifications]

1 hour ago, Mckeone.9804 said:

 

Will this vendor have a cost associated for the upgraded version, like with the current mystic forge requirements? 

 

No

 

1 hour ago, keenedge.9675 said:

I'm a bit worried about automatic updates to the gear pool.

We understand your concern. Our team has put a lot of time into thinking about edge cases and put hundreds and hundreds of hours testing the auto-conversion process alone

 

1 hour ago, Lascax.2163 said:

I can understand this reasoning, coming from personal experiences with similar systems in videogames.
Did you evaluate to enable the crafting of "slumbering" versions of these items if you've unlocked the Original ones?

Introducing more slumbering trinkets (and then adding them all to the LA, because what good would they be if not, right?) would create unfairness for players who crafted the awakened version before now. Players who crafted it later would get an unlock for the slumbering version and also the awakened version when it was upgraded (similar to the Sunrise/Twilight/Eternity situation, because removing a charge from your LA is not feasible). For rings and accessories though this means a player could craft only 1 legendary but equip 2 legendaries (not as much as issue for the 3 greatswords because you already had 2, and the 3rd does not give you an unfair advantage so it was an acceptable outlier)

[Legendary Armory: Follow up clarifications]

Hi all, 

Catmander Neko here, I’m the senior engineer who worked on the Legendary Armory. 

We’ve been keeping an eye on the discussion regarding the Legendary Armory since the blog post on Tuesday, and we wanted to respond to a few common questions. 

 

Slotted upgrades and infusions? 

Upgrades and infusions in equipped gear and equipment templates (aka your regular armory) will remain in place. For items in your bank, shared and regular inventory, infusions and upgrades will be popped out to your inventory. 

 

Slumbering Trinkets 

Players will not be able to acquire new slumbering trinkets after July 13 release and any existing slumbering trinkets will not be absorbed into the Legendary Armory. The recipes for these items will instead reward the awakened trinket.  

But what about current slumbering trinket owners? We’re going to be adding a vendor to the game that will allow you to upgrade any slumbering trinket to the fully awakened version. You’ll be able to use the effect toggle in the Equipment panel to disable the effects from the awakened versions if you choose. This vendor won’t be in-game with the launch of Legendary Armory, but we plan to release it in a future update. 

WvW player? Conflux will no longer be unique, so players who currently use the awakened and slumbering versions can continue to use their current equipment loadout. 

 

Aurora, Vision, Coalescence 

We wanted to make a toggle for the three legendary PVE trinkets (Aurora, Vision and Coalescence). Unfortunately, these three items are setup differently from other items with visual effects and giving them a toggle is a complex problem. That probably sounds silly – it’s just a checkbox, right? A quick peek behind the curtain: these items are set up using a stacking buff (based on the number of equipped legendary trinkets) to determine which visual effect is added to the character model (i.e. the effect is actually added by the buff, not the item). The toggles in the Equipment panel control the visual effects on the items themselves–it’s not changing which item is slotted (i.e. it’s not switching to the slumbering version). This makes it much more difficult to convert them to the system where effects are on the item itself and can be toggled. Conflux and Transcendence previously got their effect from a buff not the item, but because they were a non-stacking buff we were able to move the effect to the item with a small amount of work and allow it to benefit from the toggle. 

Fixing this for Aurora, Vision, and Coalescence would require a rework of the visual effects for these items and how they’re applied (which would likely leave some players unhappy as it would change their appearance), or a significant engineering investment to build a one-off solution. That investment isn’t something we can commit to right now–our engineering team is focused on End of Dragons, Alliances, and DX11. We understand how important this is to all of you and that this isn’t the response you were hoping for, but in the spirit of transparency we wanted to let you know where things currently stand. 

 

Eternity, Sunrise, and Twilight 

We already answered this question in another thread, but for the sake of completeness we’ll hit it again here. Players that bound Eternity to their accounts prior to the release of the Legendary Armory will receive an unlock for both Sunrise and Twilight in their Legendary Armory. Unbound Eternities bought from the Trading Post and added to the Legendary Armory will also act the same way. However, Eternity granted from the new Mystic Forge recipe using token items will not grant the additional unlocks. 

 

Gen 2 Precursor Crafting Limits 

Players will be able to craft multiple Gen 2 precursors after the Legendary Armory releases, meaning you can acquire multiples of Gen 2 legendaries. 

 

Legendary Armory Item Caps 

Each type of equipment has its own limit, and the limit is counted separately for every unique legendary item. For example, you can unlock a Perfected Envoy light helm and an Ardent Glorious light helm as well. Here's a complete list: 

• Two-handed weapons: 2 
• Main-hand exclusive weapons: 2 
• Offhand exclusive weapons: 2 
• One-handed weapons useable in either hand: 4 
• Armor: 1 per piece, per armor class 
• Back items: 1  
• Trinkets: 1 (except Conflux, which is 2) 
• Runes: 7 
• Sigils: 8 

[Eternity: Legendary Armory Inconsistencies]

18 hours ago, Soulanimal.3718 said:

no Tokens, and presumably no account-bound Sunrise or Twilight.

I don't see where the CS agent said that 😉 They just said they wouldn't be removed, not that they wouldn't be added. Rest assured, we considered current Eternity owners alongside future ones when developing the armory. Auto-converted Eternity's will grant a Sunrise and Twilight unlock in your legendary armory as well. Make no mistake, the edge case that is Eternity has been a nightmare to work around, but I believe we've got it pretty well handled. The Armory is a somewhat complex feature and some of the details (like this and other edge cases) were a little too nuanced to include in the blog post.