How are the Casual players doing with their Legendary PVE Armor?

[Portico.2354]

I think the difference in cost at least for the runes and sigils is that they used to be a lot cheaper before they were reworked a few years back to add them to the crafting system.

[Solvar.7953]

I don't know the history, but I expect the case was true that when the prices were first set up, the costs were all about the same.  Every once in a while, the re-adjust the prices for materials to buy boxes in festival of the four winds due to changing prices - that might make sense for Anet to do for provisioner tokens.

OTOH, basing prices for something (runes/sigils) whose value can greatly change on some future balance update might just not be a good idea in general.  Making those exchanges based on something a bit less volatile may make sense.

 

[QueenKeriti.5176]

Just made piece #1. I need to get more research notes (ez pz), and then I'll have piece #2. Convergence masteries + buff + motivations + weekly rifts = relatively quick essence compared to farming WvW skirmish tickets. 🫠

[Chyro.1462]

On 4/19/2024 at 6:46 PM, Randulf.7614 said:

It's prob just me, but I find it less clear how to make a piece compared to other legendaries, even when using the wiki

Dunno if you're even interested in starting an obsidian set or piece, but if you do I can give you an overview.

The npc Lyhr next to the forge in the Wizard's Tower is quite important for this, since some recipes and armor skins required can be bought from him. He also offers to do all the mystic forge combining and crafting for you, but charges extra ectos for it - really not worth it in my opinion, as the cost adds up to way more than you'd have to invest to level the crafts yourself. It can however help you in giving an overview of the stuff you need if you check his vendor list.

Each piece consists of 4 main materials, with the "Arcanum of Astral XXX" taking the place of what the precursor is in other legendaries.

The Gift of Expertise, Gift of Stormy Skies and Gift of Mighty/Magic Prosperity are standard legendary crafting - you collect the mats required, put the 4 things into the mystic forge to recieve the Gift. Those are the main components (the 3 gifts + Arcanum that determines the gear type. Like Arcanum of Astral Grasp for gloves etc), once you have them you can make a legendary piece. They often have sub-materials that also need to be put together in the Mystic Forge. You will need the 'Obsidian Armor Crafting' mastery, but only for the very last step of putting the 4 pieces together at the forge next to Lyhr (requires crafting of the appropriate weight class you want at 500 - this is what determines which weight class you craft. Before this final step, everything is the same for all 3 weight classes. So you can still decide at the end which weight type you want to craft.).

- Arcanum of Astral xxx
There's 6 different ones of those, one for each gear type. You can buy them from Lyhr in the Wizard's tower for the cheap price of 1 lesser vision crystal. The hard and costly part is that you have to unlock the ability to buy them by clearing a small collection for each piece. As example, the Arcanum of Astral Grasp requires the 'Astral Grasp' collection. Each requires unlocking 3 specific armor skins + defeating one champion enemy from a specific open world event (different one for each piece). The 3 skin sets are the Rift Hunter set (guaranteed reward from playing through story), and the Astral Ward + Oneiros-Spun sets which can be bought from Lyhr. It doesn't matter in which weight class you buy the skins, as the requirement is only to have the skin unlocked and it's the same across all 3 weights. So if you've done this step, you never have to repeat it for any other weight-class obsidian sets for the same gear piece. Buying the skins from Lyhr is a bit of an effort, as it requires some research notes, some high-tier map currencies + a few minor gifts (like gift of venom for example, all craftable by any weapon crafting class at 400, recipes from crafting vendor for the minor gifts) as well as a Purified Kryptis Essence (Amalgamated Essence + 1 lucky clover, any crafter 400+ can do those as well as the Amalgamated. Recipe bought from Lyhr).

- Gift of Stormy Skies
This is the 'do open world map stuff' gift. You combine a Gift of the Astral Ward with 5x of each mayor map currency (Case of Captured Lighting, Clot of Congealed Screams, Pouch of Stardust) from the 3 Soto Maps. The gift of the Astral Ward is put together in the mystic forge by putting in a Gift of Skywatch Archipelago, Gift of Amnytas and Gift of Inner Nayos. You get those 3 from map completion or doing a lantern-lightning repeatable achievement. In Skywatch and Amnytas the lantern achievement is only available after having done map completion on the same char, in Inner Nayos the lantern lighting is currently available from the get go (may change when its fully released) but also the main way to get the gift there - as map completion isn't possible yet for Nayos. The 4th material is Gift of Persistence, which you can just buy from Lyhr for 250 of each minor map currency + 250 unusual coins (from Arcane chests or Shrine Guardian chests).

- Gift of Expertise
This is the 'farm kryptis essences' gift. It consists of 1x Eldritch Scroll (mystic forge npc, 50 spirit shards), 50x Obsidian Shards, 1x Cube of Stabilized Dark Energy (any 500 crafting class, 1x ball of dark energy from salvaging a ascended weapon or armor piece + 75 Stabilizing Matrixes bought from TP or farmed from fractals) and 12 Amalgamated Kryptis Essences. Those 12 essences are the big time gate that you have to farm tons of Convergences and Rifts for, every single one eating up 250 red, 100 green and 50 yellow essence along with 50 ectos. You can craft them with any 400 craft class after you buy the recipe from Lyhr.

- Gift of Mighty/Magic Prosperity
I'd call this the pricy materials gift. Depending on the gear piece, you have to make either the magic or mighty variant. The parts that are the same for both is 1x Gift of Craftsmanship (50 provisioner tokens), 9x Mystic Clover, and 1x Gift of Research (250x exotic luck, 250 Thermocatalytic Reagent cheap from crafting vendor, and 500x Hydrocatalytic Reagent for 2500 research notes total also from crafting vendor). The 4th piece is Gift of Condensed Might (1x Gift of Claws, 1x Gift of Scales, 1x Gift of Bones and 1x Gift of Fangs) or Gift of Condensed Magic (1x Gift of Blood, 1x Gift of Venom, 1x Gift of Totems and 1x Gift of Dust) with all the minor gifts being crafted by any of the 3 weapon crafting classes (Artificer, Huntsman or Weaponsmith) with 100x T6, 250x T5, 50x T4 and 50x T3 Materials for each minor gift (like different tiers of Claws for the Gift of Claws etc).

 

Big wall of text, but perhaps helpful for some. It's a lot to do, but once you get started you can take it one step at a time and to it bit by bit. It's not hard, just a big time and resource investment that you can chip away one piece at a time.

Edited April 23 by Chyro.1462

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

I'm enjoying all three weight tiers thank you very much.

[Sobx.1758]

46 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

I'm enjoying all three weight tiers thank you very much.

But he was asking the casual players 😄 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

13 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

But he was asking the casual players 😄 

I did it very casually. I just happened to have lots of gold saved up to bypass 85% of the grind.

[Sobx.1758]

7 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

I did it very casually. I just happened to have lots of gold saved up to bypass 85% of the grind.

...which still doesn't mean you're a casual player 😄 

[Chyro.1462]

Just now, Sobx.1758 said:

...which still doesn't mean you're a casual player 😄 

Really depends on your definition of casual. You can totally be a casual player that has accumulated lots of gold over time. Unless you say casual = has to be poor.

[Sobx.1758]

2 minutes ago, Chyro.1462 said:

Really depends on your definition of casual. You can totally be a casual player that has accumulated lots of gold over time. Unless you say casual = has to be poor.

Which is why I didn't say "if you have gold/armor/whatever, you're not casual", but instead that he's not really a casual player 😉 
Anyways, I'm casually not "clicking" any part of the armor until they show t2.

Edited April 23 by Sobx.1758

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

3 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

...which still doesn't mean you're a casual player 😄 

I very casually collect lots of gold from my alt accounts every Monday.

2 minutes ago, Chyro.1462 said:

Really depends on your definition of casual. You can totally be a casual player that has accumulated lots of gold over time. Unless you say casual = has to be poor.

This. Casual does not mean poor. 

Just now, Sobx.1758 said:

Which is why I didn't say "if you have gold/armor/whatever, you're not casual", but instead that he's not really a casual player 😉 
Anyways, I'm casually not "clicking" any part of the armor until they show t2.

I mean, I was a sweaty Fractal player for a while, and then a sweaty WvW roamer for a while. Now days I might spend an hour, maybe two doing HoT metas while half asleep with 1-spam and Treasure Mushrooms while listening to Viking metal on Youtube.

[Sobx.1758]

5 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

I very casually collect lots of gold from my alt accounts every Monday.

This. Casual does not mean poor. 

I mean, I was a sweaty Fractal player for a while, and then a sweaty WvW roamer for a while. Now days I might spend an hour, maybe two doing HoT metas while half asleep with 1-spam and Treasure Mushrooms while listening to Viking metal on Youtube.

"Maybe I did grind everything there was to grind for the past 10 years, but since I don't need to grind anymore [because I'm using whatever I did grind on the way here], I'm a casual player" is not my -still rather loose- definition of a casual player, but I'm not ready to faint on this hill, so if you consider yourself a casual player... so be it! 😉 

Edited April 23 by Sobx.1758

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

5 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

"Maybe I did grind everything there was to grind for the past 10 years, but since I don't need to grind anymore [because I'm using whatever I did grind on the way here], I'm a casual player" is not my -still rather loose- definition of a casual player, but I'm not ready to faint on this hill, so if you consider yourself a casual player... so be it! 😉 

So, someone cannot play casually for periods of time? Once a sweat always a sweat? I think you need to moderate that stance a bit buddy.

It's okay, I've burned through my stock of GoBs, so I have to go sweat again in WvW sometime soon. 😅 Might get two more sets of Leggy armor while I'm at it...

[Sobx.1758]

Just now, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

So, someone cannot play casually for periods of time? Once a sweat always a sweat? I think you need to moderate that stance a bit buddy.

It's okay, I've burned through my stock of GoBs, so I have to go sweat again in WvW sometime soon. 😅 Might get two more sets of Leggy armor while I'm at it...

Nah, players can and do play differently at different time periods, at no point I questioned that. Although -again- claiming that you're a casual player because you just did your grind for years and now you're able to use up the pile of that gold seems to be missing the point of the question "how are casual players doing", oof 😅 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

48 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Nah, players can and do play differently at different time periods, at no point I questioned that. Although -again- claiming that you're a casual player because you just did your grind for years and now you're able to use up the pile of that gold seems to be missing the point of the question "how are casual players doing", oof 😅 

I mean, I am playing casual now. I don't think the question was phrased as "Only casuals where were 100% casual for 100% of their game time."

[Sobx.1758]

26 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

I mean, I am playing casual now. I don't think the question was phrased as "Only casuals where were 100% casual for 100% of their game time."

Ok, I think the extensive period of the un-casual gameplay completely misses the point of the question about "how casual players are doing with the new armor". Not sure if you don't understand that or what this is supposed to be, but hey, whatever 😉 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

3 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Ok, I think the extensive period of the un-casual gameplay completely misses the point of the question about "how casual players are doing with the new armor". Not sure if you don't understand that or what this is supposed to be, but hey, whatever 😉 

So a few years of normal gameplay offsets the past 1-2 years of very casual play? By that token ever having been a casual player means no one could ever be a pro. Strange.

[Sobx.1758]

1 hour ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

So a few years of normal gameplay offsets the past 1-2 years of very casual play? By that token ever having been a casual player means no one could ever be a pro. Strange.

There's nothing to "offset" when you're still easly using all that "non casual" loot. Also as far as I remember, soon after release you went right for leggy materials while trying to work out limits and more optimal paths for gathering them (and I remember because I used them too, although not necessarily to the caps, thank you). I think even now you're overestimating/overselling your "casualness" for the "past 1-2 years". Again, if you feel casual and think "buying out 85% of what you needed [and grinding out to the cap some of the other materials]" is what fits "how are the casual players doing with armor" question, that's great 😉 Meanwhile, I remain convinced it doesn't.
I don't think the attempt to "flip it around" works here at all. When you go from casual to non-casual gameplay, you don't gain much from the preivous casual time. Meanwhile if you grind out materials after the release and then even quit the game until the armor release, does it mean you "casually got materials for the craft" because you didn't play at all for half a year between farming them and crafting the item? I don't think it does.

Not that it's some huge deal, I didn't intend this to be anything more than a throwaway line, but eh.

Edited April 23 by Sobx.1758

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

21 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

There's nothing to "offset" when you're still easly using all that "non casual" loot. Also as far as I remember, soon after release you went right for leggy materials while trying to work out limits and more optimal paths for gathering them (and I remember because I used them too, although not necessarily to the caps, thank you). I think even now you're overestimating/overselling your "casualness" for the "past 1-2 years". Again, if you feel casual and think "buying out 85% of what you needed [and grinding out to the cap some of the other materials]" is what fits "how are the casual players doing with armor" question, that's great 😉 Meanwhile, I remain convinced it doesn't.
I don't think the attempt to "flip it around" works here at all. When you go from casual to non-casual gameplay, you don't gain much from the preivous casual time. Meanwhile if you grind out materials after the release and then even quit the game until the armor release, does it mean you "casually got materials for the craft" because you didn't play at all for half a year between farming them and crafting the item? I don't think it does.

Not that it's some huge deal, I didn't intend this to be anything more than a throwaway line, but eh.

There really wasn't much to be done, just gather from the arcane chests while lighting lanterns along the way and shoot a fireball at the meta bosses at the last minute. My point being, you can play casual, at any point for prolonged periods of time, and become a casual player. Having acquired resources to allow you to play casual does not mean that your casual play is not casual anymore. Having played hard in the past does not mean that one's casual play in the present is not casual.

[Chyro.1462]

Get a room you two. It's really derailing the topic. You have differing opinions, just leave it at that ^^

[Sobx.1758]

6 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Having acquired resources to allow you to play casual does not mean that your casual play is not casual anymore.

Are you reading what I'm writing? I'm not saying that you're not casual today, which doesn't change how specifically grinding out exact materials needed for crafting shortly after release (or as soon as the cap allows) qualifies for "casual crafting", just because you could not play the game for x time after grinding out the mats. I don't know what's so hard about what I'm writing here. "I grinded out mats months ago, but now I casually clicked craft" doesn't seem fit for "how casual players are doing with crafting the armor" at all.

3 minutes ago, Chyro.1462 said:

Get a room you two. It's really derailing the topic. You have differing opinions, just leave it at that ^^

Fair. 😄 

Edited April 24 by Sobx.1758

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

35 minutes ago, Chyro.1462 said:

Get a room you two. It's really derailing the topic. You have differing opinions, just leave it at that ^^

Sorry, Sobx and I have this habit. It's all in good fun.

 

33 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Are you reading what I'm writing? I'm not saying that you're not casual today, which doesn't change how specifically grinding out exact materials needed for crafting shortly after release (or as soon as the cap allows) qualifies for "casual crafting", just because you could not play the game for x time after grinding out the mats. I don't know what's so hard about what I'm writing here. "I grinded out mats months ago, but now I casually clicked craft" doesn't seem fit for "how casual players are doing with crafting the armor" at all.

Fair. 😄 

Always fun bantering with you buddy. Have a good night.

[Privateer.2576]

No legendary armour for me, or trinkets for that matter.

Have ascended trinkets and exotic gear (some ascended) which are fine for open world which is all I do.

[Obscura.9768]

i dont need legendary armor, at all.

[Danikat.8537]

On 4/21/2024 at 10:38 PM, Ashen.2907 said:

As much as I am not going for the Obby armor I did want to support the point being made here. It applies to much more than just an armor set in a computer game. Most daunting, massive, complex, whatever tasks can be broken down into much more manageable pieces. Doing so helps you avoid a sense of being overwhelmed and allows you to have moments of a sense of accomplishment along the way. Kudos for pointing this out Gehenna.

One thing that's really helped me and I think helped other people too is pointing out that you will never lose progress on a legendary (any legendary) by doing it too slowly. There's no time limit on completing it once you start and things don't get more difficult if you do them a bit at a time. (There might be some very specific exceptions, like if you need to complete 2 Fractals and they're both dailies you'll have an easier time getting them both done that day than if you do one and leave the other for tomorrow.)

A few times I've stopped working on a legendary part-way through, when I was making Ad Infinitum I stopped for about 2 months because there was a new story release and then Wintersday and I wanted to focus on that instead. Afterwards I was able to pick up exactly where I'd left off. With some of the others I've taken shorter breaks because I was getting bored with it, or just had days when I logged in, thought about what I needed to do next and decided I'd rather play something else so I did that instead.

I  get bored easily if I'm just doing the same things over and over (not just in GW2, I specifically look for the type of jobs where I'm never sure exactly what will happen today) so for me it really helps to break up things like farming materials. Even if I know I could get 20 mcguffins a day I'll probably do 1 or 2 runs a day and just accept it'll take longer. When I was getting the skyscale I set myself a maximum of 50 map currency per day (not 50 of each, 50 total) and after that I'd only carry on if I was in the middle of a meta event I wanted to finish. Otherwise I'd go and do something else.