The Catch 22 of Legendary Runes/Sigils and Other Legendary Equipment

[Aaron Forestman.4758]

The gameplay advantage of any legendary equipment is of course to be able to change its stats at will. That and its visual effects are the only motivators for throwing thousands of gold into ventures of armor, weapons, and trinkets. With runes and sigils having no visual effects, only the gameplay advantage is worth considering - this puts it on the order of PvP and WvW legendary armor since you can get the advantage without the unique visual effects.

The catch 22 here is that these legendary runes and sigils have limited usefulness when you don't have legendary armor/weapons and are almost completely unnecessary if you do have legendary armor/weapons.

Case 1: If you're running ascended/exotic equipment, those items will be almost always used for a single build, thus there is no reason to spend hundreds or thousands of gold to be able to change your runes and sigils when you could spend 50 gold or less for the runes and sigils that will stay in their slots forever.

Case 2: If you have legendary equipment, you can swap its stats to work for any build, so naturally you'll need a variety of runes and sigils to cycle through. A handful of inventory or bank slots can handle this perfectly well, and its clear that even converting gold to gems to max out bag and bank slots and buying the already very expensive 32 slot bags for all slots would be more cost effective per slot than the amount of inventory space saved by having legendary runes and sigils.

All legendaries are vanity items but most at least have some usefulness as well. The only reason to put effort into these runes and sigils is if you have literally nothing else to do with thousands of gold. We can see that isn't the case for 99%+ of players with how the community donation event has stalled and the prices of lucent crystals are dropping once more. The community got excited at first, but now it's clear to most that these are a misuse of our resources. Its rare for a recipe to change after an item is put in the game, but we need some serious recipe changes here if anyone is going to care at all about legendary runes and sigils.

TL;DR: Make legendary armor and weapons. They're cool AND useful, while legendary runes and sigils are neither.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

Am I the only person who don't understand these threads? It like all the threads saying not to go for the skyscale because the griffin was better. I kinda sense a sour grapes issue. I think people understand legendary rune/sigils are not for everyone, but it doesn't mean you need to testify how not for you these items are.Minus some UI issues, because anet doesn't test anything before releasing it, they function exactly as they are meant to be. There are no drop 100g tax like legendary weapons, all the cost is dictated by players. If there was no demand for them the cost will reduce in the charms and symbols. Provisions tokens can be free if you want to wait can get 4-5 for free everyday with chak eggs, auric ingot, obi shard, reclaimed plate, and mystic forge stones.

[Ashantara.8731]

@Aaron Forestman.4758 said:TL;DR: Make legendary armor and weapons. They're cool AND useful, while legendary runes and sigils are neither.

Not true. Legendary Runes might be useless, as a full stack of runes for an armor set only uses up one slot, but Legendary Sigils are very useful as sigils take up more inventory slots.

However, their level of usefulness does not justify their price. They need to lower the requirements.

[Cyninja.2954]

@Shadowmoon.7986 said:Am I the only person who don't understand these threads? It like all the threads saying not to go for the skyscale because the griffin was better. I kinda sense a sour grapes issue. I think people understand legendary rune/sigils are not for everyone, but it doesn't mean you need to testify how not for you these items are.Minus some UI issues, because anet doesn't test anything before releasing it, they function exactly as they are meant to be. There are no drop 100g tax like legendary weapons, all the cost is dictated by players. If there was no demand for them the cost will reduce in the charms and symbols. Provisions tokens can be free if you want to wait can get 4-5 for free everyday with chak eggs, auric ingot, obi shard, reclaimed plate, and mystic forge stones.

Not true. The materials required for legendary runes/sigils are used in other items as well. Items which make the materials have a higher price point then if they were only used for legendary runes/sigils. Your assumption that the price would drop to a state where more people might be interested in legendary runes/sigils is faulty.

Even at 0 cost to rune/sigil materials, the remaining cost required per legendary rune/sigil places these items above legendary armor while they are of far less use to everybody. Players without legendary armor draw nearly no use from legendary runes, people with legendary armor derive nearly no use from the replacement feature (bar some inventory space saved).

@Aaron Forestman.4758 said:The catch 22 here is that these legendary runes and sigils have limited usefulness when you don't have legendary armor/weapons and are almost completely unnecessary if you do have legendary armor/weapons.

This summs it up rather nicely.

All of that without even getting into all of these features still rely on outside addons (arc build templates) to even remotely beat ascended gear in usefulness.

[Vavume.8065]

@Aaron Forestman.4758 said:The only reason to put effort into these runes and sigils is if you have literally nothing else to do with thousands of gold.

I think this sums it up entirely.

[Turkeyspit.3965]

Every rune and sigil in the game should just be available from a drop down menu in each piece of legendary gear. Either unlocked at the start, or you have to pay an NPC to unlock each one, whatever.

But instead we get this.

We are, of course, playing a game where one of the biggest improvements to basic character environmental interaction was the ability to SIT on chairs, and subsequently now have a half dozen chairs available for purchase on the gem store. I somehow doubt the implementers of legendary runes/sigils will surpass the number of players who purchased said chairs.

Easier just to not care about it all. Play the game, have fun with what you have fun with, and remember the logout button exists. /shrug

[Khisanth.2948]

@"Shadowmoon.7986" said:Am I the only person who don't understand these threads? It like all the threads saying not to go for the skyscale because the griffin was better. I kinda sense a sour grapes issue. I think people understand legendary rune/sigils are not for everyone, but it doesn't mean you need to testify how not for you these items are.Minus some UI issues, because anet doesn't test anything before releasing it, they function exactly as they are meant to be. There are no drop 100g tax like legendary weapons, all the cost is dictated by players. If there was no demand for them the cost will reduce in the charms and symbols. Provisions tokens can be free if you want to wait can get 4-5 for free everyday with chak eggs, auric ingot, obi shard, reclaimed plate, and mystic forge stones.

There are other issues besides the bad UI https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/cl2mu1/you_cant_change_legendary_runes_while_theyre/

Probably could have avoided most of these problems if they released them at the same time as templates ... assuming the template UI isn't awful which I am not so sure about anymore

[ZDragon.3046]

@"Shadowmoon.7986" said:Am I the only person who don't understand these threads? It like all the threads saying not to go for the skyscale because the griffin was better. I kinda sense a sour grapes issue. I think people understand legendary rune/sigils are not for everyone, but it doesn't mean you need to testify how not for you these items are.Minus some UI issues, because anet doesn't test anything before releasing it, they function exactly as they are meant to be. There are no drop 100g tax like legendary weapons, all the cost is dictated by players. If there was no demand for them the cost will reduce in the charms and symbols. Provisions tokens can be free if you want to wait can get 4-5 for free everyday with chak eggs, auric ingot, obi shard, reclaimed plate, and mystic forge stones.

I think you are misunderstanding the situation here its not quite the same as the skyscale situation while some parts are certainly similar there are a lot of big factors that break the two apart.

I think this case is a bit different there is a even smaller number of players who will go for the runes and sigils then there were initially for skyscale while it is the same kind of ordeal the situation is much more niche due to the requirements and so many factors.Some factors here include

• having legendary armor vs not having it
• the gold cost per rune or sigil
• the usefulness for just swapping rune sets while the runes dont provide any visual eye candy unlike other legendary gold sinks
• alternative methods that are considerably cheaper that many players could or already have invested to (alt sets of gear and runes / big bag slot/ Extractors /Alt characters)

Ideally these things are cater (possibly unpurposly) at such a small niche of players who just will go "Why not" or "Yeah that will be nice for me because i can right away."

Skyscale was mainly an argument about the time gate form what i recall not the work required to obtain it. There was some comparison to Griff which i wont go into detail with but i mean one lets just say the biggest difference between the two mounts is one has instance use the other does not and requires you to climb first.

While Skyscale was a tedious collection most people who really wanted it powered through it even before the time gate reduction (myself included) By the first and second earliest day anyone could have had a skyscale there were plenty of them around to prove to me people were not turned off because of an idea that the griffon is better or that the work was too much. If the skyscale had a factor for example lets say, it cost say 2.5k gold at the end of the collection, do you think as many people would have it or have gone for it.. for the lack of the better words "Capital F No!" (excuse me) Then it would be a similar case to this situation. It would have been a main feature locked behind a insanely high price point and intense collection that made it a legendary mount that provides small key advantages over griff such as hovering and instnat use. Is that worth 2.5k gold? An argument like this would make this whole debate over legendary runes and sigils the same as the skyscale but thats not what happened so lets not say its the same because its really not.

Legendary Runes and Sigils just currently cater to such a small percentile that people are arguing that a change because the alternatives (which they may have already invested in) don't warrant the cost of the quality of life that the legendary runes and sigil can provide. Im sure anet will wait for a while before choosing to do anything though. Like they sky scale the will want to see how things adjust if people are not really going for them then im sure they will change the recipes.

Myself for example owns no legendary armor and i don't change my build very often there is no reason for me I'm too casual to bother with even the idea of being tempted to go for them. I would sooner make a 2nd set of ascended gear, carry extra runes, or use alt characters for changing builds on the fly.

While i will likely never go for these runes and sigils I do understand the argument people are making over them. They are "Nice to haves" Meaning you dont need them and everyone knows that, but the price point for the majority of even serious and hard core players is currently "too high." Because they know they don't need them and there is no other incentive to go for them (No eye candy) most people wont bite on the bait to get em.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

500g and a 3 day time gate is comparable to wvw and spvp legendary armor which costs 350g a piece and has a 3 week and a half a season timegate respectively. These give no eye candy and only stat swapping, just like legendary runes. Heck i can reduce the cost by 50g by only using free/3s vendor trash items for the provisioner tokens and still finishing in 10 days.

[Asum.4960]

Legendary Runes are less convenient than normal Runes if you have Legendary Armor and essentially useless if you use Ascended Gear, while a single set of Legendary Runes costs as much as buying literally hundreds of even some of the most expensive Exotic Rune sets, aka more than anyone will most likely buy in even years of playing, or ever.

I really don't know what Anet was going for with this feature.

Besides Legendary Armor, of which I made a few, I was already less than impressed with the cost/benefit ratio of Legendary Weapons and Trinkets, but these Runes take it to a whole other level of absurd to make.

Aside from just getting them because you literally don't know what to do with your gold anymore at all, I don't see any reason why anyone would ever get these.

I was actually pretty excited for these after the first announcement a while back, but after they were introduced they genuinely had me scratching my head for the last few days, wondering if I was missing something.

@Shadowmoon.7986 said:500g and a 3 day time gate is comparable to wvw and spvp legendary armor which costs 350g a piece and has a 3 week and a half a season timegate respectively. These give no eye candy and only stat swapping, just like legendary runes. Heck i can reduce the cost by 50g by only using free/3s vendor trash items for the provisioner tokens and still finishing in 10 days.

The difference is, just concerning saved space, with some of my most played characters with Legendary Armor having about 15 build Templates, even just taking in account small stat adjustments of the most commonly played builds between Fractals (with free stats from potions changing how much boon duration, critchance or whatever you need) and Raids, that's easily 60 Inventory slots I'm saving on Armor. That's a whole lot of clutter and space.But all of these builds use just 5 different sets of runes among them, which means 4 Inventory Slots would be saved by making Legendary Runes.

Plus with Legendary Armor, you already get to swap these Runes on demand without losing them.

So imo they are not at all comparable in value.

[ButcherofMalakir.4067]

There are 2 reasons to have them.1) if you have a character that uses same stats but swap runes for diferent builds/situations. Examples can be dh/power quickbrand and alacrity renegade.2) if you have legendary armor but you need to swap many runes. That way you save space. Example can be support chronomancer

[Cyninja.2954]

@Shadowmoon.7986 said:500g and a 3 day time gate is comparable to wvw and spvp legendary armor which costs 350g a piece and has a 3 week and a half a season timegate respectively. These give no eye candy and only stat swapping, just like legendary runes. Heck i can reduce the cost by 50g by only using free/3s vendor trash items for the provisioner tokens and still finishing in 10 days.

Legendary armor is far above runes in usefulness and nearly makes runes unneccessary. Runes do not do the same for armor.

So yes, runes are comparable to pvp legendary armor if you consider a 42% higher cost and less usefulness some kind of equal.

I do not.