Legendary Armor in Guild Wars 2
Aside from there being an achievement for collecting 18 unique pieces of PvE armor, there's also PvP and WvW armor by now. With all these different possibilities one may wonder how long it takes to get the legendary armors. A lot of people might already know this and people most likely even shared it on Reddit, however, I want to get through it myself. I also want to compare the prices of the armors and answering to a request on how often the reward tracks need to be repeated for the respective currencies in PvP and WvW. Aside from having a unique skin and a nice purple legendary color their attributes can also be changed to other stat combinations.
Crafting the PvE Armor
To know how long an armor takes to craft we need to know what you need for it. The recipes are very similar in their style. The basic structure can be found summed up on the wiki and it boils down to
- Gift of Prosperity / Gift of Competitive Prosperity / Gift of War Prosperity
- Gift of Prowess / Gift of Competitive Prowess / Gift of War Prowess
- Gift of Dedication / Gift of Competitive Dedication / Gift of War Dedication
- Precursor armor / (Ardent) Glorious Hero's armor / (Mistforged) Triumphant Hero's armor
Gift of Prosperity
The gift of prosperity for the PvE armor uses
- 1x Gift of Craftmanship
- 15x Mystic clovers
- 1x Gift of Condensed Might
- 1x Gift of Condensed Magic
Aside from Gift of Craftmanship, the other ones consist of materials that can be farmed. The Gift of Craftmanship, however, is sold by Faction Provisioners for a price of 50 Provisioner Tokens. These tokens are time-gated. Thus it is possible to farm all the other materials during this time-gated period, which allows me to disregard them as their influence on the time required to make the Gift of Prosperity is too small in comparison.
Full armor consists of six pieces, which means we need 50 * 6 = 300 Provisioner Tokens. To get these you need to bring the Faction Provisioners a piece of armor or weapon to get a token. Each Faction Provisioner can be given one item per day per account. There's a total amount of 12 Faction Provisioners. However, depending on how much gold or resources you want to spend you might only get 9 to 10 a day. Keeping this in mind we have a minimum and a maximum amount of time. The minimum is 300 Provisioner Tokens in total with 12 per day. This results in 300 / 12 = 25 days or 25 / 7 = 3.57 weeks. The maximum is 9 days and the same total amount. This means it would take us 300 / 9 = 33.33 days instead. That's 34 days, actually, since you can only do it daily not every third of a day, which equals 34 / 7 = 4.86 weeks.
Gift of Prowess
The Gift of Prowess for PvE armor requires
- 25x Legendary Insights
- 1x Eldritch Scroll
- 50x Obsidian Shards
- 6x Cube of Stabilized Dark Energy
The Legendary Insights is a drop mostly from bosses and a few events from the raids and they only drop once per boss per account. This resets every week. Since these are limited, as there are only 17 15 weekly rewards in the raids that pass you these insights. The Eldritch Scroll item can be bought by Spirit Shards, a currency that is awarded for each level up which happens a ton after reaching your maximum level as you can continue to level up for these. Obsidian Shards can be bought in amounts of Scrooge McDuck's safe. It just takes some karma which is awarded constantly by simply doing some events. Last but not least the Cube of Stabilized Dark Energy consists of materials. Sure, you need to salvage ascended armor, but this can be crafted and dropped - even if rarely. So, technically it's farmable. Again, we don't need to worry about this since the Legendary Insight time-gate is much, much higher than this one. For your first PvE armor, you need 150 Legendary Insights and for your second you need 300 Legendary Insights. This means we will need between 150 / 17 = 8.82 weeks and 300 / 17 = 17.65 weeks. This means you will now need between 150 / 15 = 10 and 300 / 15 = 20 weeks. Of course, this assumes you get all 17 15 every week. So, here's a table showing the correlation between the number of Legendary Insights you get and the time it would take you for the 300.
| Legendary Insights | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | ||
| Time in weeks | Inf. | 300 | 150 | 100 | 75 | 60 | 50 | 42.9 | 37.5 | 33.3 | 30 | 27.3 | 25 | 23.1 | 21.4 | 20 |
Gift of Dedication
This Gift consists of materials that can be partially bought or farmed in the Heart of Thorns map. The hardest item to farm is the Chak Eggs, yet, it's still possible to do it. Thus we can ignore this.
Precursor Armor
The first precursor armor is awarded for the achievement which takes a few weeks. For any other armor following the first, it takes twice the amount of Legendary Insights compared to the first one which we already went through with for the Gift of Prowess.
Finishing Off
Okay, let's finish it off. If you compare the numbers we figure out the longest time is required to accumulate the 150 or 300 Legendary Insights with a time of 8.82 to 17.65 10 to 20 weeks. That's only the PvE armor, though. The next post will be about the legendary PvP armor as well as analyzing the length of PvP Seasons and the breaks in between them.
Modification Notes
19.09.2018: The amount of Legendary Insights has changed. Hall of Chains no longer rewards Legendary Insights, which means you get four less now. However, the event before Gorseval and the event before Xera reward Legendary Insights now too. Thus the maximum is now 15.
