Why I won't be pursuing a legendary at this time.

First off, I want to say I love this game, and am definitely addicted to it. There's always something fun to do. I have an 80 mesmer and a 60 thief. I've done 100% world completion, and I've enjoyed WvW, played some sPvP, did all the jump puzzles and have run about 1/3 of all the dungeon paths, and looking to complete all of those as well. Personally, I've found the achievement system to be a great guide as for what to try next.

In the end, players who play 30 hours a week like myself usually pursue awesome weapon skins, and legendary weapons. Many of the legendary/other weapon skin requirements are very reasonable. 500 dungeon tokens is about a week of running two dungeon paths a night. 500 badges of honor is about 2 weeks of hitting up the jump puzzles in WvW (or less if you have alts that can make it), or a month or two of casual WvW play in your spare time where you will gain xp and karma too.

World completion takes about 2 weeks of effort, however there is an absolute wealth of content, new scenery, jump puzzles to vistas, etc that keep it very fresh. The rewards for world completion are great too, with transmutation stones, black lion keys, etc.

So anyways, that's the stuff I'm almost done with, simply from playing the game, and it's taken me 3 months of regular play to accomplish this. Everything else, or about 80% of the time requirement for a legendary is grinding for karma, xp for skillpoints and drops for money. I've talked with a few people who've gotten legendaries who talk about 2 solid months of grinding Orr, every night for 4-5 hours with MF gear and karma boosters, running the circuit in Cursed Shore. It's gotten even worse as prices have skyrocketed, while drop rates have plummeted. Thankfully, I do not have my heart set on a legendary, and have done all the other things simply in the course of playing the game.

And it's not just legendaries. Awesome looking weapon skins take tons of tier 6 mats to craft, and massive amounts of skillpoints. Now I have no problem with high costs, but I am concerned with the nature of the rewards. In vanilla WoW, there was only one great way to acquire the badass looking gear: complete difficult 40 man raids. Now while I don't want 40 man raids in GW2, the point is that if you had a full set of blackwing gear, people knew that you had been a part of a guild that had cleared difficult content. WoW is not something I want ANet to model GW2 after of course, but the gear was a symbol that said something about you. (Of course, it had the broken mechanic of vertical progression, and became grindy too because you'd have to complete MC or BWL at least a dozen times to get all your gear, if you were lucky.)

What do the great skins in GW2 tell you about someone? That they have farmed a crazy amount of mats, either in Orr, or from running Fractals hundreds of times. That you got crazy lucky and a precursor dropped and you either used it or sold it for big money to give you a boost. It isn't a sign of accomplishment. The dungeon armor sets are a great example of gear through accomplishment, and while I'm cool with legendaries having a ridiculous amount of accomplishment, what turns me off is the grinding required.

Drop rates are incredibly low. I could grind all night with MF gear in the CS circuit, and get maybe 1% of the materials/money I would need. I understand the need for money sinks, but the gem store already does a great job of that. I haven't spent any money since the initial purchase, but have purchased two bag expansions, a bank expansion and other things like revive orbs.

So what am I going to do? Whine and bitch about the system, and do it anyway? No. I'm simply not going to chase that and pursue the things I think are reasonable like dungeon skins, achievement goals and just doing whatever I feel like that night be it WvW, sPvP or completing all the dungeon paths. In general, I think this is an incredibly fun game.

What I will say is that respectfully, I disagree with the current legendary / kickass weapon skin system of grind-to-win. I think it is a fundamental flaw of every MMO that I've played. There is SO much content in this game, with various dungeons, WvW events, jump puzzles, etc, yet anyone who wants to pursue these cool skins has only 1 viable option: farm 25% of the area of Cursed Shore.

Perhaps having alternate paths would be nice, for people who want to do more than just grind out numbers in a mindless zerg of events by tagging mobs as fast as possible. The easy solution to me is alternative mystic forge recipes for things like clovers that use other things, such as dungeon tokens, badges of honor, tokens you might get from jump puzzle chests (number of tokens based off of their difficulty of course. They could also be alternate recipes for ectos, tier 6 mats, etc.

Am I completely off base here? Do you have any suggestions?