Against all odds and common sense, I continue playing Guild Wars 2.

Indeed, I completed my first Legendary just the other day:

Overall, I do not recommend unlocking Aurora and I regretted having done so almost immediately. This runs counter to nearly all advice a GW2 player receives about Legendaries, and it makes some amount of (superficial) sense. If you unlock a Legendary weapon, all characters on that account can use the weapon… if it’s beneficial to do so. If I were unlock a Greatsword, for example, only two of my nine characters would use it on a regular basis. Unlocking Legendary armor has a similar limitation, insofar as armor is split into three weight classes. Having the full gamut of classes myself, that means three characters could use a given Legendary armor piece. Conversely, every character has six trinket slots that can need to be filled, thus ensuring maximum usage across your account.

The problem is that Aurora is a Russian nesting doll of ridiculous nonsense. Neither the Wiki page nor this helpful video really dwell on absolute volume of tasks you must accomplish. One of the originating steps, for example, is completing the Token Hunter achievement, which involves finding 40 little coins across one of the expansion maps. Some of those coins are inside the Chalice of Tears jumping puzzle, which is aptly named and one of the hardest (if not the hardest) in the game. Addons like Blish HUD make most of the steps… well, I don’t say “trivial,” because it’s still an assload of steps, but at least manageable. But that’s really just the preview of coming events.

Once you get the four Sentient whatevers, the next step is becoming a Master of each of the six Season 3 maps. Becoming a Master means completing more than a dozen sub-steps for each map. Some of the items are straightforward, like completing the Hearts (quest hubs), collecting the map-specific resources, defeating the bosses at the end of meta events, and so on. But then the devs get cheeky. One of the steps is unlocking an armor piece… which you do so by unlocking the Story Mastery achievement for the map. That process is itself 30+ different achievements, some of which involve completing achievements within the story instances, and others outside of it. Then you have achievements like the one for the Wayfarer’s Henge in Draconis Mons, which is timegated to 16 days.

Is it insurmountable? Obviously not. Hell, it was even “fun” when broken down into discrete steps, focusing on just one map per day. Plus, if you really hate achievements, you can bypass a few of the armor-unlock ones by completing PvP/WvW reward tracks. Options are good.

The problem is that in the same amount of time, you could have just farmed Winterberries and gotten every variation of trinket you could reasonably wanted. That is, of course, the exact counter-point to any Legendary item in GW2, as Legendaries do not grant any higher stat bonuses than Ascended gear. Hell, almost all Ascended gear is only account-bound rather than soulbound, which means you can move it around your various characters as desired. How many “mains” do you expect to have anyway?

Still, there is something to be said about the satisfaction of a goal achieved, a journey completed. So much of the GW2 endgame breaks down to farming gold that it feels meaningfully different to, you know, spend it for once. All of a sudden, doing all those daily quests and meta events provide not random debris that you sell on the Trading Post, but critical items to fuel another component in the Mystic Forge.

That is how they get you, though. Because none of it really means anything, and all of that time could have been spent playing other games. Probably ones with exactly the same level of checklists and achievements and satisfaction, if only you would spare them the same start-up labor.

But, alas. Starting a new game sometimes feels like even more effort…