Legendary armour: four sets, four game modes, one shared reward

Legendary weapons get all the attention, and armour is where the system pays off hardest. A weapon frees one slot from bookkeeping. A full armour set frees six, on every character you own.

The interesting part is that there is no single path to it. Four sets exist, one per game mode, and they are equivalent once equipped.

What every set gives you

The same three things, regardless of which one you earn:

• Attributes change for free, any prefix, as often as you like
• Runes swap for free, which matters more than it sounds (why)
• The whole account wears it through the Legendary Armory, at the same time rather than passed around

Stats are ascended tier, so nobody hits harder for owning it. What you stop doing is maintaining four separate ascended sets for four builds.

The four paths

Obsidian armour, open world

Needs Secrets of the Obscure. Earned from open-world content, with no group required and no weekly reset holding you back.

The bill: Vicious Fangs and Large Fangs, Mystic Clovers, Mystic Coins, Globs of Ectoplasm, Obsidian Shards, Spirit Shards, and a stack of catalytic reagents. There is an upgrade to Suffused Obsidian for heavier visual effects.

This is the path most players should take. It asks for no schedule and no other people.

Perfected Envoy armour, raids

Needs Heart of Thorns. Paid for in Legendary Insights: 150 for the first set, 300 for the pieces after it.

Time-gated by weekly raid clears, so the limit is the calendar rather than the gold (what raids are).

Ardent Glorious armour, PvP

Earned through Monthly Automated Tournaments and PvP League play: roughly 300 PvP League Tickets and 3,200 Ascended Shards of Glory for the set.

Three seasons is the fastest realistic completion. The Mistforged variant wants PvP Rank 100 on top (what PvP is).

Triumphant Hero’s armour, WvW

Paid in WvW Skirmish Claim Tickets: 7,880 for the standard set, plus 3,000 Memories of Battle. The Mistforged version needs WvW Rank 500 and climbs to 10,500 tickets and 6,000 memories.

Realistically 18 to 24 weeks, because tickets come from a weekly track that caps (what WvW is).

Which to pick

The honest rule: the one for the mode you already enjoy. All four end in the same armoury slot.

If you play alone in the open world, Obsidian. If you already raid weekly, Envoy is nearly free of extra effort. If WvW is your evening habit, the tickets accumulate whether or not you were aiming at armour.

What does not work is picking a mode you dislike because a spreadsheet called it faster. Every path here is measured in months, and months of content you resent is the most expensive currency in this article.

Start collecting before you decide

Three things appear in every path: Mystic Clovers, Mystic Coins and Globs of Ectoplasm. Their prices sit at the bottom of this page, live.

Coins arrive from daily rewards whether you plan for them or not, so the only decision is whether you spend them on something small in the meantime. Two years of not spending them is worth more than any farming route (where gold comes from).

A word on what this buys

Six slots of freedom sounds abstract until the first time you change your whole build in a bank window instead of a shopping trip.

Before legendary armour, trying a support build means buying a set, and you weigh whether the experiment is worth the gold. After it, you press a few buttons and find out. Plenty of players discover a build they love only once changing their mind stops costing anything.

That is the real reward: not power, but the end of a small tax on curiosity.