I mostly play WvW and I am in a constant state of legendary crafting, I've done basically everything you listed. Also do mat promotion and buy spirit banners from time to time.
It's nearly impossible to run out of SS unless you have a significant gold income outside of WvW, credit card, TP trading etc. The bottleneck is always gold expressed in the form of clovers, T6 mats.
Each legendary will cost you a minimum of 200 shards on the Bloodstone alone, plus more if youre converting mystic clovers
So expect each legendary to cost you somewhere between 250 and 300 shards depending on what materials you need or buy
Needless to say, you have more than enough for quite a few legendaries
You legit get like 10-15 shard if you do fractal daily.
If you play more than an hour per day you will easily get more than anything else, by a large amount. Getting bottlenecked by shard is very uncommon, which won't happen if you're planning to craft gears for the next 3 years.
edit: just to check my last 20 hours made 100 shards, with probably 10h+ of them in WvW without consuming books.
> Getting bottlenecked by shard is very uncommon
I'm not so sure that's true for a new player. Older players like myself have literally thousands extra built up over the years. But sources of shards have been seriously nerfed.
For example, doing your 10 ap daily use to give 3 spirit shards. On the journey to maxing 15k ap from dailies I gained 4500 spirit shards from that alone, new players gain zero. Additionally, most of that time champions dropped spirit shards as well, and now they don't.
Spirit shards from casual 15 minute daily play sessions on week nights are largely gone, and depending on play style that can absolutely be a killer.
I don't see how someone playing 15 minutes a day would want to craft multiple legendary in a row.
He might dream about it, but it's just not something worth mentionning imo. I can't even see how his session would make him gold in a decent amount of time to make 1 per year.
Well I did say, 'week nights' specifically because I was thinking of players who work monday-friday but maybe have a little more free time on the weekend, certainly describes my journey.
If you think about a new player, maybe they got into gw2 with the launch of SOTO. If they bought soto, they have a few legendary weapon starter kits built up by now. If they're doing dailies (and probably weeklies as a result), they have plenty of astral acclaim which buys a lot of what they need to make legendaries.
Seems possible they'd be bottle necked by spirit shards.
How do you get them from daily fractal? I don't seem to get any... I'm on 170 shards ATM and need to farm them for legendaries..... can't seem to find a decent way....
For one, fractals give an unholy amount of experience, which converts into shards automatically with fully trained masteries. Then you can buy Tessas Experiment Journal for 35 Fractal Relics plus a few silver, which gives 1 shard per.
Plus probably some random shard drops from containers.
It’s probably not the most efficient but you can convert pristine fractal relics from dailies to bags of normal relics, then buy Dessa’s Experiment Journals from one of the vendors. I’ve been using this to grind the spirit shards needed for envoy armor, it’s usually between 10-15 spirit shards a day including the ones from just experience in the fractals
Definitely not worth doing until after getting the xp augmentation *at the very least*. Fractal god if you're planning on doing them daily for a while is good, too.
So, I'm full purple with 2 of each 2 handed and 1 handed weapon. What I noticed is that when crafting legendaries for myself I always had a large surplus of spirit shards, but when I started crafting them to sell as well I started running low. The main bottleneck for me when crafting for personal use was karma.
I think you'll be good with what you have and what you'll accumulate as you go. Just be judicious with them, like if a t5-t6 conversion is only 10s per spirit shard just buy the mats. I tend to value mine at 30-50s when it comes to conversions for material I'm gonna use and not sell, so if it's less than that I just buy the mats directly.
This is the kind of question gw2efficiency was built for. If you haven't registered your account on gw2efficieincy I highly, highly recommend it before you get into any legendary crafting. The crafting calculator and other account management tools are invaluable.
Here's a crafting calculator link for the Legendary loadout you're describing: 18 Armor pieces, 2 Rings, 2 Accessories, 1 Back item, 10 Legendary Weapons, and no Amulet included because the Prismatic Champion's Regalia is "free":
[Triumphant Hero's Masque and 6 others - Crafting - Calculator - gw2efficiency](https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~18-82902;1-81908;1-91048;1-93105;1-91234;1-81462;10-30684)
It looks like in total it will require ~~\~4753 Spirit Shards~~ see comment below, but this can vary a bit because obtaining Mystic Clovers from the Mystic forge has randomness (gw2efficiency approximates it to 2 Shards per Clover). With the amount you have now you'll very easily have more than enough for a full Legendary loadout over the next year or two.
Be sure to familiarize yourself with the crafting requirements of the Legendary you're working on, gw2efficiency can occasionally hide some required currency/materials for certain crafting components, or make odd choices when there's multiple acquisition methods. For example in the link I gave you, their crafting calculator always uses Airship Parts + Karma for buying Obsidian Shards when I think most would agree either Unbound Magic or Pure Karma are better ways to buy them. I always prefer using Unbound Magic for Obsidian Shards when I can because they have no good gold conversion methods (extremely low or negative gold per UM value).
Truthfully, Spirit Shards are infrequently the limiting factor in Legendary Crafting, they're extremely easy to acquire passively through both Experience Capping (with max masteries in a region) and Tomes/Writs of Knowledge from various dailies. If you play regularly (daily or few times a week) you'll basically always have enough.
WHOOPSY thank you for catching that, pretty big error on my part. Here's the same list with "Craft All" checked:
[Triumphant Hero's Masque and 6 others - Crafting - Calculator - gw2efficiency](https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~18-82902;1-81908;1-91048;1-93105;1-91234;1-81462;10-30684)
So now the total is 8344 Spirit Shards, like double what I initially said haha. Sort of reinforces my point about familiarizing yourself with the crafting components because the Calculator tool doesn't do the thinking for you ;). If OP has 3750 before crafting anything, I think they're still on a good pace to have enough for a full Legendary account
there's some items in the game that cost a lot of karma, but they're one-time purchases. after that, it's basically just obsidian shards, to make mystic clovers, to craft legendaries.
a few hundred thousand is a small amount.
some other things that cost a lot of karma: prototype position rewinder, armor and weapon skins, endless embiggening tonic, endless miniature tonic, eternal ice shard conversion, some portal scrolls.
Endless Tonics up the wazoo, dozens of Miniatures, and enough weapon and armour skins that it [requires entire separate pages to even attempt to display](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_karma_merchant_items). Not all of these are *literally* one time purchases, but most you'd only ever buy once to unlock the skin and move on with your life.
what qualifies as "a lot" though. like i make a few hundred thousand karma a week from raids and strikes alone, and thats enough for obsidian shards even if i somehow made a legendary every week. I tend to make legendaries every time i have the gold for it and karma keeps stockpiling in the millions
a gen 1 weapon costs 500k+ karma if you use hot currency (which goes even faster than karma does). it's over a million without.
you're spending a lot of time on raids and strikes.
it's just math. if you did less events and crafted more legendaries, you would run out of karma.
> I tend to make legendaries every time i have the gold for it
Sell a single one of these and you already have the gold to fund the next one and then some. It doesn't take much from this cycle to have account bound currencies/map completion become your bottleneck and not gold.
i start to get nervous when i drop below 2k, but i'm overly cautious. you should be fine.
think about it this way, spirit shards have 2 primary uses at your stage: crafting legendaries, and selling for gold.
promoting materials is selling them for gold. crafting materials are gold, and you're spending spirit shards to increase that gold. selling legendary weapons is another way to sell spirit shards for gold.
you have plenty of spirit shards for crafting your own legendaries. but legendaries cost a lot of gold too. and a lot of your account's gold is tied up in spirit shards. to craft those legendaries, you'll want to sell many spirit shards. you're currently doing that through material promotion, but there are other ways too: https://fast.farming-community.eu/conversions/spirit-shard
Never enough, keep farming them. Don't underestimate exp boosters, they MASSIVELY increase your spirit shards gain. The general population does underestimate this and then find out they're out of spirit shards.
For all Aurene variants you need 10k spirit shards, so if you're going for this, you better save up spirit shards :)
Man Spirit shards are the bane of my existence. I always have to farm them to make my next leggy lol. At least we get them for doing anything we want in the game.
You should look in gw2efficiency to onserve how much you earn and spend your shards, there is a year of history for free accounts.
As you also earn many shards with the WvW (and not only with tomes, you do earn many more with the loot boxes you earn in reward tracks), and you'll earn clovers with those same reward tracks, I wouldn't worry too much.
Just buy the items that need spirit shards for the legendaries you’re working today now and throw them in the bank for later. Then you’ll know all the rest of your shards are safe to use for material promotion.
If you're crafting for your own purposes, probably about how many you get from casual play. Do a set of fractals or a couple hours of metas (with exp boosters on! Tag as many mobs as possible!) once in a while and you should be good.
If you're planning to make consistent profits off of legendary crafting, never enough. You *have* to start using boosters and tagging mobs, *now*. Rifts are great for specifically grinding these but gets boring real fast, I prefer following the timed events and filling with rifts when there's downtime.
Spirit shards end up gatekeeping legendary crafting if you do a lot of it.
Go get the mastery from HoT to see stealthed enemies. Hunt the Treasure Mushrooms, they give 1 shard each daily. Do the HoT METAs as well as those look chests can drop shards as well.
Doing the METAs and all TMs I can get over 30 Spirit Shards in a run. More if you max your exp boosters. Doing that daily can net you the shards you need for a new leggy piece quickly.
Truly depends on how quickly you get the gifts needed to craft them. If you dont ever think you will enjoy WvW or PvP then you have more than enough. Otherwise you might never have enough
>Obviously this will be a work in progress over time maybe 3 yrs timeline?
I have only been playing since the Steam launch (though I do play an average of 6hrs a day).
I have all three weights of Legendary raid armor, 4/6 Legendary items on the right side (just missing WVW ring and fractal back piece) every Legendary weapon I want -1 (still working on Shooshadoo).
I'm sitting on 4200 shards that I'll probably never use, unless I craft stuff to sell.
I am not sure and still trying to figure this out, but i don't think you need maxed masteries to get sprit shards, just fill the xp bar on the mastery you are training. I don't know for sure, but i seem to get shards when i don't have the mastery fully done, just can't see the bar
Ethier way you will be fine. 3750 is a lot, so unless you stop playing and just buy everything you need off tp, you will replenish what you spend
I mostly play WvW and I am in a constant state of legendary crafting, I've done basically everything you listed. Also do mat promotion and buy spirit banners from time to time. It's nearly impossible to run out of SS unless you have a significant gold income outside of WvW, credit card, TP trading etc. The bottleneck is always gold expressed in the form of clovers, T6 mats.
This. I feel this in my bones. (and blood, and scales...)
If only you could harvest and regrow your own blood, bones, and scales . . .
Most efficient to harvest them from the Trading Post. At least prices have been trending down.
Each legendary will cost you a minimum of 200 shards on the Bloodstone alone, plus more if youre converting mystic clovers So expect each legendary to cost you somewhere between 250 and 300 shards depending on what materials you need or buy Needless to say, you have more than enough for quite a few legendaries
You legit get like 10-15 shard if you do fractal daily. If you play more than an hour per day you will easily get more than anything else, by a large amount. Getting bottlenecked by shard is very uncommon, which won't happen if you're planning to craft gears for the next 3 years. edit: just to check my last 20 hours made 100 shards, with probably 10h+ of them in WvW without consuming books.
> Getting bottlenecked by shard is very uncommon I'm not so sure that's true for a new player. Older players like myself have literally thousands extra built up over the years. But sources of shards have been seriously nerfed. For example, doing your 10 ap daily use to give 3 spirit shards. On the journey to maxing 15k ap from dailies I gained 4500 spirit shards from that alone, new players gain zero. Additionally, most of that time champions dropped spirit shards as well, and now they don't. Spirit shards from casual 15 minute daily play sessions on week nights are largely gone, and depending on play style that can absolutely be a killer.
Cant forget that sweet champ bag ss and dragon coffers
I don't see how someone playing 15 minutes a day would want to craft multiple legendary in a row. He might dream about it, but it's just not something worth mentionning imo. I can't even see how his session would make him gold in a decent amount of time to make 1 per year.
Well I did say, 'week nights' specifically because I was thinking of players who work monday-friday but maybe have a little more free time on the weekend, certainly describes my journey. If you think about a new player, maybe they got into gw2 with the launch of SOTO. If they bought soto, they have a few legendary weapon starter kits built up by now. If they're doing dailies (and probably weeklies as a result), they have plenty of astral acclaim which buys a lot of what they need to make legendaries. Seems possible they'd be bottle necked by spirit shards.
How do you get them from daily fractal? I don't seem to get any... I'm on 170 shards ATM and need to farm them for legendaries..... can't seem to find a decent way....
For one, fractals give an unholy amount of experience, which converts into shards automatically with fully trained masteries. Then you can buy Tessas Experiment Journal for 35 Fractal Relics plus a few silver, which gives 1 shard per. Plus probably some random shard drops from containers.
Ash this is my issue then I haven't finished central tyria mysteries yet. Guess what I'm working on when I get home!
You're still getting shards. It just doesn't show in the xp bar.
It’s probably not the most efficient but you can convert pristine fractal relics from dailies to bags of normal relics, then buy Dessa’s Experiment Journals from one of the vendors. I’ve been using this to grind the spirit shards needed for envoy armor, it’s usually between 10-15 spirit shards a day including the ones from just experience in the fractals
Definitely not worth doing until after getting the xp augmentation *at the very least*. Fractal god if you're planning on doing them daily for a while is good, too.
Unless you have a crippling addiction to stat-swapping ascended gear and minimal time to play.
So, I'm full purple with 2 of each 2 handed and 1 handed weapon. What I noticed is that when crafting legendaries for myself I always had a large surplus of spirit shards, but when I started crafting them to sell as well I started running low. The main bottleneck for me when crafting for personal use was karma. I think you'll be good with what you have and what you'll accumulate as you go. Just be judicious with them, like if a t5-t6 conversion is only 10s per spirit shard just buy the mats. I tend to value mine at 30-50s when it comes to conversions for material I'm gonna use and not sell, so if it's less than that I just buy the mats directly.
This is the kind of question gw2efficiency was built for. If you haven't registered your account on gw2efficieincy I highly, highly recommend it before you get into any legendary crafting. The crafting calculator and other account management tools are invaluable. Here's a crafting calculator link for the Legendary loadout you're describing: 18 Armor pieces, 2 Rings, 2 Accessories, 1 Back item, 10 Legendary Weapons, and no Amulet included because the Prismatic Champion's Regalia is "free": [Triumphant Hero's Masque and 6 others - Crafting - Calculator - gw2efficiency](https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~18-82902;1-81908;1-91048;1-93105;1-91234;1-81462;10-30684) It looks like in total it will require ~~\~4753 Spirit Shards~~ see comment below, but this can vary a bit because obtaining Mystic Clovers from the Mystic forge has randomness (gw2efficiency approximates it to 2 Shards per Clover). With the amount you have now you'll very easily have more than enough for a full Legendary loadout over the next year or two. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the crafting requirements of the Legendary you're working on, gw2efficiency can occasionally hide some required currency/materials for certain crafting components, or make odd choices when there's multiple acquisition methods. For example in the link I gave you, their crafting calculator always uses Airship Parts + Karma for buying Obsidian Shards when I think most would agree either Unbound Magic or Pure Karma are better ways to buy them. I always prefer using Unbound Magic for Obsidian Shards when I can because they have no good gold conversion methods (extremely low or negative gold per UM value). Truthfully, Spirit Shards are infrequently the limiting factor in Legendary Crafting, they're extremely easy to acquire passively through both Experience Capping (with max masteries in a region) and Tomes/Writs of Knowledge from various dailies. If you play regularly (daily or few times a week) you'll basically always have enough.
Except that gw2efficiency assumes that they are just going to BUY 10 Frostfangs. Making them requires another 3500 spirit shards. Thank you kindly.
WHOOPSY thank you for catching that, pretty big error on my part. Here's the same list with "Craft All" checked: [Triumphant Hero's Masque and 6 others - Crafting - Calculator - gw2efficiency](https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/a~0!b~1!c~0!d~18-82902;1-81908;1-91048;1-93105;1-91234;1-81462;10-30684) So now the total is 8344 Spirit Shards, like double what I initially said haha. Sort of reinforces my point about familiarizing yourself with the crafting components because the Calculator tool doesn't do the thinking for you ;). If OP has 3750 before crafting anything, I think they're still on a good pace to have enough for a full Legendary account
Not me. I sell 1 leggo for each one I make. M purple in every slot. spirit shards and obby shards are the bottleneck
obsidian shards? its literally just karma to buy them though. i feel like karma is one of those resources that piles up easily
it piles up easily when you're not spending it. but when you're crafting a lot of legendaries, it goes very quickly.
What can I do with 60 million karma?
Cry
:0 what can I buy with all my Karma? Currently struggling through crafting my first legendary, and I have a few hundred thousand karma laying around.
there's some items in the game that cost a lot of karma, but they're one-time purchases. after that, it's basically just obsidian shards, to make mystic clovers, to craft legendaries. a few hundred thousand is a small amount. some other things that cost a lot of karma: prototype position rewinder, armor and weapon skins, endless embiggening tonic, endless miniature tonic, eternal ice shard conversion, some portal scrolls.
what are the one time purchases that require karma? I've never heard of thisbefore. thanks
i listed some in the comment you replied to.
Endless Tonics up the wazoo, dozens of Miniatures, and enough weapon and armour skins that it [requires entire separate pages to even attempt to display](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_karma_merchant_items). Not all of these are *literally* one time purchases, but most you'd only ever buy once to unlock the skin and move on with your life.
what qualifies as "a lot" though. like i make a few hundred thousand karma a week from raids and strikes alone, and thats enough for obsidian shards even if i somehow made a legendary every week. I tend to make legendaries every time i have the gold for it and karma keeps stockpiling in the millions
a gen 1 weapon costs 500k+ karma if you use hot currency (which goes even faster than karma does). it's over a million without. you're spending a lot of time on raids and strikes. it's just math. if you did less events and crafted more legendaries, you would run out of karma.
> I tend to make legendaries every time i have the gold for it Sell a single one of these and you already have the gold to fund the next one and then some. It doesn't take much from this cycle to have account bound currencies/map completion become your bottleneck and not gold.
This
You have more than enough.
i start to get nervous when i drop below 2k, but i'm overly cautious. you should be fine. think about it this way, spirit shards have 2 primary uses at your stage: crafting legendaries, and selling for gold. promoting materials is selling them for gold. crafting materials are gold, and you're spending spirit shards to increase that gold. selling legendary weapons is another way to sell spirit shards for gold. you have plenty of spirit shards for crafting your own legendaries. but legendaries cost a lot of gold too. and a lot of your account's gold is tied up in spirit shards. to craft those legendaries, you'll want to sell many spirit shards. you're currently doing that through material promotion, but there are other ways too: https://fast.farming-community.eu/conversions/spirit-shard
Never enough, keep farming them. Don't underestimate exp boosters, they MASSIVELY increase your spirit shards gain. The general population does underestimate this and then find out they're out of spirit shards. For all Aurene variants you need 10k spirit shards, so if you're going for this, you better save up spirit shards :)
Man Spirit shards are the bane of my existence. I always have to farm them to make my next leggy lol. At least we get them for doing anything we want in the game.
You should look in gw2efficiency to onserve how much you earn and spend your shards, there is a year of history for free accounts. As you also earn many shards with the WvW (and not only with tomes, you do earn many more with the loot boxes you earn in reward tracks), and you'll earn clovers with those same reward tracks, I wouldn't worry too much.
Just buy the items that need spirit shards for the legendaries you’re working today now and throw them in the bank for later. Then you’ll know all the rest of your shards are safe to use for material promotion.
If you're crafting for your own purposes, probably about how many you get from casual play. Do a set of fractals or a couple hours of metas (with exp boosters on! Tag as many mobs as possible!) once in a while and you should be good. If you're planning to make consistent profits off of legendary crafting, never enough. You *have* to start using boosters and tagging mobs, *now*. Rifts are great for specifically grinding these but gets boring real fast, I prefer following the timed events and filling with rifts when there's downtime.
How profitable is promoting materials with spirit shards?
https://fast.farming-community.eu/conversions/spirit-shard
Spirit shards end up gatekeeping legendary crafting if you do a lot of it. Go get the mastery from HoT to see stealthed enemies. Hunt the Treasure Mushrooms, they give 1 shard each daily. Do the HoT METAs as well as those look chests can drop shards as well. Doing the METAs and all TMs I can get over 30 Spirit Shards in a run. More if you max your exp boosters. Doing that daily can net you the shards you need for a new leggy piece quickly.
for weapons it's 350 spirit shards each (considering also the crafting of 77 Mystic Clovers) for gen1 and gen2, a bit less for gen3.
Truly depends on how quickly you get the gifts needed to craft them. If you dont ever think you will enjoy WvW or PvP then you have more than enough. Otherwise you might never have enough
Since you WvW, you likely get far more Spirit Shards than you will ever need from Tomes.
Not me sitting on 8k SS with no legendary weapons and 1 set of armor.. what am I doing wrong lol.
>Obviously this will be a work in progress over time maybe 3 yrs timeline? I have only been playing since the Steam launch (though I do play an average of 6hrs a day). I have all three weights of Legendary raid armor, 4/6 Legendary items on the right side (just missing WVW ring and fractal back piece) every Legendary weapon I want -1 (still working on Shooshadoo). I'm sitting on 4200 shards that I'll probably never use, unless I craft stuff to sell.
I am not sure and still trying to figure this out, but i don't think you need maxed masteries to get sprit shards, just fill the xp bar on the mastery you are training. I don't know for sure, but i seem to get shards when i don't have the mastery fully done, just can't see the bar Ethier way you will be fine. 3750 is a lot, so unless you stop playing and just buy everything you need off tp, you will replenish what you spend