The new legendary armor will drive you insane

TLDR: new set extremely time and resource heavy; raid legendary armor will be healthier for your mind

Before you start your legendary SoTo armor journey, please consider the INSANE amount of time (and sanity) a set of the new SoTo legendary armor will require. Including the Astral Ward skins, a set of legendary armor will require base 21000 T1, 7800 T2, and 3900 T3 rift essences. This does not even factor in the essence costs of crafting Kryptis Motivation (explained below).

Here is some background. Rifts are categorized as either T1, T2, or T3 according to their difficulty. T1 rifts can be found by anyone. T2 and T3 rifts require a mastery and usually require Kryptis Motivation to spawn them, which you can craft or purchase from TP. Uncommon Kryptis Motivation tracks T2 rifts and requires 25 T1 essences to craft. Rare Kryptis Motivation tracks T3 rifts and requires 25 T1 AND 25 T2 essences. To spawn T2 and T3 rifts, you need to either 1) follow a squad who is spawning the rifts for you using their own motivation, OR 2) use your own motivation to spawn them. There is a very rare chance a T2 spawns without motivation, and I have yet to see a T3 spawn without using one.

Assuming Rift Mastery, sealing any rift gives:

  • ~6 T1 essence for finishing the preliminary killing Kryptis trash mobs event.
  • After previous event finishes, you have 10 seconds to use your own motivation for additional rewards if you didnt use it before to spawn the event. You get ~30 essence of the rift's tier if you use one, and ~10 essence if you do not.

This means that if you're not using any motivation whatsoever and have been following a commander who has been spawning T2 and T3 rifts on the squad's/your behalf, you will have to do approximately 390 T3 rift events and 780 T2 rift events. That is already over 1000 RIFT EVENTS, not even considering the amount of T1 rifts you will also have to do. You will have to do ~130 T3 events if you use Rare Kryptis Motivations, but the crafting cost will increase the amount of T2 and T1 essences you need by thousands. That will pressure you to use Uncommon and the Common Kryptis Motivations to compensate for the increased cost.

I am bringing all of this up because currently, rifts have been receiving a lot of negative reception. Imagine an old (and "dead") concept like bounties, but make it worse. Bounties have unique bosses. They're quick. Rifts are repetitive and longer. Some of them spawn in very tedious places to get to. You will have to do a FEW HUNDREDS to potentially THOUSAND(S) of rift events (depending on whether you use motivations) killing the same mobs over and over and over and over and over...and over and over again just to get a set of legendary armor. T2 and T3 raids cannot be solo'ed so if people decide to stop doing rifts by their 100th time or in a few months, you will have a lot of trouble finishing them. THIS DOESN'T EVEN INCLUDE THAT EACH ARMOR PIECE REQUIRES A GIFT OF MAP COMPLETION OF THE MAPS, 2 OF WHICH WE KNOW SO FAR HAVE LIKE 40 POIs. THAT IS 18 MAP COMPLETIONS (or map completing each map once and repeating each lantern achievement for a total 15 times). I have not even mentioned the costs for other components of the armor, including the additional Gift of Blood, etc. to buy each Astral Ward armor piece. To be fair, Anet never said this was going to be easy; it's just an alternative to legendary raid armor. With how things are right now, unless you reeeaaaaaalllly want the new legendary armor for its skins, the raid armor will still be cheaper and arguably easier to obtain.

Note: we still have two expansion updates so perhaps they might adjust the essence rewards per rift completion + there might be other ways to get essence. I did not factor in that weekly rifts also reward some essence since its quite negligible.