Author Topic: Building a Weapon of Legacy, for dummies  (Read 17223 times)

Offline SorO_Lost

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Building a Weapon of Legacy, for dummies
« on: November 07, 2011, 08:41:08 PM »
Building a Weapon of Legacy, for dummies

At first glance, WoL sucks. This is because R&D created extremely lame items, and pasted in their sticky notes on how to build them. Which can pretty confusing. Lucky for you, someone who has no clue proceeded to drink a few cans of mountain dew before trying to make sense of the drunken ramblings found within that book to make your life easier.

Step 1
Nonlegacy game statistics. Take your favorite item, and empower it to deity-like levels.

You can pick almost any item to can find or craft that is not already a legacy item, or some type of artifact, or false-living (like golems), or trying to kill you. The latter being more of an advice instead of rules. The limits on picking are simple. If it is a weapon, shield, or armor, its current effective enchantment bonus cannot be higher than +1. For anything else, it cannot exceed the sale price of 4,000gp. +1 clean durable restful soulforged acid/fire/cold/electricity resistance shadow silent moves glamered adamantine feelerplate is perfectly legal if you are immune to a-book-to-the-head.

Also, never pick an item you can sunder, who wants to invest any thing that can be broken? Create a legacy armor, or better yet. A legacy graft. I highly recommend them if you can find one you like that is cheap enough.

Step 2
Requirements. When you get to it, this is stuff to ignore.

You're making the item for your character as soon as you hit level 5. So you should pick requirements like BAB 5 & Fort +5 for fighters, or caster level 5th & concentration 8 ranks for mages etc. that you would have already met.

Step 3
Penalties. R&D's attempt to balance these things. They failed...
(click to show/hide)

Step 4
Legacy Rituals. Because no one wants to run off on a side quest all about you. You should make 'beside quests' that you can do along the way.

To Do, list some ideas or bribe an epic rogue to steal them.

Step 5
Legacy Item Abilities. Stuff that makes you awesome.

Instead of trying to get you to understand (D+E)=F and F=C and G=(F or E).
I think I'm going to try a what seems much simpler way. Abilities come in three levels, least, lesser, and greater. A legacy item has one ability slot per level from the 5th to 20th level (16 in all). Starting out, you can only choose least abilities, at the 11th & 17th levels you upgrade the ability level you can choose from. In short, each legacy item has 6 least slots, 6 lesser slots, and 4 greater slots, and you have to start from the lower side working your way up.

Some abilities take up more than one slot. For those that do, when sorting out what level grants the chosen abilities. All slots used to pay for it must be next to it and you cannot use slots from a different ability level. Example, If you choose a least ability that take up 3 slots, it can take up the first three slots, or the last three slots. It cannot use up the first, second, and fifth slots. Nor can it one of the slots used be a slot that can grant lesser abilities.

There is an exception to slot costs. If you want, you can use one slot from a higher level ability to pick up a lower level ability no matter its slot cost. There is some fine print to this, but it don't matter in a guide book for dummies. Example, You can use a single greater slot to pick up a lesser ability that would normally cost three slots.

Before we can go into the lists you should know a few things. The tag 'Upgrade' means it can be taken multiple times to upgrade a bonus up to the mentioned cap. I also ripped apart other legacy items presented in books and stole their abilities with a best guess cost. Ripped abilities note where they came from.

Least
(click to show/hide)

Lesser
(click to show/hide)

Greater
(click to show/hide)


Offline SorO_Lost

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Re: Building a Weapon of Legacy, for dummies
« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2011, 08:42:12 PM »
~size tags are wrong, might fix later~

[SIZE="4"]WoL threads[/SIZE]

Weapons of Legacy: They don't (all) suck
My muse for this thread.

Kouk's Weapons of Legacy Fix
A great thread for learning to balance creating your own abilities.

Weapons of Legacy Ability List (who knew there were so many?)
An ability list done with a different outlook than mine.

Weapons of Legacy Abuse
Lists most if not all the flat cost enchantments on weapons & armor.

[SIZE="4"]WoL items[/SIZE]
Unsorted
The Hand of CoDzilla
The Helping Hand
Legacy Ring
Ring of Mental Might

Grafts
X-buster

Weapons
God's Finger
Sword of Johan
BlindSmart
Soul Reaper Zangetsu
Shortstack
Tetsusaiga
Dark Courage
Breaking Storm
Fang of the Hellstorm
Deathforge

Armor
Browniron

Arms
Bracers of the Paranoid

Misc
Legacy figurine of wondrous power
Deck of stuff

MiC Set Items
The Heavens’ Fall

***

Also. I'd like to personally thank Dark_Samurai for porting this thread from WotC over to BG. It made me think I posted something worth while and I tired not to brag about it too much. ^_^
« Last Edit: November 07, 2011, 08:48:20 PM by SorO_Lost »

Offline Azoriel

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Re: Building a Weapon of Legacy, for dummies
« Reply #2 on: June 12, 2012, 03:30:22 PM »
Most of those links for pre-made Legacy Weapons are no good - the only ones that still work are:

The Hand of CoDzilla
The Helping Hand
Sword of Johan
BlindSmart
Browniron
Bracers of the Paranoid

(Edited for grammar)
« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 11:44:10 PM by Azoriel »
-Azoriel

Offline Nytemare3701

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Re: Building a Weapon of Legacy, for dummies
« Reply #3 on: October 04, 2015, 07:27:46 PM »
Most links are dead, including the reference material (flat cost abuse, etc).