Mastery over all
The Gift of Mastery is the only part of a legendary you'll have to fully “earn” on your own, without any purchases. The Gift of Exploration, from World Completion, can be a little grindy, though there is, as usual, no rush. You'll complete anywhere from a third to a half of your 100% completion just from basic exploration as you level. The rest you can do at your leisure.
You'll need to spend Skill Points for the Bloodstone Shard – not to mention your actual skills – but at least you'll get plenty of those from doing World Completion, and Scrolls of Knowledge are fairly common drops. With the revamp to achievement chests, getting 500 Badges of Honor for your Gift of Battle should also be trivially easy.
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Then there are the Obsidian shards. All... that... karma! If you're lucky, you accumulated plenty before the Great Karma Nerf of 2013. If not, this will probably be one of the more difficult things to acquire without hardcore farming. Right now, the karma train in Edge of the Mists is probably your best bet and, spiced up as it is by occasional PvP, it's not too dull, at least in my opinion. If WvW isn't your style, then try playing some activities. You'll get a Drop of Liquid Karma (600) for about 10 minutes of participation, so it's a good way to earn a few grand in a relatively short amount of time. And always, always do your monthlies. They're easy to complete just through normal gameplay, and each month's worth nets you 6,000 karma.
The gold blues
What else do you need? As I like to say, in addition to the Gift of Mastery, you'll need the Gift of Fortune... and the Gift of Fortune #2 and the Gift of Fortune #3. Other than the karma and skill points needed for the actual Gift of Fortune and the dungeon tokens for your weapon-specific gift, everything can be bought with gold. As I said above, start saving now.
And then there's the precursor. Yeah, about that...
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I've been fortunate enough to have not one, but two precursors drop for me. Hang on, don't crucify me yet! The first one was Venom, with which I made the underwater legendary Kraitkin. When I got it, it sold for about 30 gold on the TP and stayed around that level for several months. (It currently sells for around 70 gold.) In other words, even if it hadn't dropped, I still could have made Kraitkin.
Now, if I'd really wanted a different legendary... I'd still have it now. The second precursor I got was Leaf of Kudzu, which I sold for 390 gold. I currently have a fair bit more than that, and that's after making a Gift of Fortune and Gift of the Predator, which ran me in the hundreds of gold. In other words, I could have never gotten Leaf of Kudzu or Venom, spent what I did on that second set of Gifts on a precursor, and have a non-aquatic legendary.
But right now, there's really no clean solution to the precursor problem, especially with them spiking in price recently. I've never gambled more than a handful of times in the Mystic Forge. If I liquidated some of my other materials, I could probably afford the Hunter and make my Predator, but... I'm still holding out hope that precursor forging isn't too far off. Hey, ArenaNet's only been promising it for a year and a half!
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Really, though, if you log as much time as I have, even doing non-grindy things, you're going to get a few lucky drops. Maybe not a precursor, but you'll get some things you can sell for a few dozen gold or more. It all adds up, and maybe someday you'll even find that precursor yourself.
There's an old business adage that says when you're working on a project, you can have two of good, cheap, or fast. Something good and cheap isn't done fast, good and fast isn't cheap, and cheap and fast isn't good. I think the same thing applies to a legendary weapon. You can acquire it relatively quickly with farming and grinding, or you can acquire it relatively slowly with minimal farming and grinding. Just don't let anyone convince you that the only way to get a legendary is to sell your soul and do things you hate just to get ahead.
Jason Winter is the semi-proud owner of an underwater legendary weapon. He's been gaming long enough to remember when the Atari 2600 was a thing and when Ms. Pac-Man was all the rage. Get off of his lawn and find him on Twitter @winterinformal.
