Legendary gear

Legendary gear is the top of the ladder you can hunt, singular pieces with powers written into their identity. Legendary and Mythic items never appear out of nowhere, in shops, or in random loot, and they come only from the bosses and the crafts that own them.

Signatures

Every legendary carries a signature, a unique affix that changes how you play rather than adding another number. Signatures are mechanically enforced in combat, and they cover a wide range, such as piercing a resistance, dealing damage again as another element, striking harder at one kind of creature, drinking life on a kill, shrugging off burns or control, or throwing a matching elemental blow back at the attacker.

Some signatures carry a bargain, giving their power in exchange for a cost such as taking heavier damage, and the cost is part of the same property rather than a separate curse. Some climb as you land strikes, stage by stage, until the final stage takes its own price. What a signature does is written on the item card.

A signature is part of the piece's identity. It cannot be removed or rerolled, it takes one of the piece's four prefix slots rather than sitting on top of them, and it binds the piece to the shape it was made in. Only legendary gear carries a T1 affix row, and Equipment describes the tier ladder.

A legendary arrives with all four prefix slots already filled, so the work left on one is raising what it carries rather than adding to it. A legendary's item level is set by the material it was forged from and never changes, and it carries 8 tempers, more than any other rarity.

The work they take

Legendary gear can never be dismantled and never reforged. Tempering is the only work it takes, filling or raising the piece's ordinary rows around the signature.

Legendary crafting

Legendary crafting is linked to recipes. A trophy material taken from a great foe names the masterworks it can forge, and consuming it opens a chooser listing each one as a full item card. You pick exactly one, the material is spent, and the other options are gone with it. A linked trophy material in your pack can be worked directly by choosing to craft it into legendary equipment.

Trophy materials refuse any other working, and their masterworks demand them, so neither can be spent on anything else. Binding a legendary working asks a master's hand in Crafting, and recipes reach Epic gear as well as Legendary, as described on Crafting.

Mythic items

Mythic items sit beyond even this. They are authored whole and locked, with no open slots and no tempers, so what a Mythic is, it stays.