A friend and had been playing with the delving bench and finally had the stroke of luck of getting a recipe. Using Epic Cimmerian Armor, after two delves we got the recipe for Chieftain’s armor. After the very slow process of building up the materials and building the actual armor, we slap it on and realize it has LESS armor than the set used to discover it (and had to be repaired twice thanks to it), the weight increase brought my character from 56% encumbered to 97%, and has significantly less durability. I scanned some of the other sets, now curious, and find that in most cases the legendary armors are inferior to the armor used to unlock the recipe, despite being more expensive and tedious to make.
I am hoping that this is more a symptom of this being the early access and that the final figures have not been decided on, but it feels pretty demotivating to put in the effort for a “legendary” armor, only to find that frankly, it sucks compared to options we get just from hitting level 60.