Guild Wars 2

Let’s be honest, what aren’t ectos good for? Besides cooking, every high level crafting discipline uses ectos for max exotic gear. With the price of ectos dropping, I’ve noticed that it seems everything else is dropping too, as far as max level equipment, along with rares (amulets, rings, armor, weapons, etc). Why are rares so easy to get now? After all, they all called rare items..

Respectfully, I would really like to see the price of ectos go back up. I don’t think it should be this easy for me to get all of my characters (8, by the way) into full exotic gear. I would really like to see some sort of info from a Dev about their plans.

When I have said this to some other players, a few give me reactions like “No! I love the prices dropping! They’re getting me closer to my legendary!”…well, to this I have to say is this: If you’re worried about ecto prices for legendary weapons, instead of ruining the value of ectos, I think precursors drop rate should be increased (if it were to balance out). After all, they are legendary weapons, and again, I think this should require a lot of work, not justkittenderping some cheap crafting materials.

No! It’s to easy to gear my characters! Make it harder again so I can complain about grind!

/facepalm

I agree, getting full exotics is too easy, yet there are many lvl 80s who are too lazy to get even one character into full exotic.

Sigmatics.7056:

No! It’s to easy to gear my characters! Make it harder again so I can complain about grind!

/facepalm

Exactly. This helped fix the every increasing cost of everything so that we can actually afford to start gearing. Remember that rare is two tiers below max so its good that we can get our exotics faster and work on “end-game” gear through fractals, laurels, or guild missions and/or work on another character. Some may be rich, but those with work/school/etc. can’t play more than a few hours a week.

I just completely lost any faith in humanity. Thanks OP.

It’s not a grind, it’s actually playing to get your gear. What do you have to go for if you’ve already got all the best gear your character can get easily? It wasn’t that difficult to get it before, but now it’s just ridiculous. Do you want everything in the game to be worthless? I don’t.

The Eternal Grace.3157:

What do you have to go for if you’ve already got all the best gear your character can get easily?

Exploration. RP. PvP. WvW. Jumping Puzzles. Guild missions. Gear is not the be-all and end-all of in-game goals. It may be for some players (and if tweaking your character to have the ultimate BiS gear if what you’re after, then work for a Legendary and a full set of Ascended gear), but for a lot of us, we’d rather that getting Exotics is not a difficult task so we can hold our own in end-game content.

I see a rare item as being rare…hence the name rare…and I see exotic as something beyond that. I don’t think they should be this easy.

Eh, I see the term “Rare item” as more of a holdover from early days of MMO’s. I believe to the majority of GW2 players, Rare items are more of a “more valuable than usual” item. Exotics are the true (new?) “rare drop”.

Someone trash this thread. PLEASE.

The Eternal Grace.3157:

I see a rare item as being rare…hence the name rare…and I see exotic as something beyond that. I don’t think they should be this easy.

Thankfully you aren’t the majority. The rest of us aren’t this maschochistic.

If you are not satisfied with the current prices, you can buy from me for more than the current price. I’d feel ashamed if I charged you more than a gold for one ecto, so lets say 99 silver a piece? I have about 370 of them laying around.

what I see is just some1 has a stock of ectos bought at an higher price than now and can’t sell for profit..

I can see your point Eternal, but i would like to present a slightly different mindset to you which might make the game and the fact that ecto prices are dropping more enjoyable for you

Obtaining a full exotic gear set was always easy – there are plenty possibilities besides crafting to get them, that do not rely on the ecto price. That is buying them for dungeontokens, for karma, complete highlevel maps, etc. – I left out the Mystic Forge since that way is directly influenced by the droprate of rare items.
Also keep in mind that depending on which stats you want on your armor you even might NEED to go back to one of these ways.

However, once you equipped your character with full exotic gear, the real fun begins This can be optimizing the stats, but mostly it is about the appearance of your character. The gamemechanic is meant to make all players evenly strong, so there can’t be a stat difference between the exotic items – however, the appearance of your character can be improved by a lot. Thus you can check for example http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge/Other_Items for some “truly” exotic items. Some of these are extremely hard to get (especially if you want to farm all the ingredients yourself ), so you might want to consider obtaining all these items for all your characters as endgame, rather than “just” getting exotic gear for them.

Ectos were as low at 10 silver back in the day, and you are complaining that they are now 28 silver? Mystic clovers require about 250 ectos (sometimes more), plus the gift of fortune requires 250 ectos. At 28 silver a piece, that’s still 60 gold or so for a stack. Plus exotic gear was always supposed to be within easy reach, look at dungeon tokens. If people wanna grind, they do it for the nice skins, not ugly pearl crap. Ugly pearl stuff is a stepping stone. Ectos were too high, this new change is awesome.

Those decisions are likely being made by looking at the complete data and not some gut feeling. At least that is not how John comes across to me and he would likely have been consulted before the changes where implemented.

I really like the increased opportunity of obtaining “items” (rares/ectos) myself and not having to buy them on the TP – the price is not the primary factor, I don’t want to buy them for 1s or 10s or 50s, I like to get the majority myself and then decide if I maybe utilize the TP for some fillers, again be it gear or the ingredients.

Playing nine characters by the way.

The Eternal Grace.3157:

I see a rare item as being rare…hence the name rare…and I see exotic as something beyond that. I don’t think they should be this easy.

And I see the Ascended gear as the answer to your prayers. Seriously, gear your 8 characters in full Ascended. Hop to it!

Exotics are “easy” to get by MMO standards, but that is how they were designed, and is how ANet has always felt it should be. However, they soon realized that people like you really like grinding for years to get BiS items for all your characters, and added Ascended gear to give you something to work towards in the long term. Ectos dropping in price is exactly what the game needed to keep exotics from being prohibitively expensive for players.

Original Poster you are exactly what’s wrong with MMO’s these days. You have to realize at some point that you’re not playing the game to play the game. Your playing for virtual junk a.k.a loot. You want this junk to be difficult to obtain so that only you and other people like you who have an infinite amount of free time (insert all the fail at RL reasons here) will be able to obtain. Thus, making you more powerful than a majority of other players so you can rely on gear to getting you through content and WvWvW instead of skill. Additionally having all this virtual junk this will make you feel like you actually accomplished something during the 2,000 hours of time you spent playing the video game. In truth all you’ve really accomplished is that you played a video game for 2,000 hours and that’s it, nothing more.

The adventure is the reward. The journey is the adventure and the adventure never has to end. All of the top highest stat gear should extremely easy to obtain. By easy I mean once you reach level 80 you should be able to spend 10k on Karma and get a full set of ugly standard looking max level ascended item gear. Yes a full compliment of weapons, armor, runes, and sigils for under 10k Karma TOTAL. The only thing that should be difficult to obtain are unique skins. Players should able to switch their builds on a dime while not in combat. You want to do burst, do burst damage, you want a condition build, switch to condition build, you want healing power and survivability build, go for it, you want a support role, easily done, you want to switch to a runner build, okay there it is. You want to have a specific different setup for WvWvW and each dungeon in the game, done. You should be able to save specific skills, weapons, and armor as templates and when out of combat switch to it within seconds with only a few clicks of the mouse. Just like in the original Guild Wars.

In short. Take your grinding Philosophy back to another MMO. Trying to appease you and all the other WoW kids has ruined the entire Guild Wars franchise. Anet forgot their core competencies and where they came from. The ridiculous grind for max stat gear is the worst decision ever……. As is extremely apparent by the underwhelming retention rate of players. The developers have this flawed idea that ascended gear grind is going to save the game when in reality all it’s doing is killing the game for many current players and at the same time creating a giant barrier to entry for all of the new players in WvWvW. Epic Fail.