Guild Wars 2

With so few alternative options to gearing characters outside of crafting, and with crafting becoming so incredibly expensive thanks to ascended gear, something needs to change quickly.

Either the WvW gearing options need to be expanded (and the corresponding badge costs dramatically reduced), PvE token costs need to be dramatically reduced, or exotic items need to shift over to account bound items so players can more easily swap gear between characters.

Ascended gear is also horrendously over costed for what it provides and is in desperate need of having variable stats like legendary items have. This won’t have any impact on the value of legendary items because they were just as sought after before the most recent changes for their graphics alone.

With every patch changing classes wildly and a very slow patch cycle ensuring only a small handful of classes are ever valuable at a single time, the costs involved in adjusting to patches is simply untenable.

Please consider overhauling the crafting system and ascended gear.

While I personally would like to see Ascended gear also get variable stats, given how they’re tied to the different skins, I doubt this will happen.

Atherakhia.4086:

With so few alternative options to gearing characters outside of crafting, and with crafting becoming so incredibly expensive thanks to ascended gear, something needs to change quickly.

But… but… dungeon tokens… and karma… and badges… and rings from FOTM… Wat?!

Granted, the karma/badges gear is not salvageable and you can’t recover the sigils put into them, but still…

That’s the point I was making though…

Karma and Badge vendors only have a very select few options. If these alternatives were fleshed out to include the majority of stat combinations it would be one thing. But Karma vendors still only offer 4 combinations (iirc?) and the WvW vendors only have about 6, 4 of which are the same ones as Karma.

And then you factor in the costs associated for these sets and the time investment required, even when compared against obtaining dungeon tokens, is entirely too long.

The only other option to getting gear is via crafting, and this is getting out of hand due to the costs involved thanks to ascended crafting.

I have over 3k badges of honor from AP and EotM leveling. I could gear out my 80s with that. Badge vendors aren’t overpriced like you seem to indicate in your OP.

When dungeon runs take between 5 and 10mins each, and you need about 3 runs per piece of gear. Contrast that to how many badges it takes for each piece of gear. Is it a similar time investment? Perhaps for a guardian who spams staff all day in tier1. But as a Thief on tier8 for example? And again, it’s the selection that’s causing a large problem as well.

This is a game without (much) vertical movement. The gear should be easily available and only graphics should take effort which is kind of where thigns are. Only PvP/WvW itemization continues to lag behind PvE considerably in both reward and time invested.

You then multiply the problem by needing 3 to 5 sets of gear per character. Some of which is invalidated every 6 months due to horrible balance changes. And still at a disadvantage because it’s not ascended gear.

I really don’t think my request are that far fetched. Either make the gear easily accessible or make it so players need less gear to play their classes effectively by allowing more freedom to trade between classes.

It’s still not going to be perfect because it’s rare enough for 2 classes to want the same stats. But for them to want the same stats and runes/sigils? This is why the ascended change wasn’t near enough in the first place.

I rarely gear my chars with crafting. I’ve mostly used dungeon tokens, then applied skins and runes as I please. At the point when I had 3 lvl80s to gear, I had enough to gear all of them out with a full set of dungeon armour. I get exotic weapons from dungeon vendors as well. In the long run, that’s a cheaper way to do it and also nets you gold from doing the runs.