Guild Wars 2

Start with a question: How long is it supposed to take to craft ascended armor/weapons for a single character? And keep in mind, I want to also know exactly what kind of player is used as the metric when making the decision of how long does it take, and how many are they expected to make…

Ready? Set! RANT:

Ascended armors… frankly, i wouldn’t be so wound up over the stuff (weapons too…weapons are worse) if i could get my hands on the bits that are currently account bound (dragonite/empy/bloodstone) some way other than being funneled for weeks…or months potentially (1 damask/leather/steel per day without buying any…off subject though) into content that i hate and otherwise avoid like plague. The bonus you get is like 36 points higher in stats and to be able to include an AR slot…BUT keep in mind that infusions exist that add stat bonuses. Currently the cost of these are…insane…but there exist possibilities here… So 36 stat points and being required to transmute away yet another skin that a very, VERY few cosmetic additions/subtractions would make beautiful is not worth a month of my game time enjoyment.

TBH frankly, since fractals are capped at 50 I’m going to ignore the AR slot on asc armors and just craft up a bunch of +8 AR infusions…across 6 asc accessories that will bump me to 60 AR which is plenty enough atm and it wont have me channeled into a 1500 dragonite grinder (thats 50 orrian temples and 75 dungeon runs) for each of 1 set of armor who’s meta is about to get broken (give it a couple months), my secondary set(s)…and OH…this on 4-5 80s (out of 14) since i get so bored of playing the same old thing for more than a day or two at the time. I understand I can only realistically expect to run most content on my few favorites, but that is still more “mains” (since I so hate that model of progression) than most people play across 3 different games.

So: MONTHS of asc grinding is BORING, not alt friendly in the least, and funnels people like me though content i would almost rather didn’t exist in the first place…all to xmute weapons onto exotics cause the people who set stats to colors hate me (why did healing get the most beautiful color scheme, AND WHY ON EARTH DID ASSASSIN STATS GET CORNSILK AND EBONY), and armor with questionable improvements for the time spent considering the AR slot issue can be gotten around other ways. Yes, i said i am going to ignore crafting the armor, but the point here can stand for others who are going to go ahead and jump through that hoop.

Basically, I only ask the account bound bits be made a bit..ok, a lot faster to gather (25 dungeon paths and 16 orrian temples for 1 weapon/armor chest piece currently), and I’m not all sure i care how its done at this point because i don’t dare dream of the ways that it could be made worse for so little gain. (Again here, I’m basically crafting the weapons for skins because some of them actually are really nice looking, they just come with the worst stats possible for the characters whom the colors match with).

Is there any hope?
Or is all in vain?

Cause i already made this post, already put this in another post, but felt it deserves a place here and this one needs a bump, so here is the math logic of what’s involved:

This useless grinder for next to no stats (ascended crafting)… i craft ascended weapons because i so happen to like a few of the skins.. How about a little math here, huh?

16 orrian temples (each one gives 30 dragonite..the highest drop rate in the game, bar none) to make just over 500 dragonite ore for your 5 ingots to make a weapon/chest piece. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?
25 dungeon paths @ 20 empyreal fragmers per run (best/fastest way that i know of) to make 500 empyreal stars for your vision crystal
IF you do these other two to exclusion of all else, you actually should wind up with enough bloodstone dust to make up your 500 needed…BUT champ trains, each champ box dropping on the order of 5-10 dust, you need to kill probably 80-90 champs to make 500
Not too bad right? we just made 1 weapon. or 1 chest piece.. Oh, i forgot…you have 2 weapon slots on land, 2 underwater…ok…do the above 4 times.
WAIT WAIT WAIT, we still need the rest of our armor? SO: 1000 dragonite/empy/dust for the 5 lesser vision crystals (2 bricks each) means 32 more orrian temples, 50 more dungeons, and…all day long in frostgorge sound.

So now we’ve farmed 2500 dragonite/empy/dust…. so that should be 84 orrian temples, 125 dungeon runs, and…thats more champs than players in the game. BUT WAIT…. THERES MOAR!!!

So now we have made 1 single full set for 1 character… I personally use 4 or 5 characters frequently enough to want to trick them out/make them fractal ready and generally show off the looks i make (what was supposed to be the entire point of guild wars loot systems) and so forth… and i will need more than just 1 set of armor (sorry, i dont 100% zerk, take your zerk outta my teq and quit feeding points and loot to my enemies in wvw)
So that many more (2 sets minimum on 4-5 characters) 1500 asc mat grinders…
5000 asc mats per character (4 weapons, and 2 sets of armor) times 4-5 characters means i need 20000-30000 untradeable ascended mats that come in 20 or 30 at the time… and that number is lowballing it because i hate the stats associated with the weapon skins i really want… i use more than just 4 weapons per character, and 8 ascended weapons per character… yea it’s safe to say that all i want would mean bare minimum of 45,000 ascended mats… FOR GREAT TALLY!! that is: 1500 orrian temples, 2150 dungeons, and hopefully not more than a day on the champ grinds making up w/e the other 2 didn’t yield in bloodstone dust.

Am I the only one who sees why ascended crafting lights a fire under so many people’s rear and makes me so depressed i dunno if i wanna keep playing some days?

I do feel it should be noted that doing the above would also yield a truckload of gold and other things… this is why I don’t complain about the costs of the mats involved… the money is shoveled in your direction for all this…but…just… i’d rather gold be the issue than some trickle in account bound, must farm materials /wrists

(edited because i failed arithamatic and speeling…math more important.)

I play every day, even if it’s only to get my daily and craft my Damask. After reset tonight I will be able to finish my first complete set of Ascended armor. I recently got into Fractals, and the infusion slots have been convenient. Being able to apply my own dyes, the light armor I think looks a lot better than my first impressions. The weapons also look very nice, but I do wish you could craft the color of choice and that the recipes where not so expensive.

My biggest challenge is the Dragonite. It’s not that I don’t like temple events or the big boss battles, I just don’t like having to watch and wait for timers or for enough people to show up to do the event. Same for the time gated crafting. I don’t mind the material ‘cost’ of the Ascended so much as I mind being forced into a schedule.

I enjoy WvW, but don’t want to do it all the time. Fortunately there is often a ‘Karma train’ running somewhere, and you can hop on and get plenty of Empyreal. Fractals and Dungeons also reward that and the only schedule problem is finding a decent group.

I think the best way to look at it is do what you want to do and as you get enough materials, tack on another weapon or piece of armor. Personally I think keep lords should return about 4X the dragonite, and maybe have Fractals drop dragonite instead of Empreal or have some kind of exchange system as they clearly did not balance the three vision crystal ingredients very well.

For me most of my Dragonite has come from the Golemn world boss. It is on a redicuously short timer ( 1/2hr-45mins or something) and those with alts can bring a new character each time for more dragonite. It is actually better to only have 3 or 4 people at the event as it scales down really well and goes so much faster. Last kill I was at there were four of us and we downed him in 2 1/2 minutes. As opposed to 10-12 minutes when there are around 30 people at it.