Guild Wars 2

- Currently Magic Find is a selfish stat because, in order to increase it, you have to decrease other stats. Making things harder for yourself and those around you while only you benefit.
– Agony resistance is similar to magic find in that it allows you to gain more valuable loot, without requiring your skill at GW2 to improve. All without requiring you to reduce other stats.
– Vertical progression that only increases your income is something I don’t have any problem with, as long as the best stats are obtainable quickly for characters without the income boosting stats.
– The current implementation of infusions is rather limited, even compared to choosing a jewel.

Putting these thoughts together and I came up with the idea of making them the only stats that get improved by vertical progression. This plan has a few steps:

Raise the level cap to make current Ascended gear obsolete
Raising the level cap to the point where rare and exotic gear of the new level cap has better stats than current Ascended gear will make it obsolete. Making the best in slot items (for all stat combinations) available with a similar time investment for players at the new cap to what current crafted exotics + upgrades have will kill the stat grind.

I don’t care what color the new best in slot items are. Only that they take current runes, sigils, etc

Infuse weapon/armor/trinket upgrades with AR and MF
This is where the vertical progression comes in. Let us take any existing rune, sigil, jewel, etc and upgrade it by adding agony resistance and/or magic find to it. These infused upgrades can then be applies to any item that could take the uninfused upgrade.

Naturally, since this is the vertical progression, these infusions will be expensive. Infusing an upgrade multiple times, with a greater cost for each subsequent infusion, is also a possibility.

Make current MF upgrades undesirable
Making them incompatible with MF/AR infusion, while having infusions that get higher MF than existing upgrades (at the higher end) should go a long way to killing any MF gear that reduces your combat stats. But to make sure, also kill the creation of any upgrades that increase MF so that market forces will make them expensive. For runes bought with tokens (like rune of the noble), replace the rune in the vendor with a different rune that doesn’t have MF.
Adjusting the stats on existing runes is bound to be unpopular with player owning that rune, so I don’t think it’s a good idea when the new system will still have them replacing them over time with the new infused runes.