Guild Wars 2

There is a huge issue with the game right now for some people. That issue being the introduction of ascended gear and the presumed vertical progression gear grind that is associated with it.

I get it ArenaNet, you want to achieve the impossible and appease both groups, those who want a gear treadmill and those who do not. This is how you do it.

The full stats bonuses of ascended gear only work in dungeons and revert to exotic stats in the rest of the game (normal zones, WvW, etc). This way, the dungeon/gear grinders can get their gear progression and the rest of us don’t have to worry about it and can continue to enjoy the game how we want.

To clarify my reasoning a bit, the folks who prefer gear progression always claim that the gear is there to help them with harder dungeons. So make the new gear only apply the stat boosts in the dungeons, where it’s needed, and leave the rest of the game alone.

People who want gear progression to help them tackle harder dungeons get their gear and the rest of us can enjoy the game how we want and still remain relevant. Problem solved, everyone is happy.

I like this as an option because I’m eventually going to be wearing ascended gear and don’t want open world PvE to become trivial. I could always switch back to my previous gear if that really becomes an issue, but that seems really counter-intuitive and less likely than the possibility that I’ll just reduce myself to diabloclickclickclick without realizing it. Downscaling as well is already too lenient as is and this will worsen the issue for fully kitted + level appropriate player teams.

Dungeons, however, could always stand people with uber gear donating themselves to pugs and showing them the ropes, instead of failing spectacularly because of the double whammy of players with subpar gear/skills who are also unfamiliar with the dungeon mechanics because they gave up on all previous runs. I think ascended gear in dungeons is a win/win scenario as far as that’s concerned (anything to counteract the stealth magic find players who silently leech off otherwise good groups).

Agreed.

This will let the WoW locusts have their wheat fields, but won’t impact the rest of the game. As long as dungeons are still complete-able (ie: view all content) without the improved gear, this would be an acceptable solution. It’s the only idea I’ve seen so far that would get me to reinstall.

This might actually work, but with some changes. All current dungeons have been designed with rare/exotic gear in mind so ascended might make them a bit too easy.

So my suggestion is that stats from ascended gear would work only in lvl80 dungeons.

The longterm problem still exists though. As the gear progression progresses, dungeons HAVE to become harder to do. Otherwise, you’ll get to a point where dungeons really are a faceroll and the progressers quit anyways. But this means that people who stuck to their 80 exotics eventually won’t have high enough stats to complete those dungeons, and thus you have gated content.

I approve of this idea but would exclude the current five man dungeons and explorable modes as well. Basically, keep Ascended stats and infusions stats to the only place that currently needs infusion stats: Fractal of the Mysts and all future Fractal-like dungeons.

Otherwise, you run into the need to continually rebalance the rest of the game and the rest of the dungeons so that the new stats don’t begin to trivialize the difficulty of their content. Currently, dungeons already possess much needed work on bugs and difficulty tuning. Allowing vertical progression into them will only increase the work needed to properly tune the dungeons.

It would be best to keep vertical progression almost as separate as sPVP currently is. If it must exist, let it exists in the Fractal of the Mists, but keep it from the rest of the game.

This game could really benefit from hard mode exclusive. Take the ramping difficulty of fractal and apply it to more stuff, but only allow ascended to go where ascended difficulty lives.

TheUnNamedHero.4167:

The longterm problem still exists though. As the gear progression progresses, dungeons HAVE to become harder to do. Otherwise, you’ll get to a point where dungeons really are a faceroll and the progressers quit anyways. But this means that people who stuck to their 80 exotics eventually won’t have high enough stats to complete those dungeons, and thus you have gated content.

From what has been stated by ANet, ascended gear is going to be the the top tier for a while. Possibly even until the level cap raise with an expansion. So basically any future dungeons will be designed for ascended gear in mind which will not be going up in power any more. Once the expansion hits and the level cap is raised, it won’t even matter because all current exotics and ascendeds will be outleveled.

They can go one step further and make story mode dungeons for exotic quality and explorable wings for ascended.

This will probably create a divide between the progression crowd and those who are fine with horizontal progression but only as far as instances go. Besides, once the patch hits, that divide is going to be there anyway. At least this way both groups can world PvE and WvW together without any problems.

“The longterm problem still exists though. As the gear progression progresses, dungeons HAVE to become harder to do. Otherwise, you’ll get to a point where dungeons really are a faceroll and the progressers quit anyways. But this means that people who stuck to their 80 exotics eventually won’t have high enough stats to complete those dungeons, and thus you have gated content.”

TBH, ANet will probably do what they did in GW1 (which I consider ok) and just give you ascended armour that’s a base state of good when they upgrade.