Today I happen to read the patch notes for the previous build patch. I happen to come across a few lines that reflected that Arena Net has yet again, reduced drop rates on certain items. This immediately sent up a red flag in my mind. Arena Net has come out and claimed in the past posts by developers that they do NOT want to game to be a grind, and that all players should have access to the same gear through different means; and that the only difference would be the rarity of the skins that certain weapons/armor have. It seems that they are purposefully doing just the opposite by reducing drops rates of items, making items less accessible to players of all walks of MMO life. My biggest case of this is Ascended items (i.e. the back piece and the new rings). These in particular add a fairly large deficit between exotic items and rare items. The rings aren’t as large of a jump in stats as the back pieces; which up until now, you could only get rare quality. This means that the jump in stats is roughly a four point jump in stats from worst to best (and yes, I am aware that you cannot put an exotic quality gem into the Ascended level of items). From here on in; I will use the back piece as the target of my frustration, as the Ascended rings have received an alternate means in which to obtain them. To get one of these spiffy new back pieces; you only have two methods of which to obtain them: grind materials or grind fractal tokens. Now this isn’t exactly giving players a choice on how they obtain gear. It’s still a grind, one way or the other. But wait, it gets better; you can upgrade the Fractal Capacitor two more times! Guess how!? If you said grinding more materials, you’d be right!
In closing; I will state that Arena Net has tried to keep it balanced thus far; please continue to do so, by making these items more easily obtainable; instead of putting us on a grind treadmill, in which we show interest in farming materials and thus we are punished for it by reducing drop rates on those items that we need.
