Guild Wars 2

Karma used to be all over the place at the start of the game, you gained lots of it due to farmable events, you had the daily jug, you could use boosters on karma containers etc. At the time of the fix to reduce the ways to gain karma, it was the right thing to do but now with the ascended refinements, it’s the other way around. You can’t gain enough karma to keep up with the ascended materials you’re gathering from all over the place.
Just to state the obvious: I have zero karma left and have 3422 bloodstone dust, 3833 dragonite ore and 1625 empyreal fragments filling up my entire bank.
Can’t refine them and can’t sell them, all you can do with them is keep piling up or destroy them.
It seems like a waste to me that something “ascended” which should be something “precious” is considered a bother to half of the people (the other half still refining with karma they build up in the first months).
So in my eyes, there are two solutions:

1) improve the ways to gain karma by turning it back to the way it used to be. Ascended refinement is a huge karma drain which is sufficient to keep everyone’s karma from rising high. On the other hand, people who don’t refine would benefit from this as well.

2) make ascended materials exchangeable for karma (or directly to obsidian shards) with some kind of vendor. For example: exchange 100 asc materials for 1 obsidian shard. Then people could still refine even while lacking karma and they wouldn’t have to destroy it (like I’m about to do in 5mins to clear up my bank again) and other people wouldn’t be able to gain karma, only the obsidian shards used for refinement or the way to a legendary.

I think especially the second option should be considered since it wouldn’t affect too much other things, it would solve the problem directly in a very efficient way.