Guild Wars 2

Ascended gear is nice, and all, but I’m a little miffed. My 400 jeweler gear is being phased into obsolescence. No need for exotic rings. Flame and Frost? We’ll take your exotic amulets and make them old news, now. Granted, exotics are still an important part of getting there, but eventually there will be an entire set of pink gear, and most crafted items will be pointless. Which reminds me of other games.

Crafting equipment should be special. It tends towards “neat” instead. Sure, there are things it’s good for, but the really good stuff comes from the mystic forge, or fractals, or a combination of the two.

Anyone else ever play Final Fantasy XI? It’s old news now, and they’ve changed a lot (so I’ve heard) But when I was playing years ago, you would see cap level players running around in player crafted gear. Not because it was decent until you got real gear, but because it was the best in slot item for your job. It gave crafting a sense of prestige. The crafting system in that game was sheer murder, and rarer materials were near impossible to obtain, but one thing they did right was make the system useful.

There’s a bit here and there on the forums about making crafting more useful. Crafter only skins, for example. Good Idea. An account or soul bound item with a recipe from, say, a karma vendor, that can’t be acquired any other way. The item could even be sheer crap, and function as a tool to sell transmutation stones. Which could also address issues many have with the armour selection, But I’m getting off my own topic if I continue down that road.

There should be some way for crafted equipment to have purpose greater than as a stepping stone. Perhaps player made ascended gear, replacing our beloved ecto with some other hard to obtain thing (infused ectoplasm, lol). Or unique skins. Or a town clothes chest piece that says “I leveled X to 400 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”

Note: I’m talking VERY specifically about player made equipment and endgame content intertwining in some meaningful way, here, any bright ideas?

ATM, as far as phasing things out go only the Jeweler is really effected by the ascended gear (until inevitably we end up with full sets of armor/weapons that are ascended).

You get my +1, however, because the sheer fact that for the most part you don’t even craft Legendary weapons (Lets face it, you throw a bunch of parts at some silly genie in the town pool and he throws a thing back).

I would love to see there be more selections of armor/weapon skins through crafting (even if they are the same stats), just as an additional kick to show “Yeah, I hit leveled X to 400 and MADE this lousy shirt” :P It would also kind of be nice to see back-slot item’s get added in there somewhere to the crafting selection. Seems kinda funny to me that nobody but a genie can make a simple backpack.

Also – boss armor/weapons (especially for beasties like the army of Dragon second-hands) that looked as though you made it from them (a “part” of the baddy could be ‘looted’ from it with whatever disgusting RNG they deemed fit and used in the crafting process [lets say replace Ectos or something for sake of suggestion] and give an extra oomph to bridge the gap between normal exotic designs and super-annoyingly-fancy Legendary designs).