Guild Wars 2

Because writing it all down would have been a hassle, here’s my verbal defense for these proposals: http://www.mediafire.com/?kzue0awfqk1r5i4

ASCENDED EARRINGS

• Laurel Merchant price reduced from 40 laurels and 50 ectoplasm to 15 laurels and 10 ectoplasm.
• Guild Commendation Trader price reduced from 5g and 12 guild commendations to 5g and 3 guild commendations.

ASCENDED RINGS

• Laurel Merchant price reduced from 35 laurels to 10 laurels.
• BUY-4373 price reduced from 10 pristine fractal relics to 3 pristine fractal relics.

ASCENDED AMULETS

• Laurel Merchant price reduced from 30 laurels to 15 laurels.

EXOTIC ARMOR AND ASCENDED ACCESSORY UPDATE
All exotic armors and weapons now have an Emblem Slot and Ascended items now have an Upgrade Slot.

• Emblem Slot: This slot pertains to the stat-triads tied to an Exotic piece of armor or a weapon. Instead of stats being innately tied to Exotic armor and weapons, this gear tier will now have stat upgrades called Emblems that a player can slot into individual weapons or pieces of armor as they would runes or jewel upgrades. Nothing about Exotic armor/weapons will change except that players can now slot in different stat-triad Emblems into existing pieces of exotic gear. Emblems are classified by name in the same manner as regular stat triads (Beserker, Rabid, Cleric, ect).
• Ascended item Upgrade Slot: As one would imagine, this is a pretty straightforward change. Ascended items now lose their originally fixed “upgrade stats” (that is to say, the bottom half of their current stats that carry lower stat bonuses) and now new Mystic Essences are available for purchase at Ascended item vendors as upgrade slot components for Ascended accessories. Mystic Essences are classified by name in the same manner as regular stat triads (Beserker, Rabid, Cleric, ect). The name “Divine” will refer to the Mystic Essence upgrade that provides a boost to all stats (as does the Eye of Janthir or the Eyes of Abbadon).

IMPLEMENTING EXOTIC STAT EMBLEMS AND ASCENDED MYSTIC ESSENCES
Exotic Emblems

• All Exotic armor and weapon costs (tokens or karma) is reduced by 33%. All vendors selling Exotic armor or weapons of a particular stat triad will now also provide corresponding Exotic Emblems. For instance, let’s imagine that someone unlocks Lightbringer Brutefur in the Cathedral of Eternal Radiance in order to purchase the Karma Armor that he sells. Under the guidelines of this change, all of the gear sold by Lightbringer Brutefur would see an across-the-board price reduction by 33% and all of that armor would come with an empty Emblem Slot (that is to say, without stat bonuses). Brutefur would then also sell Exotic Knights, Clerics and Rabid Emblems (stats that his armor already provided) that would make up that 33% reduction in price.
• To this effect, his armor pieces would each cost 29,400 Karma while his Exotic Emblems would each cost 12,600 Karma. The total would still equal the original 42,000 Karma at which he currently sells his armor, but the level of customization provided to the player immediately spikes with the Exotic Emblem option.
• This same principle could easily be applied to all Exotic armor merchants—both Karma and Token-based.

Ascended Mystic Essences

• The principle surrounding the implementation of Ascended Mystic Essences is very similar to that of Exotic Emblems. All Ascended accessories merchants would now simply have additional items in their inventory that reflect the options that Ascended items provide regarding stat boosts. The only tricky part about this is that a simple across-the-board price reduction wouldn’t fit this change. Thus, depending on the vendor and accessory, a smorgasbord of unique prices would have to be developed in order to keep prices for various Ascended gear pieces in line with one another.

ASCENDED MYSTIC ESSENCE PRICES

• Ascended Mystic Essences sold at Guild Commendation Traders set at 1 guild commendation.
• Ascended Mystic Essences sold at Laurel Merchants set at 5 laurels.
• Ascended Mystic Essences sold by BUY-4373 set at 2 pristine fractal relics.

Behavior of Mystic Essences and Exotic Emblems

• Many people are asking for armor lockers for their several sets of gear that they often lug around on their main characters. In the interests of the streamlined gearing philosophy that shone in GW1, I propose that Exotic Emblems and Ascended Mystic Essences be items that simply swap places with one another when replacing other Emblems and Mystic Essences in occupied slots. To this effect, unlike runes or other upgrade components, Emblems and Mystic Essences would not destroy each other when slotted. Therefore, instead of a player carrying around loads of armor, the same player could simply tote about a collection of Emblems and Mystic Essences that he or she can slot in outside of combat should he or she desire.

And there you have it. Gearing at high levels shouldn’t be as stressful as it is now. With so many time-locked currencies, it’s incredibly frustrating to gear more than one character to full with Exotic and Ascended armor, and even MORE tedious to change armor stats around since one has to grind for more specific stat-based armors in addition to the armors that one has already bought.. Items like Exotic Emblems and Ascended Mystic Essences would simply streamline the process of gearing out a character and make the entire experience much more enjoyable for players looking to deck out several characters in high-level armor and weapons.

I like this. Especially the swapping of emblems rather than having them destroy each other . Only bad side is there may be slightly less of a currency sink.

JustCurious.3457:

I like this. Especially the swapping of emblems rather than having them destroy each other . Only bad side is there may be slightly less of a currency sink.

That’s… exactly the point…
Designers shouldn’t drag out their game’s content by packing it with time-locked content and currency-sinks. ANet is bogging down their own game by tying stats to gear and making Ascended items so time-consuming to acquire.

Also, I still don’t understand why Ascended items aren’t more flexible with their stat customization. I mean, really. If the reason is because somebody was worried that such a thing would break the game somehow, Ascended just shouldn’t have been added in.

On “GW2 MMO Manifesto” principle, the Ascended armor tier shouldn’t have been added in the first place, but that’s an entirely different topic.

Another reason for this suggestion beyond reducing the stress of gearing one’s self in GW2 is that GW2 is seeing declines across the board in several PvE activities such as low-level fractals and dungeon running (aside from CoF p1 and 2). Getting gear from these places is becoming increasingly difficult simply due to the lack of people willing to group up and get the job done. This sort of suggestion would help make creating and gearing new characters much easier on them. It’s sort of a “transitional period” suggestion. GW2 seems slower due to a lull in new content, so people are going to drift away or not be as active. By allowing high-end gear to be more accessible to everyone, GW2 could maybe maintain a stronger player base by making it easier for all players to experiment with the stats of new and old characters alike.

When they tied real life currency to in game currency via gems it made any suggestion of removing cash sinks irrelevant. Considering it is a FTP game after the original purchase they need some way to fill the coffers so there is a staff to continue putting out content. killing cash sinks in this game will ruin their business model.