Guild Wars 2

I was hoping that they would rethink the costs of Ascended items in the latest patch, but that didn’t happen. Monetary issues aside, this is just talking about the time commitment necessary to get the Ascended trinkets.

Amulets I will use as a baseline since the only way to get them is via Laurels. They also have the highest stats. 30 laurels, so they are telling us it should take us a month of work to earn one. OK, fine.

Rings – they have slightly fewer stats than an Amulet. So why does it take 35 Laurels, i.e. MORE time, in order to earn one? Furthermore if you run Fractals for only 10 days, then you can pick one of your choice (not to mention having a random chance of getting one along the way). So why don’t the rings cost more like 10 Laurels? “Fractals are harder than doing Dailies”, you might say, but still, you could make it 15-20 laurels… it shouldn’t cost MORE time commitment than an Amulet.

And then Accessories, where the stats are even lower than Rings. They decided you need 40 laurels (a month’s work PLUS the bonus monthly), AND 50 Ectos? That’s insane. If you want to purchase via Guild Commendations, the time commitment is still a little off. Let’s say you’re lucky enough to be in a big enough guild and you earn say, 3 commendations a week (Guild Bounty + Rush for instance, Trek not giving GCs). So you still need 4 weeks of work in order to get a single Accessory, where again, the states are lower than Rings/Amulets. And never mind all the people in small guilds who can’t even use this option. If you look at stats/time invested, Accessories again should be more along the lines of 10 Laurels and maybe 4 GCs.

Backpieces are even lower still statwise. We can’t get them with Laurels currently, but considering they require huge amounts of fractal grind or huge amounts of grind for a stack of T6 mats, they also certainly require way more time commitment than makes sense.

The devil’s advocate side is that maybe I should consider Amulets being “cheap” and that we’re lucky that they’re “only” charging 30 amulets for them. Still, if you want to fully gear out in Ascended trinkets (ignoring backpieces for now), that’s 30+35+35+40+40 = 180 Laurels, or about 4.5 months of Dailies, for a single character. I’m not advocating that they should hand us Ascendeds on a silver platter in a few days, but 4.5 months is pretty extreme. Consider people who say, used all their character slots and have 5 characters, we’re now talking almost TWO YEARS of dailies to get Ascended trinkets…

TL;DR the laurel costs for Ascended items are wildly uneven and should be much less given the stat points you get and the time costs for other methods to earn them.