Some other interesting ways we could midigate the pressure on alts is just make all ascended gear account bound it would remove some demand but it’s something we’ve discussed before.
Three problems:
a) my mesmer wears zerk with damage runes, my ele wears soldier’s with boon duration runes and my necromancer likes rabid with condition damage. How are they supposed to share an armor set?
Same with my adventurers (zerk, knight’s and cleric’s) and my heavys (knight’s and cleric’s). With my character setup, not a single set would be shareable.
b) even if the attributes and runes work for multiple characters, skins and dyes probably don’t. What happens when you transmute a cultural armor skin onto it?
c) Having to visit the bank before and after switching characters cannot by any means be called a fun game mechanic.
So while this is probably just a click of a checkbox to implement, it’s not going to help.
Another idea is we could make it easier to craft ascended gear after you’ve made the first set
Yes, please. I’ve mentioned it before, but the bulk of the costs should have been in leveling to 500 and unlocking the recipes, not in crafting the final items. It’s a bit late for that now that everyone is at 500, but some kind of cost reduction for subsequent items (reducing both the timegated mats and dragonite requirements) would be greatly appreciated.
Note again that this must apply to subsequent items regardless of attributes or it won’t help.
or we could allow you to duplicate ascended gear with some recipe so once you’ve created one set you can copy it for an alt for less.
Again, this would only help if the copy is allowed to have different attributes.
You could allow people to give up other time gates for the crafting one by letting people craft stuff with laurals or mystic coins.
This is not going to help players with alts, since anyone with lots of alts is not going to have a single laurel left. Amulets and ascended recipes for 8 characters already require way more laurels than anyone could have earned in the game until now.
Having to pay laurels not just for every item, but for every item/attribute combination is a major pain for everyone who likes multiple builds, and I think that that’s one of the first things you should revert. It’s just not reasonable that some players should pay as few as 40 laurels and others somewhere around 400 (depending on the amount of 1-handed weapons you wield). I think that a factor of 10 is unreasonable in general, but it’s especially outrageous when said currency is behind a hard time gate.