Guild Wars 2

This new shiny golem has EVERYTHING we always wanted! thank you thank you!!!!!!! No spoilers! j-just go check him out! he is the golden colored golem with green crystals.

P.S. not that I mind not having him as a mini but it would be awesome if we could get him :p

http://imgur.com/a/CJCL8

For those curious but not in game, posted by someone on reddit, just crossposting it.

Oh cool, I can get ascended gear by paying 50+ gold extra in materials plus relics.

When coming up with the system did any dev even look into the crafting cost of ascended gear? Why throw in a system that requires more work and significantly more resources for the same reward?

I suspect that the (fairly outrageous) prices of the ascended gear is due to the ability to bypass leveling the crafting skills. Which makes them largely useless for anyone who has the said skills leveled.

Alternatively they are banking on prices of ascended mats going through the roof which would make these competitive.

Zania.8461:

I suspect that the (fairly outrageous) prices of the ascended gear is due to the ability to bypass leveling the crafting skills. Which makes them largely useless for anyone who has the said skills leveled.

Alternatively they are banking on prices of ascended mats going through the roof which would make these competitive.

Yep, it’s a combination of 1) an alternative method of crafting and 2) stabilizing matrix prices are really high now.

Ascended weapons and armor were added to BLING because there are some players who do not want to do any crafting, but do want to play Fractals. BLING gives these players access to Ascended weapons and armor without forcing them to level up their crafting skills.
For players who are interested in crafting, crafting remains the most efficient way to obtain Ascended weapons and armor on-demand, which is intentional, as Ascended crafting is the big payoff for leveling your crafting skills.

A large portion of the cost comes from the fact that Stabilizing Matricies nearly doubled in price when the patch hit. Over time they should return to their normal price range, which will significantly reduce the discrepancy.
If for some reason the values do not normalize as we expect them to, we can certainly look into adjusting the vendor’s pricing in a future patch.

Source

At the end of the day the only thing we’re really getting are infinite potions and access to a less random way of obtaining golden fractal weapons. I thought the point of this was to find sinks for relics. Once we’re done with our golden collections and obtaining our potions we’re still back we were, sitting on top of tons of relics with nowhere to put them. I would have liked some packets like the ones in bloodstone fen, something that’ll continue to have value. I know the devs tried, and I appreciate the effort. However, I’m not a primary school teacher that’ll tell you “at least you tried”.

Zania.8461:

I suspect that the (fairly outrageous) prices of the ascended gear is due to the ability to bypass leveling the crafting skills. Which makes them largely useless for anyone who has the said skills leveled.

Regardless of this fact—which is a good point overall—it ultimately means that they’ve introduced a supposed relic / matrix / page sink that will never realistically get used except by accident.

It would have been much more useful if they had reduced the gold cost to raid vendor levels and then made the (pristine) relic cost very, very high so you either have to play a metric boatload of Fractals to gear up or get to L500 crafting. That would have been a fair trade.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Zania.8461:

I suspect that the (fairly outrageous) prices of the ascended gear is due to the ability to bypass leveling the crafting skills. Which makes them largely useless for anyone who has the said skills leveled.

Regardless of this fact—which is a good point overall—it ultimately means that they’ve introduced a supposed relic / matrix / page sink that will never realistically get used except by accident.

It would have been much more useful if they had reduced the gold cost to raid vendor levels and then made the (pristine) relic cost very, very high so you either have to play a metric boatload of Fractals to gear up or get to L500 crafting. That would have been a fair trade.

Here is the dev response to this on reddit:

We considered a pricing model more akin to the raid vendor, but a couple things led us away from that structure and to the current one.

First off, we wanted to ensure that crafting remained the primary way for most players to get their Ascended equipment. Due to their nature, Raids will never become the primary way for players to obtain Ascended, but that was a very real risk with Fractals as they are far more accessible and easy to farm.

Secondly, if the primary cost was a token instead of gold, we wouldn’t be able to use either Pristines or Research Pages as players have had to long time to stockpile those already. Since we didn’t want to add yet another token to Fractals, it made sense to make gold the primary cost and have the tokens be secondary.

Ultimately, after much internal debate, we decided the gold-based structure would be the best for the long-term health of the game.

Source

Yeah, I just had a conversation with Ben about it and I don’t think there’s any changing their mind. It technically makes sense, too, but it’s really disappointing. This whole patch came and went and I spent… 0 Fractal Relics and 0 Pristine Fractal Relics even though I’d really love to use them toward gearing alts or something. At least Pristines can be used to round out the Golden Fractal Weapon collections, but I feel like there needs to be more.

Their reasoning with Ascended makes sense to a point, but we’re still left without a relic sink. We have more things to spend them on sure, but nothing to drain them on once we have all the unique things.

Actually it’s slightly worse as in the long run you’ll save relics with the infinite use potions >.<

I appreciate all they did, and the new zone looks cool, it’s just that the problem of needing a relic sink is still there.

So, after much internal debate, they decided to make those vendor positions mostly useless.
Why i’m not surprised?

The infinite potions are probably worth the buy, but it’s something you need once. 5000 and 8000 relics is fairly steep, but not really unreasonable.

Absurdo.8309:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Zania.8461:

I suspect that the (fairly outrageous) prices of the ascended gear is due to the ability to bypass leveling the crafting skills. Which makes them largely useless for anyone who has the said skills leveled.

Regardless of this fact—which is a good point overall—it ultimately means that they’ve introduced a supposed relic / matrix / page sink that will never realistically get used except by accident.

It would have been much more useful if they had reduced the gold cost to raid vendor levels and then made the (pristine) relic cost very, very high so you either have to play a metric boatload of Fractals to gear up or get to L500 crafting. That would have been a fair trade.

Here is the dev response to this on reddit:

We considered a pricing model more akin to the raid vendor, but a couple things led us away from that structure and to the current one.

First off, we wanted to ensure that crafting remained the primary way for most players to get their Ascended equipment. Due to their nature, Raids will never become the primary way for players to obtain Ascended, but that was a very real risk with Fractals as they are far more accessible and easy to farm.

Secondly, if the primary cost was a token instead of gold, we wouldn’t be able to use either Pristines or Research Pages as players have had to long time to stockpile those already. Since we didn’t want to add yet another token to Fractals, it made sense to make gold the primary cost and have the tokens be secondary.

Ultimately, after much internal debate, we decided the gold-based structure would be the best for the long-term health of the game.

Source

Allow us to buy ascended crafting materials with fractal rewards. Then crafting is still the main method of getting ascended, but fractal currencies are also part of that method.

The moment you realize that Fractals now (roll face across the keyboard on reaper) yield 16x the rewards (in terms of pristine relics) of what fractals did back then when you actually had to think a little bit. Kind of sad.

The prices are so ludicrous that no one but those who don’t take the time to think will buy anything from him. The gold prices alone are disqualifying.

~110g for a weapon skin is totally fine.

best thing in fractals in few years,thumb up