Guild Wars 2

Ascended gear. Better than exotic gear, limited to a single dungeon in the game.

All other dungeons will become empty, since:

• The armor they offer is substandard. No one is going to be willing to have all that work (because, at this time, getting a full set stops being fun before you do the 20° dungeon run) just to get stats that are worse than what we could get somewhere else.

• The skin is going to become worthless. Whether people like it or not, in order to show other players that someone has Ascended armor (and teams will ask people to have the best armor in the game), the only solution is to wear Ascended armor with its native skin. This is not possible with exotics since there are multiple exotic sets in the game, but since we will have only a few Ascended sets…

• Dungeons still have a lot of issues. Between all bugs, the lack of balanced rewards, the design flaws and everything else, the dungeons will actually become obsolete before they are fixed.

“Endgame” will mean “Fractals of the Mists”, and everything else will be left rotting.

Assuming ascended armor has it’s own grade of color, you could just transmute the skins upward onto ascended gear, or you could just link your gear and they can examine the stats themselves.

Transmuted gear loses its original color, and you can paste the code of an item in chat in order to link it regardless if you have the item or not (which is something commonly done to preview uncommon skins in game).

Nobody knows what ascended gear is or how it will play.

And it’s related to one dungeon, just like current exotic gear is and may not effect gameplay anywhere else.

In short, jumping to conclusions before you know anything more is just a good way to get yourself riled up over nothing.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we don’t have the full details yet to be throwing stuff around like this. Give it some time first, we don’t know how big of a boost AG is gonna have, it may even be negligible at best.

Doesn’t matter if it just give 1 more stats, it’s still better than exotic, Anet is just killing their own game more and more for each patch.

Another issue is that, since Ascended gear is more powerful than everything else we have in the game, it will effectively make dungeons easier, as our characters would become more powerful with it. All those complaining that dungeons are easy would have even more reason to complain (and expecting people to keep subpar exotic sets to play the dungeons in makes as much sense as saying, today, that the dungeons would be challenging if people did them wearing white items).

In order to get weapons and skins old dungeons will be just fine … also you need tokens for legendaries from the old ones…

wait until you see the stats on the gear before we go ahead and jump the gun.

the 3rd party article was a little off on it’s wording, it even called the Kodan, Koden.

nothing in the Anet blogpost says anything about being stronger than exotic, give it a day or so until Anet clear things up.

its pretty easy to see koden as a spelling mistake/misheard if they spoke.
what is clear however is that the new items are more powerful and that infusion will supposedly make them “even more powerful” this completely trashes the horizontal progression in the game

rather than
Do what you want and get end game gear to use and be competitive

it becomes
gear up for fractals and get ascended if you want to be competitive in pvp /pve

with the implication that the difficulty/rewards will increase over time as more is added to fractals the gap in stats between what is available in fractals and elsewhere will increase.
even if this is offset by adding ascended gear to other locations it still makes the crafted/dungeon/pvp grear currently available obsolete.

it may be that, the new dungeon will feature opponents that use spectral agony and thus the infusion isn’t as bad as it seems, but vertical progression leads to awful gear treadmills where all your effort goes to waste in a few months as new content rolls out.

Whose to say they don’t offer ascended gear from the current dungeons for a higher token price? Also infusion in GW1 protected you from a single attack from a single mob type, not saying it will be the same for GW2 but they are introducing a new mob type as well with the Kraka’s and their “special” hardened skin. Also i believe it just armor that can have the Ascended quality so no weapons will be better then exo’s.

All speculation at this point, have to wait til after the 15th to confirm or deny concerns. To be clear i don’t want a gear treadmill either, this first “expansion” will be the test of how they handle these types of additions, i eagerly await…

Bit early to assume something is game-breakingly bad, isn’t it?

Two words: transmutation stones. I’ve met more people who farm exotics for the skins to transmute onto other things than people who farm ‘em for the stats + skins. Teams just aren’t going to care about their members having Ascended skins, I guarantee you. People are elitist, but they’re not THAT illogical.

We don’t even know how much better Ascended will be than Exotic (though I’ll admit, I don’t like the idea of it being better, either, I’m just willing to wait & see, and am more excited about the content patch than annoyed by the armour addition).

Lorana.2468:

nothing in the Anet blogpost says anything about being stronger than exotic, give it a day or so until Anet clear things up.

The problem is that ANet hasn’t stated that the armor won’t be better. We have an article that shows it has actual info on the update – they state that armor WILL be better than exotics. ANet states nothing to object to that thus I tend to agree with the article.

I am a bit pissed that they just added a new tier off armor because I went through alot of effort to earn 5 full exotic sets for my characters that will now just be obsolite.

I have a full set of dungeon gear. Actually I have multiple dungeon sets and enough tokens to buy alot more. Why do I still do dungeons?

-Money (yep, sad I know)
-Lodestones
-Friends
-Breaks up the monotony of grinding Cursed Shore.
-Fun (At least Arah is anyway)
-There will be updated loot tables to dungeons and rewards soon, according to A-net.
-I salvage shields and focuses for ecto.
-500 of ‘x’ Token for gift for legendary people still need.

I will still do dungeons even when I don’t need the gear from them, and I know others who are the same. Ascended set? ok, now I have that, back to Arah to party with lupicus.

Think of it this way:

It’s going to be hard to get the ascended set right? ( I hope)
Good!
So that dungeon set you already have will be put to good use working for it.
If you put the time and effort into working on a dungeon or crafted exotic set, surely they will pay off as you work for the ascended set.

When I had a lvl 35 character, I worked hard and put a rare set on it to make it easier to get the AC set, I then threw out my rare crafted set once I had my AC set. I don’t feel like I lost anything, it did a job making things easier and I worked my way up.

I’m not worried tbh, have good faith in A-net and we don’t know enough to make a judgement at this point.

My Guess at this point (shoot me down for it):
Think GW1.
Think Infused Armour.
Maybe we will have Mursaat content incomming.
Or in the case of ‘ascended’, something to do with the Forgotten, maybe you need this set to be recognized by the snake people with the elbow flaps.

Swiftpaw hit the nail on the head, there are still plenty of reasons. Even with a full set of ascended gear down the road; I will be still running dungeons for different stats for different builds / set looks, and helping guildies and friends.

Not to mention running Alts through.

I don’t think it’s as doom and gloom as you think.

I’m willing to bet that Ascended gear will retain their Ascended stats only if you are participating in content that utilizes it, such as Fractals of the Mists. But if you are not in an area that utilizes those extra stats, then it would be downscaled to Exotic stats. It would be in a similar fashion how level 80 characters are downscaled to the appropriate level of that zone.

The Infusion part would probably work in a way how Infusion worked in Guild Wars 1, in which infusing your armor protected you from being one-shotted by the Mursaat. The difference would be that it might have some interchangeability. Meaning that you might infuse your armor to protect yourself against the Karka’s one-shotting ability; while you could reinfuse your armor for a different situation.

At least that’s what I’m thinking anyway.

To those who are confused about transmuting and which color your gear will have.

If you transmute the skin of a blue onto some dungeon gear it will take the color raity of the stats on the item.

So in the up coming patch if I transmute my CoE chest skin with the ascension chest piece states it will look like the CoE chest but have the stats of the ascension gear and be labled with the ascension gears rarity. If you look at the stats when transmuting you’ll see the rarity also listed. This is why if you transmute new stats onto your legendary it goes from purple to orange.

Point 2 is moot – i transmuted my exotic TA set onto the starter white light skin… yes, the one with the garter.

Erasculio.2914:

“Endgame” will mean “Fractals of the Mists”, and everything else will be left rotting.

Oh Gee… you mean like UW, SoO, & DOA? Yeah I predicted exactly this last week here and can point to the exact post. Anet is realizing the powercreepers are leaving so they have to try to appeal to them just like they did in Nightfall & EotN if they want to keep them around.

Personally I would have preferred overhauling most dungeon enounters *(and HP pools) to make them just plain more fun… And especially faster responses in the form of Hot-Fixes to the huge game-breaking Bugs. But a tiny little Stat difference isn’t going to phase me. I have 600 Orr tokens right now that I probably won’t ever spend b/c I don’t see anything I want. I’ll no doubt have 600 more tokens from this Fractal Disco Spam Dungeon or whatever it is (sorry, can’t hear “fractal” without thinking of Tribes now) that I won’t know what to spend them on either.

The rewards aren’t the reason I did the dungeons. Infact I did DOA enough times to buy TWO Armbraces that I never used (I gave them away instead… didn’t sell them, just Gave them Away).

.

I think the only REAL danger here, is that you might see a ton of DE Farming N00bs who’ve never done any of the tougher Explorables, try to pile into PUGS just for this new gear and then just get wrecked hilariously hard by it. Right now Pugs aren’t perfect, but atleast you have a 50/50 chance of meeting a few competent people. All bets are off though when it comes to pugs for this Fractal thing. I’ll be shocked if even 20% of LFG’s for it have anything even resembling the skill or builds to tackle it.

PS: Speaking of builds, this is the most 4th-wall-breaking acronym Anet has ever given anything… (except maybe the TPS Regulator golem). I am highly amused by the discussions that will coincidentally ensue b/c of it