Guild Wars 2

I know there’s a lot of controversy about the new gear tier, but I’m fairly certain nobody doubts that it’s here to stay. This being said, I think there are some updates that would go a long way to making it more acceptable. Arenanet’s already shown that they’re willing to change existing systems (legendaries) to incorporate the new tier, so I hope the suggestions I make here aren’t too unrealistic.

- Dungeon ascended items. Explorable mode was supposed to be the pinnacle of PvE achievement, and it awarded you with some of the best gear in the game. Now that Ascended items are in place, there’s no incentive to play dungeons endgame. Dungeon skins are still unique, but to get the best stats possible you’d need to blow a whole set of fine transmutation stones. Disappointing, especially after the amount of effort that goes into a full dungeon set.

-Trading Post. Unless all Ascended items are to be bound on acquire, we need a rarity filter for Ascended. Pretty self-explanatory.

-Ascended Crafting. Again, the big draw to crafters was that you could do nothing but craft, and still achieve the height of character achievement in the game. Level 80 full exotic could be done with nothing but collecting materials and crafting stations. Maybe it wasn’t realistic for anybody to play that way, but it really emphasized the whole “play your way” philosophy, and made the hardcore crafter niche really happy. Ascended gear, if it remains uncraftable, throws this out the window.

-WvW Badge gear. Another “play your way” issue. Before ascended you could level and gear up doing nothing at all but WvW. Apparently, not anymore. It doesn’t help that badges come in very slowly for servers doing poorly and that badge gear was considered a mark of prestige in the mists.

-Karma Ascended Gear. Karma was already fairly useless before, unless you were saving up for a legendary or wanted the Karma set stats. Now, why bother with karma exotics?