Guild Wars 2

Do you think the stat difference is worth getting ascended weapons?

Please discuss, don’t just answer, and avoid qq.

I think its unnecessary, it will further trivialize game. Making new tier of gear just for sake of making it is pointless.

But I would love to hear from Anet point of view, why is acsended tier even here and what is their reasoning behind it. I just hope they didn’t introduced it for trained monkeys that need new tier of gear every 6 months… =/

I like some of the skins.

If you want to min/max then yea.

Stat isn’t required and unless you want to high level fractals, you don’t really need them either.

I don’t mind the extra bump to stats and I’ll end up with one or several across characters just for the skin so I’ll end up with stats for them anyway.

I don’t think it’s worth emptying your bank to get 500 in craft asap, but after that is accomplished, yeah I think they are worth it.

Most everything in the game can be completed in Rare equipment. If you want it make it be a long term goal.

Some will say that it is required for WvW but my experience states otherwise.

It’s a pretty loaded question, but I’ll try to answer it honestly.

The time investment involved is not proportionally tied to the increase in stats (this is hard to quantify but the stat boost isn’t “worth” the time it takes to prepare to craft one from my perspective).

Furthermore, since in-game content isn’t balanced around the slightly higher stat ceiling in question, it further deincentivizes the effort required (anything you can do with an ascended weapon you can do without one, a common and crucial point).

However, it also isn’t that onerous to collect the materials through the process of just playing the game as you see fit, and a stat boost is a stat boost. The overwhelming majority of the expense and effort required to craft one is, at the moment, simply reaching 500 in crafting in the first place. This is inexorably linked to the economy and currently a bit out of wack due to the rush of early adopters. Eventually it will stabilize and be more realistic for everyone.

Finally, in addition to the one currently available becoming easier, further methods of acquisition will be added that continue to lower the time-to-acquire per piece for the player.

So in summary my answer is: currently no, they’re not worth it unless you have to have the best as quickly as possible. Eventually they will be worth it, and further trend toward becoming more and more trivial to acquire.

edit: I left something out.

I forgot any focus on the skins themselves, some of which are pretty cool! If you want any of the skins badly for your character’s look, then (just like T3 Cultural Armor, Infinite Light, a Legendary, etc.) of course it’s worth it regardless of the effort.

Well it would be really helpful if you like to do fractals (my only real goal for them besides some skins) and it’s also an increase in damage.

Is it absolutely needed if you want to keep playing the game/dish damage? Hell no, rares/exotics work just fine right now.

It is important only for players that want to advance
on higher level fractals.
I don’t believe it can make a difference in WvW or casual PvE,
compared to exotics.

The answers to this question will be different 3-6 months from now. By then, there will most likely be Ascended armor available. When that happens, there will need to be new content tuned to ascended level stats, and/or the agony mechanic added to high level mobs. If ANet doesn’t start tuning content to Ascended level (or adding agony), people will complain that the game is too easy, and will quit playing.

kRiza krimos.1637:

I think its unnecessary, it will further trivialize game. Making new tier of gear just for sake of making it is pointless.

But I would love to hear from Anet point of view, why is acsended tier even here and what is their reasoning behind it. I just hope they didn’t introduced it for trained monkeys that need new tier of gear every 6 months… =/

Colin J. and perhaps Anet as a whole has a idea of how long it should take you to get your BiS gear.

http://youtu.be/Jy7CcwnfUdU?t=2m

Despite previous claims by Anet in terms of the B2P model they went with, as a game studio they absolutely want/need people to be logging in as much as possible for various reasons. Everything from increasing gem store sales (the longer things take to get the more likely someone with little time will buy), to making themselves look successful to a community at large with the amount of concurrent log ins etc etc. They have a vested interest in seeing their servers stay full in between the “content” updates, things like gear grind fill the time gap.

worth it to me because i like the pink text

Worth it to me personally because I have nothing better to do.

Worth it from a stat perspective, no. As an Anet ignored and hated condition spec the scaling of ascended gear is completely borked for condition specs.

Power specs gain a direct 5% power and thus dmg increase, and a 5% weapon dmg thus dmg increase, plus harder hitting and more often crits.

Condition specs gain more health or toughness, that is it. The scaling on condition damage rounds to whole numbers so we need 20 extra stat points to get ANY change in our damage. this means even getting both main and offhand weapons plus using condition dmg infusions does not gain us a single point in damage since it only give +18 which is meaningless since we need +20 to see any difference.

So if you are a power user then yes it is worth it since you will see a dmg increase. If you are a forgotten condition user then no it is not worth it.

No, you might as well go for the legendary, at least if you get the legendary you’ll have a guarantee, that there won’t be anymore higher tier weapons.

Every time I swing Zojja’s Reaver at something I feel like I bring down the Fist of God and I am often surprised why the lesser mobs do not simply explode due to the proximity to its sheer awesomeness.

I personally do not think it is worth the effort, basecally for 3 reasons:

1) Precursors: soon will be possible to craft / earn them.
2) Time x Diversity of status: The time it takes to crafting one is not worth it’s time for a static status. Today I want to use Berserker but if tomorrow you want to use Rampager? 1 more month to crafting a weapon? No thanks!
3) Legendaries: legendary weapons are worth to create, since you can have the status combination you prefer at any time and on top of it all has the same “fire power” that Ascendents.

Legendaries all day and night! ;D

It feels pointless, tbh. I think what makes this more annoying than WoW’s VP was that in doing the VP for WoW, you were progressing to an actual goal. With ascended, you’re not really using the new stats for anything. It just gives you more numbers and extra opportunities for AR (which are pointless outside Fractals).

In WvW.. At this moment I would have to say its at the very least nuisancial to have something like this. Sure, most 1v1 match ups are skill based, but I find that people fully disregard stat bonuses. If it was purely skill based, what good would be there to add more stats to begin with? Why not just make an exotic tier with ascended slots. This doesn’t even include the fact that now people are purposely letting objectives fall in WvW so they can recap for their ascended mats immediately after. And keep in mind that people who are trebbing from a safe distance whilst their friends are at the front lines more likely than not will miss their shards and Ores simply because they couldn’t make it in time to the lords room to kill the lord, so you get punished for essentially supporting your team.

It also punishes people who don’t enjoy or can’t afford the crafting costs. And really, crafting isn’t exactly the most exiting thing. You’re just standing in front of a able watching this bar turn full a dozen times in a row. You can’t sell it, so there goes that. And karma Nerfs mean that whilst its not hard to get now, in the long term, if you get a precursor after you get deck out a bunch of ascendeds, you’re going to have a harder time working for your shards. So you may aswell just save up for that. There’s also random drops, but I’d say random drops are hardly a reliable source for weapons if the drop rate is 1% or w/e.

And on top of that, precursors are.. Wierd? Apparently we’re going to be able to craft them. Yet they’re less powerful than Ascended. So we should keep our precursor in our inventory and only use it when we get our legendary? Wut..?

I dunno about being worth it or not, but one thing I can say, is that the whole execution of it seems very sloppy and short sighted. It doesn’t feel like they factored all the things relating to them when they actually did. It’s not game breaking or going to make me “THAT’S IT IM LEAVING GW2” or anything but really, this could’ve been much more polished up and neatened on Anet’s part. They spent six months but it feels like they gave ascended weapons six hours of consideration before releasing them.

Worth it? No, not IMO. It’s new BiS gear for the sake of BiS gear.
With no real guarantee of no new tiers in the coming years or even the next year to render it as non-BiS anymore(no, Colins vague “no more in the near future” is NOT a guarantee of any sort), its more worth it to grind Legendaries for the stat increase than Ascended as they will never be outdated and are stat variable. Future-proofing the time spent farming something is more worth it IMO.

What people are too stupid to realise is that Ascended Items are not there to be obtained in a single day, neither the crafting is supposed to be leveled from 400 to 500 within 2 hours. I believe that these statements answer every question regarding the Ascended issue.

Atm you don’t need ascended equipment for any in game content…so not worth making…

BUT

Anet will start designing content that will require all ascended gear sooner or later…

Anet have only promised us no new tier in 2013 btw, they have said nothing about 2014/15. I am hoping they choose to go with new skills as future progression though, rather than new equipment, they have hinted at that for 2014.

Stefanos.1673:

What people are too stupid to realise is that Ascended Items are not there to be obtained in a single day, neither the crafting is supposed to be leveled from 400 to 500 within 2 hours. I believe that these statements answer every question regarding the Ascended issue.

Very true – I’m actually enjoying having something to work towards that takes a reasonable amount of time. Having said that, I have excess time on my hands at the moment and am already working on crafting my third weapon.

I personally don’t think they are as another tier could just be introduced which renders them effectively worthless.

Legendaries on the other hand are always guaranteed to have top stats. My advice? Wait for the precursor hunt to be implemented.

For general PvE not worth it unless you’re rich… or willing to wait for prices on things to drop. You should be able to finish CoF P1 nearly as fast with or without them for example.

For WvW/fractals yes it’s worth it.

Crafting the ascended item itself isn’t all that expensive. It’s the mats required to get to 500 crafting that are. So once you get to 500 it’s cake to start making the weapons for all your characters that can use them from that craft.

Not worth it to me.

As a thief, I use at least 5 weapons in almost every dungeon I run (dagger/dagger for most single target fights, pistol/pistol for boss fights that don’t favor melee, and short bow for AoE). Considering how much time and gold it costs to make 1 of these weapons, there’s no way I could get this with my current playtime if I want to do anything when I log in besides mindless gold farming.

The real question to me is whether it’s worth doing WvW against people that have gear advantages over me. Considering that this is one of the prime reasons I left WoW for GW2, it’s a lot harder to get motivated to play with this change. Bleh…

Stefanos.1673:

What people are too stupid to realise is that Ascended Items are not there to be obtained in a single day, neither the crafting is supposed to be leveled from 400 to 500 within 2 hours. I believe that these statements answer every question regarding the Ascended issue.

Gosh, thanks, Mr. Genius; that was so enlightening.

They aren’t worth it and look UGLY but im crafting one (won’t be making more) just because there’s nothing else to do

I have 5k gold on my account. I spent 150g getting to 500 weaponsmithing. I made that back literally the next day just playing normally.

I bought the mats I needed to craft because I can. I have since aquired the mats to craft another weapon on top of the one I already created. I have already made back what I spent making the first weapon by selling critical mats used. ( I haven’t sold the daily only materials or inscriptions though).

So basically if you know how to play the game, yes its worth it. Its a small stat increase, and a new design (which I like).

Should you rush to get it if you don’t have the gold already? No, just play the game. Do WvW, PVE or whatever it is you do and you will be able to afford the crafting cost to 500 without much difficulty. Alot of the required mats for the ascended weapons are also starting to drop in price. Inscriptions were around 200g… down to around 75g now, ingots and stuff were around 7g each now down to about 4g. So prices are leveling out as more and more of the mats become available and crafted.

And those who wait till the market is saturated, will not be paying as much to get to 500 as those that didn’t wait.

All in all you get 5 extra AR some stat boost. And your set on crafting if they release any more high level recipes in the future. So in my opinion ya its worth it.