Guild Wars 2

What if ascended weapons / armor / trinkets could have their stats changed at will like legendaries, except with like a 2 day time gate? (so if you invested the hundreds of gold in ascended gear, you could change up the stats every two days to keep things interesting)

My engineer wears yassith, my elementalist wears zojja, and my mesmer wears saphir, and it’s pretty pricey to change it up, so i rarely do. I’m also a casual WvW player which makes the gear thing a drag. Sometimes I feel like playing healing tempest for a while in WvW, and then a few days later I might want to switch back to Zerker for fractals, without spending that much gold to transform my equipment, or waste the inventory space to have multiple sets.

Idk, hardcore players with lots of legendaries might not approve, because it devalues the equipment tier, but I don’t think it would hurt the community to let us try out different WvW and PvE builds every few days to keep the gameplay fresh. As compensation legendary weapons could have modifiable sigils at will as well (and of course, changing stats would not be time gated)

I have 4 legendaries but I’ve always felt ascended gear should have the on-the-fly stat change too. Legendaries should only be a prestige/visual item, Not something that gives exclusive functionality, If ascended gear had the on-the-fly stat change it would make the game way more fun, being able to change you build whenever you want even mid raid.

+1 this, being only 5% more powerful than exotic but cost 5 or 10 times as much, changing stat once in a day or two will compensate this.

Alex Shatter.7956:

What if ascended weapons / armor / trinkets could have their stats changed at will like legendaries, except with like a 2 day time gate? (so if you invested the hundreds of gold in ascended gear, you could change up the stats every two days to keep things interesting)

My engineer wears yassith, my elementalist wears zojja, and my mesmer wears saphir, and it’s pretty pricey to change it up, so i rarely do. I’m also a casual WvW player which makes the gear thing a drag. Sometimes I feel like playing healing tempest for a while in WvW, and then a few days later I might want to switch back to Zerker for fractals, without spending that much gold to transform my equipment, or waste the inventory space to have multiple sets.

Idk, hardcore players with lots of legendaries might not approve, because it devalues the equipment tier, but I don’t think it would hurt the community to let us try out different WvW and PvE builds every few days to keep the gameplay fresh. As compensation legendary weapons could have modifiable sigils at will as well (and of course, changing stats would not be time gated)

On the contrary, I believe most hardcore players would welcome this change, then again let’s run your idea through multiple steps of what it ACTUALLY means:

- ascended items get to change stats every couple of days -> decline in requirement of ascended items -> direct impact on GW2 economy
- legendary users could care less, still superior to ascended. The 1% of players who own legendarys have enough ascended in general to already switch to what ever they need

Working off of these 2 points we can assume that there needs to be a fix in the defunct economic design of the game though, we can either expect arenanet to make ascended more expensive or introduce some other form of grind which fixes the loss in revenue etc. (material drain, gold drain etc.)

Now guess who will get most affected by those changes?

It’s not the hardcore players you need to worry about with this change, they will always get by or change games. It’s once again something that will make the casual player have to run through more hoops or invest more time and/or money.

tl;dr: Stop throwing ideas out without offering balancing design decisions.

I disagree, have 1 ascended blob-stat set is dull, picking an ascended set should be a careful decision which make it more engaging and interesting. What would help however is a build manager to instantly swap between builds and armor sets.

On the other side of the coin, a legendary should give more than just another skin, so its nice to award that effort with a little extra – long term this is what legendary armor will bring as well, in which case this ascended discussion is moot.

put it another way, why stop at ascended, this ability to swap stats could have a couple homes:

Legendary
Ascended
Exotic
Rare

Legendary makes obvious sense as the place to give the greatest flexibility since it is the most expensive by far to craft.