When you have 6 lv80’s, that means to get optimal gear on each, which involves an amulet that I can only get by laurels, it means it will take me 6 months to put an ascended amulet on each toon. It will take an extra month per amulet to buy the utility infusion for extra gold earned or MF. A third of a month for the karma one.
They said this game would not punish you for having alts, but it kittening does. My mesmer is lv27 fractal. If I get bored of doing fractals on my mesmer because, oh I have already completed 467 of them in order to get rings to drop and then infused rings (not everyone was like my guildie and got 5 rings in a week), I can’t freshen things up by using another class. I am stuck with that mesmer because I want to get to lv30 for a better chance at fractal weapons and rings. So, if I want to play on my guardian, I have to start from scratch with no weapon skins or ascended ring rewards for a while. If I want to play my ranger, the same. Engineer, same grind. My ele needs to climb from level 23 to 30, which isn’t fun with PuG’s. You see the trend. I’m kittening stuck on one class if I want the rewards I seek.
And that’s one month for ONE possible spec. Because if somehow on Feb or March they actually make mesmer scepter/staff confusion-condi build actually good in PvE or a support utility build useful, I need ANOTHER month to afford a pendant to support that. Now spread that in case condition builds become more viable in PvE for other classes, or you want a tanky set for wvw but a dps one for PvE dungeons, that’s a truckload of months just for an amulet and an infusion.
I kittening hate ascended gear because it creates a gate of entry. And the whole daily/monthly achievement is contrary to their old statement about people being able to not play and come back and pick up easily. Now you actually have to catch up, and that’s what turned me off WoW. Catching up on gear that was arbitrarily delayed by a dailies system to keep players tied to the game for stat sticks.
P.S. Just put in the kitten different stat amulets as explorable/fractal pristine token rewards. 1800 tokens for an amulet from a dungeon token vendor, so it’s effectively 10 days of full runs of an explorable. Place the popular stats on less popular dungeons to make them more attractive options, such as berserker amulets and pow/vit on Arah and Sorrow’s Embrace,, and Cleric gear in CoE. Make the amulet drop from lv26-30 daily on chance, and cost 15 pristine fractal relics. Then, introduce the costs for WvW badges. Just don’t kittening get in the way of me getting my own kitten items at a reasonable pace instead of being a dick and stretching out a process to half a year.
Another alternative could be to make ascended gear like the karka shell accessory — account bound and transferable across characters so you only have to grind for them once. Account bound but not soulbound on use.