Guild Wars 2

Ashen.2907:

Rashagar.8349:

Justine.6351:

LinhZeri.6412:

lol I don’t even have a full set of ascended armor on any character I have and ive been playing since the start.

That’s just not possible unless you only farm queensdale and RP in Divinities reach.

It’s obviously possible.

Indeed. I still dont have a full set either.

i dont have a full set as well, what i have has been from wvw chest, and laurers.

my warrior has 3 ascended pieces and my guardian has 1 armor piece, and im out of mats for converting a amor piece to the stats i want :P

Crafting is another thing that Anet failed hard, reason they are doing this changes….

Pifil.5193:

Blaeys.3102:

Obviously I don’t have the numbers, but isn’t the raid vendor as big, if not bigger, source of new ascended gear than PvP or fractal vendors?

Makes you wonder why they limit this change to just those vendors.

Good question. Are they going to introduce this kind of change there too?

If they want to be consistent, they should. I doubt however that them not mentioning Raid in the list of the vendors affected by changes was an accidental omission.

Feersum Endjinn.4179:

I must be one of the only ones who agrees with ANet on this, it was far too cheap to get ascended from PVP. It is supposed to be difficult to get, it is not a requirement that you get it as you can run around with exotics all you want and still win. Those of us who have put the time and effort into crafting, spending up to 100G a piece for ascended gear only to see cheap kitten in PvP makes you wonder why you bother, but luckily they have now seen the error of their ways.

Not at all. I actually like this change too.

Fractal ascended vendor: crazy high gold prices, might as well just craft imo.
PvP ascended vendor: free ascended gear with some time commitment.

Not a fan of the second getting nerfed, but if it means the Fractal vendor will be worth actually considering now, it won’t be a completely bad change.

(This post was merged so that’s why it looks out of place)

“Hmm let’s give them alternate methods to get ascended gear without crafting. No wait better idea now make them all need crafting!”
Well no not a good idea.

Right now if you have 500 crafting you just blow over a hundred gold and 5 minutes later you get a piece of armor.
Meanwhile for fractal boxes you need to login on multiple days, play for at least an hour to get pages. Thus extending your games life.

Also the whole “ascended crafting is required for a healthy econemy” really is only looking at half of the equation. The demand, a forced increase in demand? Simple economics says that will drive prices up if a new source of materials is not implemented. I don’t see anet creating farms or mines to fulfill the demand.

Also who the kitten would use fractal boxes as a primary source to gear up a character? If you look at the time/money required it would be less expensive to level up a crafting discipline if you were aiming for a full suit. Fractal boxes are perfect for a secondary source.
Let’s pretend you only have heavy/light classes and want a bow for your warrior. It would not be viable money and time wise to level up the discipline to create ONE ITEM. But playing a kitten load of fractals to get that box would make more sense.

What Anet could implement if they really wanted to make crafting more important was to provide a second tab to the vendor where you got 50-60% off the integrated matrix and pages if you gave them a token. What is the logic of giving a vendor as an alternate method only to force crafting in order to purchase from the npc?

Also some people don’t craft but farm materials to sell on tp, this enables the people who enjoy crafting to buy the ingredients cheaply.
SOME PEOPLE DO NOT ENJOY CRAFTING BUT DO NOT WANT TO BE EXCLUDED FROM ENDGAME CONTENT. Play the way you want just went out the window.

If you wanted to prevent everyone running around with asc gear add a huge price tag to PvP gear to make it in line with the cost of fractal gear.
Also am I the only one who noticed raids were not mentioned in the post? It specifically says at the beginning pvp and fractals.
Do raid players get a free pass? Or simply neglected in the post? Oh wait open world too? You can get asc gear from vendors in ember bay for example.. will they need a jeweler token?

(DISCLAIMER)
I love the game but this is such a failure of logic that I had to point it out.

(FINAL WORD)
Also could we get numbers on people who used fractal boxes as a primary gear source to fully gear chraracters?
PvP gear was so cheap that Anet brought it on themselves. I know many people used last season to get ridiculously cheap asc gear.
Forcing crafting is a bad idea.

Is it certain that you need to craft the required token yourself? If you can purchase the token form the black lion you could still not craft while giving back some value to T6 mats.

From the wording used in the original post they kept saying about “You” having the “training/funds” so it sounds like it will be account bound.

shows a player’s mastery of the appropriate crafting discipline

I don’t see how it would show that if it could be traded.

I do hope that it will be tradeable even if it doesn’t affect me and allowing it to be traded will still satisfy

Ascended crafting is vital to sustaining a healthy economy and it is important that we keep that in place even when a player acquires ascended items via a vendor.

but won’t end up forcing everyone to craft. On the other hand that will result in more gold floating around in the economy since less of it is being destroyed via the NPCs.

Khisanth.2948:

shows a player’s mastery of the appropriate crafting discipline

I don’t see how it would show that if it could be traded.

I do hope that it will be tradeable even if it doesn’t affect me and allowing it to be traded will still satisfy

Ascended crafting is vital to sustaining a healthy economy and it is important that we keep that in place even when a player acquires ascended items via a vendor.

but won’t end up forcing everyone to craft. On the other hand that will result in more gold floating around in the economy since less of it is being destroyed via the NPCs.

Well… it doesn’t really make sense for them to word it that way if you could sell it. It could be (fingers crossed) and I’m sure that the gold being destroyed is smaller than the gold generated by the mats /enemies killed.

At this point it mostly speculation and this post was mostly aimed at devs (if they bother to pay attention to someone on the forum)
And kinda warn them what not to do.

Hi! Although I’m quite as much concerned about this as you are, I ask you to atleast wait ‘till the update is out to see how it’s doing.

Btw: I can assure you that people won’t be able to sell these boxes to other players. That would just totally destroy the economy, because there are plenty of players out there(inculding me) who only main 1-3 classes and have more than enough boxes laying around on their bank.

Kapy.9387:

Hi! Although I’m quite as much concerned about this as you are, I ask you to atleast wait ‘till the update is out to see how it’s doing.

Well this does assume a few things off the wording of the post so sorry but that and it’s more of a complaint and speculation of what they said it could actually be not that bad if they look at this and similar posts. Or it could be very bad if they try and push crafting as the sole way of gaining the gear.
As I posted originally this is mostly about the fact not everyone likes crafting but basically everyone I know wants ascended gear for fractal/raids etc. And it really peeved me mostly about the fact it’s not a adjustment to pvp gear but the other kind as well. Itso the max crafting line near the bottom of the devs post that made me upset.

(And asc gear would probably never be made tradable as that would blow up the tp)

Selling ascended boxes would ruin the economy even more so than a worst case scenario of this patch.

Jack Angelfoot.2697:

[…]But mostly the Ascended Tokens were wonderful, not because they were ridiculously cheap, which admittedly they were, but because it was an opportunity to acquire Ascended items without grinding my crafting up to 500 and then having to daily remember to slog through crafting enough material to make something.

Perhaps ascended gear is not an appropriate reward for people who are as casual as me. I have only put 4,067 hours into this game and ascended armor seems to be something for more serious people[…]

I have played 5,980 hours.

I have 9 characters that are complete ascended (gear, trinkets, weapons) – though only 1 has ascended trident + aqua breather and 2 still have exotic back pieces.

Of 10 ascended armor sets (one char has 2) I crafted 2. Of 32 ascended weapons I crafted around 5-10.

The rest – ca. 48 pieces of gear and 20+ weapons were drops. Heck, even many of the trinkets I use were drops from fractals or achievements, or bought from raids.

Added to that is another set of ascended armor and some more trinkets I salvaged + 5 armor boxes & 2 weapon boxes currently on my bank + 1,200 ascended shards of glory (equal to 5 more gear pieces).

So I got ca. 60 ascended gear pieces + 25 weapons without crafting.

Yes, I play fractals regularly. But heck, my drop rate isn’t even good. I know people who have characters whose inventories are overflowing with ascended boxes and they played a little less fractals than me.

Don’t get me wrong, if a new players makes the case that getting ascended armor is too expensive for them because they have craft it I wholeheartedly agree. Because it is expensive if you are starting the game and have neither gold nor are you doing/able to do anything that gives good ascended rewards (higher level fractals, raids).

But if you say you’ve played 4000k+ hours of this game and have problems getting ascended gear I’ll really have to ask you how much of that time was spent afking.

Ashamir.9574:

But if you say you’ve played 4000k+ hours of this game and have problems getting ascended gear I’ll really have to ask you how much of that time was spent afking.

If those hours of yours were to be spent doing things other than fractals (say… WvW?), then you’d have much, much less ascended gear now.

I also have quite a number of drop boxes i used to gear up my characters. Almost all of them were from fractals. There were few weapons i got from pvp, wvw and Teq, but, for example, all armor pieces as far as i remember were fractal rewards.

If i weren’t doing fractals, i’d have needed to craft every single one of them – and at the moment, crafting is prohibitely expensive.

This is the announcement regarding the change – and my comments:

Greetings Tyrians!

With the next release we will be making some changes to ascended vending in PvP and Fractals. Over the past year we introduced ways to obtain ascended gear via participation in either game mode thus allowing players to acquire gear by playing the game mode they chose.

It seems that this model allowing the players to acquire gear by playing the game mode they chose was wrong. Why ? Because:

With the next release we are making two significant changes to these vendors to create one system that functions the same regardless of game mode.

Hm? What about differentiating the game modes? With a first modest step – awaited by every player – balancing the skills according to the game mode?

First, each game mode will still use a specific currency unique to that mode as part of the price but the rest of the costs associated with purchasing the gear will be the same across the game modes.

This can be something. But is this change made for the good of the players? Look at what they wrote:

Having a unified system for acquiring ascended gear via vendors will give us more flexibility for adjustments, if they are needed, and it will give us the flexibility to potentially introduce this system in other game modes where appropriate.

What this system gives to the players? …. what you said? A finger? …..

Second, purchasing the ascended gear will now rely much more on player crafting. The cost for a piece of gear will now include a crafted token which shows a player’s mastery of the appropriate crafting discipline, the game mode specific currency, and raw gold.

To craft an ascendant piece right now you need the appropriate crafting discipline and raw gold. It seems that by adding the game mode specific currency Anet greatly simplified the requirements. And by requiring a max crafting level they absolutely made buying the ascendants the only variant :-)))

Ascended crafting is vital to sustaining a healthy economy ……

I want to correct this affirmation a little bit. CRAFTING is vital to sustain a healthy economy. But if we look at the actual state of the crafting, when buying an insignia is cheaper than to craft no wonder that this way of forcing the leveling of crafting was chosen.

I will not continue. But we should not overlook the reward for this change:

For PvP, this will add a considerable cost to the acquisition of ascended gear.
Ascended vending is not intended to be the optimal path for acquiring ascended gear, but rather a way for players to acquire the gear through time spent playing their preferred game mode.

Well, if you are a PvP player …. this is perfect for you. Now you can proudly show your ascendant gear at the same price with the gear crafted. And you will be now able to craft something also. Well, to be able to craft you should first play another game mode, but you will survive.

Astralporing.1957:

If those hours of yours were to be spent doing things other than fractals (say… WvW?), then you’d have much, much less ascended gear now.

I also have quite a number of drop boxes i used to gear up my characters. Almost all of them were from fractals. There were few weapons i got from pvp, wvw and Teq, but, for example, all armor pieces as far as i remember were fractal rewards.

If i weren’t doing fractals, i’d have needed to craft every single one of them – and at the moment, crafting is prohibitely expensive.

I’m not a WvW main player, but I have rank 1050 (or something), so yes, I played WvW. I took part in every PvP season. I have 7 map completions, and 9 more for the HoT maps. So let me assure you, most of my time in Gw2 was definitely not spent in fractals.

I dropped the second most ascended boxes from PvP actually, both weapons and armor. Also some stuff from Tequatl and a few boxes from WvW level chests.

Of course the most drops always come from fractals, but the drop rates especially for PvP or Tequatl/Wurm aren’t that bad from what I personally experienced. I don’t know if I have a vastly different drop rate from most other people, but since I generally don’t drop much good stuff (I still have that dream of dropping a pre once) I just can’t imagine it being that bad.

maddoctor.2738:

For science!

The cost of a full Zojja’s armor set from the different acquisition methods is as follows:

Crafting:
421 gold (plus 51 gold to get Tailor to 500)

Fractals vendor:
354 Gold
202 Integrated Fractal Matrix (about 659 Gold with current prices)
132 Fractal Research Pages

PVP vendor:
1300 Ascended Shards of Glory
800 Shards of Glory (4 Gold 80 Silver with current prices)

Raid Vendor:
1300 Magnetite Shards
47 Gold 50 Silver

Hmmm… given these figures I can see why they need to adjust this.

If they want crafting to be the guideline price then obtaining ascended equipment from both PvP and Raid is far, far too cheap, from Fractals it’s far too expensive. Seeing as how Fractals and Raids are their hardcore end-game content they should be the same and both should be moderately cheaper than crafting, IMO.

From digging around it’s obvious that they took the prices from raids changed Magnetite Shard to Ascended Shards of Glory replaced the gold cost with Shards of Glory and called it a day. Hasty stuff.

I dont understand why people are going on and on about wvw.
Wvw doesn’t have a vendor at this point so nothing is taken from you. Instead they talked about this adding the option to add a asc vendor to other game modes in the future. That means wvw MAY actually get one due to these changes at some poiint.

Maybe im missing something obvious? If so, please explain.

SkullProX.7083:

Don’t cry, it was way too easy before, and other games have an ENORMOUS gear grind, even 70-80g /asc piece is NOTHING for an end game gear compared to other games…

Just because something could be worse does not mean that it should go unquestioned.

Blaeys.3102:

Obviously I don’t have the numbers, but isn’t the raid vendor as big, if not bigger, source of new ascended gear than PvP or fractal vendors?

Makes you wonder why they limit this change to just those vendors.

I can understand this. If you can get the shards from raiding, you’re either in Ascended gear yourself already, or you’re good enough that you’re collecting those shards despite NOT having Ascended gear. It’s probably reasonable for ArenNet to assume that anybody getting Ascended from raids already has BiS gear for at least one build, and they’re using it to gear an alt or a new build. And it’s probably reasonably fair for that to be cheaper.

Mind you, similar observations apply for high-level fractals… even more so, in fact, given agony.

Neve.3145:

I dont understand why people are going on and on about wvw.
Wvw doesn’t have a vendor at this point so nothing is taken from you. Instead they talked about this adding the option to add a asc vendor to other game modes in the future. That means wvw MAY actually get one due to these changes at some poiint.

Maybe im missing something obvious? If so, please explain.

The WvW players want some way of getting ascended armour in WvW too. They’ve been asking for one for ages.

It’s important to note that these changes are not actually required before an ascended vendor could be added to WvW. They added ascended vendors to fractals, raids and sPvP without making these changes – you can argue whether that that was good or bad but the fact remains that they have been added to those modes already – they just have not added one to WvW yet.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mistforged_Hero's_weapons

They’d be a great set of skins for Ascended weapons.

draxynnic.3719:

SkullProX.7083:

Don’t cry, it was way too easy before, and other games have an ENORMOUS gear grind, even 70-80g /asc piece is NOTHING for an end game gear compared to other games…

Just because something could be worse does not mean that it should go unquestioned.

Oh my god it’s like tvtropes but for arguments.

Quickly close the tab before I lose weeks, and my soul, to it.

draxynnic.3719:

Blaeys.3102:

Obviously I don’t have the numbers, but isn’t the raid vendor as big, if not bigger, source of new ascended gear than PvP or fractal vendors?

Makes you wonder why they limit this change to just those vendors.

I can understand this. If you can get the shards from raiding, you’re either in Ascended gear yourself already, or you’re good enough that you’re collecting those shards despite NOT having Ascended gear. It’s probably reasonable for ArenNet to assume that anybody getting Ascended from raids already has BiS gear for at least one build, and they’re using it to gear an alt or a new build. And it’s probably reasonably fair for that to be cheaper.

Mind you, similar observations apply for high-level fractals… even more so, in fact, given agony.

Exactly. There’s no reason whatsoever why raids should be treated differently than fractals in this regard.

Pifil.5193:

Neve.3145:

I dont understand why people are going on and on about wvw.
Wvw doesn’t have a vendor at this point so nothing is taken from you. Instead they talked about this adding the option to add a asc vendor to other game modes in the future. That means wvw MAY actually get one due to these changes at some poiint.

Maybe im missing something obvious? If so, please explain.

The WvW players want some way of getting ascended armour in WvW too. They’ve been asking for one for ages.

It’s important to note that these changes are not actually required before an ascended vendor could be added to WvW. They added ascended vendors to fractals, raids and sPvP without making these changes – you can argue whether that that was good or bad but the fact remains that they have been added to those modes already – they just have not added one to WvW yet.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mistforged_Hero's_weapons

They’d be a great set of skins for Ascended weapons.

I totally understand why a ascended Vendor for WVW is wanted but i see literally no chance for Anet adding one for just Badges of Honor or BoH and gold – everyone and their mothers has plenty of those.
The changes they are making now make chances for an ascended vendor in wvw more realistic imo. That or they would need to use a other wvw related currency alltogether.

Neve.3145:

Pifil.5193:

Neve.3145:

I dont understand why people are going on and on about wvw.
Wvw doesn’t have a vendor at this point so nothing is taken from you. Instead they talked about this adding the option to add a asc vendor to other game modes in the future. That means wvw MAY actually get one due to these changes at some poiint.

Maybe im missing something obvious? If so, please explain.

The WvW players want some way of getting ascended armour in WvW too. They’ve been asking for one for ages.

It’s important to note that these changes are not actually required before an ascended vendor could be added to WvW. They added ascended vendors to fractals, raids and sPvP without making these changes – you can argue whether that that was good or bad but the fact remains that they have been added to those modes already – they just have not added one to WvW yet.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mistforged_Hero's_weapons

They’d be a great set of skins for Ascended weapons.

I totally understand why a ascended Vendor for WVW is wanted but i see literally no chance for Anet adding one for just Badges of Honor or BoH and gold – everyone and their mothers has plenty of those.
The changes they are making now make chances for an ascended vendor in wvw more realistic imo. That or they would need to use a other wvw related currency alltogether.

Well they could use Proofs of Heroics instead of Badges of Honor as a currency.

Pifil.5193:

maddoctor.2738:

For science!

The cost of a full Zojja’s armor set from the different acquisition methods is as follows:

Crafting:
421 gold (plus 51 gold to get Tailor to 500)

Fractals vendor:
354 Gold
202 Integrated Fractal Matrix (about 659 Gold with current prices)
132 Fractal Research Pages

PVP vendor:
1300 Ascended Shards of Glory
800 Shards of Glory (4 Gold 80 Silver with current prices)

Raid Vendor:
1300 Magnetite Shards
47 Gold 50 Silver

Hmmm… given these figures I can see why they need to adjust this.

If they want crafting to be the guideline price then obtaining ascended equipment from both PvP and Raid is far, far too cheap, from Fractals it’s far too expensive. Seeing as how Fractals and Raids are their hardcore end-game content they should be the same and both should be moderately cheaper than crafting, IMO.

From digging around it’s obvious that they took the prices from raids changed Magnetite Shard to Ascended Shards of Glory replaced the gold cost with Shards of Glory and called it a day. Hasty stuff.

You can figure out the value of the Magnetite Shards using Ghostly Infusions, and their value is ~19 silver. About 247 gold in value that you “lose” when you buy a full Ascended armor set instead of turning it into gold, for a total of 294 gold and 50 silver. As for time, there is a weekly cap of 150 Shards, which means you will get your armor in 9 weeks (excluding miniature drops) or 63 days.

On the other hand, in Fractals you need 132 Research Pages, you can get 3 per day, so 44 days to get the full armor set from Fractals.

You can get a maximum of 1200 Ascended Shards of Glory per season. You get 150 from the first tier. To get 1200 you need to acquire 670 pips and then another 60 on the next season for a grand total of 730 pips. You get 10 pips for a win, 3 for a loss, 1 for each top stat, +2 extra if you are at platinum tier and +4 if you are at Legendary tier.

You need to remember that by the time you get enough shards to buy the full set you will also have loads of extra rewards, which depend on how many times you repeat the last track (it’s repeatable)
That includes:
~89 liquid gold, 45 unidentified dyes (50 silver each) for a grand total of 111 gold and 50 silver. More than enough for your last piece (full set requires 421 if you craft it).

As for this part:

Seeing as how Fractals and Raids are their hardcore end-game content they should be the same and both should be moderately cheaper than crafting, IMO.

If a vendor is cheaper than crafting then what’s the point of crafting?

Neve.3145:

I totally understand why a ascended Vendor for WVW is wanted but i see literally no chance for Anet adding one for just Badges of Honor or BoH and gold – everyone and their mothers has plenty of those.
The changes they are making now make chances for an ascended vendor in wvw more realistic imo. That or they would need to use a other wvw related currency alltogether.

I didn’t suggest they would or should add one for Badges of Honor. I’m certain that they will eventually introduce another WvW currency specifically for Ascended equipment and it will be time gated like Magnetite Shards (weekly) or Ascended Shards of Glory (on a season by season basis). Badges of Honor may also be required but they will be a secondary currency.

I will just repost what I think is the biggest drawback of this update.
People who want a one off weapon.
I’ll give an example: Someone who wants a weapon from a discipline they would never use again. Now instead of paying an extra amount of gold for that weapon they will now have to level a discipline for one item. That will cost them an excessive amount more than the item they wanted is worth.

Neve.3145:

I totally understand why a ascended Vendor for WVW is wanted but i see literally no chance for Anet adding one for just Badges of Honor or BoH and gold – everyone and their mothers has plenty of those.

The changes they are making now make chances for an ascended vendor in wvw more realistic imo. That or they would need to use a other wvw related currency alltogether.

Badge of honor is pretty much viewed as karma, a useless currency for old stuff. I don’t know why people who object to having an ascended vendor in wvw automatically thinks it has to be badged of honor to purchase it. I certainly wouldn’t use badges in the pricing since lots of players have farmed that for 4 years and barely spent it on anything other than siege blueprints. There are more recent wvw currencies to use or introduce a new for that to start fresh, as long as the cost and time is on par with the other sections it’s fine.

As to why an ascended vendor is wanted? Wvw operates under pve rules, ascended is wanted for the same reason it’s wanted in fractals and raids, it’s the best gear to obtain. But every other section (fractal raids spvp) is now allowed to earn the gear just by playing in their section and collecting the currency there, with the change everyone will also require crafting, and that’s fine. I personally don’t think it’s fair that even the section that doesn’t require ascended gets access to a vendor over wvw.

maddoctor.2738:

As for this part:

Seeing as how Fractals and Raids are their hardcore end-game content they should be the same and both should be moderately cheaper than crafting, IMO.

If a vendor is cheaper than crafting then what’s the point of crafting?

Well, crafting will also be required for these vendors so the vendor should be moderately cheaper than pure crafting as a reward or incentive for doing the content. At least that’s their plan for Fractals and sPvP as I understand it.

They certainly shouldn’t cost more than crafting and if they cost the same then what’s the point in offering any kind of Ascended currencies for doing Fractals and sPvP?

maddoctor.2738:

If a vendor is cheaper than crafting then what’s the point of crafting?

Ability to get it faster, without any need to play additional content for it, and with ability to skip time limits using gold.

Astralporing.1957:

Ability to get it faster, without any need to play additional content for it, and with ability to skip time limits using gold.

Because there are no time limits in crafting.

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

Ability to get it faster, without any need to play additional content for it, and with ability to skip time limits using gold.

Because there are no time limits in crafting.

There are, but, as i have mentioned, they can be skipped by using gold. Timegates in other content cannot be skipped at all.

At this point we might as well just ~15 hours for the patch to drop and see what the changes entail. I’m excited at the prospect of ascended gear from the fractal vendor becoming cheaper than it currently is, because I would rather not waste time gathering thousands of T5 leather to craft a single piece of ascended armor I want, and then repeat for the rest of the set.

Getting ascended gear is cancer enough if you arent a uber farmer
And Anet want to make it so its even more hard / cancer to get.

Smart indeed…

And what about wvwvw players ? that doesnt pvp, not run fractal ?

ardhikaizecson.3697:

this changes is pretty much needed, if anet let how people purchase ascended gear on pvp any longer, ascended is pretty much become the “new exotic”, is not for exclusivity purpose but for the equality that non-pvp players do spend way more money and time to make their ascended gears while in pvp, with minimal effort people can acquire ascended gears and 100++ transmutation charges.

If you average the amount of time a season takes, plus the offseason, PvP is the longest method to get ascended.

Raids are actually the lowest investment ascended both in calendar time and in gametime.

Original Post FWIW: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Ascended-Vending-Changes

Ascended armor should be a little tough to get and legendary should be harder still.

I was a bit miffed to hear people bragging how easy it was to get ascended gear in fractals and in PVP after I spent a lot of time getting my mind wrapped around getting the resources I needed to craft mine. You will need to study the game and do some boring things. Same with any valuable endeavor.

I’ve only played 2900 hours, but managed to become fairly well funded. It wasn’t from the AB multi-loot or fractal 40, it was from playing the game and working to get what I needed. Dungeons, Fractals and WvW. (Alas, still rank 7 PVP) No gems.

Crinn.7864:

If you average the amount of time a season takes, plus the offseason, PvP is the longest method to get ascended.

Raids are actually the lowest investment ascended both in calendar time and in gametime.

This is false.
Raids are by far the slowest of all Ascended acquisition methods. You need about 63 days to get a complete armor set, that’s not including miniature drops, but also assumes reaching the cap of 150 Magnetite Shards every week for 9 weeks. How many players are reaching that cap every week I wonder, weren’t raids a minority activity?

Fractals require 44 days at best, for the Research Pages. Running the daily recommended Fractals is for everyone, really easy and quick. Maybe you could remove the T3 recommended due to the AR investment, that leaves us with 66 days of farming.

You can’t say that it takes longer to do 14 Fractals a week (2 per day) than getting 150 Magnetite Shards a week…

As for PVP, it’s actually by far the fastest. Why count off-season? By the time you get your easy Ascended Shards you will have ~120 gold extra from the other rewards, more than enough to get the last piece you’ll need. And since there is absolutely no daily or weekly cap on Ascended Shards you can pretty much cap it in a couple of days of dedicated farming.

PVP is the fastest and most effortless method of acquiring Ascended and that’s why they are changing it.

In addition, you cannot get Ascended through Raids if you do not own Heart of Thorns, while PVP and Fractals are available to people without Heart of Thorns.

maddoctor.2738:

You can’t say that it takes longer to do 14 Fractals a week (2 per day) than getting 150 Magnetite Shards a week…

Oh, i don’t know. You need to do 3 wings once. How long is that going to take for experienced group? (and that assumes no miniature drops you can sell for shards, for example)

maddoctor.2738:

As for PVP, it’s actually by far the fastest. Why count off-season? By the time you get your easy Ascended Shards you will have ~120 gold extra from the other rewards, more than enough to get the last piece you’ll need. And since there is absolutely no daily or weekly cap on Ascended Shards you can pretty much cap it in a couple of days of dedicated farming.

First, there’s a world of difference between wanting just few pieces, or more. If you want two sets, for example, pvp is the slowest option by a wide margin. If you want weapons on top of that, it gets slower even further. Second, i’m not so sure that fractal time investment is actually longer than pvp one. Even if you were to win every single fight, because if you are going to do it by “afking in a corner” (as the easy way you mentioned), it’s going to definitely take much longer.

maddoctor.2738:

PVP is the fastest and most effortless method of acquiring Ascended and that’s why they are changing it.

It’s not fastest, and it’s rarely effortless, unless you want to spend even more time on it.

maddoctor.2738:

In addition, you cannot get Ascended through Raids if you do not own Heart of Thorns, while PVP and Fractals are available to people without Heart of Thorns.

You need masteries to get most of the fractal dailies (and a reasonable level of rewards). You need elite specs if you want to be competitive in pvp.
(not sure which fractal vendors are HoT-limited now, after they redone the second island)

Astralporing.1957:

Oh, i don’t know. You need to do 3 wings once. How long is that going to take for experienced group? (and that assumes no miniature drops you can sell for shards, for example)

An experienced group can do T1/T2 fractals in less than 5 minutes. That’s 70 minutes to run the 14 Fractals you’d need in a week. 3 wings = 9 bosses. Then it depends on the boss and the group how long it will take, I’ll say more than 70 minutes though. And that’s ignoring that a competent group will also run T3 Fractals, which means they’ll get the armor in 44 days instead of 63 days, that’s much sooner. How many miniatures do you think you get per run to account for those extra 19 days?

First, there’s a world of difference between wanting just few pieces, or more. If you want two sets, for example, pvp is the slowest option by a wide margin.

No it’s not. It’s still the fastest because you need a couple of days to max the cap from pvp. A couple of days every 5 months is a steal compared to 9 weeks of Raid running or 44 days of Fractal running. Thank god that the pvp season isn’t always active and thank god they are changing it.

Even if you were to win every single fight

Since you compare it to competent Raiders, I’d say that a competent (legendary or at least platinum tier) PVP player will get his rewards in a single weekend. You need 670 pips to get to the pvp reward cap, you get 10 per win, 3 per loss, +1 for every top stat, +2 for every game in Platinum and +4 for every game in Legendary. An experienced pvp player can get up to 18 points per game. That’s 37 games of ~8 minutes each.

PIt’s not fastest, and it’s rarely effortless, unless you want to spend even more time on it.

It’s both the fastest and effortless method of acquiring Ascended items by FAR.

You need masteries to get most of the fractal dailies (and a reasonable level of rewards). You need elite specs if you want to be competitive in pvp.
(not sure which fractal vendors are HoT-limited now, after they redone the second island)

The mastery gives you one fractal daily, the other two are always available. For the Ascended rewards the mastery plays very little (if at all) role.
You don’t need elite specs to win in PVP, in fact if you stay at low Bronze (easy if you alternate win-lose) you can get your pvp rewards without the need to have any of those.

I read some comments and I was like… what’s the point of making fun on those who have only 1 Ascended armor sets in entire account

Some people (including me) don’t have time to sit in front of computer and farm > 12 hrs a day like you guys, college students or youtubers…

To add some realistic numbers to the spvp time investment, it took me ~85 matches to max out the ascended shards, with a slightly higher than 50/50 win/loss ratio in silver (started in bronze3, ended in silver3). (Not including having to grind my way up the first 20 ranks to unlock it, which took a good while but is only a one time time investment.) Probably averaged 4 games an hour (between breaks, matchmaking queue times and a good proportion of close matches).

Just saying cos 18 points every 8 minutes would get you rightfully laughed out of the science lab, with much talks of spherical chickens in vacuums, if you were to suggest it as unbiased data.

Rashagar.8349:

Just saying cos 18 points every 8 minutes would get you rightfully laughed out of the science lab, with much talks of spherical chickens in vacuums, if you were to suggest it as unbiased data.

I know but someone was asking about experienced raiders who can clean 3 of the wings for the 150 Magnetite Shards to compare it with pvp/fractal clear time.
So I took a very experienced pvp player who is at Legendary who can very well get 18 pips every 8 minutes (of game time).
Now if you are to include queues then I guess we can also count the average “queue” time to find a Raid group to do your runs (it’s nothing like pvp queue time)
And if you want to actually include that 20 rank farm, you’d need to include the time and effort required to reach a level that allows someone to Raid (it takes a rather long time btw)

I gave data based on what was said earlier, there was nothing about what an average player can do (Silver is average in PVP), it’s good not to take comments out of context in a discussion.

maddoctor.2738:

Rashagar.8349:

Just saying cos 18 points every 8 minutes would get you rightfully laughed out of the science lab, with much talks of spherical chickens in vacuums, if you were to suggest it as unbiased data.

I know but someone was asking about experienced raiders who can clean 3 of the wings for the 150 Magnetite Shards to compare it with pvp/fractal clear time.
So I took a very experienced pvp player who is at Legendary who can very well get 18 pips every 8 minutes (of game time).
Now if you are to include queues then I guess we can also count the average “queue” time to find a Raid group to do your runs (it’s nothing like pvp queue time)
And if you want to actually include that 20 rank farm, you’d need to include the time and effort required to reach a level that allows someone to Raid (it takes a rather long time btw)

I gave data based on what was said earlier, there was nothing about what an average player can do (Silver is average in PVP), it’s good not to take comments out of context in a discussion.

I followed the whole discussion, and felt that your comments were too much “trying to prove a point” and not enough objectivity in the data, that’s all.

Your comments here about raid “queue” times and “time spent getting to a raidable position” smack of it too. What’s funny is that the point would still be made quite acceptably if you were using realistic figures and undistorted arguments.

Edit, to clarify, you call my post out for “taking your comments out of context” when what I’m trying to do is highlight one particularly egregious argument distortion where you equate an “experienced raid player” (realistically, someone who’s played it a few times and is now familiar with the mechanics) and compare to a fictitious scenario of a “pvp player in legendary division who never loses”. You’re making a false equivalency between experienced and skilled. And you really didn’t need to try equate it to an absurdity to validate your point.

Rashagar.8349:

I followed the whole discussion, and felt that your comments were too much “trying to prove a point” and not enough objectivity in the data, that’s all.

Well there is no way to gather “objective data” on the subject and anyway all these “data” will only last for a few more hours.

I will make a comparison between before and after patch to see the difference. Let’s see what the changes are all about before raging.

As someone who just returned to the game after a long absence, and just about to gear up… This is awful news. xD

At least I got two full sets of Ascended trinkets from laurels. I hated having to run around the world gathering mats just to level Weaponsmithing to 400. I honestly can’t see myself doing the same with tailoring and artifice.

maddoctor.2738:

Rashagar.8349:

I followed the whole discussion, and felt that your comments were too much “trying to prove a point” and not enough objectivity in the data, that’s all.

Well there is no way to gather “objective data” on the subject and anyway all these “data” will only last for a few more hours.

I will make a comparison between before and after patch to see the difference. Let’s see what the changes are all about before raging.

Haha! I agree there’s no point in raging but in case the tone of my posts has been misconstrued, the only feeling on my end is tiredness. =P

Rashagar.8349:

maddoctor.2738:

Rashagar.8349:

I followed the whole discussion, and felt that your comments were too much “trying to prove a point” and not enough objectivity in the data, that’s all.

Well there is no way to gather “objective data” on the subject and anyway all these “data” will only last for a few more hours.

I will make a comparison between before and after patch to see the difference. Let’s see what the changes are all about before raging.

Haha! I agree there’s no point in raging but in case the tone of my posts has been misconstrued, the only feeling on my end is tiredness. =P

As an impartial third party I saw no “rage” in your posts.

Pifil.5193:

Rashagar.8349:

maddoctor.2738:

Rashagar.8349:

I followed the whole discussion, and felt that your comments were too much “trying to prove a point” and not enough objectivity in the data, that’s all.

Well there is no way to gather “objective data” on the subject and anyway all these “data” will only last for a few more hours.

I will make a comparison between before and after patch to see the difference. Let’s see what the changes are all about before raging.

Haha! I agree there’s no point in raging but in case the tone of my posts has been misconstrued, the only feeling on my end is tiredness. =P

As an impartial third party I saw no “rage” in your posts.

I didn’t mean he was raging, the second paragraph was aimed at everyone!

I am quite upset with the changes to fractal vendors for ascended weapons and armor.

Crafting is dull and annoying to me. I’ve dabbled with it but quickly grew bored and resorted to using gw2crafts.net to get through it as fast as possible. Grinding huntsman and leatherworking to 500 today only reaffirmed this.

Fractal vendors were a nice alternative for people like me who strongly dislike crafting and want nothing to do with it, and are happy to sell crafting materials on the trading post, using that gold to buy “expensive” ascended equipment for fractals and raids without requiring a joyless grind.

Random ascended chests drops will have to suffice for me now. If those go away, too, then so will my interest in ascended gear.

The wvw red headed child continues to stare into the corner, a single tear runs down their cheek, while it’s siblings squabble over who can get ascended the fastest.