Guild Wars 2

Does ascended gear make the crafting professions worthless for anything pre-level 80?

I’ve been researching Ascended gear a bit. There’s a surprising lack of clarity even though ANet has tried to explain it.

What I have found suggests that the current Ascended items are drops or can be “crafted” using the Mystic Forge. Nothing is crafted using the Crafting Professions (in this case Jewelcrafting).

Re: Ascended craftables?
I’ll note “nothing yet” and we’ve only seen rings and back pieces. One of which isn’t craftable at all (something I was a little perpleced by).

As for your question?

A: Not any more than the professions were of dubious usefulness depending on who you asked. I am actually decked out in handmade gear, mostly, but a lot of people consider it an unwelcome and unnecessary expense. In my opinion, crafting is useful primarily to fill gaps as you level up and can be useful once you have the skill and materials to do Exotic.

They’ve broken crafting entirely.

Not to make any part of the gear (which to my knowledge we can solely make the Infused runes at the moment not the gear itself). The mystic toilet will most likely be where they add the recipes to because heaven forbid we actually have a use of something that took so much work to max out to 400.

None of the crafting professions that people raced to get to 400 matter anymore.

To further disrupt crafting entirely even that of exotic gear, they severely reduced the drop rates of globs of ecto, rare items, and they still have yet to make the veterans and champions drop better loot. Add to this the severe bugs with magic find that makes mf as a buff completely useless in game and crafting might as well be removed from the title altogether.

It’s no exaggeration.

They are still useful for getting XP to quickly level up. I use them on alts to get a few levels when I’m near a breakpoint (e.g. level 40, 60)

Pretty much atm yup you cant craft Ascended gear.

Who’s knows when they will add that or how much it’ll cost same with WvW atm as you can only get it from one source, as others have said you’re pigeon holed into a certain dungeon if you want that gear

World is utterly dead after they introduced Ascend gear and the fotm. Orr looks like the risen has taken it over completly, none to group with all evening, everything is contested and all you see in LA chat is LFG Fractals (insert number). When they introduce a dungeon finder, it will be as lifeless as wow was. All you’ll see in chat are the trolls with an endless dirge + “something that we can’t say” spam.

And same goes for crafting, as a guy mentioned abovr, you can still get some use out of it for some xp, hardly seems worth doing anymore, tbh.

Feels more of a lobby game right now.

Shame.

Havnt they stated theyll add Ascended gear to other facets of the game? I would assume that includes crafting.

They did say Ascended gear would be available via WvWvW and PvE over time. We can infer/assume crafting would be included in the PvE statement.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

When Lord of the Rings Online introduced Legendary Weapons, it destroyed some crafting professions over night (like Weaponsmith). These became useless at level cap.

If that happens, only professions that craft consumables will be viable.