Guild Wars 2

I think making ascended gear account bound was a great idea. But it left cultural armour in a weird place.

I totally get that the cultural armour is meant to be race specific ankitten ot suggesting changing it. But in its present state it makes cultural armour much less appealing for ascended gear because you can only share it with other characters of that race.

I see two simple and fair ways this could be fixed.

1) Make cultural armours ‘transferable’. Eg. if you apply a T2 Asura skin to a piece of armour and you also own the T2 Norn equivalent, then your Norn characters could wear it and it would display the Norn skin. It would be unwearable for races you don’t own their equivalents for.

2) Assuming the player has any outfits, allow account bound armour to be worn under them by any race. Mechanically, it could work like this. If you’re not wearing an outfit (outfit selected and its checkbox ticked) then you can’t wear other-race cultural armour (i.e. as it is now). If you are wearing an outfit then you can equip other-race cultural armour AND the option to untick outfits is disabled. You can still change outfits but the option to untick outfit display remains disabled while you’re wearing any other-race cultural armour.

EDIT – Thanks to Electro for pointing out that cultural weapons aren’t race bound. I hope I didn’t cause any confusion.

Problem is that there is a highly sought-after and expensive achievement for unlocking all the cultural armor skins individually, so… yeah…

Cultural weapons are 100% free to use by any character anyway. You can even buy them on characters of other races. So this suggestion should be only about armor.

As far as your 2 suggestions go, #1 is nice, but it seems like it would be a logistical and programming nightmare to implement. Having the system check the wardrobe for matching armor of other types, apply them automatically, it just seems like it would be extremely complex.

The second suggestion is probably the much more reasonable one, since outfits and armors are already separate things and outfits can already hide armor as it is. It does leave out anyone who really wants to mix and match with armor and not be tied to outfits, but its better than the current situation with cultural ascended gear at least.

I’ve never understood why they have never promoted it (T3) to Exotic with selectable stats….it sure costs enough. Other than the skin (and AP / Titles), it is totally useless (yeah, I know this thread is about the racial exclusiveness of the skins).

The OP must understand that the armor skins only EXIST for those races and for Anet to allow other races to wear it, they would have to actually do the graphics and animation work for the other 4 races (quite a lot of work, despite what you may think). This is why you can’t preview them with other races.

Not saying revamping them is totally horrible idea, but it would require quite a bit of artist and Dev work and that work would take away from whatever they are currently working on (like HoT expansion or new armors, etc.).

Actually it wouldn’t be a nightmare to program, at least for my thought on how to do it. A lot of if statements is the basics of that it would seem.
I thought of this the other day, i want to use cultural armor but am stuck with exotics lol.

@Electro Thanks I didn’t realise that about the weapon skins. I’ll edit that correction in.

Re comments about difficulty of programming – no I don’t think so. For suggestion 1 they could:

a) Modify the existing code which checks for racial armour and marks it as unwearable for other races. Would just need the addition of a check to see if the player owns the matching skin for their current race. Simple.

b) As far as rendering goes they could either change the database value to the current race’s armour ID when performing the check in a) (potentially wasteful) or manage that entirely client side. Create a generic racial armour ID and apply that to armours. Player race is obviously already communicated to clients. The client would just need to display the respective racial armour for each race. Easy.

Andred.1087:

Problem is that there is a highly sought-after and expensive achievement for unlocking all the cultural armor skins individually, so… yeah…

I think perhaps you should read my post again. I did not in any way suggest, imply or even hint at anything which would in any fashion impact on that.

Riku.4821:

Actually it wouldn’t be a nightmare to program, at least for my thought on how to do it. A lot of if statements is the basics of that it would seem.
I thought of this the other day, i want to use cultural armor but am stuck with exotics lol.

I think that “its a nightmare to program” is just a cop out. I really don’t think anyone can have a say about the programming unless they know ANet’s code from inside out.

runeblade.7514:

I think that “its a nightmare to program” is just a cop out. I really don’t think anyone can have a say about the programming unless they know ANet’s code from inside out.

Speaking from personal professional experience, that is often true. Sometimes that’s just IT speak for “I don’t want to do that”.

But you definitely don’t need to know ANet’s code to have an idea of how they might do it. At a mechanical level what I’ve suggested is incredibly basic regardless of the game’s specific code. That’s not to say there couldn’t be complexities we’re unaware of but I think it’s fairly safe to say it wouldn’t be difficult.