Guild Wars 2

I was looking at ascended longbow for my ranger. It looks like the damage range is such that having ascended longbow gives my skills +5% damage boost. Now this 5% is in majority of cases meaningless increase. Let me explain:

The function of damage is to increase the killing speed of character. Damage is reduced by armor and the result substracts health of target. In very simplistic terms your killing speed is number of hits it takes to kill target multiplied by attack speed. Any excess damage is wasted. Another way to think about +5% damage increase is this: for every 20 hits your make, you deal an extra hit. In other words if it would take you less than 20 hits to kill the target you’re attacking, you see no benefit from +5% damage increase. Also those attacks that are blocked, evaded, obstructed by terrain or out of range: they don’t count.

I think this whole ascended discussion has been a storm in a teacup. Having or not having ascended gear makes very little difference in the grand scheme of things. Number of players (in WvW), positioning, skill cooldowns, attack intervals, coordination and effective communication are the true problems if one were to min-max their potential in game.

The ascended gear is extra character-progression. Some small power-increase which is designed to make a psychological difference rather than a real difference.

Yes, in the grand scale of things Ascended Gear matters very little.

But it is one of the few things you as a player can influence. And as such, many try to give themselves the best possible cards. There are so many other elements outside of player control that skill and positioning will always matter more than gear.

And then you’re ignoring the PvP side of things where players heal and burst-damage is about more than the raw DPS. Burst means pressure and pressure kills players. And 5% more or less does make a difference here. It can mean the difference between downing someone and him getting through another heal.

And then you’re ignoring Ascended gear, which next to the weapons, adds both a little extra damage and/or survivability.

In PvE it will matter because 100 players doing 5% additional damage is a lot. Also, if they haven’t waivered since the CDI’s, they had plans to add further progression through infusions, meaning next year ascended gear will be a little stronger.

Dee Jay.2460:

But it is one of the few things you as a player can influence. And as such, many try to give themselves the best possible cards. There are so many other elements outside of player control that skill and positioning will always matter more than gear.

- It gives a great sense of futility. The way the game is designed has way more impact than anything you can personally do. For example have you ever stayed defending a tower against a blob of 40 enemies below you? First of all you’d have to stay right at the edge of a wall or the wall itself is going to block your shot, since there’s no archs in bows. If using arrow cart, there’s no 2-dimensional top-down view to aim it, so you have to find some weird camera angle to shoot through door. Speaking of doors, you can’t repair it during siege because enemy AoE goes through it.

Having the mastery to pick up more than 10 supplies, when running as a team to supply camp basically means that someone’s going to have less than full supplies since you took some extra. Placing siege on towers in order to fend off potential zergs has practical dis-incentive that nobody wants to be left behind to guard a tower where nothing happens for long periods of time. Towers don’t also block anything, enemies can just run past them.

Developers decided that there just has to be ascended gear tier for +5% more damage. Multitude of custom skins were made obsolete by one skin that everyone’s going to be wearing eventually. For the sake of progression that has no purpose.

Where do you find meaning in all this? It’s like the whole thing was designed with no critical thinking or playtesting.

Ascended gear matters a great deal. And taken as a whole, it’s far from a mere 5% increase. But the real bottom line is, that for highly competitive players, a + or minus whatever percentage is in fact important. However I can understand how a very casual open-world PvE player (or strictly “zerg” WvW player) might not care.

For the most part its an omg look at me effect that about it once every one has it ppl lose this feeling and find that ascened gear dose nothing for you over all. Having said that depending how much more they will drop from wvw rank up and GM this may happen a lot faster then most ppl would think.