Guild Wars 2

Okay, so I understand that ultimately, whether or not I get full ascended isn’t going to impact matters too much. Even WvW really isn’t going to matter that much since numbers will still dominate.

But here’s the problem. What exactly does bringing in ascended armor and weapons add to gameplay besides bigger numbers and giving you some busy work to do? Rings were for fractals, amulets were revolving laurels and laurel infusions, and earrings… I don’t know about earrings. This can hardly be considered meaningful content, except by making crafting relevant again.

Well, ok we don’t know yet. But we do know a few things.

We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds! You will be able to earn these new traits and skills by unlocking them. To go along with this, we’ll expand the content and options to earn skill points to help encourage players to experience different challenges and content throughout the world. These skills and traits will be designed to be balanced with the existing skills/traits we currently have in the game, and will simply compliment and expand the range of abilities and tactics available to each profession. Both WvW and PvE players can acquire skills and traits, and additional means of earning skill points will be addressed for both core content areas.

Now why exactly was this needed? Well, this is a natural side effect of vertical progression. Your numbers get inflated, and the content naturally has to be adjusted otherwise the game gets somewhat trivialized. As gear gets better, the same content gets easier. So new content, bigger numbers to “challenge” people with better gear. I don’t think it’ll be balanced around green gear anymore.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. In many ways they were wise to dilute the already marginal stat boosts with more traits. The higher your base value is, the less gear matters. But the problem is that a lot of you might agree that the current system isn’t balanced already, so tossing more stuff on top of it is quite dubious.

Point is, balance is something extremely difficult to achieve, and even small changes can move mountains. It’s not something that can just be rushed out, and I sincerely hope that they will give this more time and don’t try to rush it out, while thinking of the consequences. Ultimately, this means more then doing 10% more damage.

So back to the question, what does vertical progression add to gameplay? Well, when you’re first starting out in a game, it can be jarring to throw you in the fire. So you start out with minimal features to not confuse you and gain more power and abilities as you advance. In many ways the leveling and gearing process were the training wheels of the game. But at this point when you’re 80 and spent some time getting gear, is that really needed anymore?

As was originally stated back in November, Ascended gear was meant to be in at launch as a bridge between Exotics and Legendary items. Exotics were relatively easy to obtain and legendaries required hundreds of hours to obtain. A middle tier that took effort but wasn’t as crazy as legendaries was made to bridge this gap. Unfortunately it wasn’t finished in time for release so people freaked out.

If they had just made the to be added ascended known before hand, and that it was the final tier in strength, I don’t think anyone would have complained. But yeah, ascended things can be kind of annoying with the time gated stuff. Luckily some of them, like rings, only take about a week each.

It does not add to the gameplay. Time gating things does not add to the gameplay either. It’s just a cheap way to force people to log in every day without actually providing new content. With us getting content every 2 weeks, why is it needed? I’m baffled. This is not what I wanted when I started playing this game. This is not what I signed up for.
I don’t know if I abandon the game or not. I know that this is a taboo on the forums with you getting called names for it, but hearing about how much of a time gate this will be I just feel like giving up. And this is my favorite game! I was going to buy gems to buy the flute today. I think I’ll hold off now. Not because I don’t want to support the game, but because I don’t know how long I’ll be playing. That will be decided by how this system will be implemented. I mean I could leave and pick Tera back up. If I’ll want the top tier sword I’ll need to buy lots of extensive alkahest and re-try the upgrading over and over and over again. However if I farmed money it will only take me a day to do it. Not a whole time gated year. The problem with leaving this game is I love it. I love the new achievement rewards. I love the way how you can do whatever you want. But… The expensive whole new tier being rolled out just like this with a time gate on top… It makes me lose all of my energy. It gives me the bitter taste of being left behind in WoW again.And I don’t want any more of those bad memories. So instead of changing the game that I’m playing I want this game to change. I want it to be friendly to us. I want to be as happy as I was 3 hours ago before reading the news.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

As was originally stated back in November, Ascended gear was meant to be in at launch as a bridge between Exotics and Legendary items. Exotics were relatively easy to obtain and legendaries required hundreds of hours to obtain. A middle tier that took effort but wasn’t as crazy as legendaries was made to bridge this gap. Unfortunately it wasn’t finished in time for release so people freaked out.

I think they actual said that ascended gear should have been there at launch. Not that it was planned.

they are adding ascended gear only to finish what they started i think.
i don’t think they really plan to add other gears, they already stated this multiple times.
everybody should calm down and in time have their full ascended set and be happy about new skins and new shinies.
also as usual they will add multiple ways to get that gear and in no time there will be more of them than you can use…

Amadan.9451:

they are adding ascended gear only to finish what they started i think.
i don’t think they really plan to add other gears, they already stated this multiple times.
everybody should calm down and in time have their full ascended set and be happy about new skins and new shinies.
also as usual they will add multiple ways to get that gear and in no time there will be more of them than you can use…

but they did not do it for the current ascended gear. All types have different 2 ways of getting it, except for backpacks that are limited to 1 way. What makes you say that it won’t just be 1 way again?

Drops and crafting.

Mirta.5029:

It does not add to the gameplay. Time gating things does not add to the gameplay either. It’s just a cheap way to force people to log in every day without actually providing new content. With us getting content every 2 weeks, why is it needed? I’m baffled. This is not what I wanted when I started playing this game. This is not what I signed up for.
I don’t know if I abandon the game or not. I know that this is a taboo on the forums with you getting called names for it, but hearing about how much of a time gate this will be I just feel like giving up. And this is my favorite game! I was going to buy gems to buy the flute today. I think I’ll hold off now. Not because I don’t want to support the game, but because I don’t know how long I’ll be playing. That will be decided by how this system will be implemented. I mean I could leave and pick Tera back up. If I’ll want the top tier sword I’ll need to buy lots of extensive alkahest and re-try the upgrading over and over and over again. However if I farmed money it will only take me a day to do it. Not a whole time gated year. The problem with leaving this game is I love it. I love the new achievement rewards. I love the way how you can do whatever you want. But… The expensive whole new tier being rolled out just like this with a time gate on top… It makes me lose all of my energy. It gives me the bitter taste of being left behind in WoW again.And I don’t want any more of those bad memories. So instead of changing the game that I’m playing I want this game to change. I want it to be friendly to us. I want to be as happy as I was 3 hours ago before reading the news.

The time gating thing, and difficulty of acquiring it leads to certain problems.

IMO, it restricts freedom of play. Currently exotic gear is interchangeable enough so you can change builds fairly easily. You can carry multiple gear sets and experiment with different builds at the drop of a dime with an inexpensive re trait fee.

Time gating it makes it so if you want gear, you have to commit to it. If you go rabid and decide you want berserker later, well, uh oh, all your time is now wasted.

Well, one could say “Why not just have ascended sets mixed with your exotic gear” then. Well that would work too, but I feel that you’re going to be wearing the “stronger” set if they are of different tiers. Take my guardian who has ascended jewelry and has a MF infusion vs my necro that has none. The difference isn’t that big and my necro is hardly crippled, but the benefits of playing the better geared character do add up slowly.

The other problem is that the marginal differences assumes that people all have full exotic. That just completely ignores everyone with yellow gear. No longer can I really say, “Well, you don’t need to spend a ton on exotics, just buy some affordable yellow, and you’re almost BIS”. Nope, the gakitten ignificant and people still decked out in yellows— I doubt they’re going to be the run Cof1 type.

The way I see it, the new gear will require more grind than exotics, since the only group it caters to is the grind/progression-minded. It will also be more expensive, and as I’ve stated above creates a noticeable gear gap between BIS and mediocre geared.

This is the utmost limits this game should take. Any more is going to make the problem worse. I don’t mind token stat boosts like infusions since it takes forever for it to mean anything. Anything bigger can and will cause problems.

I’m not really afraid of being left behind myself. I played the same way when I had only yellows/oranges so as long as they don’t do anything like scale up the difficulty, I should be good. But my point is to ask that is adding this gear tier really adding anything to the game? Yes, I know ascended was meant to be there, but in practice, the changes to the game as it is right now should be questioned.

My biggest concern overall is that they are adding so much stuff when they have trouble getting the stuff they have already correctly.

Navzar.2938:

If they had just made the to be added ascended known before hand, and that it was the final tier in strength, I don’t think anyone would have complained. But yeah, ascended things can be kind of annoying with the time gated stuff. Luckily some of them, like rings, only take about a week each.

I actually agree. But since what’s done is done and people have skinned their exotic armor and created gear sets out of it, the effect will be different then introducing ascended as opposed to it already being there.

Time gating and limited ways to acquire remain troublesome.

I dont think adding new traits make your “numbers bigger”. In my oppinion it will make more traits viable, which makes more builds viable, which is fun to figure out the one that sutis you best. This is asusming they actually ge tthe traits right. The last patch that was supposed to do build diversity wasa huge let down for mesmers :/.

I mentioned this in another thread, but remember that ascended have no upgrade slot.

This doesn’t matter much with trinkets as the only thing you could put in them was jewels anyway. You lost a little bit of flexibility in your build, but generally this is not a major concern.

But with armor … runes are completely different. First you have special effects that many won’t want to give up (warrior/guardian with soldier runes is probably a good example). Second, you get a pretty good boost to a single stat which will probably exceed the boost from exotic to ascended.

I think for many builds, you will still be better off with exotics.

The Ascended stuff in recent announcements are simply the residual effects of adding vertical progression to the game. It was added to give those inclined to grind something to do and most major reward systems (cf. laurels) have VP as a driver.

The part of the blog post that was huge for me was the section on character progression going forward. They said they were going to give us something instead of a continuous gear grind. And that something was ability progression, i.e., an optional element found in horizontal progression. Maybe I am reading too much into the blog post hoping against hope, I don’t know. But, my reading of the post says a lot more about horizontal progression than it does about ascended gear and vertical progression in our future. (And, I hope Colin will be kind enough to correct me if I am wrong. I’ve got my membership application to the Order of the White Knight half filled out, but don’t want to submit it prematurely.)