Guild Wars 2

• 1) There is an inarguable meta in place in GW2. Metagames are not necessarily a bad thing.
• 2) There is a flagrant oversight in rune and gear-set usage: the vast majority of options are entirely ignored in favor of only a tiny, select pool of viable gear options across all game-modes and among the 32 total stat spreads in place at this point in GW2’s life.
• 3) There is currently an arbitrary and taxing timegate system in place which drags out the acquisition of Ascended armor for new players. While older/established players have no real issue gearing out an alt, GW2 currently chases away new players by featuring end-game content in which older players have come to expect players who are, ideally, fully fleshed out in Ascended tier weapons, armor and trinkets.

While the first point is entirely expected and understandable, the latter two are almost counter to nurturing the “ideal” or “meta” way that players wish to tackle the content in this game. If things are going to be so obvious, then why are they so tedious to attain? Most importantly, the level of grind and lack of proper explanation or documentation relating to Ascended acquisition further at best obscures new players’ trek to “top level gear,” and at worst chases them away entirely by presenting them with a task that could easily be defended as a waste of time.

With such a case currently governing the progression of players in GW2, isn’t it time to ask for a little bit a clean-up? Do we really need all these gear stat options when we only use like five of them? Do we really need all the runes available to us when there are clearly only the obvious few that anyone uses at any given time (especially considering the price for a full set of “good” runes)? What about all of the sigils in the game? Who uses any but the 8 or so that are the only clear fit for any of the obvious, respective meta builds? Isn’t it time to simplify?

Whereas it’s easy to just to thin out the bloat from sigils and runes, reworking armor to be more accessible for new players requires understanding the meta and contemplating what to keep, what to throw out and how to treat what remains. So what are your thoughts then? Can’t we just glean the useless garbage from the stat options and make GW2 more alt-friendly and inviting to new players? If the change is enough, it would be worthwhile to even advertise it as an invitation to new people.

I don’t see the problem for 3. in the aquisition of ascended equipment. Ascended stuff is only required for mid-high lvl fractals and raids. Fractals are meant to be played while you slowly aquire more ascended stuff, which enables you to tackle higher fractal levels. Raids on the other hand are especially designed for players who have the maximum achievable amount of power and teamwork. This is not something a new player is supposed to enter after a month or two of play.

In my opinion ascended gear is in a good place. If you don’t have the means to aquire ascended gear, then you most likely also don’t have the necessary experience to play the content that requires it. The only problem is that ANet should make it more obvious to new players, that it’s perfectly sufficient and fine to go for exotic equipment and play with that for a while. The difference in stats is so low, that you will only notice it at all once you’re at a skill level where aquiring ascended equipment is no longer a dream. The rush for bis gear tends to ignore this though.

Disagree with OP:

(i) The ‘meta’ is a player choice, not a game requirement. Absolutely no reason why anyone can’t try whatever gear build they like and the wide range available makes for good fun experimenting to find one a player enjoys/has fun with. My Ranger runs with necro runes for the jagged horror proc and demon sigil for the fleshreaver proc…because why not and because no-one except the Spanish Inquisition expects it.

(ii) Ascended gear with agony resistance is only needed for fractals at a fixed level and above. Other than that its just another armor/look and alongside weapons can be runed/sigiled/upgraded however a player not into fractals feels like. 3 years in and counting I’ve only ever been into fractals a handful of times (3 or 4), because it’s not my choice of game mode. When I did, Exotic armor/trinkets were fine for the fractal I wanted to play (Urban Battleground, solo’d on my last playthrough and was done). Once again, player choice.

(iii) Agreed there is no clear ingame ‘guide’ to crafting anything including Ascended gear, but anyone who wants to can be easily pointed to the various guides available – dulfy’s is a good one and regularly updated.

Asking around in any city will easily point a new player to an external guide. Time is a factor simply because the gear is supposed to be ‘special’ and for someone new they need time to gather the materials, level their crafting skills and explore the maps where those materials are best found – called playing the game and having fun exploring/learning the different mechanics.

Bunji has it right, all about player choice and getting to know/discover things at your own pace and in your own way.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

I don’t see the problem for 3. in the aquisition of ascended equipment. Ascended stuff is only required for mid-high lvl fractals and raids. Fractals are meant to be played while you slowly aquire more ascended stuff, which enables you to tackle higher fractal levels. Raids on the other hand are especially designed for players who have the maximum achievable amount of power and teamwork. This is not something a new player is supposed to enter after a month or two of play.

Says who? According to what metric scale? Why are players seemingly disallowed from content until they gain a certain amount of experience? The raids aren’t terribly difficult. The only thing stopping newer players from getting into them is basically gear exclusion. Plenty of people already do pug runs or carry runs anyway and the raid content isn’t even like 3 months old yet.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

In my opinion ascended gear is in a good place. If you don’t have the means to aquire ascended gear, then you most likely also don’t have the necessary experience to play the content that requires it.

Refer to the first point. There isn’t a lot to learn when playing GW2. It’s a fairly basic, straightforward game. The only thing anyone really needs to learn are any sort of convoluted raid mechanics. The rest can be gathered via tooltips and wiki articles. Players shouldn’t be excluded from certain gear based on timegates. It doesn’t take 36+ days to learn how to play a class well in GW2. It takes a few days tops, especially if that new player is being mentored by veterans.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

The only problem is that ANet should make it more obvious to new players, that it’s perfectly sufficient and fine to go for exotic equipment and play with that for a while. The difference in stats is so low, that you will only notice it at all once you’re at a skill level where aquiring ascended equipment is no longer a dream. The rush for bis gear tends to ignore this though.

That’s the point, though. The rush for BIS gear is always a rush. It’s so obvious to people who play the game what BIS is, that they are willing to pick up Ascended players over Exotic. There’s no reason not to despite the basically meme difference of 5% total stats. MMOs are all about number crunching anyway. The Ascended guy is an objectively better investment.

Most importantly, regardless of how you “feel” about ascended’s “place,” you didn’t touch on how we have legitimately like 25 stat spread options that NOBODY uses because there’s no reason to do so.

Bbear.7830:

(i) The ‘meta’ is a player choice, not a game requirement. Absolutely no reason why anyone can’t try whatever gear build they like and the wide range available makes for good fun experimenting to find one a player enjoys/has fun with. My Ranger runs with necro runes for the jagged horror proc and demon sigil for the fleshreaver proc…because why not and because no-one except the Spanish Inquisition expects it.

And nobody but the Spanish Inquisition would defend it as more viable than any commonly known meta build. I’m not saying that meme strats aren’t fun, but there’s ultimately no point to them when there are objectively better options that are always used by the majority of the playerbase. There’s no reason to build or preserve content if only 1 out of thousands of players actively participates in it. We’re talking about a better, streamlined, overarching design principle that is better for the game on the whole—not some random guy’s anecdotal story about how he killed 25 things for a proc to go off.

Bbear.7830:

(ii) Ascended gear with agony resistance is only needed for fractals at a fixed level and above. Other than that its just another armor/look and alongside weapons can be runed/sigiled/upgraded however a player not into fractals feels like. 3 years in and counting I’ve only ever been into fractals a handful of times (3 or 4), because it’s not my choice of game mode. When I did, Exotic armor/trinkets were fine for the fractal I wanted to play (Urban Battleground, solo’d on my last playthrough and was done). Once again, player choice.

Your arbitrary, anecdotal reasoning is not a valid point. Just because you don’t personally feel like you want to invest into higher-end fractals doesn’t mean that brand new players should be denied the option of it for a whole month’s (or more) worth of timegates. We can remove those timegates and you could still perfectly well choose not to engage in fractals. It would be better for the player-base, and you would still get your way.

Erasmus.1624:

BunjiKugashira.9754:

I don’t see the problem for 3. in the aquisition of ascended equipment. Ascended stuff is only required for mid-high lvl fractals and raids. Fractals are meant to be played while you slowly aquire more ascended stuff, which enables you to tackle higher fractal levels. Raids on the other hand are especially designed for players who have the maximum achievable amount of power and teamwork. This is not something a new player is supposed to enter after a month or two of play.

Says who? According to what metric scale?

I think that’s a good question to ask yourself … you assertions are just as baseless as those with the opposite opinion without some sore of reference. I won’t tear your thread apart but I think most people who have extensive experience with other MMO’s will disagree with you about the level of gear grind and bloat in this game … and that’s a pretty good ‘metric scale’ to compare to.

The FACT is that you can easily obtain the gear you need for most content in this game simply from purchasing it in the TP. High level fractals are an exception and yes, the ONLY gear gated content in this game that will take you a number of weeks/months to obtain anyways, so a fastpath to the gear you need for that isn’t a crushing barrier anyway. For some it might be, but never has a game accommodated exceptional players. If that bothers someone … they have the option to leave the game or they can man up, do what needs to be done. Anet will not accommodate players that have ‘special needs’.

Agreed. Inherently the meta game isn’t a bad thing.

While the obvious approaches are there in PvE as the content doesn’t actually change every time you play it and to a certain extent in sPvP, the modes that allow player combat allow cheese builds, and cheese is effective against “standard” builds, but weak against safer builds. And while there are some top tier builds that perform better overall and are optimized for most situations, you can play around with some variation that isn’t cheese but also isn’t optimal, those aren’t bad, maybe not even regular, but people only care about what is top tier and this is a problem with the players, not with the system.

So, taking these other builds into account I think the stats spreads you can use from gear allows for a much larger variety, more noticeable on WvW and for most of PvE that isn’t high end or seeking for optimal times, mostly because you can mix different stats from different sources to get something unique opposed to the limited PvP amulets. Playing a top tier builds and classes is optional, there are good builds outside of the popular metabattle builds, those might not be the best yet they are far from inviable.

But I kinda agree with runes, some aren’t good but they are cheaper versions of something (Runes of the Centaur vs Runes of the Pack, if you want the Swiftness Duration and Power for example), while others are borderline useless and I don’t see the point of them being into the game.

About Ascended gear, weapons aren’t that hard to get, you can get some from the HoT collections and change stats if need, those come cheaper than leveling a craft and making one and provide a good boost in damage compared to Exotics. Ascended trinkets are even easier, just buy amulets (maybe rings too) with Laurels, buy accessories with Guild Commendations. Armor boost is minor, you might say armor isn’t even need unless you’re going for Fractals.

The problem here might lie, just like you pointed, in the fact that people expect players to be fully into Ascended gear while this isn’t needed.

nsleep.7839:

Ascended trinkets are even easier, just buy amulets (maybe rings too) with Laurels, buy accessories with Guild Commendations. Armor boost is minor, you might say armor isn’t even need unless you’re going for Fractals.

Where are you getting so many laurels and Guild Commendations? Both of those are behind the most awful time-gates in the game.

Sartharina.3542:

nsleep.7839:

Ascended trinkets are even easier, just buy amulets (maybe rings too) with Laurels, buy accessories with Guild Commendations. Armor boost is minor, you might say armor isn’t even need unless you’re going for Fractals.

Where are you getting so many laurels and Guild Commendations? Both of those are behind the most awful time-gates in the game.

Awfull? Guild commendations drop like candy in WvW, lol. We just play like normal and launch all the missions until they are done. Well, except the stupid dolly escort, that one you actually have to work for

Still hold to the choice over need…

Nothing stopping any groups of friends, new or established, from making their own raid/fractal runs with whatever gear they have or want to try.

Sure there will be failures (hopefully ones that will give everyone a few laughs), but everyone will learn at their own pace and in their own way until they finally succeed (and how great will that feel) – kind of what the game is all about and why it was built originally the way it was.

Let’s agree to disagree on some points – and just agree that everyone is here because they want to be and want to do things their own way. There really is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when your having fun and everyone is entitled to their own opinion in the end.

Note: Anecdotes are a way of teaching through sharing knowledge of past experiences, apologies if that didn’t come across when I was using as examples. No offence meant or intended, just there to help newer players consider when making their choices.

Oh and if your patient player, a regular daily player and someone who likes to explore all the game has to offer/find, you will get all the Laurels or Karma you will ever need and can buy exotic trinkets/rings/amulets/etc from the laurel vendors and Exotic armors from the Temple vendors without ever joining a guild or setting foot in fractals or WvW/PvP. Options are there for everyone if they choose to use them and only they can make those choices.

First of all, i don’t see an issue here. “Old players” had to farm/buy the mats, just as you do now, along with waiting on the daily reset of globs and etc. If you want to complain about something, complain about the changes to leather, and the silk drop rate, because those have changed drastically, since i last had to worry about ascended crafting.

Compared to the gear treadmills of WoW or FFXIV though, its seriously not that bad. I don’t have to raid, in order to get the best gear. Yes, there are time sinks, but that comes with every MMO. What determines if they are correct or not, is how many people who do them, and continue to play. Those who don’t, move on. This is the way of things.

slamfunction.7462:

First of all, i don’t see an issue here. “Old players” had to farm/buy the mats, just as you do now, along with waiting on the daily reset of globs and etc.

I’m aware, and I’ve done that, and I have my full set. However, we got to do that along Anet’s abysmally slow “content” release schedule, so it didn’t seem too ridiculous when players were confronted with things like ascended rings, then earrings, then amulets, then weapons, and then finally armor (over the course of like 2 years). There was so much time to stockpile materials that by the time anything released, it was terribly easy to get aside from waiting for the awful, arbitrary timegates.

Now when a player jumps into GW2, that person is confronted with over a month of timegates and hundreds of gold in material costs. It’s terrible. It needs to be reformed.

Erasmus.1624:

Now when a player jumps into GW2, that person is confronted with over a month of timegates and hundreds of gold in material costs. It’s terrible. It needs to be reformed.

Actually they aren’t because no one starts GW2 at level 80 where these timegates are encountered. Also, it costs about 100G to completely outfit in zerker exotic, and some of that can even be with guild comms for jewelry; let’s not sensationalize shall we? There is build up and players are given lots of opportunity to build up their gear/gold to buy whatever they need as they level.

The amazing part of all that … seems we have all managed to figure it out, despite the terrible things you speak of that you claim needs reform.