Guild Wars 2

I believe the Guild Wars 2 manifesto video got it best when they said that nobody wants to grind to get to the cool content. Ascended gear and everything like it only serves to create a barrier for players. For example, most of my friends who play will, if ever, only get ascended gear after MONTHS of play since most aren’t even 80 yet. This just means that more content will be unavailable for us to play together. This isn’t fun.

But of course Guild Wars 2 needs progression. But what kind of progression? Well, as I’ve established, artificial barriers aren’t the way to go. Even purely statistical upgrades aren’t the way to go. So what do you do? Expand the titles, kill 2k Drakes? Now you’re “So and So, Drakebane.” Expand the home instance and give us guild halls. Let us add furniture and NPCs to our homes and make them our own. Give us more campaigns, nothing says progression like continuing the story. Give us more legendaries. Not just weapons, but also legendary armor. There are so many ways to achieve progression without going down this path of stat accumulation.

This honestly isn’t a gear barrier at all, from what I understand the only time you will run into Agony that you will actually need infusions for is at the very hardest tier of the dungeon. In that case you most likely have the ascended gear just from all of the previous times you’ve run the dungeon anyway.

Also I think the biggest thing people are misinterpreting from the ascended item article is that anet never said it would continually increase in stats with each new dungeon release. From my understanding it is literally just a new tier of item that will continually stay with the same amount of stats through each content update rather than scaling up in stats like normal gear inflation.

Deimos, they may not have said they’ll keep increasing, but they did say they’d never increase at all. So even if they promised ‘this is the last tier’ I doubt many will buy it now.