Guild Wars 2

This thread isn’t really about whether the gear should have been implemented/continue to be implemented, or the apparent difficulty in getting for the average player. Perhaps this is being discussed in the multi-thousand post thread, but I’m not reading every page and to be honest, I wasn’t sure what keywords to use when searching. And I’m not really interested in losing this post in a sea of flaming posts. This is something I’m genuinely curious about. Instead, I’m just confused as to how ascended gear is the bridge between exotic and legendary gear, as has been said several times by Anet employees.

I’m looking as “bridge the gap” as a way to help decrease the enormous difference between exotic and legendary, to make a step in between. But ascended does not do that. As far as we’ve seen, ascended gear is going to take a lot of T6 mats, ectos, and/or gold – things that are fundamental in getting the legendaries. I feel like if there are people who are working on getting legendaries at the moment, going for ascended gear first isn’t going to help them at all. It’s actually going to set them back. So what is this bridge mentioned? The only thing I can imagine is its time scale is somewhere in between legendary and exotics, for people who don’t have time for legendaries. But seeing how long it takes to get a single piece, I can’t imagine getting a legendary will be longer than full ascension gear (clearly this is pure speculation based on one item, backpack). Just wondering what everyone else thought.

Short answer: It doesn’t.

This is like saying “Well you have some good baseline gear. And then there’s these really super expensive items that cost 200g each. They take a long time to get so to bridge the gap we inserted a tier between the two that costs 100g each.”

Except the problem is, it doesn’t bridge a gap because you blow resources on the middle tier first. All it does is make it take longer.

Ostensibly it is about the time scale required, but even then, the “filling a gap” explanation doesn’t hold up to even light, impartial scrutiny.

Legendaries shake out to be somewhere in the range of 900-1000g to create.

I don’t think that any of the Ascended pieces cost more than 100g to create at this point.

Exotics, on the other hand, run over an entire spectrum of prices, from 2g all the way to 500-700g.

Exotics fill the gap between Ascended and Legendary equipment, not the other way around.

There really was no gap. Unless you consider the difficulty in acquisition as a gap. Most exotics are relatively easy to get while most legendaries require an astronomical grind. Instead of addressing the legendary grind, ArenaNet has decided to add another grind.

Ascended gear does nothing more than add more grind to an already grindy game.

It really doesn’t fill any gap except the fake one they created for themselves.

Ascended gear is one of the things in this patch that I genuinely can’t support on a fundamental level. I’m especially bitter that they finally added quivers for ranger-types (we’ve only wanted them since FOREVER), but they’re all ascended tier gear.

I’ll defend the rest of the patch quite happily, but NOT the ascended gear.

It bridges nothing. Trying to get an ascended item is going in completely the other direction and will just set you back gold you could be using for getting Legendaries.