Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing both a dedicated Staff elementalist which doesn’t require weapon switching, and a Thief for which I use 4 different weapons in total. Am I missing something with regard to the Ascended crafting ingredients? Because it seems to me like it would take 80 days of straight crafting just to gear the Thief up to the same level of performance as the mage. And considering how they already brought two-handed weapons into line with regard to stats and sigil slots, is there any reason why the Elementalist isn’t coming out waaaay ahead over my thief in terms of the grind required to get them to perform at the same tier? The same thing for a Rifle engineer (assuming they un-nerf Kit damage)?

I mean I know the imbalance was already somewhat part of the game, but the sheer scale of difference when you introduce ascended and time-gated materials seems to bring it out way out of line.

What’s a Mage?
15letters

2 hand weapons have been favored in many ways since launch. It’s not likely gonna change.

I guess so then. I mean I guess it’s no skin of my back, since I main a Rifle engineer and I’m really favoring the Ele over my thief as it stands. But daaayum…you’d think they’d at least halve the number of Time-gated Mats for the 1-handers if nothing else. It definitely makes me lose all interest in leveling my Thief, and somewhat for any other class that depends on weapon switching. These changes are really encouraging people to entrench themselves into one class and one build, and throw out any silly notions of leveling alts, or even having secondary builds for end-game.

It may just backfire if their intention is to increase the longevity of game. Like…yeah, sure, I maxed out my one main dude, but instead of going back and bringing another class to 80 and continuing to enjoy the game, I’d be more tempted to just burn out on the one dude til I’m sick of it.

So you play a “dedicated staff elementalist,” meaning you only do a few of the activities in which a staff is desired/optimal or choose to do all of the other activities with a less than optimal weapon…but choose not to limit yourself on your thief – I see no issue here with ascended weapons.

The Ascended time gate is per weapon – whether you want to have 1 weapon, or 10; whether you have one character, or 30.

(shared component + time gating) = bottleneck.

azurrei.5691:

So you play a “dedicated staff elementalist,” meaning you only do a few of the activities in which a staff is desired/optimal or choose to do all of the other activities with a less than optimal weapon…but choose not to limit yourself on your thief – I see no issue here with ascended weapons.

That’s really reaching for a justification there. My point is that it takes a fraction of the time to gear out a single build for Elementalist or Engineer than it does the thief, or other melee classes that can switch between up to 2 sets of 2 completely different weapons. With the elementalist, I could very well get 3-4 ascended weapons, each of them having the stats to support a whole variety of builds and roles. For the thief, the same amount of weapons have to be grinded just to support one single build. God forbid a player wants to have a different set of stats for a different type of content on a thief and ends up having to get 5 to 8 weapons to juggle around!

Now I got it. Eles only use one weapon (two-handed i mean), while the thief has a D/D and SB, that makes 3

Hum… Sure, the thief has to work a bit more to get full ascended (obviously), but I don’t think it’s such a pain to get all the materials so you can say that ele has an advantage

It’s a difference of 28 days and material cost. And that’s IF your second set is a two-handed shortbow instead of something like or P/D, or P/P, or S/P which makes it around 42, again, all assuming you have the materials to refine ready every single day for one and a half months and never miss a log-in.

Yeah no issues. My fire ele uses six weapons including two stalves, one used for building stacks. On my thief, I can get by with 4 weapons (though I have MANY), being two daggers, 2 SB’s with one used for building stacks. I can probably narrow down the ele to 3 weapons as well as for the thief. The only real problem I see is that the ele has no swap. In general the problem is ascended weapons themselves, if you are used to weapon swaps for sigils. Now you need to have 8+ ascended weapons to have the right sigils in the right situations, or you loose that extra damage more or less.

I think yous are missing the point.
To craft 1 one hander takes nearly the same mats as to craft 1 two hander.
Assuming the character has no equipment, and assuming the thief does not want the short bow (only two hander), it would take twice the amount of time for a thief to get both a main hand and an off hand, while the ele can get by with just getting a staff.

The problem is that there’s no difference in mat costs between one handers and two handers. NOT how many weapon preferences one may have.

I’ve said it in another post somewhere….
The only explanation for both one handers and two handers having nearly the same mat requirement, is probably due to the fact they yield the (nearly?) same exp when crafted. Instead of adjusting the exp and mats accordingly, they were lazy and made everything worth (mat wise) nearly the same.

This, on their part, was not thought throughly.

That comes down to personal preference though. I have a LOT of SB’s for my thief. I can get by with having just one staff for my ele, but really it’s going to take more to round it out. I have all the classes, and the only class I have on tap that has an advantage to this is probably my warrior. I build stacks with the hammer then switch to GS for the remainder, I can live with just a purity or gifting sigil there. My thief I can get by with just two ascended daggers, since I’ve used mostly the same two daggers and sigils for almost a year. For my ele, I really-really need more than just one staff, just like my thief needs many bows.

But yes I do agree that 1h v 2h should be adjusted accordingly. Regardless of what class uses what, it’s not a point of class warfare imo. Not every ele is a 2h, not every thief a 1h.