Guild Wars 2

Dynamic events. Dynamic events. Dynamic events. How much did we hear about dynamic events leading up to the game’s launch? As I see it, there were two major features that were touted as setting Guild Wars 2 apart from the rest of the MMO pack: dynamic events and the more action-oriented (and free of holy trinity) combat system.

Fast forward to level 80. A player gets to Orr and eventually comes across one of the karma vendors offering level 80 exotic gear in exchange for karma. Great. But…wait a minute…they just have armor.

“/m Hey, where do I get exotic weapons with karma?”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t? What am I supposed to do with all this karma then?”

“Work on your legendary.”

“Yeah, have you seen the precursor prices? No thanks.”

“I don’t know, then. Bake?”

“Bake?”

“Yeah, you can buy cooking ingredients with karma. Go bake some stuff.”

“…”

So exactly why cannot exotic weapons be purchased with karma when exotic armor can? I’ve no idea. I’d love to hear the reasoning behind that.

And now of course we have ascended items. Can those be obtained with karma? Not as far as I can tell. Nope, just run fractals every session, I guess. And now we’ve got a new way to obtain them, as they said there would be…that uses a currency that has a very low hard cap on how much you can earn over time. God help you in your quest to get gear with the best stats (which was supposed to be easy in this game, remember) if you actually play a lot of alts.

Hey, guys, remember karma? Remember dynamic events? What happened? I know it can’t be that hard to throw an NPC in somewhere that sells ascended items for some crazy amount of karma, so that can’t be it…

Everything has to be balanced around the mystic forge. If anything valuable can be purchased for karma then it skips the TP. If you can reliably farm karma and then buy easy exotic weapons then you can throw them into the forge and make money. Remember right at launch (or bwe) there was really cheap karma stuff? People bought tons of it an put it into the mystic forge and made lots of gold.
This is what I think anyway.

Currently, for now, you can exchange Commendations for Level 80 Exotic weapons.

If you want High End exotic weapons, (Volcanus and the like), Karma – > Orrian Jewelry Boxes – > Lodestones – > Exotic Weapons.

Honestly, if you could snag 4x exotic greatswords for any amount of karma…. that would make gambling with the MF for precursors way easier…. as someone who has flushed 1M karma at a time, I don’t think you could put a karma value high enough on exotic weapons to not have them wind up in the mystic forge and still be reasonable.

CassieGold.7460:

Honestly, if you could snag 4x exotic greatswords for any amount of karma…. that would make gambling with the MF for precursors way easier….

Am I supposed to be convinced that would be bad somehow?

Seriously, if precursors are the reason, that is just a really bad reason in my opinion. It is dumb to mess with all other itemization just to keep precursors stupidly hard to obtain. It’s not like a legendary weapon is easy to make even if you have a precursor, anyway. It’s just one of several barriers. If I’m supposed to care that the price of precursors would not be sky high, as if that would be a bad thing, I don’t.

Precursors taking a dive in value would be . . . interesting to watch, but anything that totally devalues something highly rare would be probably detrimental to the economy on a larger scale.

I say “probably” because Legendaries would probably remain at the same spot they’re at now (beyond stupidly expensive) and the cornerstone of “highly expensive to obtain by purchase” but would drop in price somewhat. Precursors would take a hit, but still be three figures for the more desirable ones . . .

Hmmm. I’d assume materials would take a boost in expense since more people would be out to buy their way to the rest of the Legendary, drying up supply just a tad.

After the dust settles, you’d probably see things about the way they are now, but with cheaper Precursors being bought up to artificially maintain the market where it is.

Always wondered this myself…but refuse to delve too deep into the shiat to find out. Seems kinda kitten to not offer weapons…leave it at that