Guild Wars 2

I was one of those people kitten off by your addition of Ascended gear, because I just don’t do Fractals. Now that dailies allow me to get Ascended gear, I’m “OK” with it.

Now I still don’t like the gear treadmill, don’t get me wrong. GW1 was much better about having one tier of armor/weapons.

GW1 had tiers too, but they maxed out fairly early.

If they properly add laurel rewards to other achievements it might be ok.

As of now, 3 months to get one set of rings and amulet…it certainly is NOT acceptable amount of time to gear up in a game that supposedly encourages to swap builds and try out different things.

Zeivu.3615:

GW1 had tiers too, but they maxed out fairly early.

Gw1 had no tiers. Rare could have same stats are common blue.

It still does not in any way make it okay. They are still forcing you to grind to obtain a boost in stats, it’s a treadmill. What’s worse is they gated it via dailies so it extends the grind out. This is every bit as bad as blizzard adding broken bosses and gear check bosses to slow down progression.

Until they add better/faster ways to obtain ascended gear that aren’t gated it will not be okay. They could have EASILY patched in ascended gear to a karma/badge of honor/dungeon token vendors and have it being sold that way. They won’t because they want people to continue to grind. Maybe they will convert achievements into laurels, but it sounds like they are adding another currency for that.

I’m not OK with ascended gear at all, and probably never will be. That said, I prefer to judge the Laurel system separately.

So in that regard, I wish there was a faster method than 20 days for 1 item. I can log in and knock out a daily in 30 minutes. So 20 days at 30 minutes each day. But I do kind of wish there was an option where I could get it in 10 days for an hour each day. :-\

I almost feel like I’m playing EVE online with the 20-60 day wait for stuff =D

The ascended gear was a bad idea from the outset.

Laurels are alright, but they really should have just revamped one of their other currency systems instead in my opinion. Mystic coins would have worked perfectly fine had they made them soul bound. Karma could be made to be a bit more valuable too.

I like the fact that with these Laurels you have to play the game for a certain extended period of time in order to reap the rewards; it’s how Legendaries should be too.

LathanHaiko.9182:

I was one of those people kitten off by your addition of Ascended gear, because I just don’t do Fractals. Now that dailies allow me to get Ascended gear, I’m “OK” with it.

I am not. With 8 characters i have, amulets alone will take me half a year. Which means that i’ll still need to grind fractals for rings (and backpacks…) just as i had before this update. In fact, after this update my expectations for getting ascended for my chars got even lower than they were before it.
And that is only if i’d want one eq set per character – i wanted to play with different builds, but i guess it’s no longer an option.

Until ascended become accessible through karma/crafting/open world drops and (last but not least) TP(!), nothing will change.

And of course of the stat sets i need for some of my chars, some are still missing.

It will be more “OK” in the future, when they implement a diverse array of stat combinations-as of now, Ascended Gear is only for those who can’t live without the higher level Fractals that require Agony Resistance, and the few builds that require the limited pool of available stat combinations. That said, they must add more sets in time. I have no doubt they will, as otherwise ascended gear will always have an unfinished/beta feel to and it just wouldn’t make sense.

The Laurels themselves area nice addition. It’s nice that there are many things to acquire with them other than Ascended gear (which again, has a too limited selection as of now to be useful for all types of players.) I will save them in case they add something I may find worth purchasing.