Guild Wars 2

Reposting this because it got merged even though it is about INFUSIONS, not ascended gear.

Infusions seem a lot less like the infusion of GW1, where you completed 1 mission and you were infused (or did several infusion runs in about 10 minutes each back in the old days), and more like attunements in WoW, or Radiance in Lord of the Rings Online. They were awful systems that accomplished one thing: Gating so that you couldn’t play content with your friends because they didn’t have the attunement/radiance gear to be able to participate in the content with you. A new guild member, same story. A lot of guilds simply would not accept new guild members without the proper attunements, keys, or radiance levels. Trying to form a PuG for the new dungeon? People will reject for not having the proper infusions.
This is possibly the most backwards thing I’ve ever seen from Arenanet, in 7 years of being an Arenanet fan. Arenanet has in the past shown that they are very educated, forward thinking people as developers, why on earth can they not use the hindsight of predecessors to realize that infusions are a very bad idea? Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be different, Guild Wars 2 was supposed to not be about gear and stats, but about player skill. Putting in a mechanic that cannot be overcome by player skill but requires a specific stat to overcome absolutely rejects that philosophy, and that has been a part of Guild Wars’ philosophy from before Prophecies was launched. I just don’t understand.. especially when WoW and LotRO threw out those gating mechanisms, they looked at the feedback, looked at their metrics, and decided, hey, this was a bad mechanic to have in the game, let’s remove it. Now 3 years later Guild Wars 2 is ADDING a similar mechanic? It makes 0 sense..
Help me understand what you’re trying to accomplish with gating content Anet?

Again, this is about infusions as a gating mechanism, not about ascended gear. It doesn’t belong in the merged thread about ascended gear.

What’s insulting is Anet resorted to this flawed cop out when it would have taken them all of 15 minutes to come up with a system that wasn’t a gating mechanism and didn’t affect WvW.

Here, I’ll suggest one right now. Just put an infusion slot on chest, legs, shoulders, and helm armor. All exotic armor of those types gets an infusion slot. Now put infusions of masterwork, rare, and epic quality in the “end game” PvE content, and give some lore reason why they don’t work in the mists. Boom, you have PvE only progression that doesn’t bother WvW players and isn’t a terrible gating mechanism.

EDIT: The infusions would add bonuses like health regen, increased run speed, increased boon duration, etc.