Guild Wars 2

Heavy: Ive seen Megatron before…boring. Spikes…really?
Medium: Holy kitten more kittening trench coats…are you kidding me?
Light: Best of the three (on female only?) but oh look…more spikes…

Spikes are such a cop out in design. It really highlights the short comings and lack of imagination on the design team. This and the trench coat AGAIN. Please no more trench coats. How many more times does this need to be asked?!

To summerize:

Heavy: Great, some spikes are too much, need to paint first.

Medium: generic and overused design compaired to the rest of the game

light: more medium (leather, facemask, etc.), seems to busy (frontloaded, shoulderdome)

Again, we need to see it in action and colored differently. So far light and medium are based on exactly the things, people complain about and in case of light a way to busy design, which could have been placed more thoughtfull

Neural.1824:

While some people like the look of the armor, this thread reminds me a lot of when the Ascended armor came out. A lot of people couldn’t stand it, and today few use it (the skins).
That’s the intent. Anet did as little as possible to make the appearance of the armor unique, added the features to make it Legendary, and will then go back to pushing outfits.
It’s a simple process really, and it worked really well for them with ascended gear:
1) promote new armor with new features that no other armor has
2) design it so that it’s unattractive to most
3) Sell more outfits on Gem Store
4) profit.

Quite ironic, as I never will buy an outfit, since I often only enjoy parts of the design and love to mix and match.
No nostalgia will get me to buy them.
Though some outfits look better than some of these armors.

What I don’t understand is that they know what people want appearently, thanks to Polls, their (unfortunatly canceled) communications efforts and repeated begging for the reduction of certain armor tropes.

Aside from heavy (which is actually the decent one here, as it tries to go the full armor style at least and I know the transformer feature won’t appease everyone), the “please not more of that” is in full effect on the other.

While we don’t know the other races or genders, we see a very obvious neglect and even disregard of open criticism and a very lackluster explanation of their designideas.

We only get some basic strokes:

Medium: Fallen foes and trophies should imbue our armor, which leads to trenchcoat and Arah design how?

Light: We wanted crystals of magical power, which leads to leather dragon style, how?

I think we need a more explicit explanation on their designs and why they went there.
They also need to explain why they go against common criticism and allow us to grasp their decissions.

What we still don’t have in GW2 is some way to store builds. Every time I want to do a Fractal I have to swap all my weapons/armor/trinkets. Such a pain. I was hoping with Legendary armor they would let us store optional runes on the armor itself saving some inventory management, but I guess they think that is fun for us, constantly dealing with inventory management.

Storing runes in the armor would involve creating an entirely new system within the game engine, as well as a new UI interface to show that storage and allow the choosing of runes. Probably not something they’re rushing to do for a single type of item that only a fraction of players are going to even have.

The way they’ve done it instead is a simple mechanic where the game looks at the type of rune already inside the armor and adds one to the players inventory on replacement. And runes stack, so its not like you’re going to be carrying around 6 separate runes or anything.

They’ve given everyone the feature they were hoping for and its still not enough. I shouldn’t be surprised.

Heavy: Appealing (to me). Nice “mecha” look. Helmet looks ridiculous on Charr, but I’m used to hiding helmets anyway.

Medium: Looks like a fancier reskin of Arah Medium. :/ Not too happy with yet another trenchcoat design, but could be worse.

Light: Looks awful, like a fancier version of the Crystal Arbiter outfit. But, will wait to see what it looks like on Asura first.

Electro.4173:

They’ve given everyone the feature they were hoping for and its still not enough. I shouldn’t be surprised.

To be fair to the critics, it’s not close to the execution that a lot of people were hoping for. On the contrary, it’s about the most simplistic possible solution. This works like having a permanent upgrade extractor that just works on legendary armor — it gets the job done, but it’s neither elegant nor a new feature per se.

So it’s a lot better than the current situation for legendary weapons and it’s not nearly as good as people hoped.

Among the other suggestions:

• Use the PvP system: if you unlock the rune (by purchasing or crafting etc), its permanently unlocked and can be applied at will.
• Use something similar to a ‘locker’: store as many upgrades as you like and swap out the ones that you have (so if you store 12 scholar runes, you can outfit two sets of armor, while six would only be enough to upgrade one set).
• Store the runes inside the armor, so your inventory isn’t impacted.

Sure, all of these suggestions have their own implementation and usage headaches. My point is merely that the planned execution fits the category of “gets the job done,” not “this is what we hope to see.”

I’ll wait to see at least a video of the armors on the different races before I’ll even attempt to decide if I do or do not like them.

I have to agree with Electro – while it certainly would be wonderful to either unlock the runes per-armor/character/account (those last ones probably fairly effectively gutting the rune economy), they’ve managed to give people what they’re asking for without requiring huge amounts of code change, and still providing utility/value to legendary gear to support build swapping.

This is the same basic reason that transmuting things through the mystic forge destroys upgrades. If it didn’t, they’d have to have recipes for every modified base input item – an infused bloodstone ruby ring with a 14 AR infusion? You want to attune it? Sure – here’s an attuned infused bloodstone ruby ring with a 14 AR infusion and a new shiny empty infusion slot. Items are singular, and upgrades attach to items upgrade slots directly – it’s not in a separate lookup table or anything fancy, it’s just a fixed field – they would need to do a lot more coding to support your request, which would push things out further. What was previously 2 item IDs is now 60+. Again, that’s just a relevant example – it’s actually way more complicated than that, because we’re talking about unlocking X rune slots on the legendary in an arbitrary order, so it’s either a modulus operation and mapping all the items, or a parent/child relationship and now storing goo gobs of data.

Changing it to be normalized (e.g. ever used a basic store checkout where you just have “an address” vs. Amazon where you have a list of addresses and choose which address to use) would require rewriting tons of underlying pieces – same idea why they don’t have dye channels on back pieces – it wasn’t considered early enough in the design process, the assets weren’t built with it in mind, and the object storage simply isn’t developed around it.

Now, that said – I certainly wouldn’t balk at them providing characters w/ access to a few ‘bonus’ slots that are non-shared and dedicated to only hold runes for swapping these into, akin to the shared inventory slots (e.g. not an actual bag, specific purpose, only sits at start or end of inventory). Since runes stack, you would only need 1 per unique build. If we also get sigil swapping with legendary weapons, then having 2 slots for armor and 3 for weapons seems about right. I do have to admit, though, my anal retentive nature is probably going to have me walking around with an extra rune of any given type to ensure that the runes go into the inventory slots I want them in. If they don’t give us some kind of “rune inventory” slots.

There were lots of ways to skin this cat – they’ve chosen a way that, at least, serves the actual need.

Dont forget they might want this a base feature system for the base game and they can introduce the buildtemplate system as a selling point in the next expac. Thinking it like that makes sense.

Ashantara.8731:

Neural.1824:

That’s the intent. Anet did as little as possible to make the appearance of the armor unique, added the features to make it Legendary, and will then go back to pushing outfits.

That theory is erroneous since the Legendary Armor will provide unique pompous effects that won’t be visible unless you use the skin.

The product has to be viable on some level, but I don’t think moving parts are going to change that many peoples opinions about the medium and light armor. I mean, up until this release, Ascended gear was pretty darn prestigious if you were into having best stats, but I don’t see that many people using the skins. As with all the skins, there are people that like them a lot (I happen to like the medium ascended armor chest/legs/boots), but when the player base has been saying for a long time that they don’t want anymore trench coats, and Anet turns around and delivers a trench coat for the most anticipated armor release in the game…. yeah.. they want people to make the gear, then buy an outfit to cover it.

Asc armor was prestigious lul. Every last bit of prestige died on pvp se 5.

I posted something about the rune before but got removed.. it be nice to hv it with selectable option with the armour once the runes are unlocked.

I paid for it when I preordered HoT, it’s really something I wanted. Then I didn’t have the patience to wait for who knows how long, so I barely touched the game.

Meanwhile the Mac client stopped working at a playable framerate, besides all the other problems like the constant crashes that makes most boss encounters, large map events and WvW unplayable.

So, don’t get me wrong, I think the new skins look amazing: Congratulation.
Just wished I could have seen it in the game, you know, since I paid for it and contributed to your company buy buying more than a reasonable amount of gems for WvW transfers and skins.

and you will next week Its unfortunate the client stops working but i believe they have improved it over time.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fe/9a/7d/fe9a7d20630184047572c48f5efd4152.jpg

i’d love to try for the heavy armor set, but rl commitments and a janky connection at the best of times kinda precludes from even attempting raids. that’s the disappointment for me, doing fractals for Ad Infinitum was doable enough thank goodness with pugs, due to their short nature, so yeah it feels a bit exclusionary but I suppose they needed something to sell with raids. too bad it’s content I cannot experience.

I’m waiting to see how it looks in-game. I want to see what the animations are like, how dye affects it, what the individual pieces are like and how it combines with other armour sets.

When I first saw medium ascended armour I thought it looked absurd. But actually that’s just the helmet and shoulders (and to a lesser extent the mismatched gloves). The coat is one of my favourites (especially on human female) and the leggings are nice too.

So, (in a hypothetical world where I get around to raiding enough to even think about it) I probably wouldn’t use a full set of legendary armour, I don’t really do full sets. But there might well be pieces I think are amazing and perfect for my characters. Or amazing but not right for my characters and then I’ll convince myself it’s a good thing I don’t want it because I can’t get it anyway and pretend I’m only previewing it to remind myself of that.

Heavy: I really like it!
Medium: awfully ugly!
Light: meh….not looking legendary enough, still better than medium though.

I have a feeling most ppl just want these so they do not have to spend 100G to changes the combos. So they way they look is realty subjective. Now the real issues is how they are going to be obtain though a means of ppl who already are haves making the have nots have even less.
So… Heavy: doom of gw2
Medium: doom of gw2
Light: doom of gw2

They looks alright but not sure what so legendary about it, lol.

Vagrant.7206:

What the heck is with ArenaNet’s armor design team? It’s like they have no conception of simplicity or elegance. Please bring back the Guild Wars 1 armor design team!

GW1 also had a LOT of terrible reskins with random, ugly details added in. That’s Anet’s armor design for you. They’ve already proven for years and years that they can rarely design a good armor set without overdesigning it with useless crap.

The thing that GW1 had for it, though, was that it was easier to create armor back then. This meant there was more diversity and that we would get more sets more frequently, so the chances of getting something that actually looks good were higher.

Even so, let me remind you that male elementalists had to wait until Factions to have a gray armor that did not look ridiculous, and they had to wait until Nightfall to get non-grey armor.

Ultimately, bad armor is merely a Guild Wars franchise tradition. To this day, I still ask myself how can a company with some of the greatest artists in the industry be so incredibly bad at designing armor sets.

SkyShroud.2865:

They looks alright but not sure what so legendary about it, lol.

Being able to swap there combos on the fly when your out of combat. Skins are pure subjective and most outfits cover partial effects ppl want (though i realty want a chak set i still cant believe we have weapons but no back items or outfit).

Heavy: I like it, though I most likely will get it last if ever.
Medium: Looks promising, really looking forward to seeing it in action and on human models! Definitely getting it first.
Light: I really like the look, although my mesmer is an asura so looking forward to seeing that too on asuras.

Heavy: Boring. Huge spikes, and this over elaborate fancy design stuff looks like many of the gem store stuff already available. I really feel that the design direction is aimed at an Asian audience. There are so many real world armors that are cool, its just disappointing to see this stuff.

Medium: Not as bad, some elements are nice, but overall nothing with a wow factor.

Light: Spikes! meh, not interested,

I don’t blame the concept art team though. They have to design for a mass audience. Art direction is based on what they feel is appropriate for the user base. GW in general is a very spiky design game anyway. Its just so overdone at this stage. I mean there are awesome designs throughout the game, but its starting to feel stagnant on costume designs, the one area I personally feel designs have been lacking. But I am sure there are plenty who love it,its just so subjective.

I would have liken them to do some cultural legendary armors. I think the cultural stuff is the best in the game.

Heavy: is ok, bit too spiky but could be cool.

Medium: Dear Anet, Does anyone besides Gaile actually read these forums?
Sadly it appears not. And while Gaile does read them (thank you Gaile in all seriousness for taking the time to interact with us), she cannot affect anything in the game as they don’t listen to her either it seems. We know that they barely post here choosing reddit over their own forums. (This still makes me shake my head in wonder).

Why won’t you listen to a lot of your"paying customers". Lots of people wanted and asked that you didn’t do a trench coat for medium. Not that that statement will carry any weight as they don’t read here anyway. I really like my sneak thief skin look TBH and its a non trench coat design.

Light: looks like another reskin of the Human Female elite armor. You know the one they copped a lot of flack for when they released it in the BL Store as a skin and then had to remove it and redesign it.

SkyShroud.2865:

They looks alright but not sure what so legendary about it, lol.

The suits transform between in- and out-of-combat modes.

Frankly, I think the heavy armor is the only good one. Except they screwed up the Charr’s helm design. If it’s supposed to be a full helm, make it a full helm. If it’s supposed to be open-visored, give it an open visor. That jaw cutout makes the helm look stupid.

Kyvrn.4209:

For the amount of time that went into this armor, I must say It sucks. Sorry. Apparently spikes make things look cool now.

I’d have been happier if they had just given us the base sets that you start out with when you make a new character. Rather than the 3 cactus suits we got.

At least the way the handled Stat changes and runes is good.

Thank the gods for transmutation charges. Gonna be making good use of those.

anet has always though spikes were elite since guild wars 1
https://wiki.guildwars.com/images/0/02/Assassin_Imperial_armor_m.jpg and the “elite version”
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Assassin_Elite_Imperial_armor_m.jpg

notice how there are more spikes that are bigger. Its not just anet though, most games feel special armor has to be more ornate and more flamboyant to justify its elite status, and a fair amount of users agree, or maybe they just like the prestige associated with them, who knows.

Heavy still has armor the term heavy doesn’t mean just metal they could make a heavy set of armor with barbarism styled animal hides or cloth and bone.

Medium is still overloaded with trench coats more shirts would be nice for a change

Light armor has maybe one pair of pants nothing but dresses/skirts and the like a few pairs of pants and maybe a pair of shorts isn’t asking for a whole lot.

At the end of the day legendary army had to be generic akin to ascended armor. Nothing they’ve shown will clash too much with whatever your personal characters theme happens to be. Nor will anyone really require legendary armor to complete there own theme. For instance imagine if the armor was dripping with slime like the TT wurm armor then some people would be put off by the slime and put that as a reason not to make it while others who luv em’ some slime would feel obligated to get it or forever feel incomplete. They may even quit if their unable to get the armor.

zealex.9410:

Asc armor was prestigious lul. Every last bit of prestige died on pvp se 5.

Ascended armor hasn’t been prestigious in years, man.

Vagrant.7206:

What the heck is with ArenaNet’s armor design team? It’s like they have no conception of simplicity or elegance. Please bring back the Guild Wars 1 armor design team!

You say that, and yet half the sets you linked are neither “simple” nor “elegant”. GW2’s armor design is pretty much exactly what GW1’s was, and every design trend people complain about in GW2 came directly from GW1.

I just want to point something out.

Creating the armor has been a very long and intense process; we’ve never produced any armor set as complicated as the legendary armor. A key original requirement was that the armor should animate. However, when we started digging into what that entailed, it soon became apparent that this wouldn’t be simple: for us to accommodate that design vision required multiple engineering changes to the underlying game engine.

Now, instead of doing all that to create armor that relatively few players will get, wouldn’t it have made more people happy if they had put that work into capes that everyone could get?

raids? no thank you.
i misunderstood. i thought i could play this game the way i want to play.
gw2 has giant boss fights like tequatl and now its hiding stuff in raids.
every other game already has raids… iam sick off it.
maybe its just me but…. they also dont look that great….

so… you can change runes for free. nice! very nice!
but on my old legendary weapon i cant swap sigils for free? T_T

i agree. very disapointing.

Might be better to wait until we seem them animated since that is a fairly significant part of them.

heavy: best of the 3 but looks silly/overly complex, this isn’t gundam.
other 2 are boring generic for their weight, a trenchcoat for medium and a long dress for light, oh but lets glue spikes on it and call it 2 years of work!

yeah, not impressed.

I already have an epic looking armor combo for my character so i’ll just transmute. That being said:

Heavy: hard to say, since the colors on screens are weird. But looks ok.

Medium: I wonder for whose sins we’re suffering here. Worst of medium (coats + bones) + worst of light (the cowl) on worst of models (asura).

Light: Hi i’m ele and I got a legendary armor made for me. Rest of you transmute.

on side note I would really appreciate if we could have separate slots for head armor and face paint/accessory (visual wise). It really pains me how character with revealing helmet can’t have any eye accessory or face paint showing, while those with said can’t have any helmet.

Not sure how people managed to be disappointed. GW2’s armour design as a whole is pretty awful.

Light armour: Jester outfits, ranging from skimpy skirts for girls to no-pants for guys.
Medium armour: trenchcoats.
Heavy armour: spikes and/or generic fantasy armour.

Lol. I don’t normally enjoy outlandishly loud armor designs on my characters, but I’m going to say I really like the heavy armor on that Charr.

Heavy breathing It looks like some sort of kitten Charr/Gundam thingy.

I’m not disappoint in the looks of the armor as much as I am in the method to obtain it. It is basically a Raid only armor. This means ANeT spent years developing something that only the elites and those who pay the elites can obtain. At least with PVP skins you have a decent way to obtain them. So, unless you can find someone who can clear the bosses for you, you are S.O.L. on this new legendary.

I’m not saying I want legendary armor to just flow out a waterfall to everyone when they log on. I’m saying that the method to obtain it should be available outside the Raid setting. I’ve only been successful on a few of the Raid bosses, and that’s after hours of absolutely zero fun. The only one that was even remotely fun was the escort. VG was purely mechanics and dps. Gorsy was purely a dps check with some minor mechanics tossed in. Of course VG and Gorsey have that annoying artificial timer thrown in. Why not just increase the reward if they are defeated under a certain time limit while leaving the current reward alone?

Anyway, back to the armor. I’m sure the WvW folks would love a way to obtain Legendary armor, other than Raids. I know PVX players certainly would. I play in nearly all aspects of the game and I can say that Raids are my least favorite. So why lock the Legendary armor, your “greatest achievement”, behind something that the vast majority don’t play?

LSD.4673:

Not sure how people managed to be disappointed. GW2’s armour design as a whole is pretty awful.

That’s what I’ve been saying.

Anet’s never been that great at armor sets. By marketing and hyping legendary armors as much as they did, they only ended up exposing one of their biggest weaknesses.

It’s actually quite amusing to watch, in a sad way. I rarely see a company working so hard to structure an entire game’s reward system around something that they’re not very good at delivering. It’s sad to see that the very same game that is driven by cosmetics is also one of the games with the worst cosmetics in its genre.

But what truly annoys me as a fan is how Anet’s been dead silent on this, whilst repeating the same mistakes over and over.

Heavy: Passable.
Medium: Unatractive. (Boots and gauntlets look good, though.)
Light: Repulsive. (Muzzle-face AND circus-tent rear? Come on!)

Heibi.4251:

I’m not disappoint in the looks of the armor as much as I am in the method to obtain it. It is basically a Raid only armor. This means ANeT spent years developing something that only the elites and those who pay the elites can obtain. At least with PVP skins you have a decent way to obtain them.

Oh wow, the most prestigious item in the game is only available if you put in some effort, what a shock! On a side note, I’m apparently elite now. On a different side note, I likely won’t ever get The Ascension because I dislike PvP, but I’m not complaining about it.

Feanor.2358:

On a different side note, I likely won’t ever get The Ascension because I dislike PvP, but I’m not complaining about it.

There’s also Ad Infinitum you can get, and you can turn off the backpacks….

How is turning off relevant? Also, Ad Infinitum pushes you pretty hard into fractals, and not just briefly.

Being able to turn them off is a blessing when your stacking in dungeons and fractals. I gladly turn them off so that peeps can see their own skill effects and not my “wings” in their face. That would be great if the leggie armors could also turn off any visuals.

I keep my Ad Infinitum turned off for aesthetic reasons, but I still fail to see how is that relevant to its acquisition.

I am kind of relieved these armors are so totally ugly. I am not real fond of raids and now I have no pressure to do them. I’ll keep working for my radiant which, I think, is far better, even if the medium is still (barf) a trench coat. Of course the last 3000 points are gonna be a bear but that armor set, at least, is worth it.

I still wonder who it is at ANet that says "players are sick and tired of trenchcoats and butt-capes. Hey, here’s a great idea. Let’s put in more trenchcoats and butt-capes.

It’s relevant because if you wanted a legendary backpiece then you found one of the ways to get one, whereas with leggie armor, there is only one way to obtain one. The original founding principle of this game, was to be able to obtain any goal however you wanted to.

1. Backpacks were released one by one. There was a period when an alternative method did not exist.

2. Suppose I like The Ascension more and want it. I’d be forced to play PvP, no way around it.

3. Either has nothing to do with the purely cosmetic ability to hide your backpack, existing on all tiers of gear.

Legendary armor is very important aspect of the game.
Even if on surface it’s content for 5% playerbase or less, a whole lot more will be affected.
Legendaries = greater freedom of experimentation and more builds made.
Builds tested in practice, not just theorycrafted on gw2skills or similar.

That’s something that can affect and enrich a wide array of players, even if they themselves care little for raids.