Guild Wars 2

reposting w/ fixed wording – Arena net deleted this post once already. Hopefully this wording is more favorable.

tl:dr; This set of changes is a bad idea and will drive players away.

No End-game, all of the game is end-game:
Fractals is targeted at level 80s, while non-80’s can certainly join in and get scaled up anyone that’s run explorable dungeons frequently has probably had the not-so-fun experience of playing with undergeared and/or underleveled players. Everything becomes harder, takes longer, and some things are just impossible (AC Exp 3 for instance) without enough dmg or beef. Fractals has this same problem in spades, people need to be both geared and familiar with many other aspects of the game. There are a lot of gimmicky encounters and mechanics to leverage in the fractals and learning them on the fly can be painful for the person playing and those in the group. This is, of course, most noticeable in pugs. This also appears to introduce a requirement to get to 80 and then get exotics before you can join your friends. Either because they’ve out-leveled you, you’re on an alt, or you’re new to the game. That sucks, on all counts. Exp’s were hard w/o geared 80s, but my guild still happily ran them with low level characters. It was normal to find us pvp’ing with a group of mixed 20-80’s and the same was true for our PvE. People would bring alts or try new specs or different gear. That doesn’t seem possible in the fractals as they are now.

No grind
Ascended gear is usable in WvW, can be infused, and the requires grindy fractals to acquire. This is a harsh deviation from the previous model of easily crafted/bought/token acquired exotics where grinding was only present to acquire a specific look. This isn’t what we were looking for in GW2, we loved the existing model and were happily repeating dungeons for tokes to build specific looks. We had evenings where we stood around in LA linking gear and commenting on cosmetic combinations. This grind isn’t what was pitched to us, we were told Legendaries would be cosmetic updates, gear wasn’t going to be hard to get, NO GRIND! Then this patch came out… and it appears to be nothing but grind and full of non-cosmetic updates. I was happily leveling my 5th character (with plans to play all 8 classes to max!) and had kited out the 3 of the previous 4 with rare MF suits and spec-specific Exotic suits. The amount of time it appears to take to get ascended gear means that if I want to have equal footing in small group pvp (the kind I like, I don’t zerg or siege) I’m going to have to commit to both a spec and a single character. I can’t be the happy-go-lucky alt-aholic that I am now without sacrificing some statistics. That’s a shame and really ruins the game for me.

Overall problem is longer term
While I’m sure that 3 items aren’t going to represent a large difference in PvP, I also anticipate the next patch adding 3 more ascended pieces. It appears that if I’m hyper focused on pve I can get 3 pieces of ascended gear for one character focused on one spec by then. So I’m essentially forced to lock in to a spec and a character to ‘keep up’ in wvw. This isn’t something I’m interested in. I’m sure you’ve all see the quote from Linsey about this being the start of the gear progression and the promises of “no new gear in the next 3 months” both of which point strongly to a full suit of ascended in the works. There’s also the comments about ‘bridging the gap’ to lessen the jump from Exotic to Legendary. “Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two”. This statement implies a higher tier than ascended of Legendary. The current ‘jump’ in power from Exotic to Legendary is 0. As of the patch, it became an actual stat gain, but Ascended is certainly not ‘in between’ the Exotic and Legendary tier as Ascended = Legendary for stats right now. Reading between the lines a little this seems to point toward an upcoming bump, again, to Legendary stats. I’m guessing we’ll eventually see Legendary armor available as well. Not something we’re interested in, if we wanted vertical progression and gear that was time consuming to acquire, we’d still be playing WoW with it’s 8 years of expansions and 10+ years of development.

I see you have a better tldr now.

“Thanks for leaving”, “QQ more”, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” – such respectful and well-considered remarks in response to someone voicing an opinion or concern. I love a great community.

Kaleidoscope.8091:

“Thanks for leaving”, “QQ more”, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” – such respectful and well-considered remarks in response to someone voicing an opinion or concern. I love a great community.

What does one do about the flood of tears coming from gear you don’t have to get to be usefull in other settings.

Refrain from replying if you don’t have anything constructive to add? Usually works.

Edit: I am sitting on the fence myself. Seeing mostly a bunch of rude remarks in response to legitimate concerns makes me want to ditch the game just to get rid of the community.

Well Mythic pulled the same stunt with “Trials of Atlantis” in DAoC…..Nearly killed the game overnight…….Just saying

Genesis.5169:

Kaleidoscope.8091:

“Thanks for leaving”, “QQ more”, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” – such respectful and well-considered remarks in response to someone voicing an opinion or concern. I love a great community.

What does one do about the flood of tears coming from gear you don’t have to get to be usefull in other settings.

Check your math. Mandatory to compete in WvWvW

Genesis.5169:

What does one do about the flood of tears coming from gear you don’t have to get to be usefull in other settings.

Why do you have to do anything about it? This post completely misunderstands the main issue and the OP’s issues. ANet listened to the flood of tears from the people whining that there was no progression. Now, folks are complaining the other way. Since that was how the game was advertised, one might ask why the gear grind crowd bought it in the first place.

Don’t listen to the gear grinders. They will leave the game long before the end.

To late to tell Anet the error. They have made a decision, it is implemented, they will stick to it. Like I have said many times recently 2 years from now they will look back and admit the mistake. They pulled the ol’ bait and switch on me. Never again. I keep my promises, I will not spend one more penny on anything this company produces. Finger in my eye? Finger right back.

I find it just sad.. Others are right… ToA DID kill DAoC doing the exact same thing. And as Indigo said, “Don’t listen to the gear grinders. They will leave the game long before the end.”… I believe this is so true. Just sucks that Anet seems to be doing so much to cater to that crowd, even though they pitched the game for years saying that there would be no “grinding”.. I enjoyed the game up until now, but this will be it for me as well. Good luck to those who stick it out.

Just don’t forget to request a refund before you go.