Guild Wars 2

I came to the conclusion that maybe I don’t understand gear progression.
I always thought that it means the gear gets more powerful as I progress in my levels. And more importantly, that I have to use gear of proper level if I want to stay alive and do some proper damage.
ArenaNet stated this game has no gear progression (at least a lot of players say that) and there are a lot of topics about whether this is a good or bad thing, so I am a bit confused right now.
If there is no gear progression, why is gear level based and why are gear’s stats getting better by the level?
Or can I actually use my starting gear all the way to my level 80 and still be competitive as much as if I would use level 80 gear (let’s for a moment assume I don’t care about my looks – yes, we do exist)?

The comments are mainly about the level 80 gear. In other games you had big gear progression after you hit the end-level of the game. In this game stats increase only slightly between a lvl 80 rare and a lvl 80 exotic and it is more about the looks.

Thank you. It appears I did have wrong understanding of gear progression.

You should grind for exotics. Exotics are about 10% better than rares. After you get exotics the grind is over unless you want to grind for legendaries which are pretty much cosmetic.

That being said, having that exotic gear isn’t a must to be competetive in dungeons. In other MMOs your output was feeble compared to what those in top tier gear could do. In GW2 it’s less a deal breaker, but it will make you better.

Gear progression is also associated with “Power Creep”.
Perhaps this vid will help you better understand the issue.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep

AlexanderFaust.4518:

Gear progression is also associated with “Power Creep”.
Perhaps this vid will help you better understand the issue.
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep

Awesome link. It does a great job of explaining the issue and how it impacts game play.

Stats from gear and your trait build very much do affect how your character performs. The system for GW2, if they had decided to make it a gear progression game, ivery much could have depended on gear.

The way they took gear out of being a huge factor was by having just a few levels of gear to progress at 80. For around vendor price, there’s blues and greens. For about salvage price there’s yellows. And then into the “more than a gold” there’s exotic, which is where it ends.

Gear grind is a little heavier than I wanted however there are so many paths to get them, karma, pvp, crafting, dungeon marks and trading post. I found PvP marks the longest to get since I fail at noticing the bags a lot of the times, dungeons next because I can only run a dungeon about 3 times before I’m done with that for the night, plus everyone always wants to run the easiest and fastest, so the others are hard to get groups for.
The trade post items are cheap enough, super obtainable, crafting in this game is actually decently easy as well. You could do all the content in the game in rares without much issue and rares are stupid cheap right now.

“at least a lot of players say that”

There’s your problem. Just because a number of kittenes say it doesn’t mean in any way that it is true or intended by the devs.