Guild Wars 2

I feel that Arenanet should give the players an alternative way of getting agony resistance other than grinding for ascended gear. And yes, I may kind of be griping about this game having become way too grindy, let us ignore that for now. What I am going to suggest is that exotic armor and weapons would be made infusable similarly how you can infuse ascended rings and backpacks. This would give a less time/money consuming method to ge to a level of agony resistance needed to play higher level fractals for the people who do not wish to invest time in getting ascended/legendary gear. I feel this would be balanced enough because you would have to separately infuse the armor for every character since exotic gear is soulbound instead of account bound like ascended/legendary. This would give the more casual playerbase a chance to play and enjoy higher level fractals with less time spent on grinding for gear.

Now, this will propably make some people think that this would make ascended gear obsolete, but I don’t think so. The 12.5% total stat boost over exotic gear would still be there and would give the player wearing it an advantage over people wearing exotics for example in WvW. And as always with MMOs, there are people that enjoy making a number higher.

The recipes for infusing a slot to exotic items could be something akin to as follows:
“Item to be infused”
Agonized Essence
50 +1 Agony Infusions
250 Philosopher Stone

This would still have a moderate grind. It could be made that you need the 4th rank in Fractal Masteries to unlock the exotic infusion recipes.

I would very much like to see a discussion about this to happen and perhaps something like this to be included in the game.

You can do level 19 (even 29 if your team agrees to it) without much hassle without having any AR (did 30 and 31 with a friend yesterday who had no AR at all, wasn’t much of a problem). Doing that you often earn ascended rings anyway, and get pristine fractal relics with which you can get an ascended ring from with stats you want (you get 3-7 pristine relics now doing the fractal dailies). So that’s basically 10 AR for free.
Now infusing takes a bit longer now than it had (because you have to do lvl 35 to even get globs), but having fractal mastery on lvl 2 (which doesn’t take that much xp) you can very cheaply attune an ascended ring.
From that point on you can make use of your agony infusions, which you get a lot now. Just doing the 3 easiest fractal dailies gives you about 50. You need only 16 for a +5, which means at that point you have at least 20 base AR.
Additionally there are potions you can buy that temporarily give you +10 AR.
So you have a base AR of 20, with which you can play up to level 34 without much of a thought. At that point it’s really no big deal to get other ascended stuff, and it takes maybe 4 days.

If you want to play higher levels than that: don’t be a casual. If you have the time to play higher, you have time to get more ascended gear. If you don’t want to invest in it because you want to buy that 1000g skin on the tp that’s your choice.

I see no issue with this.

Agony is just a grindsink anyway. Doubt Anet will go for it though. They want you playing 24/7.

MegumiAzusa.2918:

You can do level 19 (even 29 if your team agrees to it) without much hassle without having any AR (did 30 and 31 with a friend yesterday who had no AR at all, wasn’t much of a problem). Doing that you often earn ascended rings anyway, and get pristine fractal relics with which you can get an ascended ring from with stats you want (you get 3-7 pristine relics now doing the fractal dailies). So that’s basically 10 AR for free.
Now infusing takes a bit longer now than it had (because you have to do lvl 35 to even get globs), but having fractal mastery on lvl 2 (which doesn’t take that much xp) you can very cheaply attune an ascended ring.
From that point on you can make use of your agony infusions, which you get a lot now. Just doing the 3 easiest fractal dailies gives you about 50. You need only 16 for a +5, which means at that point you have at least 20 base AR.
Additionally there are potions you can buy that temporarily give you +10 AR.
So you have a base AR of 20, with which you can play up to level 34 without much of a thought. At that point it’s really no big deal to get other ascended stuff, and it takes maybe 4 days.

If you want to play higher levels than that: don’t be a casual. If you have the time to play higher, you have time to get more ascended gear. If you don’t want to invest in it because you want to buy that 1000g skin on the tp that’s your choice.

Well, I managed to barely get to 70AR on one character before HoT came out after a painful grind that cost me all my gold. After the release they pushed the cap to 150 and added 50 more levels of fractals it simply feels like an unreasonable grind is required for anything higher than level 55. I feel what I’m suggesting is much more reasonable than like asking to lower the AR requirements for the higher tier fractals or lowering the cost of ascended armor. I’m simply suggesting that they’d add an alternative way to gain effective agony resistance. At the moment the gate for Fractals is unreasonably high and is driving an even larger wedge to the playerbase of the game. All I’m saying is that give the playerbase an alternative to the ascended gear grind, even if it’s just another different kind of grind to make exotics actually worth using again.