Guild Wars 2

So Chris said there will be no more tiers added and they plan to add ascended gear into the game throughout the next year, acquired from participating in whatever gameplay you like(DEs, dungeons, fractals, WvW, etc). Ok, a step in the right direction.

Then he went on to hint that the infusions will become more powerful over time, acquiring better infusions to insert into your gear, instead of replacing the gear itself. So basically, the gear is not the gear treadmill, infusions will be. Infusions will become obsoleted every so often. Am I correct and understanding this correctly?

Ascended gear and legendaries stay the same over time, but the infusions become a treadmill?

Quoted from Reddit:

[–]ArenaNetTeam[S] 104 points 12 hours ago

Hi All,

Here is the reply to the second question:

E2:""Ascended gears are making a lot of people worry about an ever-increasing gear treadmill. Many players did not want the exotic/legendary system to change, and they don’t like ascended gears. Was this expected? Can this be something fixed in a painless way? Can it happen?"

Yes the response was definitively expected. We did not intent for the information to come out this way. Going back to my previous answer the issue is that we believe in the vertical progression system we had pre launch and that the introduction of an element into the system post launch was going to cause concern but something we believe in. That is why there is no plan for new Rarity Tiers of loot but there are plans to enhance or gain items within the existing rarity design whose properties continue on a shallow power curve. This said we certainly don’t want to create a system where itemization blocks progression in the game globally and we also need to be careful of this in areas such as FotM if the primary reward isn’t available elsewhere in the game. So in short its an exciting problem but one that has been poorly communicated and handled.

And for this i take responsibility and apologies. However the future of this philosophy and the design challenges it throws up are going to lead to a pioneering world and one that we are very excited about.

So anyway i kind of went of topic here so in short. We don’t intend to have an item rarity gear treadmill, we intend for the progression for gaining these rewards to have lots of different avenues for different types of player and where possible lower no fun grind within the whole of the game.

I hope this answers that question. I will be right back.

Chris"

As you can see through the bolded, that you can gain items whose properties increase on a shallow curve, i.e. a treadmill. Am I correct in these assumptions?

I want to say one thing about it, taking World of Warcraft as our usual example.
WoW doesn’t have a new “color” tier with every dungeon, yet it has a dozen or so of progressive tiers of the same color (purple).
This is the exact same thing.
There are tiers.
They plainly lied in the manifesto when they said that you would have had a maximun power set and that would have been it, no gear progression, no treadmill.

Seems to me that the itemization of the infusions will purely be for later content inside the dungeons. We’ve already seen that players can get very, very, far into FotM as it is, without needing the gear.

It will not be a gear treadmill. It will simply allow players to progress down the dungeon ‘path’ for greater challenge, both game-wise and personally. I can also foresee that in the time it takes to get to your ‘ceiling’ in the dungeon, you will most likely have already acquired the +whatever item you require to go even further.

It sounds to me that their “novel” idea is that instead of creating a real treadmill, they introduce a different type of powercreep system. I am not convinced this will appease a lot of people, but that’s for each person to decide.

For me, the best course of action is to let this game where it is for a year or so and then either forget about it or have a look and see what happened.

Bottom line is that I don’t trust Anet enough at this stage.

Poor guy, brainwashed by world of warcraft clones.

Other than GW, DAoC had no vertical progression until the second expansion… which killed the game altogether.

EvE has no treadmill and that does amazingly well – we all need to appreciate degrees of mechanics and not go apespit when a hipster term is dropped into a discussion. @ Khemizt

There are a multitude of ways that mechanics can be applied and used. Have some diversity.

I think without a unifying purpose like open world pvp or something of that effect that horizontal progression gets incredibly boring. Without GVG, GW1 would never have been half as interesting. So they need to beef up WvW and SPvP..and other things will plane out imo.