Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone. I just wanted to take this moment to discuss something I thought was interesting with the current PvP and WvW back items.

So currently, the precursor for both back items is the product of four lesser back items: one fine, masterwork, rare, and exotic; what I wanted to talk about is the reason for the 4th tier of the precursor. If you think about it, as soon as a player has all four tiers of the precursor simultaneously, they’re going to just immediately forge them to make the final tier of the precursor. What I’m saying is, the 4th tier precursor is nearly pointless.

SO, my suggestion is, replace the 4th tier of the back item with an item instead of another back item skin. That way, we save developer time in making the legendary, should they choose to make another in the future.

This way, you’ll still have the progression of the skin from tiers 1-3, the final precursor, AND we save time for the developers in making a pointless skin no one will ever use.

Sure you could argue you will lose an exotic attribute back item, but you could just make the precursor and get one that way too (ascended). (Yes I realize there’s also the loss of a wardrobe skin, but it’s mostly likely underwhelming relative to the final precursor anyway.)

Tell me what you think.

Its a weird situation because of the players in general. A huge complaint from a while back is that there were no intermediately goals to most of the end game reward skins; often citing “sense of progress” as the reason why they didn’t like the setup. But the reality, as you pointed out, is that players treat investments very differently when theres a cash/material cost involved in the process.

Because of how colossally expensive it is to do many of these collections, players have developed a habit of Stock piling what they need BEFORE they start, on the chance that they’ll lose interest, or come across a better opportunity in the mean time. Its the only way to keep our options open, when theres this expectation of “minimum cost” to everything we do… Especially with their reliance on time gates for all the newer content, and an inability to recoop/repurpose costs if stopped half way.

The problem with Skins being unlocks, is that the the intermediary rewards will very likely go unused. Just looking at Pre-cursor crafting, some of them give fun or useful items (like Chromatic Ooze tonic), while the Experiment skins (which purposely look unimpressive) go unused….. in fact, the weapons themselves tend to go unused because you need to salvage them at some point, and don’t want to lose track of it.

The summation of all of this is perfectly exemplified in Cooking as whole. It produces a lot of “dead end” products that no one will proactively want to use, and a crap ton of intermediary materials that only have value in the production of a higher tier recipe. This wouldn’t be as big an issue, if not for the fact that you have to store these materials if you can’t use them…. and bank space is at a huge premium.

The problem they have, and one thats fundamental to how the reward systems are designed in this game, is that the intermediate items in the long process have no useful value. But in a dissonant position, the players also demand the process produce items as “proof” that they are making progress toward their goal; but if immediately useful, motivation to complete the collection would be much, much lower.

For instance… the Caladbog collection (which is repeatable) can produce a cheap, easily re-purposed Ascended weapon, for each character thats finished HOT. This is potentially more useful then Legendary weapons, because you can change stats on it with minor effort… but also change the entire weapon class. Now compare that to pretty much any Pre-Curosr Crafting collection that has you crafting 250 “basic weapons”, and 500 in spare parts, and then 10-15 each of T2-5 weapon parts, 1 each of T7… all so you have the ability to craft a 2 Trophy items (worth 2s each) out of another 50-60 gold worth of material…. neither of which is used in the next crafting phase, that requires another 70-100g to make another 2 types of “perfected” components created in the last step.

The legendary production process needs to be rethought to use a better incorporation method, if they insist on keeping the kind “crafting/collection” gating they’re using track progress. The more direct solution is to reduce the number of items and skins down to a couple (initial, pre, and Legendary, and then use shaders to create variable states of the item’s progress. But while this reduces the item/skin clutter, its relies on shaders…. something I’m unsure the Devs are willing to use with how they’ve scaled things back for LS3. It seems to be reserved for Legendary items, and a few special cases where they add particle effects.