Just before I get into anything: I’m not referring to ascended equipment, I’m referring to unique exotics and upgrade components.
One of the issues that comes up often is the handful of unusually difficult to obtain basic necessities for certain builds. You know the ones. Celestial stats held behind 5 charged quartz crystals (which recent changes have made exorbitantly expensive), Zealot stats held behind getting 500 watchwork sprockets, and Sentinel stats held behind getting 10 guild commendations. Likewise a good number of useful sigils and runes are held behind large amounts of watchwork sprockets and pristine toxic spores (neither of which have been readily available outside of niche locations for years). This is something that always frustrated people and I was believing it to be getting better with the release of easier to obtain stat combinations, sigils, and runes that came with the release of permanent content that included stats such as Sinister and Nomad.
It was a mistake to believe that, however, as the release of Heart of Thorns has doubled down on the inaccessibility of stats and confoundingly made certain exotic stats more complicated to make beyond obtaining a new inscription as previous new stats had done. The release of the four-stat combinations is a welcome change by many across all game types but it comes with a frustrating change: pointless new crafting materials. Oiled components, barbed thorns, charged thorns, leaf fossils, charged relics, and a number more. Another name for it all is clutter and unbalanced clutter at that. Charged Thorns and Charged Fossils (used in creating Commander and Wanderer stat combinations, respectively) are expensive upgraded form of Barbed Thorns and Leaf Fossils (used in creating Marauder and Crusader stat combinations, respectively). It seems like nonsense, like that certain stats should intrinsically be more expensive and valuable than others by virtue of being itself and not because gameplay and market demand decides it. Not to mention the charged items all require Charged Quartz Crystals, one of the most controversial time gated items in the game BEFORE the expansion came out but now the expansion has more than doubled the uses for Charged Quartz. To say they are in short supply is an understatement. Oiled components is another useless change, a full set of new crafting components for every single tier 6 crafting component that cost more due requiring linseed vials and do absolutely nothing that the old components could have done.
Heart of Thorns also contains a number of new runes and sigils that come as part of the map reward system: Rune of Thorns, Rune of Durability, Rune of Surging, Rune of Leadership, Sigil of Absorption, Sigil of Ruthlessness, Sigil of Draining, Sigil of Rending. All of these runes and sigils are varying degrees of useful to individuals but share one thing in common: exorbitant grinding. The currencies for these items are the map reward currencies for the four new world maps in Magus Falls but the matter is the amount of grinding required to get a pair of sigils or even worse a set of six runes it astounding compared to the acquisition rate of these currencies. I’m talking weeks of grinding for a set of runes, something that is seen by everybody as a very basic and essential part of a build. Acquiring a set of runes from a map reward vendor is by far the most time consuming thing related to map rewards across every single map. This isn’t for unique skins or special privileges, these are the things related to how you can build a character. It’s restrictive and it’s frustrating.
I was under the impression, with progressively easier to acquire exotic and runes and sigils being in the game since day one, that the game was designed around having fully built character a relatively easy thing to do so that players could focus on cosmetics (and later small boosts gained by ascended equipment). But this is being subverted time and time again, with one of the smartest things available to players: easy access to the ability to try new builds, being choked under pressure of harder to acquire stat combinations and upgrade components. When Guild Wars 2 came out, the available stat combinations were mostly equal and the players decided what would have value but the release of Heart of Thorns has skewed that common sense design choice in favor of needless grinding for new possible builds. I don’t feel like I can experiment between the capabilities of Minstrel’s and Wanderer’s like I was able to experiment between the capabilities of Cleric’s versus Soldier’s. I don’t feel like I can change my runes from Nightmare to Thorns like I can for Flame Legion to Balthazar. This seems like the wrong direction to be taking and the enjoyment of the game, especially with the introduction of actually needing a variety of builds in PvE for raids, will take its toll as more and more people decide that things like taking Rune of Leadership would be too much work and instead opt for less useful runes simply due to work needed to obtain those runes or the concentration bonus from Wanderer’s isn’t worth the extra work of simply making a set of Soldier’s equipment. The playing field needs to be far more balanced.
tl;dr: grind gating builds is bad
(edited by GoZero.9708)
