Guild Wars 2

So armor at the moment has 8 stats:

Power
Perception
Vitality
Toughness
Condition Damage
Healing Power
Critical Damage
Magic Find

Now there are certain rules (as of now anyways) to how these stats can be combined, namely, Magic Find can only be a major stat, and critical damage must be a minor stat.
This gives us 7 × 7 × 5 different combinations (my maths might be off feel free to correct me) = 245 different combinations for 3 stats.

Currently, we only have about <15 of the available combinations in the game. Here’s a disclaimer: I don’t support the introduction of ascended gear. I think a simple stat increase does not enrich the game experience in any way.

Different stat combinations do. Builds in GW2 are driven as much by the stats armor gives as the traits and skills a player chooses. Before November 15th there was an interesting discussion on the necromancer subforum about why there is no Condition/vitality/toughness gear. Lo and behold, now there is.

Arenanet could have went with the slow implementation of different stat combinations, such as Wayfarer in the Nov15th patch, which would diversify and enrich builds in the game.

Horizontal progression development enriches game experience, imo, vertical progression merely repeats the same thing.

I agree.

I said to my guildmates that this is actually one example of horizontal progression they should have went with first. I also find it a bit weird that if you want certain stat combos, you have to do certain dungeons. How about this:

— Have all combinations (everything present in the game right now, SPvP included) be available to crafters. Create new crafting ingredients for them if you have to.

— Instead of (or in addition to) bartering for the armors themselves, have the dungeon barters be Armor Tokens or something. These tokens can be used by crafters as additional ingredients to make an armor piece with. Using an Armor Token will make the armor produced have the corresponding dungeon cosmetic.

Well, I actually don’t want them all to be released at once. But more than what we have now for sure. Releasing new ones, particularly the more sought after ones could really change the meta game when it starts to get stale.