Guild Wars 2

Say you have a back item skin such as the Decorative Molten Jetpack Skin equipped to one of those generic back items, or Spineguards, and you want to make an ascended back item but don’t want to give up the current back item you have on. Some would tell you you could just slap the skin onto the ascended back item, but for others that would seen like a waste to create something like Dynamic Tempered Spinal Blades just to cover it with, say King Toad’s Backpack (Not to mention there’s that whole transmuted item name issue that just makes it more weird). So I was thinking what might help is that we were able to upgrade the exotic-level spineguards, such as the ones you get from the Karma vendors at the Temple events, into ascended-level spineguards through the mystic forge, the same way you can upgrade the Sclerite Karka Shell into an ascended back item. That way you could have an ascended back item that is essentially a blank slate for you to put whatever back item you want on it and you won’t feel weird about making Shadow of Grenth just to slap Desert Rose Skin on top of it.

TL;DR Make exotic-level spineguards upgrade-able to Ascended-level

Thoughts?

yes, i would very much welcome that.

ascended back item is extremely not friendly to acquire in gw2

I’m all for it.

So basically just cheaper ascended back items?

I’m somewhat skeptical because you can already get very straightforward ascended items using several recipes. While they’re expensive, they’re not too difficult to get.

Except for costing like, 160g. But yeah maybe just adjust that pattern to instead use 50 t6 materials rather than 250.

An ascended fractal back is free. Its only expensive if you want it infused or glowy.

I’m not sure what you’re asking here. Any ascended (stat-wise) back item is a “blank slate” for a skin. There’s already a separation between appearance and stats. Once you unlock a skin you have it forever.

What I meant by “blank slate” is that since the Spineguards are not visible whether or not you have back items hidden is that you could slap on whatever skin you wanted without feeling like you ruined it, and an ascended spineguard would be the same thing, a literal blank slate to put whatever you want on it

All I see here is an OCD problem, not an actual game mechanic issue.

You just don’t want to apply a skin over an ascended backpiece because you feel that you are ruining the item, even knowing you can get that skin back at any time.

This is true, however it seems to me like a waste of transmutation charges to switch between the skin you want and the ascended item skin. Besides, no one is saying you have to use the ascended spineguards, I’m just saying the option to use them the same way some would use the crafted armor and weapons would be nice is all.