Guild Wars 2

I hate to add to the chaos of these forums but I have a great solution to put in gear progression for the people that “NEED” it.

Each new dungeon can drop the ascended armor but introduce a new condition like agony. Early bosses, tiers, etc of the dungeons can drop infusion slots to defend against the condition. Those early bosses will also deal the previous dungeons “agony” condition.

This allows gear progression from a dungeon runner standpoint but has no effect on those not wanting to play through dungeons.

Everyone wins… am I wrong?

EDIT: The story mode of each new dungeon can completely ignore the condition mechanic allowing players to see the new things in dungeons without needing to grind for better gear.

i think it would be alright if the infusions them selves didn’t have stats added onto them.

i’m waiting to see the actual implementation of this new patch to really see how good/bad its going to be. although it would be a lie for me to say that i like the idea of a new gear tier.

There are definitely pros and cons to new gear tiers. I do think the new infusions should have the same stats as the other infusions released but a defense against the new condition.

Prima.3512:

Thirsty.2875:

Those early bosses will also deal the previous dungeons “agony” condition.

Early bosses will not drop “agony”.

And? That is the idea that you finish one dungeon and get their “agony” resistance to use against the early bosses in the next tier of dungeon.

Thirsty.2875:

Prima.3512:

Thirsty.2875:

Those early bosses will also deal the previous dungeons “agony” condition.

Early bosses will not drop “agony”.

And? That is the idea that you finish one dungeon and get their “agony” resistance to use against the early bosses in the next tier of dungeon.

I know, I misunderstood :P

Thirsty.2875:

Everyone wins… am I wrong?

Yes, you are wrong. Ascended will now become needed to have the best performance in WvW. If ArenaNet really plans on making a full set of Ascended gear (as they’ve stated in their blog post) and plan on “eventually” making it available through WvW and open world PvE options, then it’s a safe assumption that Ascended will become the new gear standard that content will be designed around (instead of Exotic). This will end up causing a slow ripple effect that will force a gear progression treadmill onto the entire game, which is something that ArenaNet has always mocked in other games.

Ex-raiders like myself who came here after seeing much of ArenaNet’s philosophy are unhappy. This game was advertised as being more about making alts and the climb to the level cap. It was never about the end game scene, regardless of some last minute panicked statements from ArenaNet that were issued shortly before launch. Now ArenaNet has flipped things and has decided to cater to the ex-WoW (and insert various other MMOs) crowd. This group of people is historically fickle and has caused every new MMO to be changed to meet their needs. Yet this crowd is never pleased with the revised version of the new MMO, so they leave it and jump onto the next new MMO while the existing MMO has to deal with the loss of the MMO jumpers (because their jumping is inevitable) and the loss of much of their hardcore devoted fan base (who were angered that their beloved MMO was mutated by the devs to meet the needs of the MMO jumpers).

Will this cause GW2 to implode? Hard to say. It certainly raises some red flags and has made me start to seriously look at other MMOs. If you’re going to introduce gear progression, then man up and say it from the very start. I have little patience or faith in companies or people who are too spineless to say what they really mean, which means that they’ll hit you with a bait and switch scenerio at a later point.

Wiser with Age..

Full sets of Ascended gear is coming that won’t be stopped no matter how much people agree or disagree with it. It is time to accept that fact and move on, it is another tier of gear they felt needed to be added after exotics. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with this decision.

If they stop with Ascended that relives the game of having the gear treadmill. My suggestion allows gear progression through dungeons but doesn’t make it required to anyone not interested in them.

Thirsty.2875:

Wiser with Age..

Full sets of Ascended gear is coming that won’t be stopped no matter how much people agree or disagree with it. It is time to accept that fact and move on, it is another tier of gear they felt needed to be added after exotics. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with this decision.

If they stop with Ascended that relives the game of having the gear treadmill. My suggestion allows gear progression through dungeons but doesn’t make it required to anyone not interested in them.

Infusions have quality levels, and add stats to the gear.
They are starting with Fine (blue) quality Infusions, and plan to add more in the future.

They have tried to hide the treadmill in new upgrade slots instead of new gear.

Nymia.3256:

Infusions have quality levels, and add stats to the gear.
They are starting with Fine (blue) quality Infusions, and plan to add more in the future.

They have tried to hide the treadmill in new upgrade slots instead of new gear.

A gear treadmill is the idea that gear will infinitely get better so you constantly have to strive to get the new gear. Like I said before the new levels of gear are here and ANet isn’t going to take them away.

The game is very new in terms of an MMO and as long as the best tier of gear stops at ascended ANet is simply extending the gear progression already in the game.

Thirsty.2875:

Nymia.3256:

Infusions have quality levels, and add stats to the gear.
They are starting with Fine (blue) quality Infusions, and plan to add more in the future.

They have tried to hide the treadmill in new upgrade slots instead of new gear.

A gear treadmill is the idea that gear will infinitely get better so you constantly have to strive to get the new gear. Like I said before the new levels of gear are here and ANet isn’t going to take them away.

The game is very new in terms of an MMO and as long as the best tier of gear stops at ascended ANet is simply extending the gear progression already in the game.

You haven’t read everything they have said about this change. I’m not going to argue with you, because I don’t think you are trying to be difficult I just think you are ignorant of the entire change.

I suggest you do a little more reading, because this is in fact the first step of the new vertical progression system that has been added to GW2. They have confirmed that in the future new content will require this gear, and more gear progression is coming.

Don’t ask me to prove it, because I won’t. You will either find out now or you will find out later when it’s staring you in the face and laughing at you.

Thirsty.2875:

Wiser with Age..

Full sets of Ascended gear is coming that won’t be stopped no matter how much people agree or disagree with it. It is time to accept that fact and move on, it is another tier of gear they felt needed to be added after exotics. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with this decision.

I completely agree that these changes are coming, regardless of what the player base does. As a non-subscription model, it’s hard to make ArenaNet pay for the consequences of any change that they make to the game. My fundamental issue is that this was the only MMO on the entire market who ran a counter-design philosophy and heavily marketed themselves as such. By flipping around 180 degrees in less than 3 months in an appeal to keep players who weren’t part of their original target audience (at least based on their advertising), ArenaNet has proven to be like every other MMO designer in the past decade.

There are still a lot of things that I like about GW2. It’s not even the power creep by itself that I object to, though that is part of it. This game was marketed as more of a casual game for part time players due to IRL obligations, part time players who played this on the side of their main MMO, and people who loved WvW / PvP. Now ArenaNet is changing their game’s structure towards a new demographic. If they did this at the 6 month or 12 month mark, then I would be much more understanding. However changing it this close means that they either completely mis-read their demographics or that they have always intended to go down their route and had simply deceived everyone into buying their product. Both of these scenerios say very poor things about the potential future of GW2.

Sometimes things which are different just don’t do very well with the general public. Case in point, Funcom’s new game called The Secret World. I love the lore of that game and still might get into it once they finish their rumored transition to Free to Play. Funcom failed because they tried to do something too different and too time consuming (quest wise) for a subscription basis. As an example, The Game Station did a podcast with Felicia Day and she mentioned that she spent 2 hours learning how to do Morse Code to complete a quest. She loved that level of involvement and had a blast, but felt that this kind of quest structure was a poor choice for a subscription MMO since you’re normally expecting more combat and xp for your time investment.

Even with Funcom’s TSW probably going F2P, they haven’t made any drastic changes to the game and are still trying to produce new content. I really respect that and I hope that they carve their own cult following niche after the F2P switch. The only reason that I initially avoided that game is that I wanted to get away from the whole trinity role system.

That would be alright if they scrapped Ascended equipment and added the Infusion slots either to existing armour, or to new equipment slots that add no stats besides an Infusion slot.

Beyond every other problem with Ascended armour – the bad precedent they set, the gear treadmill of downgrading everybody’s existing equipment, the power creep, etc – the most important issue is that equipment with top stats shouldn’t be any harder to get than the cheapest Exotics already are.

Exotics are “easy” to get if you play one character, with one build, and you don’t care whether or not your character looks nice.
Call the amount of time needed to outfit a character in exotics ‘x’.
If you play more than one character, getting a full set of Exotics for each character multiplies the amount of time needed to max out by the number of characters (‘c’). You now need to spend ‘cx’ time to max out.
If you play more than one build on those characters, and need gear with different stats to make each build effective, you now need to multiply the amount of time spend grinding by the number of builds per character (‘b’). So now we’re up to bcx.
And when you factor in aesthetics, Exotics cover the range from low-end crafted equipment (~2g each, let’s say) to high-end, sub-legendary items like Mjolnir, Foefire’s Essence, etc (up to ~500g). So let’s say this is effectively a multiplier with a range from 1~250.

Let’s assume you don’t care about appearance, but you have three characters, and two builds to play on each. It’s now costing you 6x to outfit all your characters.
Or say you only have one character, but you have three builds you’d like to play, and you’re only moderately concerned with making that character look cool (give it a multiplier of just 4 or so). Now it’s taking you 12x to max out. Or, hell – say you just want to be able to play any of the game’s eight classes, even if you don’t have specialized builds for any of them and don’t care about looking cool. Still a cost of 8×.

So how much is ‘x’? Well, if we set the cost per piece of Exotic equipment at 2g, as we did earlier, then you’re going to need between 13 and 16 pieces of equipment, depending on how many weapons you use – let’s use 13, to be generous here (only Elementalists and Engineers can possibly get away with only having one weapon, but there also aren’t any Exotic back braces, so we’ll split the difference). That means that ‘x’ is 26g.
That’s ‘attainable’, not ‘trivial’, all by itself.

But in the first case, where we needed 6x to max out? Suddenly this is 156g.
The second case was 12x – that’s a whopping 312g!
The third case, 8x – so just the base cost of playing each class, without any specialization or particular attention paid to customization – still shakes out to 208g.

That’s a lot of kitten money. It’s not too likely that you’re going to see more than 2g or so per hour of playtime. I wouldn’t call a grind time of 75+ hours “too easy” to get, by any stretch of the imagination.

Now figure that, based on what we’ve seen so far (and this is roughly consistent with the jump in cost from Rare to Exotic), the overall cost to acquire an Ascended piece can be roughly on par with obtaining a full set of Exotic armour.
In other words, ‘x’ could easily be multiplied by 10-20, or more.

This is the biggest problem with Ascended equipment. It’s designed to give long-term goals to players who refuse to play more than one character, refuse to play more than one build per character, and who refuse to expend that extra time they have into improving their character aesthetically.
In the process, it constitutes a functional downgrade to every character in the game (Exotic is the new Rare, Rare is the new Masterwork, etc), and it renders it effectively impossible to play multiple characters, or even multiple builds, and even takes cosmetic advancement largely off the table, because the time that you would spend trying to get a really nice looking Exotic set now has to be dedicated toward getting your Ascended equipment, because otherwise you’re at a mechanical disadvantage.

I agree with a lot you are saying Wiser and I didn’t want this thread to turn into a debate about Ascended gear. ANet added in this tier of gear because three months into the game everyone is walking around in the top tier of gear, many people on multiple characters. If it stops with ascended gear we don’t have a gear treadmill the gear marathon just added a few miles to it.

My suggestion will let that marathon end for everyone that wants it to end. The system also allows for people that “NEED” that gear progression. In this system it will be very helpful to progress through each dungeon but at the same time if you want to jump to the newest dungeon you will be able to see it but progress much much slower through due to not having the proper resistances going into it.

Crater

You are debating the addition of adding ascended gear which is flooding the forums right now. My suggestion is talking about down the road when ascended gear is today’s exotic and people are leaving the game because they have “nothing to do”

Thirsty

“Flooding the forums” is hardly a reason why people should silence themselves. The forums are “flooded” because there is a great amount of outrage.

More people are going to leave the game due to broken promises and the bait and switch than will leave because they have “nothing to do”.

Yes, and your solution is good – but every aspect of it that applies post-Ascended (to prevent ‘Exalted’ gear, or whatever) applies equally right now. The argument is the same whether it’s being had now or whether it’s being had after Ascended is the new normal – if you can’t win it now, there’s not much hope for winning it later.

Crater.1625:

Yes, and your solution is good – but every aspect of it that applies post-Ascended (to prevent ‘Exalted’ gear, or whatever) applies equally right now. The argument is the same whether it’s being had now or whether it’s being had after Ascended is the new normal – if you can’t win it now, there’s not much hope for winning it later.

For this instance we will say we lost the battle with ascension gear because it is here. My suggestion allows ANet to put in a reason to get the next gear besides looks for the people that really want it (the people grinding dungeons) and makes it only a visual change for the people that have no desire to work for new gear.

The fact is, weather or not you like it, numbers will prove a very large amount of players like gear progression. If ANet can cater to those people while not making the newer gear any better for those that wish to not raid dungeons than we all win. More players happy = more players = more money for ANet = incentive and resources for ANet to make their game better for everyone.

Thirsty.2875:

Crater.1625:

Yes, and your solution is good – but every aspect of it that applies post-Ascended (to prevent ‘Exalted’ gear, or whatever) applies equally right now. The argument is the same whether it’s being had now or whether it’s being had after Ascended is the new normal – if you can’t win it now, there’s not much hope for winning it later.

For this instance we will say we lost the battle with ascension gear because it is here. My suggestion allows ANet to put in a reason to get the next gear besides looks for the people that really want it (the people grinding dungeons) and makes it only a visual change for the people that have no desire to work for new gear.

The fact is, weather or not you like it, numbers will prove a very large amount of players like gear progression. If ANet can cater to those people while not making the newer gear any better for those that wish to not raid dungeons than we all win. More players happy = more players = more money for ANet = incentive and resources for ANet to make their game better for everyone.

I just say A-Net lost the battle for my money with this new tier.

Surbrus.6942:

Thirsty

“Flooding the forums” is hardly a reason why people should silence themselves. The forums are “flooded” because there is a great amount of outrage.

More people are going to leave the game due to broken promises and the bait and switch than will leave because they have “nothing to do”.

I never said to stop posting your opinions but you cannot deny there are many many threads about the same things aka the forums are flooded with those threads. This post was meant to not be a debate about ascended gear but a suggestion for how to handle the future of gear progression.

Ascended gear is coming if you think that means ANet broke a promise they made to you and you are angry about it then stop playing their game. They gave you at least $60 worth of video game content before this patch.

I expect future progression to be lateral… future ascended sets with unique infusions and comparable power. The ascended layer nicely fills in the “time to acquire” gap between exotics and legendaries.

I predict concurrency will go down over time without vertical progression of some time. New infusions are a masked vertical progression that will gate any content it’s created for. This game needs depth. It needs character building. However, Anet is doing things in the fashion of gw1 so in the end, this will become a niche game, not a triple A game with years of being a top 3 mmo. That’s fine. However, I sense Anet trying to please both types of crowds, but in the end alienating both.

Natural.7013:

I predict concurrency will go down over time without vertical progression of some time. New infusions are a masked vertical progression that will gate any content it’s created for. This game needs depth. It needs character building. However, Anet is doing things in the fashion of gw1 so in the end, this will become a niche game, not a triple A game with years of being a top 3 mmo. That’s fine. However, I sense Anet trying to please both types of crowds, but in the end alienating both.

I would agree to an extent. My suggestion allows for a level of vertical gear progression for the areas it matters while not effecting those that don’t want to go into dungeon progression.