Guild Wars 2

Ok, Ascended gear is here to stay. I really don’t see ANet dropping it’s stats back to exotic quality.

Lets take a look at what they did with it though, as to me it looks like it was built using the tech they aready had, rathre than adding what would be nessecary to do it properly for everything.

Current ascended items are Back and Ring. Back and Ring, as far as I know, have no upgrade slot items that give anything but stats. Most people don’t mix the upgrade, and match the upgrade stats to the item stats. So rolling the stats into the item isn’t going to change a lot. (I’m staying out of the fact that they increaced the stats just now*) Since they wanted a new item slot, accessories are the only place they can get rid of the existing item slot without destroying runes and sigils. Since they don’t have the tech to give an item two upgrade slots, that works.

All this means that I doubt we’ll see any ascended items apart from accessories.

@ANet: Don’t even think about doing ascended Armour and Weapons until you have the tech to do an infusion slot and a rune/sigil slot. And make it a fourth slot on the transmutation stone so people can pull their existing looks and runes/sigil across.

• Just going to point out that GW1, which made enough money (with only minimum updates after GW:EN) for GW2, never increaced the stats on “perfect” gear. The stuff I have there currently has equivilent stats to the stuff available at release.

It is all about establishing a norm(than that you need the items at the moment) and ensure that they can introduce new tiers when they want more cash flowing in. The introduced recipes require a serious time investment, as drop rates and DR make it hard to farm them fast and craft the items without investing much time, it is easier to buy gems, get gold and buy the materials.

Think about it, when they pull this through, every player that starts GW2 after the introduction of the new tier will be accustomed to the fact that there is a tier beyond Exotic, so there will never be as much uproar about introducing a new tier as now, if any at all.

They are and it is already in game because the legendary items had the stats boosted to ascend levels when the patch on the 15th went live.
I believe I saw data mines for the other possible ascend stuff on redit but could be wrong.
They wouldnt start down this path if it wasnt ready. This wasnt a hasty choice it was deliberate and took time to implement.
You always start small in something like this cause it is less likely to provoke a reaction instead of releasing say weapons as the first thing.Back slots ect are meaningless compared to armour and weapons and would cause less blow-back from community.
my 2cp.

Trust me, this is a dark path Anet are taking and its not going to end well. Not without levelling the playing field and that would literally require handing out equal level ascended items for 10% of the cost current best in slot ascended and future ascended items ~ otherwise, the gear divide will become so bad, the only people left playing the game will be the hardcore crowd and lets see how the game functions with 10k people playing or less.

[quote=845336;Narkosys.5173:
You always start small in something like this cause it is less likely to provoke a reaction instead of releasing say weapons as the first thing.Back slots ect are meaningless compared to armour and weapons and would cause less blow-back from community.
[/quote]

If this was a small blow-back I really don’t know if I want to see a big one. Maybe it would involve cracking ANets servers or something (Not that I’m condoning that, I just don’t see how much bigger a responce could get without something like that).