Guild Wars 2

By making ascended gear more important, people aren’t going to experiment at all given the insane price of switching ascended gear sets. If you thought the berserker meta was bad now, wait until they’re punished even more for trying a second stat combination.

I’m actually completely fine with the prices, but it feels like the game is moving more toward forcing us into a single specific playstyle.

The hero point system locks us out of traits unless we go through a grindy, tedious, and unchallenging process of running to every corner of a dozen maps. Ascended gear is becoming even more of a factor than it already was, and unless they make changes that they haven’t told us about, the prohibitively high cost of it is going to encourage people to just make one set and stick with it forever, or at the very least, only play characters of the same armor weight.

Anyone that decides to try out anything else that doesn’t use the same stats is going to end up being underwhelmed by their performance, which will just strengthen their desire to stay with what they’re already using. A 10% increase in damage and survivability is a huge factor that will skew every experiment in the favor of the set you have ascended gear for.

It feels like SPvP is going to end up being the only mode in the game that will keep the freedom to experiment with builds rather than just picking whatever is best and staying with that one thing is going to remain accessible, and that wont last once Heart of Thorns launches and those that bought it will have access to an entire additional specialisation over those without it.

Eponet.4829:

By making ascended gear more important, people aren’t going to experiment at all given the insane price of switching ascended gear sets. If you thought the berserker meta was bad now, wait until they’re punished even more for trying a second stat combination.

People were saying exactly this when Ascended gear came out. And your fears already have come to pass. Those who picked Ascended gear stats assuming their chosen traits would cover some of their needed stats got completely screwed. Will they go back and recraft more Ascended gear?

The problem is that people who do this are mostly WvW players as its the only game mode that requires careful balancing of stats (and has Ascended gear), so I don’t think Anet will do much about it.

The good news is that PvE content is moving more towards content like VW so it doesn’t really matter what gear you use.

Colin announced today that we’ll be able to convert ascended armor and weapons in the Mystic Forge.

• 5 ecto
• 10 spirit shards (aka skill points in today’s jargon)
• the old gear
• an exotic insignia/inscription with the new stats

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ascended-Gear-Anet-please-fix-this/5173842

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Colin announced today that we’ll be able to convert ascended armor and weapons in the Mystic Forge.

• 5 ecto
• 10 spirit shards (aka skill points in today’s jargon)
• the old gear
• an exotic insignia/inscription with the new stats

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Ascended-Gear-Anet-please-fix-this/5173842

More importantly, ascended gear is remaining at 5% above exotic, not the misinformed 10% that was going around.