The point of ascended?
As opposed to the logical and promised way of emphasizing player skill over gear, Anet decided it’d be a good idea to throw whatever integrity they had out the window in favor of a system which some people (me included) specifically didn’t want, and most certainly wasn’t what they paid for.
Instead of making players play through content, such as beating a difficult dungeon to get to a creature who infuses your gear, a precursor dungeon if you must call it something, Anet decided that player skill should mean absolutely nothing. Well, nothing in regards to content other than grinding the same thing over and over to achieve this exact same end.
Now we get to grind all day every day to meet the daily requirements to get items which shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and for what? To do one dungeon… Fractals of the mist. They can try to spin the story as much as they want, such as fotm being multiple dungeons in one, but the truth is, it’s just one dungeon.
Let’s look at what has been going on:
People wanted challenging content for PvE, but all Anet could deliver was simple, repetitive and easy, all but Fractals of the mist, at least regarding the “easy” part, as higher levels of fotm do get tough.
A dungeon which gradually gets harder the more you “complete” it, is an excellent system. It allows people to show others (and themselves) what they’re made of.
This would have been fine if not for agony resistance. Instead of allowing players to find out how far they could go on their own, Anet added a gear check to a game which previously didn’t have it, well, at least not a real one, because exotics are relatively cheap and easy to get.
But instead of just adding infusion the way it was done in the original Guild wars, Anet’s next decision is what broke everything they had promised ever since they announced guild wars 1; They added Ascended tier.
Why did they do this? Ascended gear could have had the same stats as exotics, the only difference being that you could add +5 agony resistance to it, there was absolutely no need for ascended gear to be superior in any other way to exotics.
I am dumbfounded as to why Anet went this way, I had faith in Anet’s ability to come up with new content, but they did what a plethora of other (usually p2w) mmo’s out there do. They added gear treadmill. It’s so much easier to write 1045-1155 than it is to design actual content.
Arguing that “you don’t need ascended gear” is as ridiculous as it is false. First thing of course is, that if I don’t need it, ascended gear most definitely doesn’t need higher stats than exotics, I could make a counter-argument just as dumb as the original “Ascended gear should have the same stats as green gear”, because you don’t need them. But in reality, if I wanted to go deeper into fotm I need ascended gear. The tentacle creature will at some point wipe a team with no agony resistance no matter what they did. And people can’t honestly say, that the only reason we have a requirement for a whole new resistance in the game, is just because of one dungeon. Anet will add more content, and because they can’t think of anything else, they add agony to it if they think it’ll make it “harder”.
Or is anyone going to argue that after they’re done with fotm, they add a new dungeon with “agony-2”, which requires “agony-2 resistance”, and requires you to build gear specific only to that one dungeon.
But even if that was the case. There would still be no reason for ascended gear to have higher stats than exotics.
Anet messed up, they won’t admit it, simple as that. They can’t stop making ascended gear, because that would be to admit their mistake.
They promised me one thing and it took only a couple of months for them to show their true integrity. I didn’t buy this game, I bought guild wars 2.
Any other company and I wouldn’t be this offended, but I actually believed what they said. I wish I could get my money back, so that I could show that I do not want anything to do with what they’ve done with this game. But that’s not going to happen, what is going to happen is me quitting gw2 permanently, with absolutely no trust in Anet and a sour taste in my mouth because I can’t help but feel that I was worth nothing but the money I paid. They could at least be honest about that last part, instead of saying how much they care about their players.
The point of ascended gear? It was the easiest solution to a problem that didn’t even exist.
