Guild Wars 2

…being account bound?
Why can’t i sell them?

I don’t think there is a real answer for why it’s account bound. But i’m grateful for it, because if it was soul bound that would be very expensive.
Generally you can “buy” a set of Ascended gear technically.

Because if you could buy it, you wouldn’t be required to have 500 crafting to get it. It’s supposed to be something that, when you see someone with it, you know they at least had to reach max crafting in that discipline. Even if you buy all the materials to make it, there’s no cutting corners around the crafting requirement.

That’s my understanding anyway.

EDIT: Forgot about weapon/armor chests, which I suppose are the reason this topic was created… idk, it’s supposed to be something special, not something you can just buy. Obviously not the same logic they applied to Legendaries, but don’t look at me, I didn’t make the game.

But you don’t HAVE to be 500 crafting to get the gear..

Padapwn.5924:

But you don’t HAVE to be 500 crafting to get the gear..

Well, I suppose you’re right, but weapon/armor chests are very rare, and even rarer you’ll get the one you want. I generally don’t even consider them when talking about ascended gear.

Ummie.1980:

Why can’t i sell them?

MAny people complained that legendaries and precursors were tradeable because theoretically, people could buy them with their credit card, so they didnt really represent an in game achievement.

Ascended gear was introduced as a long term goal and was designed not to be obtained quickly, even if you spend alot of gold. Thats why they are not tradeable as a whole.

Ascended gear is earned not bought, If you could sell them, everyone could get them and earning them would mean nothing!

MMOs need long term goals for players or they have no financial reason to exist. This is especially true for a game that has no monthly fee and only earns money (after original purchase) by gem store sales. The odds of Anet ever making money if players are not in the game are VERY low…..so they have long term goals that keep players logged in.

Many player find this to be some abhorrent evil plan by the Developers, but the bottom line is that if they DON’T make money, none of us will have a game to play.

The main difference between GW2 and other MMOs (IMO) is that all of the long term goals (Ascended gear, Legendary weapons, collections, etc.) are ALL optional and generate very minor statistical advantages (that have NO effect on actual PvP modes).

I am guessing that if Devs had one thing to do over, they would make Legendary weapons un-sellable (maybe even Precursors). On the other hand if a player buys gems with RL $ and converts to gold and buys a Precursor / Legendary, then Anet makes money, (so long as not every one is purchased with converted gold)…..so I could be wrong.

Far too many players don’t see the Forest for the trees….despite what you want to believe, Anet is in business to make money and many players don’t want to (or choose not to) think about the very few ways they have to generate revenue. GW2 is a very different beast (in MANY ways) than the traditional subscription based MMO.

Personally I don’t see a “I earned this” from ascended gear, because you can just buy the emblem, and the two pieces and easily make the crystal. And for the most part 500 crafting isn’t that hard, as you can buy that too.

If you could sell Ascended gear, it would end up like most of the rest of crafting, where you can buy the item cheaper than the cost of the materials required to make it.

Not that I’d complain, but it would defeat ArenaNet’s purpose which was to stretch out the difficulty of getting to BiS gear. It’s there for the portion of the population that need a BiS pursuit to motivate their play.

Riku.4821:

Personally I don’t see a “I earned this” from ascended gear, because you can just buy the emblem, and the two pieces and easily make the crystal. And for the most part 500 crafting isn’t that hard, as you can buy that too.

I don’t think it’s supposed to be an “I earned this reward”. It’s supposed to be something that keeps a portion of the population either in game, grinding out gold, or opening their wallets for gem→gold conversion.

@Gibson
Most likely. But everyone dreams of having those “I earned this look at me” rewards.
But everything can be gained via credit card in this game.

Gold sink, material sink, and the mistaken idea that vertical progression is necessary.

Riku.4821:

Personally I don’t see a “I earned this” from ascended gear, because you can just buy the emblem, and the two pieces and easily make the crystal. And for the most part 500 crafting isn’t that hard, as you can buy that too.

If gold is no obstacle for you and you start crafting one ascended set after another, you will soon discover the other timegates, especially laurels for the recipes and the t7 mats, everyone is showering in, will halt your gold bought pace eventually.

Wanze.8410:

Riku.4821:

Personally I don’t see a “I earned this” from ascended gear, because you can just buy the emblem, and the two pieces and easily make the crystal. And for the most part 500 crafting isn’t that hard, as you can buy that too.

If gold is no obstacle for you and you start crafting one ascended set after another, you will soon discover the other timegates, especially laurels for the recipes and the t7 mats, everyone is showering in, will halt your gold bought pace eventually.

Some recipe sets can be purchased for gold, Sinister is actually a very good stat combo and all recopies are on the TP for less than the gold cost of the laurel recipes. The time gating on t7 mats can be completely bypassed since you can buy the finished mat directly.

While you can take the time to craft out ascended gear completely, it is far more time effective to simply buy the stuff off the TP for around 70g. It is even more time/cost effective to buy the t7 mats and craft the final pieces.

There is no benefit to farming all the ingredients and crafting yourself, as the time spent could have earned that 70 gold much faster.

Ascended gear is still very much “I bought this” more than it is “I earned this.”

You still have to get to level 500 in crafting. Also, ONE stat set isn’t good for every profession, so the fact that you can buy sinister stats doesn’t mean ascended crafting is “I bought this”.

Ascended was added so the hardcore players had something to do when they realized that the pve endgame is lacking instead of switching to other games. And I daresay it worked pretty well.

I’ve made over 100 ascended items (60+ weapons, 40+ armour parts) and I’m perfectly happy with what components I can buy versus what I have to grind out myself.

I’m also happy about the “I made this!” factor, that people who have this stuff make a personal time investment in the actual manufacture of their gear.

To get that final bit of polish on a character, there should be some emotional investment. More than anything that means spending time.

The reasoning behind the implementation of ascended was that the loss of revenue inherent in alienating players who bought the game based on the original stated intentions for best in slot gear acquisition could be offset by revenue gained from those who need a carrot on a stick to continue playing.

Whenever the question, “why is this done this way,” comes up the answer is almost always money.

Ascended armor is not necessary at all.

However my celestial ascended armor with matching purple text to go with does give me a nice tingly feeling inside.

Ummie.1980:

…being account bound?
Why can’t i sell them?

It has implications for the economy, i.e. to force crafting down everyone’s throats and artificially extend the baseline effort that each player needs to put in for bis gear.

Ummie.1980:

Why can’t i sell them?

Not being able to sell Ascended items doesn’t bother me, however not being able to salvage them does bother me. For example I’ve got two Ascended weapons I made currently sitting in my bank taking up space because I originally made them thinking I liked a certain build but eventually realized I liked a different build better. I’d love to be able to salvage them and at least get back a few of the materials used to craft them.

Monkey Fritz.9052:

Wanze.8410:

Riku.4821:

Personally I don’t see a “I earned this” from ascended gear, because you can just buy the emblem, and the two pieces and easily make the crystal. And for the most part 500 crafting isn’t that hard, as you can buy that too.

If gold is no obstacle for you and you start crafting one ascended set after another, you will soon discover the other timegates, especially laurels for the recipes and the t7 mats, everyone is showering in, will halt your gold bought pace eventually.

Some recipe sets can be purchased for gold, Sinister is actually a very good stat combo and all recopies are on the TP for less than the gold cost of the laurel recipes. The time gating on t7 mats can be completely bypassed since you can buy the finished mat directly.

While you can take the time to craft out ascended gear completely, it is far more time effective to simply buy the stuff off the TP for around 70g. It is even more time/cost effective to buy the t7 mats and craft the final pieces.

There is no benefit to farming all the ingredients and crafting yourself, as the time spent could have earned that 70 gold much faster.

Ascended gear is still very much “I bought this” more than it is “I earned this.”

I guess you mean verata gear, as sinister is exotic. You are right that those recipes are tradeable on the tp and able to be purchased without laurels but you still need to get the recipes for the sinister and verata insignia, which have to be purchased with another account bound currency, bandit crests. The crafting process also requires another account bound material, charged quartz, but the sheets can be bought on the tp.
However, this kind of acquisition is more the exception than the rule.

I also didnt mean deldrimor/damask etc but the mats for the vision crystals. PEople might not believe that they will eventually run out of them but at 1500 dragonite/fragments/bloodstone per set, plus another 1500 each, if you need 3 more weapons of the same stat combo, will require quite a bit of time investment, if you didnt build up a stash over time.

Cirian.8917:

To get that final bit of polish on a character, there should be some emotional investment.

Oh yes, crafting a set of ascended light armor had indeed a lot of “emotional investment” attached to it. Namely, rage.
I’d rather be able to avoid that kind of investment altogether.

Ascended gear was put in as a stopgap measure to forestall the game’s bleed-off of players. ANet bet that they would retain more people who needed a long-term carrot to keep them playing than they would lose of those who believed the pre-launch statements about BiS being easily obtained by L80.

The thing about carrots designed to keep you playing, is that if they can be bought, they do not serve that purpose as well. Thus, you have soul and account bound. Account bound was a later add-in feature of Ascended to partially mitigate the extreme grind for those who want BiS on multiple characters.

Ummie.1980:

…being account bound?
Why can’t i sell them?

Oh that’s easy. Ascended armour along with fractals came at a point when a lot of players (so this was relatively early in GW2 life) who came from other MMOs that had a classic gear treadmill were complaining that you could get max stat armor very very easily. So to placate the vocal players ANet introduces ascended with it’s large amounts of grind, and fractals that at higher levels requires ascended armor.
So to make them sell-able would be against the core idea, that is to give players the grind they ask for.
Mind you ANet has never outright stated it, but there does seem to be undercurrent of: well that didn’t really work out too well. A lot of players rather liked not having a gear treadmill.

After launch, Anet quickly realized MMORPG need things to keep players occupied. This is not criticising them (well, maybe they shouldn´t have been so loud about the no grind fad before), it just seems to be the nature of the beast. In all fairness, it is a really tame long term project for a player compared to some other games.

I am so happy for this. You can’t buy ascended. Good. Play the game and you get it… you can’t just gems → gold → buy ascended. If ascended didn’t exist I’d wish they went the same route with exotic. I mean, go ahead, make it so you can buy it via karma… or WvW tokens and karma… but not just straight up gold (and not laurels either… just logging in and bam, best gear in the game? I know.. rings, amulets and accessories are already able to be bought with laurels… but let SOMETHING require some work, please).

IIRC they weren’t originally account bound. They were soul bound. Which meant, of course, that you had to create multiple sets, find multiple accesories for each character. But they made all ascended items account bound so people didn’t need to feel they needed to create 2 sets of heavy, 3 sets of medium, 3 sets of light, just to be able to run high level fractals with all their characters. Now you can create 1 set (of each different weight) and swap it.

It was a very good change, that made a lot of people very happy.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/account-bound-wxp-legendaries-and-ascended-gear/

They are account bound because this game doesn’t have a gear grind.

wait a minute something is wrong here…

They are account bound because they used to be soul bound and that wasn’t very healthy.