Guild Wars 2

Crafting has never been something that I enjoyed. I’ve generally steered clear of MMOs with a heavy crafting element or stuck with only gathering professions.

Guild Wars 2 at launch was perfect for a player like me. I could acquire gold or run dungeons for exotic gear, and happily assembled many sets with crafting level 0.

After taking quite some time off, I read that many strong PvE builds leverage brand new prefixes on gear. A quick auction house search for “Viper’s” turned up not a single piece of armor, and further research turned up a frustrating fact: crafting is the only path to these new types of gear!

So a characters that uss berserker’s gear can get a full exotic set in dungeons, PvP (with token rewards), the auction house, and crafting. But builds that need Viper or Sinister? You’re going to have to level up THREE professions to 400+ just to get your exotic gear. This isn’t fair, and it means that I have to do quite a bit of profession grinding. It might be easier to find a different game at this point…

Please allow for trading of the new items and change some of the dungeon token sets to these new prefixes!

Add to that the absurdly low drop rate and/or high trading post prices for the components, and, well… Guess I’ll save my in game gold for something else, because playing WvW doesn’t add a lot to my account wallet and I don’t want to go broke making another set of armor. I feel your pain, and I’ve maxed all crafting professions.

While it’s not a real solution, you get awarded one Viper’s armor box near the end of the HoT personal story, so you could make a full set if you run six characters through it.

That aside, the reason the new prefixes are account bound on acquire is likely because ANet doesn’t want non-HoT players to have access to HoT gear and skins, but they didn’t add a way to do an expansion check for gear (like the check they do when non-HoT players try to use Guild Hall services).

The reason for all those soulbound items is that Anet tries to force more players into those horrible HoT maps. They understand how badly these maps failed so they implemented all kind of systems to make sure players HAVE to go there, instead of making sure players WANT to go there.

Essentially, it’s just pay to win.