Guild Wars 2

“Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two”

So you are saying you want to give a midway point for people trying to make legendary weapons, so they don’t feel compelled to farm plinx all the time? That is fair enough and a good idea.

Why do we need armour with better stats to do it?

Guild Wars 1 – The most expensive armour (obsidean) had no better stats than 1.5k armour. 15k armour was the “mid-point” you talk about, which also had the same stats as 1.5k armour.

You had Underworld and Fissue of Woe – 2 high level dungeons required to craft Obsidean armour, that required no special armour to farm in. As far as I know, that worked fine? Or did it not and my perception is skewed?

By all means give people a midway point with vanity items, but why give a midway point with better stat items?

Also why is this all being implemented slowly? To stop people actually having max gear for as long as possible? (???) Why can’t we get ascended gear in all dungeons after this update? (for example).

Link is here btw: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside/first#post721451

When i read their response to the issue, I was thinking, that they completely avoided to comment on the improved stats. How can anyone take a response like this serious? They’re not touching the subject at all.

The acquisition of full exotic gear was simply too fast. Some people claim it’s a massive grind, but if you actually played the game, it took just a few days of playing a few hours a day to get an entire set through crafting. The only point of doing the dungeons was for the skins. Personally, I had enough karma to buy a full set of karma gear once I reached Orr around a week after launch.

They could have made ascended items have the same stat distribution as exotics, but then there would be no incentive to actually aquire them. The whole point is to extend the game. Without a carrot, most people will simply quit. Additionally, ascended items will only come in certain stat combinations and cannot be upgraded with jewels or runes, so there is a downside in having them. A mix and match set will always be better as long as you are min/maxing a specific stat.

They are gating the release of ascended items to force people to slow down. By doing this, they can also add another “tier” of gear to work towards, which is actually the remaining pieces of the last tier. When they say progression between exotics and a legenday, I think they’re referring to time spent, since there is no actual progression between the two. If you play normally, by the time you get a full set of ascended items, you’ll have a legendary. Previously, you could get a full set of exotics on day 1, then you’d have to grind the legenday as the only thing left. At the current rate, a full set of ascended items will take 6-9 months to aquire, spread out over several dungeon releases.

Healix.5819:

The acquisition of full exotic gear was simply too fast. Some people claim it’s a massive grind, but if you actually played the game, it took just a few days of playing a few hours a day to get an entire set through crafting. The only point of doing the dungeons was for the skins. Personally, I had enough karma to buy a full set of karma gear once I reached Orr around a week after launch.

They could have made ascended items have the same stat distribution as exotics, but then there would be no incentive to actually aquire them. The whole point is to extend the game. Without a carrot, most people will simply quit.

It was even quicker in guild wars 1, and you are quite simply wrong about people quitting without a stat incentive. Guild Wars 1 is still being played, it is a living example of the fact vanity items are the only carrots needed to keep this playerbase happy.

Sure some people would quit, those are not the kind of players I or any other guild wars 1 player would expect to play this game for a long time, the problem is A-net wants to cash in on them I guess.

Content should be the driving force behind the game, not stats on armour. Even call of duty has expansions (DLC) that show this better, and that is just a cash cow low innovation game that gets spewed out every year. I have never played a game of CoD without a DLC and thought to myself (god kitten he has that new gun that you have to grind for with the expansion, I cant beat him). In fact why not give hardcore people the option to “prestige” since it suits their play style better without penalising casuals.

Ascended gear in lay terms means Death Timer it will also create and further divide the community ie; GLFM must have ascended gear etc etc… bad idea is bad no matter how you spin it.

The idea that there’s a “gap” between Exotics and Legendaries is patently false. It’s a convenient framing of the issue that makes it sound as though Ascended equipment is fulfilling a role in the game that already exists but is empty, when in reality it’s a square peg being hammered into a round hole.

The ‘gap’ between an Exotic and a Legendary, in terms of stats, is now zero. Shunting them up to ‘Ascended’ stats is making the gap wider, not filling it in. How much wider? Well, take whatever stat increase Ascended equipment has over Exotic equipment, and just divide by zero...

The ‘gap’ between Exotics and Legendaries in terms of rarity and difficulty to obtain is also largely a myth. Building a Legendary now requires somewhere in the area of 900-1000g worth of materials – and this new patch promises to alleviate some of the tougher components of the recipe (specifically, at least, the precursor). The most expensive (non-precursor) Exotics can be worth as much as 600-700g, and the prices on other (non-precursor) Exotics run the gamut from 2g crafted gear to 8-15g unique skins and dungeon equipment to 30g Corrupted gear and the Halloween items to 60g Destroyer gear, to stuff like the Vision of the Mists for 100~150g to the Foefire’s Essence and similar weapons that sell for 300~400g.

If Ascended gear is meant to “fill the gap” between how difficult it is to get Exotic and Legendary gear, that means that it’s poised to be worth somewhere between 750g and 900g. If it’s supposed to be less rare than that, then this entire argument about filling a gap is nonsense.