Guild Wars 2

No aspect about Ascended gear has been alt-friendly so far. I wouldn’t keep my hopes up.

GOSU.9574:

Next game I am considering playing your toon can switch to any other class. Now that is “alt friendly”. If a single toon can have all classes and all skill crafting available, thats the game for me.

You don’t need to wait at all, it exists. Darkfall online for instance.

Jski.6180:

It is as much as say exotic is alt friendly. To get both ascended gear and exotic gear you can carry over rewards from ruining events and doing days / monthly to your alts. Now if you want to take ascended or exotic gear you already have and put it on an alt you cant but this is true for armor in most games.

It’s the cost that makes it alt-unfriendly. People can’t afford to get ascended on one character, let alone on multiple…

Time is the only commodity that has any real value in a virtual world.

I agree that people are willing to pay real money to make the grind consume less time. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Arenanet believes that long grinds through ascended/legendary crafting might be a long term and profitable business model.

I suppose time will tell.

Well, the thing is ANet said that Ascended gear is a medium term goal, and that is subjective.

One can define long term for legendary as in it should take about 1 year per legendary.
For ascended gears, I believe it should takes roughly about 10-20 days per piece. 8 pieces (6 armor pieces and 2 weapons) would take about 1-2 months. (Time gated materials for weapons vs armor is slightly different) I would take a guess that ANet would want us to take approximately about 1-2 months to fully equip a character.

So my question to those who say it’s not alt-friendly is: why there is a rush? If you have 8 characters, it would take about 1-2 years for you to equip them all. Just play normally, farm here and there a bit at a time.

If you want to get them all NOW (or when it comes out), the amount of materials required might look a little scary. But if you would take your time, spread out over two years (or a year if you are not patient), you would be surprised that you could gather a lot of it over time.

You can’t eat an elephant in one meal. If you have an account of 8 characters and want to take care of them all, it would take time.

You want a lot of characters fully decked out, time and patience would be involved. On the other hand, the benefit of having 8 alts is tremendous compared to those only have one character.

You can farm 8x as much for once. Yes time is required, but hey it’s your choice to have 8 alts. No one force anyone to have 8 alts.

TL;DR No it is not alt-friendly but you already have the benefits of having 8 alts. Just need patience and play along. Don’t worry about getting them ALL NOW.

Fully exotic alts are playable as well, so you don’t have to get ascendeds on all your characters.

Making the ascended stuff account bound* would be way more alt-friendly and build-swapping friendly.

*Either via a sort of soulbound → acc bound converter thingy or just via a global patch. If you can pass farming tools across characters, why would trinkets or weapons be impossible?

Stars.2179:

Well, the thing is ANet said that Ascended gear is a medium term goal, and that is subjective.

One can define long term for legendary as in it should take about 1 year per legendary.
For ascended gears, I believe it should takes roughly about 10-20 days per piece. 8 pieces (6 armor pieces and 2 weapons) would take about 1-2 months. (Time gated materials for weapons vs armor is slightly different) I would take a guess that ANet would want us to take approximately about 1-2 months to fully equip a character.

So my question to those who say it’s not alt-friendly is: why there is a rush? If you have 8 characters, it would take about 1-2 years for you to equip them all. Just play normally, farm here and there a bit at a time.

If you want to get them all NOW (or when it comes out), the amount of materials required might look a little scary. But if you would take your time, spread out over two years (or a year if you are not patient), you would be surprised that you could gather a lot of it over time.

You can’t eat an elephant in one meal. If you have an account of 8 characters and want to take care of them all, it would take time.

You want a lot of characters fully decked out, time and patience would be involved. On the other hand, the benefit of having 8 alts is tremendous compared to those only have one character.

You can farm 8x as much for once. Yes time is required, but hey it’s your choice to have 8 alts. No one force anyone to have 8 alts.

TL;DR No it is not alt-friendly but you already have the benefits of having 8 alts. Just need patience and play along. Don’t worry about getting them ALL NOW.

Yeah right.
Right now the Ascended grind doesn’t look like a long term goal but as an asymptote to most of the people that play this game that have other stuff to do than playing GW2. Which is the overwhelming majority of the GW2 audience, as the AP spread statistics show.

Ronin Orca.4132:

Fully exotic alts are playable as well, so you don’t have to get ascendeds on all your characters.

What this has to do with the OP’s question? (hint: nothing at all) The answer about ascended gear being alt-friendly remains the same – it’s not alt friendly, and it is not meant to be alt-friendly. In fact, it’s not even meant to be single-char friendly.

Stars.2179:

[…]

So my question to those who say it’s not alt-friendly is: why there is a rush? If you have 8 characters, it would take about 1-2 years for you to equip them all. Just play normally, farm here and there a bit at a time.

[…]

TL;DR No it is not alt-friendly but you already have the benefits of having 8 alts. Just need patience and play along. Don’t worry about getting them ALL NOW.

1-2 years? seriously? My life is not enough sad to create a 2 years schedule for a game and work on it. I hope you are joking.

BTW, please tell me the benefits of having 8 alts, besides mining quartz or taking some chest (anyway, usually nothing valuable in them)

Stars.2179:

One can define long term for legendary as in it should take about 1 year per legendary.

So my question to those who say it’s not alt-friendly is: why there is a rush? If you have 8 characters, it would take about 1-2 years for you to equip them all. Just play normally, farm here and there a bit at a time.

I don’t know about you, but do you honestly think that this type of system will appeal to the younger generation? The instant gratification “credit card” generation?

You’re asking a younger group of gamers to play for years to get what they want? In my opinion, this business strategy will ultimately fail.

Even if GW2 somehow manages to attract an older audience with disposable income “which isn’t available to younger generations at this moment” how long do you think this strategy will hold when 3 big RPG titles release next year?

There were a lot of people who complain about “there is no end game” and “there is nothing to do” or “there is no progression” – why would I play a game when I already max out everything (exotic gear back then) ? ANet created a solution by introducing just one more tier.

Personally 1-2 months for maxing out one character whom you treat as your main and just enjoy the content with him or her isn’t too bad.

Sadly in today world a lot of people in general just want everything without having to earn them and then once given the same people come back and complain that they have nothing to do. I say it’s a vicious cycle.

The point above agreed with Calae on the point that today younger generation lacks the patience to do such thing, sadly it’s the way the world is. (Btw, what are the 3 big RPG titles to release next year? – are they TESO, Titan, Archeage?)

So I think 1-2 months of efficient playtime (3-4 if you’re not efficient) to earn a fully equip character with best gear is an appropriate time.

As much materials as I posted that I have above, it would be the same for me (1-2 years) since I lack the karma, ectos, dragonite ores, empyreal shards to make them. That makes me realize that “hey I’ll just play and not worry too much about it” – the mats in the bank just ensures that maybe after a week, i’ll earn enough shards/ores to get another ascended piece, great, after two more weeks another piece great – and not worry about farming for the mats.

It’s all about changing your perspective and realize that you can never have everything immediately. Just play and enjoy whatever, earning one piece of ascended gear at a time.

About the advantages of having 8 alts (I’m assuming you already max out at lv 80).

1. Roleplay.
2. Change classes on the flight when you feel like it.
3. Farming. Once per day you can get
   Frostgorge: 6 ori ores, 6 ancient woods.
   Malchor Leap: 18 ori, 12 ancient.
   Southsun: 15 ori (6 ori plus 3 × 3 ori on top – guest to two other different servers for that), 6 ancient woods) –
   If you choose the correct guest servers, you shouldn’t even have to engage in a single fight to get at least 39 ori ores and 24 ancient woods per day.
   8 available characters means that you get 312 ori ores and 192 ancient woods. And all this can be earned in less than two hours. Value of ori ores and anc. woods are at 5s each. That’s over 25g per day just in two hours of farming. 10 days you get 250g, 100 days 2500g. (In fact you could just do that and buy ascended mats from it. If all the ascended mats to make 1 ascended piece costs 100g, you could get 25 pieces (for 3 alts i.e., 3×8 = 24 pieces) in 3-4 months, which coincides with my calculation)

More if you do world bosses events you get more karma, dragonite ores, and dungeons/fractals to get empyreal + obishards.

Note #2 gives tremendous advantage over the people who just has one, though ascended gear changes it a little so you still have advantage just not in best gear. No matter how you look at it, having more alts is better than having just one. (Note that the cost is also higher but to combat it look below)
Adventage #3 gives you a mean to strengthen #2.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Just this: if you play a certain build it requires certain stats to be effective. If you just want to play differently you have to kittenING CRAFT ANOTHER kittenING SET OF ASCENDED AND FARM THE kittenING TRINKETS OVER AND OVER AGAIN. I mean this is just for one kittening Profession. Just imagine you have 8 Professions (Like me). What the hell? I mean REALLY, are you kittening serious? Do you really want to go back to medieval times of RPGs?

This is one of the issues, anet tried to break the mold with GW2 when they perceived it as failing they panicked and fell back on out of date techniques maybe because they have little experience with actual mmos. They’ve had close to a year to come up with something better for ascended weapons and gear and they can’t.

I use to play 3 classes and had multiple weapons and armor for different builds and styles. Now I only play 1 class and 1 build.

Doing Fractals 178?

Wanna play with your friends who are also doing Fractals 283?

Getting tired of playing your boring guardian?

TOO BAD!

WELCOME TO THE RICE FIELDS!