Infusions and HOT
While they have stated the Ascended gear is the definite top tier for gear progression, they haven’t said anything about the progression of infusions lately. Infusions are clearly another avenue for unlimited progression.
Infusions provide a reward for top tier players who have very limited options to spend excess resources while the incremental improvements are too small for lower tier players to worry about.
Where do you see infusions going with HOT? Do you think they will take this opportunity to improve and expand the infusion system?
Personally, I’m waiting to infuse anything else before we get more info. Infusions serve two main purposes currently: agony resists and stat improvements. We’ve seen the agony infusion increased to 15 and many are expecting advances coming to FOTM with an FOTM-specific mastery track and a possible increase to FOTM levels.
It’s easy to speculate the FOTM mastery to provide an exclusive NPC merchant to sell more infusions (Fractal Attunement Mastery—Recursive Resourcing). Alternately, the FOTM mastery could provide an innate account-based agony resist that would remove the need to slot AR, and open up those slots for more stat improvements (Fractal Attunement Mastery—Agony Channeler). Other FOTM masteries could remove the Mistlock Singularity debuff from you (Fractal Attunement Mastery—Mistlock Singularities, Essential Singularities, Hyperactive Singularities).
Rings and back pieces can be infused for an additional infusion slot, but that infused tier has never been offered for amulets and accessories. Armor and weapons could even be infused for a second slot as well, though unlikely.
Currently, stat infusions cap at 5, but as agony was increased from 5 to 15, it’s possible for stat increases to be treated similarly. I’d expect another kitten storm if stat infusions increased to 15 considering what happened when ascended (and all other gear level) stats were increased with the recent patch. Boosting stat infusions which already cost as much or more than the armor pieces themselves would bring about another mutiny.
On the other side of things, when you have enough gold and you’re already fully ascended, there really is not much left in the game on which to spend your resources..
Just a minor correction. The agony infusion have not been increased to +15. They have been increased to +30 (actually I think infinite, not sure though), but anything past rank 15 is highly unlikely due to cost.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Agony_Infusion
That being said, it is much more intersting with what anet calculate “desired” or achievable ar. This is currently at +5 and might increase to +10 (meaning you can achieve required ar by sloting +5 resitance in all slots and use +10 or higher to cover for items not having ar).
The ideas with fractal mastery sound interesting. Guess we will have to wait and see what anet are planing.
Can we instead get something that isn’t purely stat scaling? The whole ascended armor stats thing in PvE/WvW is enough concern as is. But the sad truth is they won’t remove AR infusion slots, as its a huge money sink for fractal farmers.
What Fractals need is a new handicap method that can run in parallel to AR, and use that as a track reward. But more importantly, make sure the track awards aren’t just “compensate for the handicap”. AR is fundamentally flawed, as it doesn’t increase the difficultly if you can nullify its effects.
Where do you see infusions going with HOT? Do you think they will take this opportunity to improve and expand the infusion system?
I really hope not. Ascended are bad enough as they are, adding power creep in infusions that require ascended gear to slot them in would be just adding insult to injury.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I hope they cap ar req at 70 and leave it at that. It’s a stupid gate and it’s annoying only being able to play certain classes because some of mine don’t have ar.
inb4 they make it account wide ar and reset fractal leve,l tokens, infusions, and ascended gear…
Otherwise i like stat infusions as long as they don’t cost a ton which they do rn.