Guild Wars 2

I understand that Arenanet does not want to introduce a “gear grind,” with this expansion, but will there be any new gear of similar/equal quality to current top level gear? Perhaps new stat distributions? Or Special effects?

I’d be shocked if there weren’t new stat combos, as that seems to be their go-to way of introducing new stuff via Living Story of late (and even in general). The first part of S2 gave us Nomad’s, the second part gave us Sinister. I certainly expect new stat combos in HoT, there are plenty left to add.

What there won’t be is a new “Tier” of gear, or more powerful gear. An example would be how in WoW Expansions you could say have an Epic piece of gear from WotLK and the Epics that appeared in Cata were immediately better by leaps and bounds. What they’re saying is the gear is going to be any stronger/high stats. What is likely to happen, as Electro mentioned, is new stat combinations, and most of all new gear skins (because Fashion Wars.).

Yes. There are new armor and weapon designs but no new armor weapon types.

think they have to fix the current ones before adding new ones, or maybe both at the same time

I really want to see Power/Vitality/Healing so I can swap out some of my Clerics. I don’t even care which stat is the main stat.

Im actually immensely happy there isnt a gear treadmill! Feels so awful if all my progress is invalidated in one fel swoop! Sure there is ascended gear to work towards and I think thats a good thing in terms of endgame content.

(although cloth wearers have it rough: needing 36 bolts of damask for one set of ascended armor AND each spool of silk thread is vastly more expensive to craft than elonian leather squares or deldrimor steel ingots).

Lilium.4270:

Im actually immensely happy there isnt a gear treadmill! Feels so awful if all my progress is invalidated in one fel swoop! Sure there is ascended gear to work towards and I think thats a good thing in terms of endgame content.

(although cloth wearers have it rough: needing 36 bolts of damask for one set of ascended armor AND each spool of silk thread is vastly more expensive to craft than elonian leather squares or deldrimor steel ingots).

Yeah, ascended isn’t too bad though. Play the game long enough, and eventually you’ll have all the materials/gold you need for a set. That might be quite a long time unless you get some lucky drops, but even so, I think it’s well within the range of an average player, given that they play long enough to get there.

In b4 ascended runes and infusions ^^ but personally im looking forward to it along with legendary armor/trinkets.

We gotten a lot of new combos for armor that kind of new gear.

I believe there was mention of better infusions available when you get further along the fractals mastery track. so there is still a “grind” for that +1. A few years back someone data mined out infusions with +7 to stats instead of the current +4 and +5.