Guild Wars 2

I really, really don’t “get” cultural armor. Am I missing something?

Ignoring the obvious fact that I can often get better gear cheaper via other routes – and ignoring the lack of variety – one thing really puzzles me. Why is the cultural armor for each race – light, medium and heavy – restricted so tightly to a single trio of stats? Take Sylvari for instance: Precision, Condition Damage, Toughness. Unless I’m putting together a build in which all of those are of keen interest to me – and it’s not, I would suggest, the most common mix – why on earth would I buy the armor? And even if it’s precisely what I want – unless, I’m Sylvari, I can’t buy it anyway.

OK, yes, I get a few achievement points (once). And if I really want, I can skin other stuff with the look (although it’s one heck of a lot of money to spend on a few aesthetic tweaks) . But beyond that?

I don’t get it.

Endgame = looks or achievement points

The question “anything beyond that” is pretty pointless. Why paying 1k Gold for mjölnir or infinite light if it’s just looks? …

1: The game is free to play without being pay to win. That is very unique ion the world of MMO’s.
2: The game does not have endless gear grinds. It is reasonable easy to obtain optimum stats when your max level.
3: the rest is all bout looks. To get the bets looking gear you either have to grind OR support the game by buying gems. This is pure optional but you help the devs a lot in keeping it free to play without pay to win.

Pretty much just for charismatic and achievements-purposes :P

I understand cultural armour as a combination of the following:

• Slightly better-than-average skins
  (Better than average: tail support for Charr, etc.)
• Collectible items, for achievement points
• They’re expensive, so you don’t want to destroy them even if you only buy them to complete your achievements. Then they take up inventory slots, thus motivating the player to buy bank or bag slots.*
• They’re locked to arbitrary stat combos AND the highest rarity is “yellow”, thus motivating the player to buy transmutation crystals.*

*To be honest, I think that is fair enough. They have to make money in some way, after all.

I would prefer if they were just skins. They’d still take up inventory space, but not require transmutation crystals to use at level 80.

Also, while many of the skins don’t benefit my characters at all (for example, I like the human T3 heavy armour, but my human engi wears medium), AND I’m kind of cranky that they’re cultural (as some of them would be super nice to use on my characters of other races), I think they’re overall well designed.

As everyone said said the main appeal of cultural armor is the skin.

The stats are largely irrelevant. I don’t know if before launch Anet thought they might be useful combinations, picked them to suit the theme of each race, or maybe even made them deliberately undesirable to encourage people to transmute them but whatever the reason most people will buy racial armor entirely to transmute the skin onto another set.

In fact some people seem to think ‘end game cosmetics’ simply means transmuting T3 cultural armor over Temple exotics then dying it back (and/or white).

For me it’s purely about looks. With a Sylvari main, I prefer to have plant like armor, and I find it to be very nice. For me the skin was worth the gold (I wasn’t using it for anything else anyway)

I see Cultural Armor to each race as Traditional costumes are to some countries: (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:National_costumes_by_country)

It’s not about power, but to be a racial identity!

/cheers

Cultural is meant to be transmuted, imo. It’s the same thing for craftable armor. Exalted isn’t exactly the best on a Sylvari, so I transmuted it with dungeon armor. It’s hard to get the look you want with the original armor. I’m glad we can transmute, because some games don’t let you and you end up with ugly armor for stats.

Transmutation. Any other questions?

For the Sylvari.

Its a money sink and used for the look.

It’s all about the bling!

The stats are not important as you can easily get the stats you want (crafting, WvW vendors, TP, etc.) and transmute to get the Cultural “look” (tho, I find very few of them appealing at all). They are WAY overpriced compared to what I can craft myself (or buy off the TP) so while I “get them”, I have no plans to “buy” them.

Mainly for charrs who gets 90% uglier armor than other race. T3 colored in wheat and brick with some touch of abyss suit very well the ascended zojja weapon, since the ascended armor have 90% chance of being ugly on charr, I already bought it for later transmutation.

can you transmute cultural armor onto a white to make it account-bound then transmute it onto your exotic armor? just thinking out loud here.

You can just transmute it directly onto the exotic, no need for two steps. Unless you mean armor you’ve soulbound but want on another alt of the same race, in which case yes, you can do the white item trick to move it like any other skin.