Guild Wars 2

OK so I understand that there are always going to be hardcore players who want to be constantly grinding for better gear. But I’m concerned that the ‘ascended’ entry in the table on http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item#Quality now says that they will be 175% better than white gear .. whereas exotic is 165%.

It used to be ArenaNet’s policy that it would not be necessary to ‘grind’ or spend huge amounts of time to get the gear with the top stats. Instead, the gear with the best appearance would be the time sink. But now you seem to have changed your policy.

Also another point is that I actually do not want ascended gear because I’d rather have the flexibility to add/change runes/sigils/etc. But if my weapons and armour will be weaker than exotic gear, surely I will not get a place in a party for high-difficulty content unless I have (and can ping) ascended gear.

I’m worried. :-S

too late, people have been grinding for ascended in fractals for weeks now.

A patch about grinding ascended gear?

Thats strange.

I could of swore Mike O’Brien promised:

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.

I have to admit I was worried about this at first as well, but this has since changed.
As Catisa already pointed out, this is not work in progress and has already been implemented. With the introduction of the Fractals dungeons, ascended gear was also introduced.

This also irritated me at first, but now it does not bother me as much.
First of all, you still don’t absolutely need the gear, except you plan on running fractal dungeons excessively. In that case, the gear and the infusion slots to protect you from agony damage become necessary. However, by running the fractals and advancing through the levels and collecting the badges from that dungeon, you are bound to get your hand on some ascended gear along the way.

However, if you are not interested in fractal dungeon progression, there is no absolute need to get ascended gear. Everything in the game prior to fractal dungeons was designed to be achievable without fractal gear, as none of the old content or dungeons includes the new agony type damage. So there is no need for infusions, etc.

Personally, I have played a few fractals on lower levels (I think I can access lvl 3 now) just to see how they are designed and play and I really like a lot of them design and setting wise. But I made the decision not to grind them like crazy to get the ascended gear required in order to access the deepest level fractals there are.
I will get my exotic armor and focus more on the visuals than the gear scores or item levels or whatever it is called. I’d rather have a full exotic armor with the looks of Human Cultural T3 on my guardian than a full set of ascended gear. Getting the exotic and cultural will probably keep me busy long enough as I cannot play on a daily basis or farm for hours.

But I’ll get there. Someday. I guess that’s my story. ^^

Faelan.7123:

First of all, you still don’t absolutely need the gear

You don’t absolutely need exotic gear either. It’s an issue about the difficulty of reaching max strength gear. The easier it is to reach, the more the being good or bad is about skill.

And even if its just for Fractals, it’s still kind of harsh that you have to spend 40-60g+20-30g for the infusion just to get to higher levels without getting owned by agony. Well at least with the way inflation is going, it’s not as bad as when it was released. Maybe they were counting on this all along?

P.S. It says 175% on wiki because they only took into account the three basic attributes. For some reason the inherent upgrades on ascended are a lot stronger than exotic exquisite gems, so it’s actually more than 175% of a white’s strength for the trinkets.

They havn’t released Ascended armor yet, so can’t really disagree with something that isn’t there yet. Rings, earrings, back pieces, and amulets are all bound to 1 upgrade component, jewels. The way they made these ascended versions is great, maybe a few more stat varieties but they are still great since runes don’t factor into them so no loss in stats/bonuses.

Now they have rares starting at like ~40’s, Exotics starting at ~60’s, but they didn’t have anything for 80. Now they do so we can truly feel like we reached end game. I doubt they will go any further than ascended..

For now I’m just going to wait and see how they handle ascended armor acquisition. If it’s another forge gold grind like back pieces, then there’s going to be a lot of rage. Who knows though, they might just add laurels as an option for obtaining them.

The thing I hate the most about ascended gear is how its introduction effectively nerfed everyone who wasn’t willing to run fractals. The only explanation I ever accept for a nerf is that it’s to stop something overpowered, so when I see a nerf that takes two groups that were equal and only hits one of them, I can’t see how it can be justified.

Laurels remove the fractal only aspect for rings and amulets. So lets just see how many days it takes to acquire them before we complain about the grind.

OK so I now have 30 laurels, enough to buy an ascended amulet. When I think about it, maybe it’s not so bad that ascended gear has 175% strength compared to exotic’s 165% as that only gives it a (175/165 × 100 = 106.0..) 6% improvement over exotic.

However, this does raise questions as to the point of crafting at a high level .. surely the demand for crafted lvl 80 jewellery items will drop dramatically as I don’t think people will pay money for exotic jewellery when ascended stuff is better and not that hard to obtain. This will extend to the other crafting professions once ascended weapons and armour becomes available.

What do you think?

I’m just ignoring it. It doesn’t bring any advantage. I would become very angry and annoyed only and only if this gear becomes requirement for future content. That would be very stupid of ANet to do.

I don’t mind it, as long as it doesn’t go past the trinket slots. As it is, it doesn’t toughen a PvE/Wv3 alt too much over full Exotics. At least we’re finally at a point where one can snag ’em sans Fractal-bashing. /shrug

I don’t get it.

I run beginners and new players through various fractals on the 1-10 tier all the time, they enjoy themselves.

As of now, ascended gear doesn’t affect your ability to complete any other content except harder Fractals, and even then most of the Agony is avoidable, therefore it is theoretically possible to do Fractals without Agony Resist or even Ascended gear post lvl 10.

Although more ascended gear is coming, I have a feeling it will supplement a separate tier of dungeons, the “hardcore” dungeon runners if you will.

The great thing about GW2 is there is no damage meter and no gear inspecting feature. I find this to be great relief because if you’re in my FOTM 20 with 0 AR, that’s just dandy, as long as you’re holding your own.

An Ascended char has about 8% more stat than an Exotic one, barely a noticiable difference in any content.
It’s like a char with divinity runes and one without, it’s no big deal.

Furthermore, there is no “grind” involved in doing fractals.
The system actually favors doing one a day compared to farming it, and doing something once every 24 hours definitely doesn’t count as grinding.

“I don’t like fractals” is not a valid excuse, either.
I could say I don’t like pink, and therefore I’m impaired because I don’t wear ascended items as they are pink.
But that would be my problem, not game’s problem.

More ways to obtain such gear will be added, but if you don’t like any of those ways you can’t really blame it on the game can you?
Can’t get the best of the game if you dont even want to play the game.

Rewards are on par with what you have done in the game.
If you have never stepped into WvW you don’t deserve world completion, if you have never did fractals you don’t deserve ascended, etc.
You can’t just cross arms and expect things to be handed to you the way you want and when you want.

“I want pinks but I don’t want to earn them” is not a valid complaint sorry.

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

An Ascended char has about 8% more stat than an Exotic one, barely a noticiable difference in any content.
It’s like a char with divinity runes and one without, it’s no big deal.

You forgot something : the damage done in this game for direct damage skills is of the form :
weapon * power * crit chance * crit rate

Taking ascended berserker gear into account, you get 8% more stats to the 4 stat components of this formula. It results in a total damage of ( 8% more = 1.08 ) :

1.08*weapon * 1.08*power * 1.08*crit chance * 1.08*crit rate

The net result is an increase in damage output of : 1.08*1.08*1.08*1.08 = 36% more damage.

stof.9341:

…

The net result is an increase in damage output of : 1.08*1.08*1.08*1.08 = 36% more damage.

Woah – really?!

No, not really.

There are no ascended weapons.

1.08 * (power on that specific item) not 1.08 * power.

Repeat above for all other stats. Stof did bad math.

It’s indeed a little inflated because the item 8% more power doesn’t directly translate into 8% more character sheet power. There’s base stats, trait boosts and then equipment boosts. For example, let’s say the equipment accounts for half your stats (it’s a lot more but whatever). The increase then would be equivalent to 4% more power, precision and crit damage.. It’d still corresponds to some 17% more DPS.

Still the idea is here : the 3 zerk stats + weapon base damage all got a very strong synergy between each other and increasing each of those stats by some small amount results in a much bigger overall DPS increase. You can’t say “but it’s just a tiny amount of each stats” without seeing the big picture.

OK I see your point. I’m now tempted to go for a Beserkers Ascended Amulet with my 30 laurels but then I’m not fond of “glass cannons” so I’m not sure.

so far i have been getting the power/tough/vitality ascended items. i find myself using conditions more and more lately, but ascended items are keeping me invested into the game. while some argue it is not needed, i have accepted this change, except the fact the new stuff req’s ectos.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Berserker but I thought about something else. If you decided you wanted to focus on survival and therefore Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power, wouldn’t this have a similar %-age multiplying effect and make you a lot more tanky than someone with exotic rather than ascended gear?

I think the reason they made this ascended gear was an incentive for people to play the new content, since its more challenging than just buying the jewellery, there needs to be some reason why you would go there, If they ever introduce ascended armor though that will completely ruin the normal dungeons.