I believe Ascended gear should be removed from PvP. It creates the typical “Grind to Win” scenario that is so common in other MMO/Games.
I feel that Arena Net created an amazing PvP game with Guild Wars 1 and they should stick to how things were run. I also predict a very certain power creep for Melee classes like Warriors/Thiefs who benefit so much from weapon power as opposed to classes like Mesmers/Necromancers, this will create a distinct imbalance between these classes that will be compensated by 1) Nerfing the Warrior/Thief/Guardian/Ranger and effectively screwing players who don’t have Ascended armor on these characters; OR 2) Not nerfing them and creating a huge gap in power between “Physical DPS” classes and “Magic” users.
WvWvW players like to PvP, but any PvP’er will do everything in their power to achieve an advantage over the enemy, the important thing for most PvP players is winning (yes they have fun too but winning is the most important), pretty soon we will have fully ascended players in WvWvW which will make it unplayable for people who don’t have hundreds of hours to dedicate to a single character in order to equip them with full ascended armor, I believe the weapons cost 200g each, the trinkets/accessories using Laurels would take almost a year to get and the back piece is not even available, and that’s assuming you do your daily every single day. Fractals should not be required to play PvP competitively.
WvWvW players already have to spend ~50+g on Runes + exotics to remain competitive, I believe that’s enough as you should naturally accumulate that gold levelling your character and doing a few dungeons along the way, a lot of people will say ascended armour makes no difference but if we assume both zergs are of equal skill, the zerg that is fully ascended will always beat the non ascended zerg that has 5-10% less stats, it’s the same thing as putting a level 80 zerg vs a upleveled zerg, which zerg do you think will win? And don’t get me started on roaming/sniping groups fully ascended vs non ascended people, in the law of averages, we have to assume everyone is at the same skill level so the person who is better geared will win. Could a pro player beat a fully ascended “newb”? Of course, but pro players a very rare and they don’t make up the average WvWvW in our realm. Heck, my realm is full of PvE players (Desolation) so if anything Ascended gear is awesome as the sheer power of these people will carry me but I still believe these items should not be implemented in this game mode.
Solution: It’s simple, just scale Ascended gear to Exotic stat level upon entering a Borderland. I believe fair play should be encouraged and “grind to win/pay to win” (crafting) should not be encourage or allowed in PvP, this is not World of Warcraft and I believe the fair play/balanced gear model from Guild Wars 1 was perfect and it should be encouraged not scrapped. If I wanted to go “3 Shot noobs with overpowered gear” I’d go back to WoW and grind RBGs to 2200.
Regards,
Bastien