Guild Wars 2

I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it was intented so I’ll just be leaving it here.

I’ve tried to use the Mystic Forge recipe to change the stats of Ascended Armor to change the stats of my Breathing Apparatus, but it doesn’t count it as a armor piece. I think it’s wrong since the Breathing Apparatus is the substitute for the head piece while on underwater, so technically it’s a armor piece just as much.

At best, it’s a frustrating design choice. More likely, it’s a bug.

However, I really wish ANet would just completely dispense with requiring a seventh piece of armor as gear. Instead, why not make them just skins?

• Aquatic Breathers have never been needed to breathe underwater in the live game.
• For 3 years, fighting under water has meant reduced stats and has required buying a seventh rune for every armor set.
• For most of these 3 years, breathers were limited to sub-L80 masterwork, karma items: no rares (never mind exotics) and completely uncraftable or unsalvageable at top levels.
• Even now, the supply of better-than-green rarity is extremely limited.

Thus, in a meaningful sense, we’ve never really had true underwater headgear; all we’ve had is a placeholder marginally better than no gear at all (and arguably worse than nothing at times). At best, it increases expenses by 16% at a time when there’s zero underwater combat in the new zones, including Alpine Borderlands, Magus Falls, and Raids.