Guild Wars 2

Stormleaf.1769:

Beerzilla.3297:

You say you want the dungeon to be available for everyone to experience, and yet what is happening in-game is people are excluded from parties for lack of that experience. You say gating the higher levels is not intended as a treadmill, and yet it is effectively a treadmill thanks to the Agony mechanic. There is no skill required to make it past Agony, you either have the gear to mitigate it or you don’t. Seems to me to be a poor design, completely contrary to the manifesto and principles this game was sold on.

Not true. Skill can mitigate Agony, trait builds can mitigate Agony, playstyle can mitigate Agony, people are just refusing to even look at how it works or how they might be able to deal with it without ascended gear. Try looking at what even causes agony (such as evadable mechanics) before saying ascended gear is the only way to ever deal with it.

Furthermore, a few people wanting to do higher difficulties is not “excluding” people from content. There are plenty of people still doing lower level fractals. Heck, the fact that there’s so many rage posts by different people about lack of low level fractal runs proves that there are more than enough people still doing them. Even to this day, I see people constantly advertising for low-level fractals in /map chat on every server and overflow I go to. People here are spreading lies, misinformation, and hysteria to “get back at” ArenaNet for implementing ascended gear, and it’s just completely ridiculous.

Actually, this is in their own words, not mine. So please tell me how I am spreading misinformation or lies; this is straight from the devs.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/

New Condition: Agony

In the upcoming Fractals of the Mists dungeon, we’ll introduce a new monster condition called Agony.
This extremely dangerous condition ticks percentages of player health away and can’t be cleansed by normal means. Players who wish to delve deep into the Fractals will find that Agony makes progress increasingly difficult, until they reach the point where some defense against this condition is a must. The only way to mitigate Agony damage is by building up resistance through Infusions, a new type of upgrade component that can be acquired in the Mystic Forge.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

Derk.3189:

Stormleaf.1769:

Erulogos.2591:

Quoting you both as you both make the same argument, essentially, and miss the same issue.

The issue is not with -current- content. No Ascended gear is required to finish every dungeon and kill every boss currently walking Tyria.

The issue is with -future- content. It was stated, when Ascended gear was announced, that Agony (and thus Agony resist) was something that would be involved in content going forward. It was not stated, one way or the other, if it would be required to even attempt future content, and it therefore becomes a simple question: grind Ascended and Agony resist now, so you are ready for the new content no matter what, or wait and see if it will be required, and hope that, if it is, enough other people waited that you can get groups to grind it out.

It is true that as of this moment in time, the grind heavy gear is not required to see any of the content in the game. But we don’t know when or if it will be, and Anet has not said one way or the other. A lot of folks saying it is required are basically taking the cautious path, assuming it will be and preparing for the worst.

The issue with this is that ArenaNet could have easily made this content require Agony resistance from the beginning as well, by making it some Mystic Forge thing and introducing Agony at fractal level 1. They didn’t; heck, they even made it so low levels can participate. Exotics aren’t even a requirement for the early difficulty levels. If they didn’t do it now, why do you think they’re magically going to start doing it in the future? None of the content in GW2 has been restricted like that. There is zero indication of ArenaNet ever restricting content like that, and it’s simply not helpful to base your argument on an assumption that they’ll magically start doing it.

AHHAHA You really think they did that for the players? Its just there to draw out the content, an additional carrot on another stick. Oh you want to see what agony is like? Hit me up 10 levels.

The Agony mechanic wasn’t introduced at the start of the dungeon so that everybody can experience the content. While one of the goals of the Fractals of the Mists dungeon was to provide some difficult content for players looking for a challenge, we also wanted the dungeon to be available for everybody to experience. While getting far into the dungeon requires agony resistance from ascended gear, the content was designed to provide challenging content, and to allow players to choose what difficulty they wanted to play at.

As for ascended gear, to reiterate what Chris has said (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside), it’s not intended as a treadmill, but rather as a tier of rewards that can help bridge the gap between Exotics (a few hours of effort to acquire a piece) and Legendaries (hundreds of hours of effort to acquire one). They’re currently only available in the Fractals of the Mist Dungeon, but we’re going to be adding new ways to acquire them, both inside of WvW as well as elsewhere in PvE.

You say you want the dungeon to be available for everyone to experience, and yet what is happening in-game is people are excluded from parties for lack of that experience. You say gating the higher levels is not intended as a treadmill, and yet it is effectively a treadmill thanks to the Agony mechanic. There is no skill required to make it past Agony, you either have the gear to mitigate it or you don’t. Seems to me to be a poor design, completely contrary to the manifesto and principles this game was sold on.