That would be alright if they scrapped Ascended equipment and added the Infusion slots either to existing armour, or to new equipment slots that add no stats besides an Infusion slot.
Beyond every other problem with Ascended armour – the bad precedent they set, the gear treadmill of downgrading everybody’s existing equipment, the power creep, etc – the most important issue is that equipment with top stats shouldn’t be any harder to get than the cheapest Exotics already are.
Exotics are “easy” to get if you play one character, with one build, and you don’t care whether or not your character looks nice.
Call the amount of time needed to outfit a character in exotics ‘x’.
If you play more than one character, getting a full set of Exotics for each character multiplies the amount of time needed to max out by the number of characters (‘c’). You now need to spend ‘cx’ time to max out.
If you play more than one build on those characters, and need gear with different stats to make each build effective, you now need to multiply the amount of time spend grinding by the number of builds per character (‘b’). So now we’re up to bcx.
And when you factor in aesthetics, Exotics cover the range from low-end crafted equipment (~2g each, let’s say) to high-end, sub-legendary items like Mjolnir, Foefire’s Essence, etc (up to ~500g). So let’s say this is effectively a multiplier with a range from 1~250.
Let’s assume you don’t care about appearance, but you have three characters, and two builds to play on each. It’s now costing you 6x to outfit all your characters.
Or say you only have one character, but you have three builds you’d like to play, and you’re only moderately concerned with making that character look cool (give it a multiplier of just 4 or so). Now it’s taking you 12x to max out. Or, hell – say you just want to be able to play any of the game’s eight classes, even if you don’t have specialized builds for any of them and don’t care about looking cool. Still a cost of 8×.
So how much is ‘x’? Well, if we set the cost per piece of Exotic equipment at 2g, as we did earlier, then you’re going to need between 13 and 16 pieces of equipment, depending on how many weapons you use – let’s use 13, to be generous here (only Elementalists and Engineers can possibly get away with only having one weapon, but there also aren’t any Exotic back braces, so we’ll split the difference). That means that ‘x’ is 26g.
That’s ‘attainable’, not ‘trivial’, all by itself.
But in the first case, where we needed 6x to max out? Suddenly this is 156g.
The second case was 12x – that’s a whopping 312g!
The third case, 8x – so just the base cost of playing each class, without any specialization or particular attention paid to customization – still shakes out to 208g.
That’s a lot of kitten money. It’s not too likely that you’re going to see more than 2g or so per hour of playtime. I wouldn’t call a grind time of 75+ hours “too easy” to get, by any stretch of the imagination.
Now figure that, based on what we’ve seen so far (and this is roughly consistent with the jump in cost from Rare to Exotic), the overall cost to acquire an Ascended piece can be roughly on par with obtaining a full set of Exotic armour.
In other words, ‘x’ could easily be multiplied by 10-20, or more.
This is the biggest problem with Ascended equipment. It’s designed to give long-term goals to players who refuse to play more than one character, refuse to play more than one build per character, and who refuse to expend that extra time they have into improving their character aesthetically.
In the process, it constitutes a functional downgrade to every character in the game (Exotic is the new Rare, Rare is the new Masterwork, etc), and it renders it effectively impossible to play multiple characters, or even multiple builds, and even takes cosmetic advancement largely off the table, because the time that you would spend trying to get a really nice looking Exotic set now has to be dedicated toward getting your Ascended equipment, because otherwise you’re at a mechanical disadvantage.
