Guild Wars 2

There’s a lot of arguing about whether the 400 HP cost to fully unlock an Elite spec is reasonable or not; it seems there’s two camps that are mostly talking past each other. Some complain about an intense grind, the other side shrugs and says it just playing the game. Who is right?

I believe the difference comes down mostly to whether the person is rerolling/swithing mains or not. Here’s the reason.

If you currently play your warrior (say), love your warrior, and want to continue to play your warrior, but would like to add more abilities to your warrior in the form of an Elite spec, then getting those extra HPs amounts to doing what you would have been doing in the game anyway: playing your favourite character through a new zone. People in this camp have no problem with the cost. They don’t see it as a grind. Because for them, it’s not.

On the other hand, suppose you never played Necromancer. You were never interested in playing a necromancer, or maybe you played one to level 20 and decided it is not for you. But you are really, really, excited about playing the Reaper. In this case, maybe you levelled up a Necro to 80, without spending much HPs, in order to dump them into Reaper the moment it comes out. Being told by Arenanet that you basically have to play a class you do not enjoy, for an indeterminate period of time, before you can “unlock” the class you’d rather be playing, can in fact be, as some have described, a “total buzzkill”.

Here’s the thing. Neither of these positions is wrong! They’re both valid ways to look at the game. You can see an Elite spec as a simple addition to class you already love, or as a completely new class that shares mechanics with an old one (Arenanet, in fact, has pushed this second view repeatedly). It is pointless to argue that one is wrong and one is right.

What Arenanet should do, however, is try to keep both camps as happy as they can. The people that love the class they intend to play through HoT want things to do with their class, and goals to aim for. Rerolls ( Herald rerolls in particular) want to play the class they want, and not have to “train rush” HPs through a new zone that they’d rather leisurely explore, in order to be able to do so.

I suggest a compromise: Take away the requirement that we need to max out all other trees in order to be able to put points into our Elite spec. Instead, make it so that you can unlock the Elite spec, and the first half or so points, immediately, but then have to fully unlock the rest of the class to continue down the Elite spec. Basically, so that you can put in enough points immediately upon the release of HoT to unlock the elite spec, weapon, traits, heal and utility abilities. But then, if you also want the runes, gear (and possibly elite ability), then, AND only then, do you have to go “grind” all those HPs in the jungle, to fill up the rest of your base class trees and so on.

I think this should make both camps happy.

Lots of suggestions in this thread. I think most of them can be summarised thus:

1) Make Ascended gear provide a stat/combat benefit over Exotic gear ONLY in the Fractal Dungeon

2) Cosmetic / convenience advantages of Ascended gear are OK, and can be made permanent in and out of the new dungeon.

These are not bad ideas. I think, however, that most everyone’s suggestions can be summarised thus:

1) Make Ascended gear provide a stat/combat benefit over Exotic gear ONLY in the Fractal Dungeon

2) Cosmetic / convenience advantages of Ascended gear are OK, and can be made permanent in and out of the new dungeon.

Aren’t you grateful?

I hope you are as excited about these new items as I am!

Huh, I guess I need to clarify my claim here.

I said that the gear is 26% more powerful not that you are 26% more powerful for equiping it. If you equip an ascended ring, the claim is that the stats you get from your ring contribute to your damage increase by 26%, not that you can kill stuff 26% faster.

This is still true if you equip all ascended gear. You mentioned level 80 base stats. There is also buffs like Might. All of these dampen the difference between a full Ascended and a full Exotic (or full blue for that matter), character. It doesn’t change the fact that the gear itself is 26% more powerful.

I see however, how I might have been a bit misleading in my OP. I will try to amend that.

TLDR Ascended gear is 26% more powerful than the same-slot exotic. Proof: see below.

Disclaimer

First off, this post is merely to clarify the matter with some math. Some people are saying that ascended gear is only slightly more powerful than exotic gear, including Miss Murdock herself. This is simply not true. The number people are quoting is an 8% increase in power. This is also not true. Ascended gear is 26% more powerful than exotics, as the math below shows.

I will not editorialize, or add my opinions on the matter of Ascended gear. I just feel, very strongly, that people need to be aware of the facts, be on the same page so to speak, in order to cogently discuss any issue. I made a similar post to this one on the main thread discussing Ascended gear, but it obviously got drowned down. People need to know this. So I ask: moderators, please don’t pull this post into the main thread, it’ll only get lost. And forum-goers/readers, please don’t discuss the virtues/downsides of Ascended gear. Let’s keep this thread purely informational. That said, if you find an error in my math, feel free to point it out.

Math

From the blog,

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

post we can see that increase, per stat is roughly 8%. The Exotic ring has a total of 63 power, and the Ascended has 68, which is a 7.9% increase (See note). This is where the "8% more powerful* figure floating around gets taken from. However, this is misleading, because that is the increase in one stat. Notice that both rings have three stats. Precision also got an 8% bump, and magic find gets an (10 – 7) / 7 = 42% increase. Yes, that is 42%.

Now, in Guild Wars 2, each stat increases your damage (survivability, etc), linearly. That is, an increase in 8% to your power stat will increase your damage by 8%. When you increase three stats, however, you don’t get a linear increase in damage, you get a cubic increase. To show why this is true, let’s imagine you go from an Exotic Berserker ring, to an Ascended Berserker ring. We don’t have the stats on the Berserker jewelry, but we can extrapolate. Let’s be conservative, though, and assume that the Berserker will increase each stat by 8% only (unlike the case of magic find above).

Now, from the wiki,

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

we have this formula for damage:

Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor) (1)

From (1) we can calculate the statistical average damage of your hits taking into account precision and crit damage:

Average Damage done = (weapon damage) x Power x (skill-specific coefficient) x (1 + (crit chance) x ( 0.50 + (crit damage) ) / (target’s Armor) (2)

This looks complicated, but we can just assume that everything but power, crit damage, and crit chance remain constant, and get rid of all the constants, we basically get that (asymptotically) your average damage grows as the function

Average Damage done = proportional to ( power x crit chance x crit damage)

Now, multiply power, crit chance, and crit damage all by 1.08, when moving from exotic to Ascended:

Average Damage done with Ascended gear = proportional to ( power x 1.08 x crit chance x 1.08 x crit damage x 1.08)
= ( power x crit chance x crit damage) x 1.259

Ergo, going from full exotic berserker gear, to full Ascended berserker gear increases your damage contribution from items by, roughly, 26%. See note 2.

Now, I used berserker because it is the easiest to showcase, since you can use the simple damage formula above to show how the three stats multiply each other. However, this increase of 26% is (roughly) also true for any other piece of gear. If you mix defensive and offensive stats, or offensive and magic find, or what have you, these stats multiply together to increase your effectiveness.

Note: An important thing to add here, on edit, is that my calculations already include the stats offered by the jewel in the Exotic gear. So this claim floating around that this disparity is made up by runes/sigils/gem slots that the Ascended gear lack is a canard. What my calculations do not include however, because we don’t know them yet, are stat increases, if any, provided by filling the infusion slot. These “infusions” could potentially increase the power gap between exotic and ascended even further.

Note 2: Important to note that level 80s have roughly 900 points in each stat. Also, you get roughly 1400 stat points from your spec. And, finally, there are stacking buffs like Might which remain the same regardless of gear. So your total damage will not go up by 26%. Your damage contribution from items goes up by, roughly 26%. Hence, the title of my thread that ascended gear is 26% more powerful than exotic.

“I hope you are all as excited…”

is the new

“Aren’t you grateful?”

Absolutely not. A new tier of gear, making current end-game gear obsolete, two months after release???!? When Anet said they didn’t want to be like other MMOs, they never mentioned they wanted to be worse. Not even WoW made gear obsolete on a two-month schedule…

My thoughts on this.

Earlier I did the maths to show that ascended gear is, roughly, 26% more powerful than exotic gear. That is huge. Now, the problem is not that they are introducing a new tier of gear; as others have pointed out we already have blue, green, yellow, orange tiers.

So, what’s the problem with a new tier? Here’s the problems:

1) First and foremost, it’s only available through this new dungeon system. Before, you could get the highest tier of gear, exotic, through whatever means you found more appealing: dynamic events karma farming, dungeons, WvWvW, auction house, crafting, etc. Whatever way you enjoyed playing the game was a valid way to do so: Arenanet stayed true to their “manifesto”. Now, whatever you ultimately want to do in the game, if you want to be the most effective at it (barring sPvP of course), you have to do this dungeon.

2) It’s a gating mechanic. Others have stated why this is bad, I won’t beat on a dead horse.

3) It’s all of these things being introduced 2 months after release; not, say, two years.

Xsorus.2507:

DrCereal.1765:

Some maths, before giving my own thoughts, since everyone seems to be missing this:

What you are seeing from the picture on the blog is an 8% stat increase, from exotic to ascended, per stat. As a reminder: stats scale your power linearly in GW2, meaning that an 8% increase in a single stat increases your power, roughly, by 8%.

However, each item at level 80 has three stats. This means that a linear increase across all stats from one item to the next results in a cubic increase in power. To make this more clear: increasing your power by 8% increases your damage by 8%. But increasing your precision by 8% also increases your damage by 8%, the same is also roughly true of crit damage. If you increase all three of these stats by 8%, as the ascended armor does, you get a whopping 26% in damage.

TLDR Ascended armor, judging from the official info we have available, is roughly 26% more powerful than exotics. If/when ascended items are available for all slots, if you equip them, you will be able to kill people in WvWvW 26% faster than they can kill you.

Really? you’re going to try and bring up WvWvW that had a far greater system in it called Orbs up until a little while ago..

The Bonus stats weren’t the big problem with Orbs, it was the 15% bonus to Health that was the problem.

A) Orbs are gone now; aren’t they?

B) I used WvWvW as an example. You will also be able, with full ascended gear, to kill mobs in PvE 26% faster. You’ll be able to do 26% more damage during DEs; perhaps pushing you over the damage treshhold for “tagging”, or generating loot, from more mobs than those with exotics. Really, my point is that 26% is nothing to scoff at.

Some maths, before giving my own thoughts, since everyone seems to be missing this:

What you are seeing from the picture on the blog is an 8% stat increase, from exotic to ascended, per stat. As a reminder: stats scale your power linearly in GW2, meaning that an 8% increase in a single stat increases your power, roughly, by 8%.

However, each item at level 80 has three stats. This means that a linear increase across all stats from one item to the next results in a cubic increase in power. To make this more clear: increasing your power by 8% increases your damage by 8%. But increasing your precision by 8% also increases your damage by 8%, the same is also roughly true of crit damage. If you increase all three of these stats by 8%, as the ascended armor does, you get a whopping 26% in damage.

TLDR Ascended armor, judging from the official info we have available, is roughly 26% more powerful than exotics. If/when ascended items are available for all slots, if you equip them, you will be able to kill people in WvWvW 26% faster than they can kill you.

Same issue here.

Maybe the common skins could be time-limited? Instead of having them available from a vendor in LA, they could be the “trash” commons in the BLCs.

Moka.9641:

Finally , some constructive criticism! I actually thought something like that too.. I hope they will do something like that in act 2,3 and 4

I really doubt they can do anything like this about this current holiday event. Hopefully, they do something like this for the next one though (Christmas, then Valentines and how knows…)

kaffaljidhma.1496:

Obviously the limiting factor becomes how many of the skins they can model. Aside from the resource concerns (having to load all these extra models into the active memory) this was one of the main reasons TF2 decided to outsource its paid content.

Agreed. I don’t deny that there are technical limitations on the number of skins that can be introduced in the game. However, I doubt this limitation is so severe that my suggestion could not be implemented.

Addenda: I realise that some people will manage to find a reason to complain no matter what. But I think there’s a difference between valid complaints (e.g. “I spent 50USD and got nothing special”) and invalid ones (“I spent 50USD and did not get this ultra-rare skins I was warned beforehand is very rare”)

Hello Arenanet,

I see there’s a lot of complaints about your Halloween event. It’s true, you can never please everyone, and it’s true some people will complain no matter what. But some of the complaints are valid. Here’s my suggestions on how you can avoid the bulk of the (valid) complaints in the future.

First, take a look at the complaints. People are upset they spent money on Lion Keys and got nothing (special, i.e. Halloween related) back. The counter argument is that, of course, this was chance based; and furthermore, if everyone gets these special skins or what not, by simply spending some amount of money, then they are no longer special.

Who is right? Well, both views are, of course! In order to please both crowds, and increase your own revenue, this is what you can do. Taking some cues from Magic: The Gathering, and other collectible card games, etc.

1) Make several rarity tiers of skins for your next event. Perhaps 3: common, uncommon, and rare. You can add an Ultra-Rare, if you want. All of them should have a holiday flavour, but rares should be somehow more desirable than commons. For example, a common dagger skin could a small skull for halloween. An ultra-rare could have some ghastly-weapon like effect plus some trail or something (something cooler than the exotic weapons, but not as cool as legendaries).

2) Every opened Black Lion Chest should include at least one common skin. Again, these common skins should not be all that awesome, or distinctive. If everyone starts running around killing dragons with these skins, it shouldn’t look ridiculous. They’re meant to be FUN. They should make people that spent money on keys expecting at least something Halloween-y happy. That is all.

3) Rares and ultra-rares is where you get your repeat-customers money. People who really want some amazing skins will gamble on getting them. Just like people who want a particular Ultra-Rare foil card will spend hundreds of dollars on booster packs and what have you.

3 a) (Edited in): Also, include a warning on the label regarding rarities and what not. For example: “Every BLC will include at least one skin. Only 1 in 20 will have uncommon skins. Only 1 in 500 will have rares”.

4) …

5) Profit! Everyone should be happy now. People who just want to have something fun in the spirit of the holidays should get it with no great effort. People who want something really special can gamble for it. We don’t get the problem of everyone running around with a Halloween spider-bow. And you, Arenanet, increase your revenue as both casuals and hardcore players will spend money on gems to their varying degrees of hearts content.