Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Samhayn.2385:

Spawne.3128:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Is it fair to say that regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method?

Chris

I would say that is true pretty much about all items. However I see this strategy being problematic unless you increase the overall amount of items in the game. Supply vs demand basically. Scale it so that ascended weapons/armor only drop from the hardest of pve related events in the game, and exotics drop from lower difficulty events, and just leave the drop rate of precursors the same so that you dont diminish the rarity of legendary’s. PvE in this game has so much potential however has been largely undeveloped.

I like this idea of higher drop rates for harder content but it still neglects wvw so I would like to add. Higher drop rates in wvw from Player kills modified by the players rank. Higher rank = better chance to get something good from them. In theory higher rank players should have more experience and thus be more difficult to fight.

Interesting idea.

Chris

Chris,

I don’t know if you played Warhammer Online at all, but they had a system like this.

For those unfamiliar, WAR had a tier system that required you be fully geared in one set before you could not get one shot by the new content and grind that for your next set. Well, early on the only way to get new gear was through RNG bags, and only 3-6 people got these bags based on some arcane public quest system. To help progression into the enemy cities, they added additional ways to get the gear. The most noteworthy was that low stat items (such as gloves or boots) could rarely drop off of players and players had a chance to drop a crest based on their rank(or a lower rank). These crests could be turned in for gear of the associated rank. There was no better feeling than having an epic fight against an enemy player and finally best him and looting a Sovereign crest (even if you needed like 250 for a chest piece alone). You knew you just beat one of the enemies big dogs!

This could be one way to add alternative paths to ascended gear which I hear alot of people asking for; killing high level foes for token that can be traded for dragonite, emphyreal fragments or even T6 mats(assuming this doesn’t wreck the economy). I know you can get ascended weapons chests from WvW ranks, but you can get WvW ranks for following the karma train. Finally crafting the last piece of your ascended armor piece after slaying your 250th Blackgate Gold Legend is a reward for skill (assuming you didn’t zerg down all 250 enemies) and is a story worth telling.

In WAR, the community was very small and therefore very tight. You knew everyone on your server who was RR80. They were the commanders calling all the shots, the assassins who were in and out before the health bar could render from full to empty, the healers who were unkillable and saved your life countless times. They were legends and knew they had a target on their head, knew they could drop the best gear to the enemy and carried that responsibility accordingly.

So, would ArenaNet be open to letting us, as a community, be the gate keepers to gear? Also, would people be open to being a gatekeeper? Does the zergy nature of T1 destroy this possibility?

SPvP

• I admit I play very little SPvP. Also, I hear there are changes coming to glory and how ranks work. So I will leave this one in your capable hands.

Living Story?

• Is sticking with the LS and getting every meta achievement along the way worth an ascended weapon box? Assuming that the whole Scarlett arc lasts about a year, I would say its a maybe.

Final Thoughts

• Keep the trinkets for laurels in the game. I would say that if you are dedicated to your daily for a month, you deserve the trinket. In addition, they help people round out their AR and access content. However, to address alts…
• An item locker would be great for getting skins for your characters! However, maybe a separate tab in the item locker could be an ascended vault. Once you equip an ascended item on a character, it unlocks in the vault. Therefore, if you want to equip your alt or try a different spec you can go to your vault and for a small fee (maybe a dragonite ingot can be crafted into a dragonite key to take out 1 armor piece and a empyreal star can be used to take out a trinket) take out the ascended piece and assign it a stat combo. This way, there’s that achievement of unlocking your full set and all the work that comes along, but you also have some flexibility when it comes to alts.
• My intent here is to give people who play all parts of the game a chance at ascended while also allowing people who focus one one type that opportunity as well. For the focused type of people, there is room to grow and show off in your field of choice. For the unfocused, there’s always something new to explore. Maybe my post isn’t so much about how future progression should play out, but how we can’t leave new players in the dust. Multiple choices on how to catch up are always good.
• As always, I am open to criticism and discussion on my ideas. Really, I just wanted to propose an idea that I felt would help me feel like I was progressing in the game, as opposed to being lost in gigantic mat lists.

Edit: After posting this I only now realized how long it was. If you are actually reading this, thank you for our time.

Anyways, here are my ideas for each area of the game:

Crafting

• Keep this system in place, as we don’t want to take away armor from people who already crafted it. Also, the mat requirement is high enough, IMO, that if you crafted it, you are worthy of it.
• Craft your exotics on the way from 400-500.
• Infuse your armor with additional craftings for more prestige. if the art assets are available, make it like the fractal capacitor. The armor would start looking kinda dead but then comes to life over time with successful infusions.
  *Traveling this path shows you are a master craftsman.

Wealth Acquisition

• Buy your exotics from the AH
• More of an offshoot/ alternative to crafting
• Add in a new T4 cultural armor (if time exists to make the armors and weapons) that’s even more expensive than T3 and is ascended. Should be more expensive than crafting the set, gold wise, but lacks the time gated component.
• Traveling this path is for those who want to show off just how obscenely rich they are.

Fractals

• The exotic Armageddon set drops from the boss fractal chest at lower levels
• As I said earlier, I like the AR and infusion system as it is.
• Add a way to craft ascended gear or ascended gear mats in the Mystic Forge using items dropped inside the fractals (things like the globs of Mist Essence). By the time you are at Frac Lvl 50 and conquered the Mistlock Instabilities, you should be able to craft an ascended set to show off you made it this deep into fractals.
• Be it titles or even more glowy back pieces, armors or weapons, someone should be able to look at you and know that your armor has been infused 2 or 3 times and you are at Fractal level 125 or something.
  *Traveling this path shows great skill..

Dungeons

• Use tokens to get your exotic armor and weapons
• The first time completing an explorable branch awards a unique item. The three items from each branch can be combined with the Gift of X (purchasable for 500 tokens currently) to make a component that can be used to help craft ascended items. Maybe this is an alternative method to craft dragonite ingots and empyreal stars? Either way, getting an ascended set should require beating all of the dungeons and getting the dungeon master title.
• Maybe add a system similar to AR, but for dungeons. Then, once or twice a year come out with a new, super difficult dungeon. To even have a chance at this new dungeon you must have infused all your armor slots in last years dungeon.
• To differentiate itself from Fractals, the new dungeon is long and hard and filled with puzzles. Maybe even some sort of limited healing mechanic with checkpoints to heal/save progress. While it still shows skills, it also shows cleverness and endurance.

Exploration

• Buy your exotics with karma at the Temples.
• 100% world completion offers 8 Gifts of Exploration. These Gifts along with dragonite from the world bosses can be used in creating an ascended set. Maybe hide things like dragonite ingots in rotating chests that are located in some of the hardest to reach areas of the game?
• Many people early in this thread offered ideas for open world achieving, such as zone wide sets/challenges. This can be used to infuse your ascended set.
  Traveling this path shows your dedication to find all the secrets in the world.

WvW

• Buy your exotics with badges.
• Getting the dragonite to craft an ascended set can be difficult depending on the role you play (I personally love roaming. Unfortunately, I get squat for dragonite because of this.) Also, I know you don’t want WvW to become more profitable than PvE, but a little boost in gold gain wouldn’t hurt to help offset the cost of siege, respecs for different roles and armor damage. it would also help in buying mats to level up crafting.
• New token like items have a chance to drop from WvW Rank up chests and a small chance to drop from players and keep/castle lords upon being killed. The type of token would depend on what tier you are in (Invader, Bronze Invader, Silver Invader, ect…). No prefix gets you a token that might buy some dragonite, wood or ore from a quartermaster in town. Bronze would maybe let you buy a bolt of Damask or an Dragonite Ingot. Silver and up could possible buy you a box with an ascended item. Either way, I feel that by the time you are a Bronze Invader, you should be looking at being able to craft an ascended set( or at least a good portion of it).
• To show achievement in WvW, break up the huge 1 million kills type achievemetns into smaller tiers, awarding cool titles along the way. In addition, getting to silver, gold and diamond invader should allow you to get the mats needed to infuse armor for an additional slot for things like +1% guard damage or even +1 supply carried.
• Traveling this path shows how battle hardened you have become.

What Should Progression Be?

So, here is my question to the devs. Is it possible to make aiming for ascended gear not the goal of the game as far as future progression goes? Instead, can it simply be a reward for achieving in the game? A show that you have done something monumental? When ascended gear first came out, I really liked the idea of it. You get ascended gear and then slot it with AR to dive deeper and deeper into fractals. Eventually you go deep enough that you have to infuse your items so they can hold even more AR. The back piece goes from some dull, dead piece of rock to this glowing living thing. That was an incredible system. It was a reward that was in addition to, but not replacing, the skill it took to get to Fractal Levels 50. Now we have Ascended weapons and armors and they are simply just a mat list. Really, its just a test of do you have enough gold or can you stand mindless grinding.

Earlier in this thread you asked what our favorite progression systems from other games were. Instead, I would like to propose what I think would be my ideal system for GW2. While I praised the ascended system when it came to fractals earlier, there are a few flaws in it. In my opinion, the most prevalent one is the ways to acquire ascended are very narrow (craft grind or pray to the RNG gods) and their use (outside of the stat boost) is limited to fractals, a single portion of a very large game. My dream system would keep the existing systems in place while also expanding it to every other portion of the game. I realize you guys are busy, so I tried to keep the perceived work to a minimum. This means finding alternative ways to acquire existing mats instead of brand new recipes from scratch for each area of the game. Also, for now you can reuse the same skin for all areas. but long term it would be cool if eacha rea had its own skin that fit the theme.

In my dream system, you buy the game and level your way up to 80. At 80, you probably have a few yellows, blues and greens. A bit undergeared, but good enough to get started. This is where things get interesting for you. The whole world is at your fingertips, you get to choose how you will leave your legacy. Your journey will take you through exotic armor and ultimately ascended. From there, you can infuse to show additional prestige in your area or move to a new area. I want people to be able to “master” each area of the game or focus on one area and be a supreme kitten of their chosen field. Either way you go, it should be about the same amount of time to get an ascended set, with my suggestions probably being quicker than the current method. However, the ascended set is an reward for completing a grand task.

Chris,

Background in GW2

Before I dive into the meat and potatoes of my post I wanted to do two things. First, thank you to you and your team for doing this. The amount of back and forth I am seeing is really positive to me as a player Second, I wanted to give you some background on my time with GW2, so you had some perspective on where I am coming from. I consider myself a semi-casual player. I have a 9-5 job, friends, other hobbies and, as I would dearly like to find my soulmate, I go out on dates as well. Despite that, GW2 has gripped me in a way that no game has since Warhammer Online (my first MMO, you may all start booing) did back in college. Therefore, I often find myself playing a couple hours at a time 2-3 times a week and then like all day Sunday.

Maybe this is that “entitlement” that people speak of, but as a fairly regular player for over a year now I figured I would of had enough mats to craft ascended armor when it came out, especially since I haven’t crafted an ascended weapon yet. Now, I don’t do anything that I consider a grind, but I figured that over the past year all the dungeons, WvW, Living Story and just open world roaming I have done, enough mats would have dropped that crafting ascended armor would be viable. However, I am nowhere close. Maybe I am just playing the game wrong? Also, as someone who is looking to purchase GW2 for a friend, how can I tell them that the best armor in the game (even if its just a 5% increase over exotics) is over a year away?

When I first heard of this CDI, I was ready to come in here and blast you guys for making Ascended gear such a grind. But then, I looked at my character. My armor hasn’t changed one bit in the last 6 months. Furthermore, my trinkets were a disaster. Aside from the few ascended pieces I had purchased with laurels, they were yellows, a green and the Karka Shell from Lost Shores. It then hit me that gear doesn’t really matter at all in this game. I still feel compelled to get ascended because its a stat boost and I hate the thought of losing in WvW because the other guy had that 5% boost, but gear shouldn’t be the end all be all. In fact, looking back, I don’t really have anything “physical” (as physical as something can be in a digital world) to show for my time in GW2. All of my achievements have been emotional ones. I didn’t feel achieved when I got full exotics, but I did when I got 100% zone completion, completed the SAB achievements, came together with some guildies and WvW non-stop for a week to finish WvW Season 1 in the nick of time, and seeing the Living Story through from start to finish. These are all goals I set for myself and followed through on.

To be continued…

Random thought of the day. A coup is a bloody overthrow of government. But add one letter and it becomes coupe, a fancy car. Or, change one letter to coop and it becomes a house for warm and lovable chickens. Aren’t words fun?

As for Nerdy Mike’s question, we have a little over 40 members with about 10-15 playing at any time. Anyone interested should definitely reach out to us here or in game.

Thresher.3049:

Been some really high level fights today in the effort to take JQ down a peg in their own borderlands, pretty impressed, probably the hardest 500kills in a session I’ve ever had to earn so far. (bloody garrison lord out on the back steps making life harder!)

Our more recent BG transfers are certainly giving em some serious stick out in EBG, some real quality crews and its great to see.

The fight for garrison last night was crazy! I gotta give you KnT guys and the rest of BG some credit. SoS too. Most guilds and servers would of failed once or twice and then given up, but you guys came back for 2 1/2 hours. That is some persistence that demands recognition.

It was a fun night, perhaps one of the best my guild and I have had in WvW so far. If Tier 1 stays like this, I think everyone will be happy campers. Thanks for all the loot bags! (hehe)

Don’t worry Hypo. Some day you will be able to best me and take my place as Supreme Overlord of Sanctuary… but not today.

Good morning everyone. Elleryion stopping in to say hello and to say that Hypo pretty much got everything right (except the being leader part… that’s me. Nice attempt at a power grab there Hypo, but you are going to have to try harder if you want to overthrow me!!! -insert obligatory evil laugh-)

Anyways… As Hypo said, we are laid back, friendly, a bit odd, very goofy and generally run some dungeons and do quite a bit of WvW. I am just going to leave you with some links here to our old recruitment thread and to our homepage. I feel obligated to fully disclose to you what you are getting into before you join. So if you actually like what you see below, I urge you to please contact us here, on our website or in game for additional information!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/guilds/Sanctuary-SANC-of-JQ-is-recruiting-WvW-PvE/first#post708948

http://www.sanctuarygaming.org/index.php/homepage

Hey Kaellok,

Sent you a PM. Hope it answers all of your questions. If not, feel free to get back to me.

I will get started on that right away buddy. Can go right next to the keg room when we finally get guild halls.

Thank you Butch. While we don’t come out with the “we’re a madhouse…so yeah, join us” right off the bat, we like to leave enough hints that no one is surprised when they learn the truth.

But back to the matter at hand…. Maybe we wouldn’t have to do all the recruiting ourselves, Grayh, if someone logged in every now and then. Having your house getting hit by a hurricane and displacing you, your wife and the rest of your family for weeks, and potentially months, is no excuse!

Hypo, these people are guests and potential future guild members. At least bring out the muffins!

Sparrowbane,

Reading through your post, I think my guild, Sanctuary, would be a great fit. You can read more about us at our recruitment thread( http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/basics/complete-guide-fractals-mists#.UKT2QkeP4Po.reddit) which just happens to be next to your thread in these forums (its a sign!!!)…but I will cover the basics real quick.

We are a small guild of 25 with about 15-20 of us logging in nightly. We started out back in WAR with just 6 of us and have built ourselves up till now. We have been through alot together and the core of our guild are members for life. We have a no nonsense approach to guild drama: just don’t do it and be respectful. Like you, most of our members have real life responsibilities but we still like to improve and progress as a guild, even if our pace is slower than more hardcore guilds. We run Dungeons twice a week and WvW (we are on JQ as well) for the rest of the time (we are also getting our toes wet with some sPvP).

But yeah, I hope you like what we have to offer and will give our thread and website a look. Also feel free to contact me in-game.

Finally, as our name implies, we are a safe haven and would never turn down the friend of a friend. I hope to hear from you both soon!

Guys, shhhhhhh!

We lure them in thinking we are normal, THEN break out the crazy. We went over this!

Greetings Dark Night,

From your post, I think Sanctuary[SANC] would be a good fit. We are a small group of gamers that came together 5 years ago and have overcome alot of adversity since then. This has left us with a very tight knit feel, more akin to a family or group of friends than a normal guild. We have a vent and access to TS, which we use in a mature yet fun manner; once described as “just the right amount of twisted”. We run dungeons on Thursdays and Sundays, jumping puzzles and zone exploration on Wednesdays and WvW on most other days, with some sPvP sprinkled in from time to time.

I really hope you will check out our recruitment post here on the forums and hope to hear from you soon!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/guilds/Sanctuary-SANC-of-JQ-is-recruiting-WvW-PvE/first#post729424

Hypo, I don ’t know how to break this news to you… but you are already in the guild. Knucklehead.

But for those actually interested in joining, we have two ways. Either fill out an application on our website (it takes like 1 minute) and give us a day to look it over or talk to a member in game so we can get a feel for what kind of person you are.

Greetings Primeherald,

From your post, I think you would be a great fit for Sanctuary [SANC]. Basically, we are a group of gamers that came together in WAR and are more akin to a group of friends playing together than a traditional guild. We are respectful and mature, but still have fun goofing around in vent or guild chat. Best part is, we are already on JQ so feel free to stop by and talk to any of us!

We currently have a recruitment post on these forums that I really hope you check out: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/guilds/guilds/Sanctuary-SANC-of-JQ-is-recruiting-WvW-PvE/first#post715883

Hope to hear from you soon!

Hey all,

Back real quick to answer some of the more frequently asked questions.

Q: What time are you active?

A: Sanctuary is most active from 9 PM – 1 AM EST. However, we also have a fair number of afternoon and west coast players as well.

Q: Do you guys have any sort of voice chat?

A: Yes we do! We currently share a vent server with our sister guild. However, we are currently looking into a few other options. Either way, your voice will be heard…unless you just want to listen. We are ok with that too.

Q: Is your guild family friendly?

A: I like to think yes. Many of our members are parents and we have played with their teenaged children in the past. Now, do we have specific rules in place for language and content? No. Our number 1 rule has always been “Keep it Civil” and that has always worked. If you game with us you are bound to hear the occasional swear word or adult situation, but our guild chat or vent is never hateful, explicit or what I feel is unsuited for children.

Q: Do you guys RP?

A: Not really. While most of our members keep lore appropriate names for characters and we have been know to get into character from time to time for fun, we do not host any RP events.

Greetings all,

I am Elleryion and I am the leader of Sanctuary. We are currently looking for a few more members to round out our ranks, but will not turn away any candidate looking for a new home.

Sanctuary is a group of gamers from all walks of life that started playing together in Warhammer Online (with a few of our members having previously played DAoC together) and have continued that tradition till today, picking up many new friends along the way. Sanctuary has always been a sort of get away from the other portions of our lives; a place where we can escape for a couple hours and hang out with friends. As such, we do not rush through content or demand you attend certain events. We simply play at a place that our busy lives allow us. This is where we get the term “semi-casual” from. We are just a bunch of guys and gals playing a video game for fun, the way it was meant to be played. Also, did I mention the lack of drama? Yeah, no drama…and I mean that.

We currently run dungeons on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons. We run jumping puzzles and other fun nonsense on Wednesday nights. Most other times, you will find us in WvW defending the JQ borderland.

I really only brushed over the basics in this post. So if anything caught your eye, I greatly urge you to check out our guild website, which has much more information: http://www.sanctuarygaming.org/.

Additionally, you can contact me or my recruitment officer & resident vent nazi (hypo.1057) in game if you have any questions or just want to talk.

Hope to be hearing from you soon!