Before you flame or just drop out, take this with a grain of salt. I am here to try to propose an idea and not cause friction, nor am I here to annoy anyone. Also, a TL;DR will be at the bottom.
(Pic is at raid hype.)
I believe that the nerf to ascended gear with the expansion was uncalled for, but it’s what ever. It makes sense to me, but it wasn’t needed. All it did was make crafting ascended gear even less worthwhile. It’s barely an upgrade since you are locked out of upgrade components. I believe that upgrade components should have been able to be used in Ascended gear from the start, and agony resistance should have been its own stat that you can add to different slots in the same gear.
This would make rings crazy with 4 slots as they are right now, but they would lose (or keep) the meager +15 to a SINGLE stat that you get while still keeping the agony resistance. They could even reduce it to just one infusion slot (or keep it, doesn’t really matter), but you can go to higher agony in a single slot than currently to counter that. You would get one slot for each piece of gear, like exotics, to use upgrade components on ascended gear.
Build diversity would be promoted even more with a change like this, and it would help to motivate people to get ascended other than the fact that Jimmy wont let them into the raid. Since there is no inspect option, I could just claim to be full ascended and get into any pug. Having a legendary weapon also causes more of a fully-geared illusion that could cause some headaches. Some people WILL/HAVE bought them with real life money. I bought $100 worth of gems and flipped it to gold. Then flipped that ~1.2k(?) to about 3.3k and bought Meteorlogicus during the Halloween event from opening over 70k trick or treat bags (when they were 4 silver instead of 7 a bag, and candy corn sold for 2x what it does now).
To get to my real point, the fact that raids will never give increased stats is redundant (doesn’t help that I lose like 1k health on every character when I enter for some reason). What, are we just going to get increasingly harder content? As it currently is, there is no way we can go 2 or 3 raid tiers into the future without people giving up altogether and losing all hype for GW2 High End PvE Content.
A few changes I would personally want to see is have some sort of item drop that allows us to add an upgrade component slot to a piece of ascended gear, at least the armor and jewelry. Weapons probably wouldn’t need it as much, but it would be cool to see it in every raid. They could time gate these by having certain ones drop in certain raids. Maybe not do it in the current raid, but start with something like helmets and maybe shoulders in the next raid.
To further this, after we get to a point where we can unlock all of the legendary armor, they could add legendary upgrade components (could just do a higher stat and no stat change, but the stat change is an amazing feature that pretty much everyone with a legendary LOVES).
This would give us potential gearing upgrades for the next 7 raids (full raids, not individual wings) AFTER Spirit Vale. They could do the slots like this: Helm/Shoulder, Chest/Gloves, Pants/Boots, Rings (both), Accessories (both), Back/Neck, and finally Weapons. They could even just make it only one, which would add about 4 (3 extra from armor and back/neck being separated – which would make it the next ELEVEN RAID TIERS). This would also keep raids relevant for forever as new players will always come and players will always make alts. Thus, you would have to go back to older raids to get the correct upgrade slots.
They could also make some sort of item after the point where we have all upgrade components to buff them up to maybe a 1-5% increase of what they are, consuming the upgrade slot. That way, in even 5 years or so, people still run Spirit Vale, the next several raids, and what ever raid is the new one at that point in time.
TL;DR (I prefer if you at least read the 2nd half of the post, but to each their own)
Gear is too scarce and the difference in stats are WAY too low (granted, there is a hefty amount of stat combos – which is cool).
Raids may potentially get even harder with even less people able to attempt them due to no stat increase.
No Inspect option so you can lie about your gear being full ascended and stat combo you don’t have.
Infusion slots were always a bad idea, IMO.
Raids are VERY FUN and I want them to never die out.
They could go in any direction to increase the value of raids.
My idea on gear upgrading:
Add an item that adds an upgrade component slot to ascended gear, and make it limited to what slot per raid.
After all slots are covered, make an item that increases stats by a 1-5% (could do RNG or just straight out, which would bring more longevity to raids if it’s RNG 1-5%) on the item, but consumes the upgrade slot (must have it on said piece to use the item stat upgrade token).
You can add upgrade component slots again after they were consumed, and keep going in a chain to a certain point.
Make higher tiered upgrade components only from raids.
Remove or keep stats on infusions, reduce amount of infusion slots and increase the maximum amount of agony resistance to each infusion to compensate (or keep as is and add in the upgrade component ideas).
At the end of the day, I am just a player. Sure, ANet are pretty cool and do like to give us what we want every now and then, but they do also have some things set a certain way that they do not want changed. I DO NOT see this change ever happening, but I would be so very happy and probably quit other MMO’s like WoW for good if they added stuff like this just to focus on GW2.
I PvE and PvP, but I like PvE a whole lot more than PvP. I am good at both and will do either, but raids have always dragged me in and forced me to stop PvPing when I need to finish up some raid stuff.
