Guild Wars 2

Rpgtabbycat.5869:

So it seems the community is now split into two groups over the Ascended gear.

1. The group that either does not care or is excited about the new armor and is looking forward to obtaining.

2. The group that believes ANet is going back on their promise about no gear progression and are upset to the point that they will quit the game and possibly attempt to get a refund.

I wonder which group is larger. I am sure though that whichever group affects Anet’s bottom line the most is the one they will cater to. Unfortunately companies exist to make money.

At this point though, if they choose to change the Ascended armor they run the risk of alienating those who are happy about the new changes and don’t want to go back to horizontal progression.

Good. That’s exactly what people who bought GW2 and expected a gear grind forced progression through content gates -should- get… alienated.

A) this thread is about to be merged with the other. There’s no point starting new threads.

B) Who cares if they allow crafters to make the gear? Who cares if you can get it in wvw? The biggest problem is that the power plateau was supposed to be incredibly easy to reach, and now it is not. The -only- compromise that would be acceptable is the complete removal of the Agony mechanic (which is content gating and gear treadmill all in one) and if there has to be a new higher tier of gear stats wise, that anyone wearing currently max level gear will have it automatically be upgraded into new max level gear.

Crater.1625:

DootmasterX.3025:

Well, predictably the elitism starts:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/Fractals-dungeon-players-restricting-others

Is that even elitism, though? The level 1 Fractal rewards are pathetic relative to what you need to get any of the items, from what I understand the enemies at level 1 are barely tougher than enemies you fight on the overworld in dynamic events, and it’s still going to take at least 20-30 minutes to get through, as a very optimistic estimate.

This strikes me as pretty different from “I won’t take a non-80 character into Ascalonian Catacombs, because I want to shave 90 seconds off my completion time”. It’s more “This is going to take me dozens and dozens of hours before I see any real return, and playing level 1 is going to extend that time by 25% or more – plus I’m going to be kind of bored fighting super-easy versions of the enemies”.

Elitism or not, it’s end-result of content gated systems. New players to the game will be left behind, people who don’t/can’t participate this weekend will even be left behind. The longer you wait to jump on this treadmill, the harder the progress will be.

It’s pretty funny that it’s happening already, hours after the patch.

vespers.1759:

Onshidesigns.1069:

mulch.2586:

Umm… then why would I grind fractals?

I kinda actually do want something to “work” toward.

I can see that ascended gear really isn’t going to matter much, but at least it’s something.

Work?
This is a game. Do you also want to work while playing your alts?

not sure if trolling or just clueless.

Irony, thy name is vespers.

Vash.9183:

To all of you crying about how you think ascended gear is ruining the game- you are just angry because you have more stuff to do in-game now. You didn’t waste your time with exotics, they’ve been great for a while now… and they will stay great even longer.

They even said that ascended gear is going to be released slowly, I mean, all we’re starting with here is a back piece and a ring. Come on. I know that I wouldn’t want the game to just stay the same without any new content like this… it’s great.

Lastly, referring to this as some kind of epic grind is crazy. Just because you hear that there’s new gear, you assume that it’ll take ages to get and that this is going to be a never-ending sequence of new tiers of gear. You’re the ones making the big mistake. It’s your fault that you’re losing interest.

I wasn’t going to reply again, i think 5 or so posts is enough. But I had to comment on this. Not on all the things wrong in this post. (ie. it -will- take a grind to get, they have specifically announced that they want these to be a halfway point between exotics & legendaries. Or perhaps how the gear isn’t the gear-grind, the infusions will be); no, I need to address that last sentence.

I was not losing interest in this game at all, until i read the article. I was playing for hours a day, hundreds over the 2-3months since pre-release, and was not slowing down. I was just working up my 3rd alt to 80, and had the other two in max level gear I liked with dyes I liked. I spent hours planning on what exotic weapon skins I still wanted to aquire for them. I went to bed late (after staying up late playing) thinking of the game, I woke up thinking about it, and daydreamed all day at work about it. I’ve spent way too much time at work on gw2 sites that aren’t blocked. I’ve spent more real money on gems than I paid for the game. I was -not- losing interest.

This announcement hit me like nothing in my life. I cannot even express in words what it felt like. Some sort of terror-misery-anger? The most comparable feelings I can equate it to based on other events from my life are the time I caught my s.o. cheating and another time when I was dumped, out of the blue. This was worse, but similar. I’ve never felt so betrayed in my life, which is ridiculous, given the two examples I just mentioned. I only mention that because it helps me illustrate my deep love for the game I had been playing for about 3 months.

I am deeply offended you think my immediate and abrupt distaste for playing this game is somehow -my- personal fault. This came out of the blue in complete contradiction to every single release of official information about the game before its launch. The game was marketed with the exact opposite philosophy that is being added a matter of days from its announced arrival. That is the cause of my deep dissatisfaction.

Strang.8170:

Spurious D.6173:

Strang.8170:

Deth.4109:

same impression i got that it what exotics shoudl have been.

They are exotics with +8% stats and infusion slots….

They didn´t need to add that 8% there, would´ve been fine with just infusion slots.

No, then they’d have been only half as terrible. Why do people think infusion is a good thing? It’s WoW Attunements all over again, it’s awful… Infusions are at -least- as offensive to me as the fact that they are creating a new tier of gear for no good reason.

Why i say it would´ve been fine was because the effect would´ve been just on the new dungeon content, it could´ve been ignored if someone flet like it.
As it´s now, you´ll need the ascended gear everywhere because it has that +8%

The problem is, as stated in the blog, -all- new content is going to follow the exact same infusion gear-gate method.

So sure, you’d have been free to ignore the new dungeon and all new dungeons for the rest of the game and be stuck doing the content the game shipped with… great.

Content gates are bad for games. Radiance killed LOTRO, WoW had to remove it’s attunements years ago… they are bad, they do not work, they are, in my personal opinion much much worse than a single (ya, right) new tier of gear.

Strang.8170:

Deth.4109:

same impression i got that it what exotics shoudl have been.

They are exotics with +8% stats and infusion slots….

They didn´t need to add that 8% there, would´ve been fine with just infusion slots.

No, then they’d have been only half as terrible. Why do people think infusion is a good thing? It’s WoW Attunements all over again, it’s awful… Infusions are at -least- as offensive to me as the fact that they are creating a new tier of gear for no good reason.

Crater.1625:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two.

If this was what ArenaNet was actually doing, this blowback wouldn’t be happening.

Currently, there is zero jump in reward between Exotics and Legendaries. Ascended gear is introducing a massive jump in reward between the two.

There’s already intermediates between ‘My first Exotic weapon’ and Legendaries, anyway. Anyone who’s just hit 80 is likely to first get themselves a boring looking crafted Pearl weapon. After that, they can upgrade to a number of higher-end Exotics that don’t break the bank: dungeon token gear, or any of the other weapons with cool unique models but no special particle effects. There are the special Halloween weapons and skins, and there’s an entire list of specifically craftable Mystic Forge Exotic weapons which all have unique appearances, and run the gamut from something that a player could make with a few days or a week of playing, to sub-Legendaries like Foefire’s Essence that actually require some of the same Gifts that are used to create Legendaries. If Legendary materials hadn’t skyrocketed to a truly ridiculous degree based on the extreme scarcity of some of their components, it would be a fairly smooth progression curve, as well – the only discontinuity is happening at the Legendary level, where it goes off the charts.

There is already a very healthy cosmetic progression curve in the game. No offense, but pretending that Exotics are Exotics are Exotics and that there’s nothing for a player to work toward between a Pearl Broadsword and a Twilight strikes me as a little disingenuous.

This is pure genius. Please, everyone +1 this gentleman’s/madam’s post. There was something there in that blog post that bugged me quite a bit and I couldn’t figure out what it was, as bothered as I was with the increased stats and content gates. This hits the nail on the head. This post here is a sterling example of why the entire blog post is disingenuous, the premises they are claiming exist to support these changes… do not exist.

Arkham Creed.7358:

I think people, especially those arguing with me, are overlooking one detail; the whole point of infusion slots is to overcome the new Agony stat. Back in GW1 we had a similar system where in infused armor granted resistance to the Spectral Agony skill, so I fell confident in speculating that this will work in a similar fashion. A big point being brought up is the offensive and defensive infusion slots, as if this means they must be stat based. I say they don’t, and I’ll give some examples off the top of my head.

Defensive: Reduce agony duration by X, reduce agony damage by X, gain regeneration when under the effects of agony, ect.

Offensive: Deal X greater damage while under the effects of Agony, gain X crit chance while under the effects of Agony, gain might when under the effects of Agony, ect.

I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that the effects from infused gear will be conditional, dependent on being effected by the new Agony stat or at least fighting creature types that use said skill. If this is indeed the case than pretty much every argument about infusion slots equaling rune or sigil slots evaporates. Frankly it wouldn’t matter at all if every single upgrade in the game as an infusion equivalent if I’m right and those upgrades are themselves dependent on the Agony condition to trigger. And I remind you this condition is ONLY found in the new dungeon. In fact I’d say this is little different than the gear separation we already have; now we have PvE gear, sPvP gear, and endless dungeon gear.

I understand your concern but at this point we don’t have enough information to go on, so you shouldn’t just assume the worse. This community has embarrassed itself before doing that.

I think people like you are overlooking one detail.

This is content gates. The entire Agony mechanic is not new. It’s been done in other games, and it does not work. It almost fully killed off LOTRO, and even WoW removed attunements way back near the end of their 1st expansion. Content/Gear Gates ruin games. We were promised accessible content for all, limited solely by player skill.

No matter what they do with progressive gear (which we were also promised we would not have to deal with), and no matter what the infusions actually do, people are going to be denied access to some* of the games content without replacing their current gear.

• It should also be noted that “some” in this case basically means, all content that is not currently in the game before this update. So -all- future content will be similarly gated. This isn’t speculation, they admit as much right in the blog. This is their new thing! Attunements! Something WoW abandoned due to player retention issues, something that caused a middlingly profitable mmo (lotro) to become a F2P one, is their new endgame.

Sawyer.9713:

OK so I understand why people are getting so upset about this, but dam how does anyone know that this is not the only time they will do something like this?

The addition of infusion is great and prob would of been much harder to implement on existing gear, so making a new level of gear was a smarter choice IMHO.

They’ve said why they did this. To cater to people that need constant improvent in their gear to reflect their vast play time. That means to cater to these people they will have to continually do this again and again.

Also, the infusion mechanic is not great. It is singlehandedly the worst aspect of the content update. As many people have mentioned this exact mechanic was attempted in LOTRO and it caused the game to fail and go F2P and get removed anyways. World of Warcraft removed attunements before the end of Burning Crusades because of how many players it alienated.

Think on that. The most successful gear grind MMO of all time does not have attunements anymore, and hasn’t for years. Why are they adding a Gear/Content Gate at all? It’s a flawed mechanic that will fail their game. The evidence of that abounds.

Lomax.2463:

good god you people cant read !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i am amazed there so so many that cant comprehend what Anet is doing

OK FOR THOSE THAT HAVE NO CLUE.

1. There is no stat increase !!!!!! they took away the upgrade slot and put the points that you would have gotten from the upgrade slot into the main stats of the item!
that is right Ascended armor is worse then exotic as it is not as customizable as normal armor!

2. Infusion slot is for negating a new condition call Agony that will only be in this dungeon! that is right it is worthless in WvW or any place outside this dungeon.

3. getting exotic gear is easy and is full customizable with upgrade slots, Ascended armor is hard to get is less useful as real exotic gear outside of this dungeon.

4. this is a cool great new dungeon , it is scalable for the progression players but none of it is any use outside of this one dungeon. it will allow player to brag about i hit 27th level of infusion !!! woot for me but as infusion does nothing outside of the dungeon why would a WvW player even care ?

this is like a PVE dungeon version of the PVP ranking , i think its great .

1. Look closer, there is a major stat increase.
2. the entire infusion mechanic is a Gear Gate. We were led to believe this game would not have content gates.
3. They’ve said they want Ascended items to take more effort to get than exotics and less than Legendaries. This is not acceptable. We were told we would not need to grind for the best gear just to keep on par. Some people consider getting Exotic gear a grind already.
4. The new gear is most definately useful outside the new dungeon.

As someone with a clue, this is appalling. I won’t quit, since there’s no sub fee, but I won’t ever buy more gems or expansions, i will log on for much less time overall and do much less content. If we were paying a sub fee for this game, the loss of revenue would immediately kill the game. It seems foolish to assume this will keep gear grinders happy or lure them away from superior gear grind games.

It’s sad really, for the foreseeable future I will simply log on after reset, do my dailies for my karma jug and coin, then log off. One of my guild members exclaimed, “omg you can’t quit! you play more often than 3/4 of the guild!” Not anymore