First time posting on the forums but I feel like I need to pitch in on this so I can be counted with the players who are unhappy about the new gear.
I, like many of you here, played the original Guild Wars from shortly after it launched and was a massive fan of the skill > gear system. It was one of my favourite aspects of the game, the special skins were more than enough to keep me coming back for more and I spent a good amount of time collecting a full set of Obsidian armour for my monk main, along with a tonne of other weapon and armour skins for all my other characters.
The fact that GW2 was going to be continuing this tradition was awesome to me, since I quickly burn out on other games that have a stat based gear progression system, I always feel like my hard work counted for nothing when a new tier is released and my old gear becomes obsolete.
It took a while to get my head around the GW2 system but once I realised that exotic was the GW2 version of ‘max armour’ I was more than happy to start working towards a full set so I could then start collecting rarer skins and then hopefully a legendary weapon or two.
The recent announcement of Ascended gear has just left me disappointed, I’d be perfectly happy with this new dungeon offering infusions which could be applied to existing exotic armour similar to how it was with the Mursaat in GW1. I’d also be happy with them just adding an extra slot to existing armour and allowing us to collect infusion ‘runes’ or something similar to slot into them.
I just don’t understand the need for gear with higher stats, the original Guild Wars managed to add 3 expansions worth of challenging content without ever raising the gear level or even the player level, is it not possible to do that again?
The thing that bugs me most is the reason for adding it.
“One of the primary design purposes for the Ascended item tier is to bridge the gap between Exotic gear (which fairly casual players can have a reasonable certainty of acquiring without too much angst) and Legendaries (which are for the hardest of hardcores). " – Linsey Murdock
“Our goal is not to create a gear treadmill. 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.” – Chris Whiteside
If I understand correctly, the only ‘gap’ between exotic and legendary currently is the amount of time required to get them and the unique visuals of the legendary weapons, but the stats are exactly the same.
Why then do we need to ‘bridge the gap’ between them by boosting stats? There was never a gap there to begin with. What’s wrong with putting new and unique unique armour and weapon skins in the new dungeon with the same stats as exotics? Having this armour still shows people that you completed the dungeon, it still gives you the bragging rights, just without trivializing the effort everyone has put into getting their exotic sets.
I understand that Chris is saying this is it, this will be the max tier, and that it’s only ‘slightly better’ than exotics, but that just leaves me wondering, what’s the point?
I love you ArenaNet, I love the Guild Wars franchise and everything it stands for, I watched your manifesto a hundred times and showed it to all my friends saying ‘THIS is how you should run a games company’. This is genuinely the first time I’ve been disappointed.
I just feel like you’re listening to the wrong crowd here. I get that it’s a business and you’re in it to make money, but the people complaining about the ‘lack of progression’ are clearly in the wrong game, if I stormed into a Pizza restaurant and said ‘but I don’t like Pizza, I want Fish, what do you think they’d say to me?
Come on guys let’s stick to the original vision