Exactly right about the weapons. The numbers I give above hinge on the fact that Ascended gear not only increase stats, but the actual weapon damage too. I treated the stats in a blanket form to keep it simple, but the problem is the stats compound on each other, making the in-game effect change a much larger amount than the small stat increase.
So yes, right now full Ascended gear gives something like a 12% damage buff. But because of how weapon damage, ferocity and power all multiply together increasing the gap has a much sharper effect than it says on the label. A current 5% gap is more like 12% damage increase, and a 10% gap would be more like 25-28%. This also means that by increasing the gap, the armour stats become more significant and it’s not as easy to get by with just a weapon.
As for easily achievable, that I will have to dispute. Trinkets are dead easy, no question. And yeah, maybe to get a weapon set is just fine. But leveling 500 crafting is an expensive endeavour, difficult for any player who isn’t in the game just to grind gold (or the mats) every time they play, or is still fairly new to it.
It is also a question of play style, not everyone uses the same 2 weapons all day every day. My main regularly uses 9 different weapons and has 4 armour sets. I have another 3-4 toons I also run things with quite regularly. Outfitting them all would take an utterly ridiculous amount of resources. I certainly don’t want everything in the game to be easy and free to get, but there are players who enjoy tinkering with a large variety of stuff more than they do the quest to get one set, and I don’t feel that this method of play should be punished. There’s plenty of other ways to have exclusive stuff with much higher difficulties to obtain (skins, legendaries and so on).
The calculations to show the percentages, as well as account for compounding, can easily be made. This can easily be done in a spreadsheet. The damage gap would be more like ~20% than 25-28%. And again, most of this is from items that are easily obtainable.
All trinkets are very obtainable. You have laurels and pristine relic for the ring or you can rely on RNG for the stats you want from the fractal daily chest. Earrings you can get from WvW season rewards, laurel vendor, or the guild vendor. There are many ways to get the back pieces and the LS has provided relatively cheap ways to get them as well.
Crafting costs about 120 gold on average to get to 500 for either of the weapon crafts. The largest portion comes from ectos, orichalcum ore, and the recently spiked in price ancient wood logs. All of these are very easily farmable if someone doesn’t want to do the SW chest farm. You can also allocate this cost across the number of weapons that you make. I often do this when trying to justify a purchase that has an initial upfront cost.
Not everyone uses every single weapon type on a regular basis either. Some people only have one character while others claim to have 20+ that they need to outfit not counting the various stat combos they claim they must have. The amount of grind and hardship in equipping characters is entirely reliant on the player.
I made a set of berserker for each armor weight and then soldier for the heavy weight. I’m still contemplating on whether to use the damask I have now and make another armor set. For weapons, it’s the same thing. I have no problem swapping equipment between characters. It’s fairly painless to go to a bank and swap them. I usually log out at the bank on all of my characters so I can just put the equipment into the bank as I’m about to log this way I can freely come back at another time and use them on another character if I so wish.
Oh. Also keep in mind of the stat caps. If you ever are down-scaled while in full ascended, you likely have hit the cap and will have “wasted” stats. Ascended weapons are also no better than exotic weapons when down-scaled.
I’m also not against other alternative, reliable ways to get ascended being added so long as it requires as much time/effort as the existing methods.
