Just refine all your bloodstone dust to get an extra 10-20 levels after 450. If you have spare Obsidian Shard laying around you should do it. It’ll turn gray at around 460-470.
After reaching 450; I started refining ascended materials and noticed that my crafting XP was going up very slowly.
It appears that exotic discovery will be the quickest way to get to 500 and the most expensive. This will require a lot of orichalcum and ancient wood.
Vertical progression is unsustainable. Nothing can grow steadily or infinitely. You’re going to hit a brick wall at some point and it’ll probably be mathematical.
Look at other MMOs; stat inflation, ability saturation and UI clutter.
These games are plagued with over saturation of everything. Their developers are talking about cutting fat and item squishing (stat deflation).
Vertical progression solves one problem and creates another.
Apparently we’ll be able to sell refined ascended materials on the TP. We won’t be able to sell the raw materials and the final product. Which is interesting because if someone levels their crafting to 500 and buys the recipes; they can buy all the components off the TP and craft a weapon in less than a minute.
I feel so bad for people with multiple classes and multiple weapons. I just pulled an excel sheet and calculated the total for all 5 weapons I have to craft on my Thief and it’s just insane.
Huge gold sink for players sitting on hundreds of gold. Terrible for players with little gold.
I think initially the prices of ori, ancient wood, t6 mats and ectos will rise again because those are needed to lvl your crafting to 450 or 500.
Once most people are at lvl 450 crafting, they will need the ascended mats and the farming meta will change quite a bit. More people will farm the world bosses which might push ecto prices down again.
I also expect exotic weapons to rise in price because they will be salvaged more often now.
Ectos are needed for exotics and exotics are needed for dark matter to build ascended weapon components.
There will be very strong demand for ectos for a very long time.
Not if you can’t sell dark matter and ascended items.
I’ll bet ascended armor will be using a similar formula.
There aren’t many good deals left on level 80 exotics.
If you dig around a bit; you can find some level 80 exotic weapons that sell at the same price as their superior sigils. Not only would you make all your money back selling the sigils; you’ll get some ectos and dark matter to boot.
I think initially the prices of ori, ancient wood, t6 mats and ectos will rise again because those are needed to lvl your crafting to 450 or 500.
Once most people are at lvl 450 crafting, they will need the ascended mats and the farming meta will change quite a bit. More people will farm the world bosses which might push ecto prices down again.
I also expect exotic weapons to rise in price because they will be salvaged more often now.
Ectos are needed for exotics and exotics are needed for dark matter to build ascended weapon components.
There will be very strong demand for ectos for a very long time.
I’m sure there will be a lot of stuff to buy with gems before the end of Q4 2013. Like any business; reaching revenue targets is important to shareholders.
Out of curiosity, what percentage of the active population do you think are aware of the amount and type of materials needed to craft ascended weapons?
The amount of ecto’s needed to level from 400-500 is not yet known. Just one exotic inscription requires 5. Salvaging might return 40% / 50% but; you still need ectos to make the pieces to build the weapons.
AFAIK, when you reach a craft level, you can craft any weapon/armor under that crafting profession provided you have the materials.
Example: You can craft weaponsmith orichalcum weapons as soon as you reach 400 weaponsmith.
I am interpreting this as:
it will take 2 weeks to max a crafting profession(say weaponsmith) to 500 and say you are using greatsword & sword/axe, you’re done right there as long as you have the mats, you may craft all 3(they are all under weaponsmith). Now you need another 2 weeks to max your huntsman and another 2 to max artificier, so depending on what weapons you use, it may take 2-6 weeks to finish your ascended weapons.
Of course that means you will also need huntsman500 for your speargun or artificier500 for your trident.
If they make it time-gated and it takes 2 weeks for 1 weapon, then arenanet has lost a customer, a fan and a possible investor.
If it wasn’t time gated, you’d complete it in a day, get your weapon, and then complain about a lack of content.
Buying items on a trading post and crafting them is content?
It’s a game design problem. The engineers and designers are supposed to know the limitations of their engines and hardware. Yet they create a playground with a specific set of rules that exceeds its limitations.
No, sorry, the modern MMO player prefers solo play and the online part is only for showing off.
This will get old very fast.
If this is the best that Anet can do they’re going to be in trouble at some point. The MMO crowd is hungry for something new and innovative; you can tell from the ups and downs of these massive budget MMO’s that have been release in the past 5 years.
It’s nice to see Anet succeed but; I fear it’s because there’s nothing better at the moment. That doesn’t mean that it’s good.
TL:DR To summarize, the piling up ‘daily’ and time-gated content is just a shallow attempt to keep people coming back, and to restrict those that play many hours a day, causing GW2 to feel like a chore.
It’s what happens when players consume content faster than it takes to build it.
The sandbox “player created” content is the holy grail of MMO’s but; we have yet to see a company accomplish this and keep millions of people playing. Gear treadmills and time-gated content are cheaper to produce and known to be effective.
For classes with multiple weapons it’s probably going to be pretty bad. Multiply that with other classes this player might have and I wouldn’t be surprised if it took years to craft everything.
I have a strong feeling that we’re all going to have a good laugh when all of the details are officially released.
Downed state and rally are borrowed directly from First Person Shooter games.
Zero creativity, zero innovation.
A game mechanic that was copied from another game and pasted in an MMO. I’m willing to bet the only testing they did was to make sure it worked. It terms of balance and flow; no testing what so ever; which doesn’t surprise me at all.
Cloak and Dagger is useful against NPC’s, bad players and pets.
Swap to a pistol on the offhand and you’re not only more valuable to the team with blind on demand but; you have a smoke field. DPS is slightly lower but your mobility, survivability and group support is much higher. You even have a ranged interrupt ability on zero cool down.
Laurels are a limited supply item that cannot be traded. You should be hoarding them. There are plenty of ways to make gold in this game without laurels.
Arena net will probably use laurels as a time gate currency to get other items. Laurels are like banked time.
Except that some players already have dozens, if not hundreds, of laurels stockpiled. Tying newly released equipment to them would have two effects:
1: Those players who have a pile set aside would be able to get the new items immediately or much sooner than anticipated. This negates the effectiveness of time-gating them in the first place.
2: Those players who do not have a pile of laurels will complain because others have access to things they do not. This leads to dissatisfied customers and makes them less likely to put in the effort to get the items, because they perceive themselves as being hopelessly behind from the start.
So, if they want to time-gate equipment, they will most likely do it without laurels, instead introducing a new currency or other requirement so that all players begin at the same point, instead of a small number of players getting the items immediately and a lot of players complaining about it.
You’re making it sound like the equipment is required.
It could be entirely cosmetic. Part of the recipe might require crafting and another part might require an account bound item purchasable only via laurels. The point is that laurels is what will prevent Arenanet from creating other currencies. It’s a very safe bet that there will be more things to buy with laurels in the future.
They just have artificer to level and craft 2 weapons and they’re done. The rest is all gravy.