Engineer – Thief – Warrior
ANet wanted to (not sure if they still want to) introduce Ascended Weapons & Armor in the future…. Please no! If you would do the same as what we’ve seen now, everyone would run with the same gear, same stats… less or no variation at all…
Prevent the Ascension becoming an ever greater failure than it already is, DO NOT introduce Ascended Weapons and/or Armor!
I agree. If ascended items were just meant to be a higher tier that allows players to play the way they want as opposed to a knee-jerk reaction to grinders demanding grind, ANet would make all exotic stat combinations available for gold and karma in PvE, and have at least one ascended item for each combination. Ascended weapons and armor are probably coming. It’s like watching a slow train wreck =)
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
If you don’t like doing Fractals why do you want Ascended gear at all, let alone on every single character?
The additional stats are not enough to make a real difference in anything else so the only real benefit is the Agony resistance. And if you don’t like Fractals you’re not likely to be doing it enough to need Agony resistance.
The additional stats are a huge increase, between 12-15% per ring and 15-18% per amulet.
Which is to say not even noticable, yes? You will notice the missing AR but not in anyway will the rest of those stats make a noticeable difference.
Are you out of your mind? A statistical increase of 12-15% more effective ALONE is a massive jump. This isn’t the difference between exotic and rare, this is closer to the difference between exotic and masterwork. Gear yourself out in full greens and tell me you don’t see a difference.
Now prove to me ingame that you do better then a person without them. Make it obvious to everybody that you are now a superior being due to having a 12-15% increase in stats on those slots.
My point is that you do not NEED ascended gear. People who generally do not play fractals and certainly not high level ones now claim that they now NEED this gear “omg 20% glod drop increase!” and that this has turned the game (dailies) into a chore that they now must comeplete to stay “competative” in regular PvE and WvWvW.
If ascended items are so inconsequential as you say, why have them in the first place? Are there people out there who were about to quit but are now actively playing so they can have nominally higher stats with no gameplay difference? If so, why do these people deserve to be catered to?
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I wonder how people who defend fractals would think if ANet made it so that the only place to acquire ascended items (before the laurels update) was in sPvP or WvW.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
You have three options:
1. Spam Cluster Bomb
2. Take down single targets
3. Stealth -> Go to the middle of enemy zerg -> Signet of Malice Passive + Caltrops + Dagger Storm -> Stealth -> Run the hell out -> Profit
These are the best ways to contribute to your zerg but I find that it’s just not as effective as using my other classes. When I play my thief in WvW I always roam, to inflict disproportionate damage on the enemy with my one character. Thieves pay for being good at roaming with poor support skills.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I think ANet should recognize WvW as a PvP area and implement the sPvP gearing/skill system with free food, transmutes, runes and sigils for everyone. Have build variety and alt-friendliness where it counts. If ANet is determined to revert to the traditional MMO system where most casual players only have one “main”, they should keep it in PvE.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
The problem with dailies is that it is very unfriendly to people with work schedules who may not be able to play on week days.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Frankly I don’t see what the point of adding laurels was in the first place.
Karma basically shares a purpose with Laurels: A currency that you gain by going out into the world and doing things, as opposed to sitting on one’s proverbial behind in Lion’s Arch all day and spamming lfg fractals level 46.234. And we were already getting a healthy sum of karma from completing our dailies! Why not just make a karma vendor with the same items as the laurel vendor has now? This would also solve the current issue of there being no real karma dumps for people who don’t care about their legendaries.
because you can farm karma to an unlimited amount per day.
laurel is limited, meaning anet controls our progression better with laurels than karma.
Why would that be bad? People who farm karma do not get an advantage over those who don’t; they either get a wider variety of ascended items or they can cash in their karma, but the rewards can be priced such that cashing in karma is not too much more profitable than other ways of farming. Another way would be to make ascended items cost skills points like mystic weapons. The point is that you can work towards it no matter how you play, like exotics.
Anyway, I expect that ANet will implement something like this in the future. When more ascended items come out, ANet can’t seriously expect a new player to spend 6 months after reaching level 80 to log in every day and do dailies to get max gear.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
“I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was. That’s why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PVE and PVP.
“In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2.”
-Mike O’Brien
Level cap increases are coming, folks. If you enjoyed GW1 for its level and equipment cap, I have bad news for you: Apparently they were only there due to technical/design limitations. GW2 bravely leads us into the revolutionary future of MMO’s without the restrictions of level caps (sarcasm)
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
OP’s complaints are valid, and are easily remedied if ANet makes laurels purchasable through karma/badges of honor/skills points etc.
Which defeats the whole point of getting people out of LA and playing the game. If you could trade tokens for laurels people would just do speed runs for them.
The same for doing them on multiple characters, start toon do daily delete start toon etc etc 30 laurels from a weekend grind.
Ok in a few months when people have rings and amulets and laurels are sitting in the bank if you “miss” a day wont seem so bad but i understand the OP’s point i feel guilty if i dont do the daily atm.
If once a week you got a daily double ie miss the previous day you do twice as much today for 2 laurels it would give people a little more flexability.
No, making laurels convertible through currencies that you acquire from doing anything (karma, skill points) or WvW will get people out of LA. The current laurels for dailies system does not get people out of LA because its still much slower than fractals, hence why gw2lfg.com is still filled with fractal listings.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
OP’s complaints are valid, and are easily remedied if ANet makes laurels purchasable through karma/badges of honor/skills points etc.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
This game would be much better if ANet used the resources they put into developing the holiday events, lost shores, fractals and flame and frost into adding new traits and skills for each class.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
So it’s not additional vertical progression. They’re just fixing and polishing the game which launched half-baked to begin with.
And if you don’t believe that, there’s really nothing else anyone can tell you. You have only your subjective thoughts to rely on.
And I’m speaking from personal experience when I say that subjective thoughts alone aren’t all that reliable when one is frustrated; they lead to nothing but further disappointment and paranoia.
Strangely enough I don’t believe ANet when they say ascended items should’ve been in the game at launch. If that was the case, they should either be craft-able or obtained through some kind of story related process. Currently, your character “progresses” by running an arbitrary VR simulation for some bored asuran scientists or by doing daily achievements. This gives me the impression of a tacked on feature rather than a well thought out progression path. For instance, ascension and armor infusions actually had a story purpose in GW1.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I did PvP in GW1 every so often. When I did, it was pretty boring. GW1 game play just can’t compare to how action-orientated this game is. So PvP is a lot more fun, imo.
Battles in pvp were always predicable in gw1. You pretty much knew if you were going to win within the first 10s of a match. If one player died on someone’s team, that was a clear single that the other team had the advantage and would win.
With GW2 there’s actually more variation to how one can overcome their foe. So even though someone went down during a match, that doesn’t mean the other team is going to win. It’s awesome to how it works now.
To be fair, GW2 being more action oriented than GW1 is more of a technical issue. There’s no reason that they couldn’t have imported GW1’s combat and skills, but added GW2 controls and the ability to jump. As for battles being predictable, I would argue that the outcome of battles in GW1 were more strongly affected by the pre-determined individual and group builds rather than the actions taken during the battle. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Much like Magic: The Gathering, most of the skill and enjoyment actually comes from building your deck than actually playing the game. Playing PvE in GW2 reminds me of Kingdoms of Amalur: Great graphics, controls and production values, but somehow I’m completely bored.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
More traits, skills, food and armor skins. Don’t release any more ascended items. Make every stat combination of exotic items available in PvE. More game modes in sPvP. More upgrades, rewards and capture-able points in WvW or anything else that would increase the scope for strategy. Stop wasting resources on one-off singleplayer style content like the holiday events, lost shores and flame and frost. That is all.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
If you are comparing the two games, I assume you are a fan of GW1, and most likely aware of what type of game it was. It is also logical to believe that since you were a fan of said game, you would have followed news and been up to date on a GW2 release, therefor knowing that GW2 did not follow GW1’s mechanics or gameplay to a large extent.
People who did not play GW1 were fully aware this was a MMORPG, as it was stated many times over the games life cycle and promotional material.
The whole argument of " I thought I was buying GW1 part 2" has no basis in fact.
I played GW1 actively and watched some gameplay videos of GW2; it was far from obvious that GW2 would be a conventional MMO. If I really looked hard, I suppose I would’ve found quotes from the developer about the “shallow power curve” and “raising the level cap”. Oh well, caveat emptor I guess. It’s not like only a few people felt baited though, the announcement of vertical progression divided opinions. I’m just presenting the arguments against GW2’s design direction for those people who haven’t left yet.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
The only thing I can agree is about Ascended items and Agony, but instead of arguing on the forum for countless hours about the grind, why don’t you either:
1. Play the kitten game
or
2. LeaveThis game does not force you to play. It has no subscription. ArenaNet will not miss you.
That is the truth.
Because consumers should never communicate with the developers about concerns with their product, they should either suck it up or leave.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Gw1 is not and never was a MMORPG, GW1’s impact upon GW2 is only based upon the lore of GW1 and a few game mechanics. Comparing two games that are not of the same genre for grind is illogical. May as well compare NWN2 to GW2 if you do that.
That’s fair enough and to be honest, the developers made some of these issues clear before the release of GW2. However, some players may not have had the diligence to do an extensive background check on all games they purchase and simply bought the game because it’s called Guild Wars 2.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
GW1 player here too. Though I have played quite a lot of other MMOs too. I have a different perspective though. I see GW2 as different game from GW1. There are similar aspects and stories, but it’s ultimately a different game. Like a game that evolved from GW1.
@Redfeather, I strongly disagree with your view. Grinding for any single thing makes it stale, so I avoid that by spreading my gaming over bits of time, and by doing different activities. If you seriously play this game casually, then you shouldn’t feel like you’re grinding and having a tedious experience. If you play “casually” like I do, then stats don’t matter to you. I still enjoy the game without max stats lol. My guild and friends always joked about how I am badly geared (I had 78 exotics for like 1 month before I cared to upgrade), but it didn’t stop my enjoyment. I COULD HAVE upgraded to 80 exotics much earlier, but I didn’t out of laziness and saved up my gold and emblems.
It’s really not that bad as some of you guys make it out to be. If you reached exotics, you don’t really have to get ascended. You could if you wanted though, and it’ll give you a small stat boost for your efforts. But if you dislike grind, then don’t go for it. Just slowly gather up fractal stuff for like 2-3 months and then use it, or wait for when they add more ways to get fractal items.
I’d agree with you if GW2’s action styled combat was enough to carry the game on its own. It isn’t. It’s certainly very interactive for an RPG but not enough to be an actual action game. It’s great that the gameplay alone is enough for you but it isn’t for others.
A major source of enjoyment that I and other GW1 players find involves experimenting with different builds of traits, skills and equipment. Part of the reward comes from simply having a novel play style, but it also comes from the fact that you know you’ve crafted a quality and competitive build, having considered the constraints and trade-offs. GW1 catered to this play style by having dirt cheap basic maxed armor and a plethora of skills. GW2 has fewers skills, no secondary profession, expensive exotic items and grind-worthy ascended items. It is the opposite of GW1.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
The difference is, Counter Strike has excellent gameplay. GW2 gameplay is pretty shallow. So GW2 needs the loot, while Counter Strike doesn’t. If we had the original Guild Wars skill system, that would be an entirely other (and superior) beast.
Bingo. Someone gets it. To be fair I’ve had decent experiences with vertical progression in singleplayer RPG’s such as Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age Origins, but they all had strong stories and the vertical progression enhanced build variety and character development. In MMO’s, they are ubiquitously used as substitute for gameplay.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Eh.. It’s kinda like asking: “Would you play Counter Strike if they took away all the guns, granades and knifes?”
Sure if GW2 was designed with that in mind that yes, but why would I try to drive a boat at land?
I feel that OP’s loaded question is directed at the opposition to vertical progression, in which case the counter question would be “Would you play Counter Strike if you needed 500 grenade kills to start each round with $1000 extra cash?”. Now some apologists will say that they like getting grenade kills, some people will say they’re not hard to get and others will say that $1000 is not big deal if you have good aim but the fact is that many players will be spending hundreds of hours doing something that they don’t find fun in order to unlock something so they can have fun.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I do see your points thou, if the next peice of ascended gear that came out required me to go PvP every day i would probably be moaning too.
I guessing if you really feel strongly about it, and you all make one forum post and get lots of replys and make it huge then you have more chance of being noticed instead of random rants every other post.??
Well there are always going to be random rants about everything. I think a lot of people will stop complaining if ANet actually makes ascended items obtainable everywhere, rather than the poorly thought out laurels for dailies system. Consider that there will probably be more ascended items within 3 months. Log in everyday for the foreseeable future, everyone! Instead of complicating things by adding more currencies or what not, ANet should just make laurels purchasable with karma, badges of honor and glory.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I have nothing against dailies and monthlies per se. It’s just that a non-fractals player has to log in everyday for 3 months to get maxed gear for one character. This is f2p Asian MMO level game design. Of course it’s possible that ANet has further updates for ascended item acquisition planned, in which case it’d be nice for them to comment on it or something.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Take a half hour nap inside the lord’s room of Stonemist under enemy control.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
People are looking at it from completely different perspectives. On one hand we have traditional MMO players who are used to long grinds, gear checks and increasing level caps who are amazed that people think GW2 is grindy. On the other hand we have GW1 players and others who bought into GW2 being a “non traditional MMO” who are as outraged about vertical progression as HoN or Dota 2 players would be if it was introduced into those games.
I’m still waiting on ANet to make good on their promise to make ascended items available in WvW; the current laurel system is completely inadequate. Adding a huge incentive for players to log in daily or be left behind is one of the oldest tricks in the MMO book. ANet can fix this by making laurels purchasable through karma and badges of honor.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
My main concern is with ascended items
Irrelevant. ArenaNet has to be concerned about everything, not about a single kind of item in the game. It would be significantly wiser to add more ways for people to get ascended gear than to add more ways for people to get laurels.
Sorry, I still don’t see why this is a problem if the exchange rate is such that the profit from grinding laurels for t6 mats is not out of proportion with grinding anything else in the game. You can already trade karma and dungeon tokens for gold anyway.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Lol I don’t understand your reasoning at all. Fractal grinders already have full ascended items, they don’t need to grind laurels for that.
Thus, they can use laurels for everything else. If you think giving grinders free access to ectos, lodestones and tier 6 crafting materials wouldn’t hurt the game…
My main concern is with ascended items. I want to be able to play different builds and alts on WvW without having to grind too much, or at least to be able to work towards ascended items without grinding fractals or having to log in everyday for 3 months. If you read 1 sentence after that quote, you will see that your concern is simply eliminated by making the exchange rate for tradeable laurel rewards un-economical for grinders.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
So you want to give grinders even more easy rewards? That’s not solving the problem, it’s making it worse.
Lol I don’t understand your reasoning at all. Fractal grinders already have full ascended items, they don’t need to grind laurels for that. If your concern is that grinders will convert currency to laurels then make tons of gold, ANet can simply raise the exchange rate so that it’s not economical. The only other thing available to grinders are the cosmetics available for laurels. I don’t think the cat tonic is going to imbalance the game.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
This is a bad idea. One of the good aspects of laurels is how they equalize everyone – the grinder who plays 10 hours per day and the casual who plays 1 hour per day are both getting at most one laurel per day. This helps to cull grinding, as grinders realize they are not being rewarded more than casual players. Being able to get more laurels through grinding (aka in exchange for gold, karma or whatever) goes against the entire point.
Except grinders can already obtain full ascended in fractals.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I totally agree, laurels will take time to obtain, and not everything in the game needs to cater to 24hr a day grinders that want it all now now now now. Play steady and consistent and you will get your laurels with time.
Well the problem I have is that I work on weekdays and often won’t be able to play at all, but I have lots of time to play on weekends. That means I miss out on 5 laurels a week. I’m not saying ascended items need to be dished out immediately, I’m saying you should be able to work towards them whatever you choose to do, and making laurels convertible with other currencies is the simplest way to do this.
GW has always been about titles/skins/accomplishments where you obtain items to play the game, NOT play the game to obtain items, and there is a wealth of difference there.
Ummm… are you sure you thought that statement through? The whole reason people are complaining about ascended items is that they have to “obtain items to play the game” on par with everyone else, and that the process to obtain these items are not fun. In GW1 and games like Dota 2, you play the game to play the game.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I partially agree with OP. The idea is to implement a realistic fog of war, which is a legitimate strategic reason to not zerg. I think removing orange swords may be worth considering. However I think swords on structures should remain. There are NPC scouts there and in any RTS game, you are warned when your buildings are under attack.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Dolyak powered ballista cart, anyone?
Dolyak? Dood.. try Alpha Siege Golem! >=)
That doesn’t make sense, you don’t use a high tech vehicle like an M1 Abrams to haul siege weaponry from 200BC around. Imagine a zerg riding into battle on ballista mounted dolyaks though, that’d be cool.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
If you want to stand back and spam aoe, do not pick a grenadier. Your fingers will get arthritis within a month.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Dolyak powered ballista cart, anyone?
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I mean, do players really don’t want to work hard anymore? Is this the society we are in? We feel that we should have things the easy way everytime?
We get Pizza delivered to our door because we don’t want to cook or are too lazy to get dressed to go out to eat or can’t miss that show that’s on tv. We are a catered to society….
Answer…YesDoes not make it right though. :-D
Lol… yeah, grinding builds character. Do you have a truant son named Calvin, by any chance
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
There really is nothing else out there in any MMO even close to as good as current WVW in GW2.
Feb update is just a bonus really, ongoing fixes.
I wouldn’t be so complacent. True, not many MMO RPG’s offer WvW but the large scale strategic co-ordination in WvW can be found in many other games. Planetside 2 for one. Also Eve Online just had a 2800 player battle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLqb-m1ZZUA
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Reduce run speed based on how many people are nearby. So, if you “zerg” with 30+ people, you are essentially doing the walk animation. You are no longer a group, you are an army. And, in an era with trebs and cats, armies walked…slowly.
Small groups can still hit and run. Well, maybe not run, but jog…I mean, you should at least wait for your friends.
I second this idea. I think the map should also be increased in size with more capturable camps and nodes. This way you can still zerg, but there will be strategic trade offs that you have to make just like in any RTS game.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Disclaimer: This is not a flame thread. I really intend to see everyone’s views.
Now, I see spawns of threads that the game has a grind – from Legendary Items, to Ascended to the latest one: Dailies.
Main question:
Now, discarding those – what else do you do that is “not a grind”?I mean, I don’t want to sound elitist, but grind cannot be avoided entirely on a MMORPG. It can be minimized – and compared to most MMORPG’s I played, GW2 has the least amount of grind.
What I am saying is, you are not required to have a Legendary, nor run FoTM to have Ascended, nor complete the Dailies. It’s all up to you if you to do/get them.
And lastly, though grind has a definitive term in a dictionary, I still feel it is subjective to a person’s perspective. A person who likes what he/she does will not feel a grind, but to someone (note: this is my personal view, please, don’t flame) who is lazy and/or feels like everything should be obtained easily whenever he/she wants it (commonly called “entitled”) will feel the grind – simply because he/she doesn’t want to work “hard” for it.
Just my 2 cents.
To answer your question, people are against grinding for stats (i.e. ascended items) because fractals is still the most viable place to grind for them, and many people do not find fractals to be fun. For people who don’t like fractals but want optimal gear, ascended items are seen as an “obstacle” or “filler” between them and what they’d rather be doing, which may be PvP, WvW, dungeons, etc. However, the people against grinding for cosmetics are wrong.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
This is somewhat frustrating. GW was focused on PvP which most people loved. However, GW2 keeps adding in PvE content when people want PvP content. I mean you can add the laurel system in WvW so easily yet they try to force us to do dungeon runs for the monthly. The dungeon runs aren’t even fun and you also need a group to do them. Dungeon runs are probably the dumbest thing ever introduced to the MMO genre. What happened to do open world pvp for boss drops -_-; the closest thing this game has that combines PvE and PvP elements is WvW. At the very least, add the laurel system in there.
There’s also a WvW component to the monthly, and it takes about as long to get those WvW kills as it does to run 7 fractals. Seems fair to me.
All the dailies are easily achievable in WvW, probably easier to complete them in WvW in fact … so the laurel system is already in WvW.
Technically the laurel system is already in WvW but I hope you can see that it currently takes 2-3 months of playing at least half an hour each day for a WvW player to kit out with ascended items, and it is much quicker to obtain them in fractals. However, not everyone finds fractals fun.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Btw I understand people are saying that ANet plans to make ascended items obtainable in WvW etc in future updates. I’m slightly concerned that the current laurel systems is that update. If not, I’m just suggesting an easily implementable way to allow WvW and other players to get ascended items.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
They just added the kitten laurel system 2 days ago. And by doing this they have added a second way to get ascended gear. They have also repeatedly stated they’re working on making them accessible through other means(such as Wvw). God have some kitten patience.
As for getting laurels in another way than achievements. Hell no. Then people would be trading in their karma and gold for ascended.
This has to do with design direction, not patience. It is not hard for ANet to create an item vendor that sells laurels. And yeah, people would trade in their saved karma/currencies for ascended. So what? Those people were doing activities that they considered fun. For many people this excludes fractals. If they had spent their time doing fractals, they would have ascended items. If people spent enough time doing fun stuff that would’ve allowed them to get ascended items if they were doing fractals, why shouldn’t they get ascended items?
Also with the numbers I’ve given, it does not exactly make ascended items easily obtainable. For 240k karma you can get full exotic armor, but it only buys a fraction of an ascended item.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Do people think laurels should be convertible for all currencies? It could be something like 30k karma, 25 badges of honor or 100 dungeon tokens for one laurel (The exact numbers are up for debate, of course). This way, players can achieve ANet’s vision of “progression” while doing what they enjoy in GW2. Although you can get laurels through dailies, it is very slow and impractical for alts, which means ascended items still rewards fractal players much more than others.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Change WvW to sPvP style gearing since grinding should not give any advantage in PvP. This also allows for people to play different builds and alts without grinding, which has been one of the main complaints against the new ascended items. Other than that, ANet can give the masses all the grind they want in PvE, for all I care.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
How’s WvW nowadays? Does Henge of Denvari still dominate everyone it goes up against?
Hahahaha… seriously though, the recent patch added some welcome tweaks and balances, and there’s going to be a WvW overhaul next month. However, ascended items and vertical progression are going full steam ahead. Up to you if you want to start playing again.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Peeps seem to be neglecting the big grinds of GW1, FoW and UW for obsi armor and DoA. Good times.
I had obsidian armor for my warrior in GW1 cause it looked awesome. However if it gave extra stats in PvE and PvP, I would have quit long before farming enough gold to buy it.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I don’t recall green weapons being bought with plat unless you were buying them from another player that had to go out into the world and earn it first. And they had better stat combinations than your average max stat weapon.
No
GW1 wasn’t a grind for gear, but there sure as hell was a grind for skills.
Only if your goal was to attain every skill. Getting skills for a particular build did not take long. Now admittedly the EotN PvE skills was a grind. I think the game would’ve been fine if they were maxed out when you learned them. Even so, it was limited to PvE. If ANet keeps their “progression” out of sPvP and WvW, I’d have no problem with it.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
ANet was stating over and over again that they want us to play in our own way, but they’re limiting our builds with new ascended items that do not get all attributes variations.
Yeah well Bioware said Mass Effect 3 would have different endings. If ANet really wanted players to play in their own way, they would work on making all stat combinations available in exotic form, and to make them all purchasable through karma as well as gold/crafting. Ascended items do the exact OPPOSITE of their stated intention.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Only if they implement sPvP level/gearing in WvW. Then why not, give the scrubs all the grind and progression they want.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
I would’ve traded all the new content added post release (other than tweaks and bug fixes) for, say, 10 new traits, 5 new utility and 1 new elite skill for each class.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior
Wrong in so many ways.
First, players can never create a gear treadmill. That’s all on the game developers.
Second, As for the better gear not being necessary, did you miss the fact that PvP is a HUGE part of this game? Many players play this JUST for the PvP. Sure, the extra stats on better gear may not be that big a deal in WvW, but you can bet your kitten it is in anything more structured. And for that matter, if you really think it doesn’t matter, please tell me you do all your playing in just plain old white gear. After all, every quality level better only adds a few stats, surely it’s not necessary?
Thirdly, getting top-stat gear was always easy in GW1. That’s the spirit of the game. That’s one of the things that set it apart and made it attractive to those of us who are sick and tired of having to waste hours on end just to get the gear needed to run the content we want to run. Even exotic gear takes way too much time to acquire in this game. Seriously. No gear in GW2 should have better stats than rare quality gear. Exotic and Ascended gear should be different in appearance only. There’s already a billion and one MMORPGs out there that allow you to keep grinding and replacing gear forever, why on earth would you want that crap in GW2? So it’s just another run-of-the-mill MMORPG, except with chaotic group PvE instead of a trinity? Because that’s what it’s rapidly turning into.
I, for one, will not put up with ANY more vertical progression of any kind in GW2. Higher levels, another level of better gear, and I’m gone. Just like that. I’ve been there done that in way too many other games, and I’m DONE with gear grinds. They’ve already assured they won’t see any more money from me for a long while until I can be 100% sure they’re not going to screw it up further.
All excellent points, couldn’t have said it better myself. However I wouldn’t go so far as to say I would not put up with any more vertical progression. I’ll keep playing if they keep all future (inevitable) vertical progression out of sPvP AND WvW.
Engineer – Thief – Warrior