Guild Wars 2

kandolo.2574:

Quick Breathing isn’t the only condition management option. Running shouts with Runes of the Soldier allows you to remove conditions immediately, even while incapacitated. Warhorn’s cast time allows conditions to tick and stops your DPS. Warhorn is still great, but it still has its downfalls.

But the warhorn doesn’t just remove conditions with Quick Breathing traited; it converts conditions to boons, for the group. I’ve never had the opportunity to test, but does the condition removal from Runes of the Soldier apply solely to the warrior using them, or to the group?

Anyway, surely the best thing would be to have both? And again, hammer can only be seen as a much, much poorer alternative in such situations.

That and GS gets damage benefits from both Slashing Power and Forceful Greatsword.
Maybe Merciless Hammer or Cull the Weak or even both should increase the length of disables? That plays more to the hammer’s control strengths.

@Oglaf:
I heartily agree about Backbreaker, especially when it’s actually worse than it was in the first game, where you could get the KD on it as high as 4 seconds. What’s even more galling is when mobs use it on you and you’re down for as much as 8 seconds!

I do actually spec distracting strikes, but you’re right, with no investment in Condition Damage and the speed at which the stacks deplete, you usually only get one underpowered proc out of it before the confusion runs out. Better than the other options in that traitline when building for hammer, sure, but still not exactly thrilling.

I find my full Knight’s set (including trinkets) with all Dolyak Runes works incredibly well for tankiness, and a weapon with a Superior Sigil of Perception can get my crit rating up to a very respectable 78%.

…but it needs a little more love from the devs.
Making Hammer Shock a mobile skill is a strong step in the right direction, but it still comes out as less attractive than Axe/Warhorn when I’m looking to choose my main weapon combo.

For a little background, I mostly play PvE open world with the occasional dungeon and some WvW thrown in. My favoured build for the longest time has been 20/0/20/30/0, with a focus on healing shouts and warhorn abilities. And the trait Quick Breathing is the main reason hammer can’t compete with this combination.
With Quick Breathing, I have some of the best condition management in the game, especially when combined with Vigorous Shouts and “Shake it off!” for condition removal with a strong heal.
Converting conditions to boons is just ridiculously useful.
On top of that, Charge combines unparalleled mobility and root removal with a constant speed buff when combined with Signet of Rage.

Warhorn is just too valuable to ignore, and hammer doesn’t offer enough of an alternative. Even its DPS seems less consistent than a main-hand axe. And let’s not forget, I can take advantage of 2 sigils when using axe & warhorn.

I’m trying to think of ways to make hammer a more attractive prospect, but other than making it fully mobile by also allowing movement during activation of Staggering Blow, I’m struggling.
Maybe changing the Disabled requirement on Merciless Hammer to Weakness?

Does anyone else feel the same, and if so, do you have some more recommendations?

Yeah, I think Asuran levitation technology adoption is more insidious than we were first led to believe.

And I know where your username comes from, you filthy monkey.

You still get the occasional extra goodie; I got a Mystic Forge Stone this morning for example.

It’s been like this for a month at least. In fact, I’d go so far as to say 2 months, if not since release.

Hi;

I’ve previously reported this in-game using /bug, but it’s still around, so I thought I’d report it here with picture evidence.

When entering water, the butt-flap on the tier 1 human cultural light male armour replaces the regular texture with a junk one, which is the same texture and colour every time. This texture change is permanent until you remove your character’s trousers then put them back on.

Before and after pictures are attached. Before is on ground, after is underwater.

What a lot of people are forgetting at there’s a limited acquisition window on these items too; when you take that into consideration, these items swiftly disappear out of the reach of normal players; people who probably have 100 socks / sweaters, maybe 50 hats and have only just hit the monthly achievement present opening requirement.

These posts with people opening thousands of presents in order to get the skin are the exception, not the norm, and if they’re having a hard time getting these items, normal players stand no chance whatsoever. That’s where ArenaNet’s RNG statistics get it wrong; they favour the gold-rich, not the average player.

Quests with these things as a reward are a much better idea and a lot more inclusive.

And if ArenaNet want to make money from the store, they should release items that are exclusive to it and won’t drop in the game itself. The current system only serves to muddy the waters and frustrate players.

They also killed the shatter noise when you run out of tools or break off while harvesting.

Some people will do this just for kicks, and you have no way of stopping them. The only way to avoid this behaviour is to play exclusively with people you know.

I think the point here is that they’re selling it as part of the Collector’s / Digital Deluxe edition. People who have already bought those products, at a higher price I might add, may feel hard done by.

Personally, I’m massively disappointed with the quality of the Digital Deluxe and Collector’s Edition items, especially when compared to the bonuses that were offered with the original game’s special editions.

The ring is completely useless after a couple of levels. Bonus weapons received in the first game had BIS stats and were useful throughout your character’s life.

Mini Rytlock is awkward to use and prone to being deposited (they REALLY need to work on a miniature slot for your inventory). Let alone which, it can’t be sold. Kuunavang from Factions was fully tradable and incredibly valuable.

Mistfire Wolf is generally pretty useless, with a massive cooldown and poor performance while active.

And the rest are crappy, one-time temporary things, some of which didn’t even work on release. I had to wait 2 months before finally getting a Tome of Influence that actually worked, and even then it was a stingy 1,000 influence.

I must admit, I was worried about the descriptions of these Collector’s Edition items before release, but reasoned that this was ArenaNet, and surely they wouldn’t make that kind of mistake.

But nope, none of these items are worth spending the money to get.

And the final slap in the face?

The Divine Aura from the first game was a genuinely cool thing, something rare and nifty that while not affecting gameplay, made your character stand out.
I was really hoping it would be re-used for GW2. In fact, maybe somewhat misguidedly, my purchase of one Digital Deluxe and one Collector’s Edition were based on the strength of this past experience with the first game.

Fool me once ArenaNet.

I attended the event and got the reward at the time.
I received another reward in the mail on Saturday.
No precursor, but I’m not complaining! The two 20 slot bags alone were great.

Interestingly, I’ve also started receiving gold seller emails again.
When I initially stopped receiving them, I wrongly assumed that ArenaNet had done something really clever. Turns out, not so much. They simply increased the aggressiveness of the spam filter in mails, so if you send more than one mail with the same subject, or more than one in a certain amount of time, you get blocked.
This is a really lazy, bad solution, as it impacts legitimate players badly; for example, when doing a PUG dungeon run, I like to be able to distribute potions to all party members, but the draconian mail spam settings prevent me from doing this.

But this is very symptomatic of the slapdash development approach to GW2 we’ve seen so far, with rushed, “Good Enough” solutions applied to perceived problems without considering long term effects. Drop reduction, spam filters, bot bans, all have been done at minimal cost with no ingenuity or elegance displayed.

IceBlink.4317:

Huh, so any NPCs who wear headgear, are automatically bald?

Any CHARACTER who wears headgear loses their hair. ArenaNet decided to take a cheaper, easier shortcut here rather than do the right thing and do the work necessary to show character hair with all headpieces.

…has been bugged for 2 weeks now, meaning people can’t finish their personal story, or indeed do the dungeon.
Pull your finger out ArenaNet, this is unacceptable.

Not much help I know, but I did it in the first 2 weeks while server transfers were still instant and free.
Now we’ve ended up with a situation where server balance has been ruined by the players mostly interested in wuvwuv migrating to the most successful ones. I can see certain servers never again being able to dominate the maps, even with the aid of night-capping.

There’s a lot wrong with your post, but let me highlight one point in particular:
kits don’t give temporary buffs when equipped but the temporary weapons of elementalists are (one of the most OP classes of the game)

Well you must be doing SOMETHING wrong, as whenever I swap a weapon kit as an engineer, I get 5 seconds of swiftness and vigor.

@tasaunders: I’m one of those with my personal name as my user name, so I hope you’ll forgive me for not revealing it here. However, I used to mod id Legends. I still post over there, although not as frequently as I used to

I’ve been playing home video games ever since I got a ZX Spectrum 48K back in ‘83.
I’ve had a variety of systems, although I was never an 8 bit / 16 bit Nintendo player. My first exposure to Nintendo was with the N64.

Favourite games on a per platform basis are many, but things like Rebel Star & Laser Squad on the Speccy, Target Renegade on the C64, Dungeon Master on the ST, Blood Money / Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga, Micro Machines 2 on the Megadrive, Doom / Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar, Wipeout 2097 / Resident Evil / Tekken 2 on the PS1, Goldeneye / Zelda OOT / F-Zero X on the N64, Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube / Wii, Fable 2 on the 360, Demon’s / Dark Souls on the PS3 and too many games to even think about on the PC, as it spans decades.

In competitive gaming, I played a lot of Quake 3 and was a moderator over at Quake3World; my high point was leading a Return to Castle Wolfenstein clan that got to number 7 in the European Clanbase ladder. Not a massive achievement, but one that I’m proud of. RtCW streamlined the class-based, objective style gameplay pioneered by the original Quake’s Team Fortress mod, and was a much more pure experience than Splash Damage’s Enemy Territory.
I did burn out a bit on RtCW, and since then have taken a much more casual approach to competitive gaming.

My FPS experience over the years, especially prior to the concept of unlocks in online shooters, has coloured what I find acceptable in esports and any form of PvP, and in that respect, I cannot and will not take any game seriously where factors other than a player’s skill contribute to a game’s outcome.

This is why I enjoyed Guild Wars 1, my first experience with an MMO (I know it’s not really an MMO before the pedants get warmed up). It was always a level playing field, although I did resent the rock / paper / scissors style of gameplay which tended to favour certain builds depending on that month’s skill balances.
In PvE, maximum level and gear was easily attainable, and everything after that was achieved was pure content, to be explored and enjoyed.

And this is why whilst initially loving GW2, I’ve been feeling rather uneasy about recent changes in direction. I have played various other, more traditional MMOs, including WoW, AoC, DDO & DCUO, and every single one of them devolved into holy trinity, raid-bound gear hunts at top level, completely invalidating any previous content, and purposefully locking out players with less time on their hands.
I really didn’t expect GW2 to go in this direction; after all, increasing a few numbers every now and again is the easiest, laziest way of implementing “Content”. I thought ArenaNet were above this, yet the AMA and everything uttered by developers recently has made me realise that they’re not as interested in actually pursuing original, hard-to-implement ideas any more.

I’m thinking of stopping playing GW2 and heading over to Planetside 2. And the sad thing is, because they’re implementing vertical progression, I doubt I’ll come back that frequently, as the idea that I’ll be falling further behind the power-curve the longer I leave it dissuades me from revisiting.

39, UK, and ascended gear and the implication that they’ll be adding new tiers and levels leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.
Constant iteration caters to those with the most time on their hands. Usually, those people are the unemployed or full-time students, both of which have less money to spend than people in full time employment.
ArenaNet are alienating their most valuable customers.

If they want people to play earlier areas, they should add T6 nodes to them. These already can’t be mined unless you’re level 60, so there’s no worry of people getting something before they should (although this is an archaic MMO notion to start with).
Or are they worried about their precious economy? I’m willing to bet that if T6 nodes were easily mineable, it really wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

Because different people like different things?
You really can’t see this?
If ArenaNet give people the tools to express themselves creatively, certain talented crafters would be able to carve themselves a niche. Artistic talent is not easily copied.

I would expand the free teleport cost question to include each cultural city.

It’s been overclouded by the Ascended gear fiasco, but are there any plans to reduce teleport costs overall?

Also, repairs can be seen to be a necessary evil and a means of punishing death, but what made ArenaNet step away from the complete failure modes of the first game, where it was possible to utterly fail an instance and have to restart it?
This would be preferable to armour repairs for a lot of old GW1 players, I’m sure.

There are various noticeable shortcuts and placeholders throughout the game, such as certain items sharing generic icons, rare armours in each category all sharing the same artwork, non-rare weapons all sharing the same artwork, all males and females of a specific race sharing the same voice actor, etc. Do ArenaNet plan to address these shortcomings in the future?

A lot of emote commands from original Guild Wars do not report an error when entered, yet do not activate an animation. Are these going to be fleshed out eventually, or will they remain as another example of unfinished work?

Did you not see the bit about being able to add personal flourishes?
I didn’t mean just another formula, I meant something that would add a creative personal touch. That way, truly creative people would be able to make something that would have a value beyond its stats.

To be honest, the more experienced I get with the crafting system, the more flawed I realise it is.

For one, as you get more experienced in playing the game and you level up all of the crafts, there is less need for materials below the top tier.
This reveals a critical flaw in the entire system; materials shouldn’t have been tiered, but what you can make should have been.
If you have all level 80 characters, anything below top tier has literally no value to you beyond selling.

It’s also a massive shame that things you were able to craft at a lower level become entirely irrelevant once you advance in crafting and levels. For crafting to feel useful, you should be able to craft things with low skill that retain their usefulness.

It would have been a lot better if ArenaNet had approached the system the same way they originally approached gear; that you could craft the useful stuff pretty much immediately, but later tiers would have allowed for crafting of many and varied styles (something crafting is severely lacking in).

It would have also allowed for characters that while they had never dealt a blow in their life, could make a living from crafting.
There’s also the problem that once you max a crafting skill, you no longer earn experience from crafting, even if you craft something you’ve never made before.

They did a lot of good work with the crafting system in GW2, but it’s a transient thing with no real long term reward. There’s also hardly any reason to craft things for other players. Material costs often outstrip what you can sell finished items for. But I suppose this is the problem when you’re dealing with a system where materials are essentially infinite and everyone can eventually do it themselves.
If they had somehow managed to make a system whereby people were able to add personal stylistic flourishes to crafted gear, there would be a viable and lively market for crafted gear.

I regularly play with Conjurer Elementalists, yet I always, always prefer my real hammer and will choose it every time over the Lightning Hammer.

When traited, it does extra damage against weakened and disabled targets, causes 5 stacks of long lasting confusion on interrupt (AoE when combined with Staggering Blow!) and the weakness, contrary to what has been mentioned earlier in this thread is NOT single target, but will hit in a generous cone in front of you.
Personally, I like the small AoE on the third auto-attack and am not really sure it needs a buff (although maybe a traited AoE range increase would be nice); I’m also not convinced that the attack speed should be increased. HOWEVER, I do think they should consider removing the roots from Hammer Shock & Staggering Blow. Being able to use those whilst moving would make it a great mobility weapon.

And while I love it, having been playing with traited Axe/Warhorn recently, even with the control of hammer, I have to reluctantly admit that Axe/Warhorn has far, far superior utility with regular conversion of conditions to boons, a permanent personal swiftness buff when combined with Signet of Rage and mobility across all 5 skills. Plus, do NOT underestimate the debuff on Call to Arms.

I didn’t get a mail offering a link to a survey; I only knew it existed because of this thread.
Would someone care to link it?

Columba.9730:

flood all online buying sites with complaints and bad reviews. if they can’t sell anything over the holidays, someone will get fired and things will change.

Done; one-star review submitted to Amazon.co.uk, and I’ve up-voted a few other one-star reviews too.
Let’s hit them where it hurts.

That thread WASN’T circular and pointless; it was a conglomeration of lots of other threads, all callously merged in an effort by ArenaNet to sweep the elephant in the room under the carpet. Disgraceful behaviour.

I’ll see your Fat Liam Neeson and raise you a Robin:

Oh for the love of Mike, I was just responding to the topic I created when some over-zealous moderator merged my thread with this nasty behemoth. Moderators, you DO realise that in doing this most people’s opinions are going to be ignored even if they ARE completely relevant, don’t you?
Or perhaps that’s the intention?
Make it so that things can be easily ignored, much like shoving your fingers in your ears and screaming “LALALALALALALALALA!!! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!”.

You’re potentially making valuable feedback useless.

In closing, I would implore ArenaNet to rethink these one-time events.

One, make timing based on the geographical location of the server. Sure, this means things may get spoiled, but more people would be able to attend the event and not feel left out.

Two, set the player limit for zones connected to one-time events a LOT lower than it is currently set. While I appreciate what you’re trying to strive for, and admire the spectacle you’re trying to create, your technology obviously isn’t capable of accommodating your vision.

Three, I know this has been mentioned a lot, but seriously consider rolling out a test server to test these events on. Slap testers with NDAs if you have to, but rolling out buggy, unfinished events does not reflect well on your competence.

Four, and this is personal opinion but reflects a lot of the community’s opinion, roll back the new gear tier, leaving exotic stats as the top. You’re going to lose a lot of players if you don’t.

Five, consider moving the entrance to Fractal of the Mists away from Lion’s Arch.
Thanks to dungeon runners, few will ever be able to access the Lion’s Arch of their home server reliably ever again. Move the portal to Southsun Cove or somewhere equally as accessible.

And six?
Compensate those who partook in the event but received nothing thanks to your network code kicking them at the very last minute.

Overall, if I were to grade your work for this event, I would say that while your ambitions were big, you failed to deliver a satisfactory experience. Must try harder.

Now that the weekend is over, I’d like to roll together some thoughts on the event as a whole.

First off, making one-time quests without testing them properly first ends up with a very bad first impression amongst players.
Friday night’s event in Lion’s arch is the first such example.
First off, very few people were able to get in to their home district. Not a major hassle, but indicative of server load and I’ll expand on this later.

Next, when the event itself started, the karka invasion, GW2’s unique lag errors kicked in.
With so many people in one place skills wouldn’t activate, player and enemy culling crapped out resulting in players being killed by invisible enemies frequently and event scaling went through the roof, with normal enemies being as tough as veterans, veterans as tough as champions, etc.

After this finished, we were not able to visit the new area which the weekend was supposed to be about. What WAS available was the Fractal of the Mists dungeon and the scavenger hunt.
Fractals seem enjoyable, but grouping problems are ruining many players’ enjoyment, and of course there’s the controversy of grind and gear tiers, both of which many will claim are contrary to the original much referenced manifesto. However, complaints have been expanded on elsewhere on the forum, so I won’t comment here other than to say I think it’s an insanely bad idea on ArenaNet’s behalf.

The scavenger hunt was a complete shambles. This really should have been tested more extensively prior to release, as it merely served to increase frustration. Players who were already in a bad mood thanks to other things in the event had their aggravation compounded.
Even the communication surrounding the scavenger hunt was of poor quality. Messages from developers were unclear and many players were left confused and worried that they might not be able to complete the quest.
Not that they should have worried mind you; the reward was cursory to say the least.

Of course, the development team’s communication as a whole leaves a lot to be desired.
The continued reliance on third party mediums such as Twitter and Facebook to deliver important messages rather than the game launcher or official forums is not a good decision to have made. Not everybody who plays the game uses these services, yet everyone sees the launcher, and your forums are an official means of communication.

On Saturday, Southsun Cove was finally opened to the public. This was actually probably the smoothest part of the weekend, with few problems experienced and the area behaving as intended. I’m a little worried about the sparsity of events and a lack of monster variety, with a heavy over-reliance on the karka, but overall, pretty good with two very nice jumping puzzles. Stepping Stones captures some of the spirit of the Mad King’s Clock Tower, which is nice, while Under New Management is a lot more relaxed.

However, any goodwill you gained from this one glimmer of competence was soon shattered with the one-time event last night.
Firstly, there was a lot of confusion surrounding where we actually needed to be.
Secondly, again with a massive influx of players, few were able to play on their home servers, with the majority ending up in overflows.
And once again, although much more painfully this time, due to overpopulation the above mentioned effects of lag severely hampered the event, making it a 3 hour slog with little to no enjoyment to be had. Monsters connected to the event had ridiculously inflated health pools, telegraphed attacks were impossible to avoid thanks to input lag resulting in mass wipes, many monsters weren’t visible until you’d been killed by them, and disconnects were frequent.

Fortunately, I didn’t get disconnected at all, but every other one of my party members did, with two not being able to rejoin us in our particular overflow.
One team member gave up half-way through due to it being almost completely unplayable, and heartbreakingly, one team-member got disconnected right before the final boss battle, meaning when she finally got back on she didn’t receive any reward. The only reward she had was an enormous armour repair bill.

And as this was a one-time event, she had no opportunity to repeat it, although I doubt she would have been able to seeing as it finished at 11PM GMT on our overflow.

Can you provide a link Lolana?

15 minutes to go.
Come on ArenaNet, pull your finger out.

Yeah, while I suspect Ayrilana’s correct, I would prefer a red post confirming.

Lion’s Arch or Southsun Cove?
Available information is lacking in detail.

Bardes.1870:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13ccl4/mystic_forged_a_quiver/

Just 1 day, someone already has a pink(red) backslot equipment.

Hopefully Anet has good schedule and does not underestimate the ability that how fast players can get upgraded-stat asc gears. ’Cause soon, those who had nothing to do will have 2 asc rings and asc back.

Well, I admit I’m wondering when you will break your promise again — to announce T2 ascended items.

Once again proving that the “Content Locusts” will devour any content placed in front of them faster than the developers could ever hope to predict.

I think someone’s definitely in trouble.
I always come to the forum via the front page, and at the moment they have a “Sale” promotion; any copy of GW2 bought before November 26th automatically gets bumped up to Digital Deluxe.
Reeks a bit of desperation to me.

Aaaaahahahahahahaha.
Oh wow.
The left hand really doesn’t know what the right one is doing, does it?

Say, Colin, you obviously yelled at someone and got them to roll back the stat boosts to keep from embarrassing you. How about you go back and tell them to junk the whole bloody stupid idea of gear progression?

Mandrax.7342:

I saw something on Kotaku where Isaiah Cartwright was doing a live Q&A. Someone asked a direct question about vertical progression which he neatly avoided answering properly.

Q: how important for you is vertical progression in GW2?

A: All progression is important to us, we want to make sure our rewards and progression systems hit a spectrum of players and makes everyone feel excited to play the game.

Was hoping to see more on the session but actually it was a pretty lame affair.

Link here: http://kotaku.com/5960951/the-lead-designer-of-guild-wars-2-is-answering-your-questions-right-now?tag=kotaku-q%26a

I read that too, and at that point I realised there was a “buffer” between Izzy and the public, and by “buffer” I mean “PR spin drone”.

I still don’t understand the “Filling the gap” statement. Firstly, there was no stat gap between exotics and legendaries.
Secondly, if it was cosmetic gear, we had the unique Mystic Forge recipes to work towards as a stop-gap, like Mjolnir.
THERE WAS NO GAP TO FILL.

For normal players, those people who make up the vast, vast majority of the community, we didn’t get our legendaries in a couple of months. We still haven’t got anywhere near the materials required because the level of mindless grind and/or financial investment is beyond the desires / means of the average player, those who aren’t unemployed or students.

The majority of us haven’t done all of the dungeon explorable paths. Heck, we haven’t even done all of the dungeon story modes. Let alone which, we really don’t want to be doing the same content over and over; it gets boring incredibly quickly and isn’t what we’d consider unique content after the first run through.

And yet now we’re told that the gear we DO have is no longer optimal, and that if we want to get the upgraded gear, we have to play the same content over and over.

I like variety in my game. I rarely play the same content continuously. Dungeon gear acquisition is already more grindy than I’m comfortable with, and looking at the numbers required for the new gear, well, I have no interest in playing the same 9 fractals over and over, so I’m never going to see it. And I’ll no longer feel comfortable partaking in WvW as I’ll be aware I’ll be at a statistical disadvantage, no matter how skilled I am.

As someone else mentioned I played Age of Conan while waiting for GW2 to be released, and as far as traditional, grind MMOs go, it does the whole grind / trinity / raid thing better than GW2 is ever likely to, so if I’m going to end up playing that type of game in GW2 now, I may as well go back there, where it’s prettier and more established.

The thing is, I don’t really want that style of game.
I want easily attainable max level gear. I want a big world with a wide variety of activities to partake in.
I had that in Guild Wars 2 before this patch.

Personally I find the internet’s need to pigeonhole people in to stereotypes to be rather immature and narrow-minded. When it comes down to it, everyone playing Guild Wars 2 is a different person with different priorities. Labelling them is lazy and causes tension and conflict.

Vasham.2408:

“Don’t quote the very thing that invalidates my entire argument! It’s not fair!”

See, this is you right now. It’s not making you look right. It’s making you look unable to accept that you’re wrong.

Among the five stages of acceptance you are either in denial or bargain. Not sure which but amusing none the less.

It doesn’t invalidate his argument. The passage is very carefully worded PR speech. What’s more interesting is what they’re not saying. They may not do it every 3 months, but without the explicit statement that they’ll NEVER introduce more gear tiers, there’s nothing contradictory about them releasing a new gear tier every 4 months.
PR and marketing folk are snakes, and every word uttered by an ArenaNet employee goes through them before it’s finally released to the public. It’s like the army reading soldiers’ letters home in order to censor any sensitive material.

I’ve always thought progression meant that I was getting better at something, such as playing a game, not that a number was getting higher. After all, in those scenarios, if my numbers get higher, so do the numbers for the monsters, so I’m just doing the same thing. The end result is the same as it was before. That isn’t progression. That’s staying in the same place.

GADefence.5634:

Allright, so basically, reskinning gear is now completely kitten since I’ll have to re-reskin it every 3 months. Thanks for that.

Isn’t it generous of them?
Plus, they sell the tools you need to do it through the gem store!
Wow, convenient too!
Gee whizz, I hope they add a new, even more expensive transmutation stone allowing transmutation of exotic gear into Ascended!

Sarcasm? Moi?

This gives me the excuse I need to shelve Guild Wars 2 and get on with playing other games.
I’ve played GW2 every day since early access. I was fully intending to continue to play it as much as I could, but now the devs have successfully driven a wedge between me and the game. It’s becoming something I didn’t want. I’m logging in to my dailies still, but even that is tinged with contempt. It won’t be long until I stop playing completely if they continue with this behaviour.
And it’s not just the introduction of gear progression; something about the Halloween event left a nasty taste in my mouth too. Too much profiteering and forceful pushing of monetised features.
I notice that the Black Lion Chests are once again to feature special items for the new event.
Heh, let’s see how many people buy keys after they got burned last time.