In case they can’t be inferred, here are my explicit concerns for this update.
1) Ascended gear will render previous content obsolete.
Yeah, there will be the occasional run through a dungeon for the skins or gifts, but that’s all it will be. There is no longer any incentive to spend time working on an exotic weapon through dungeon tokens when you could be spending that time working on ascended ones. This is why there is such a dramatic price difference between exotics and rares – if rares couldn’t be mystic forged into exotics from time to time, the gap would be even larger. No one wants subpar gear. By introducing superior gear, the eight existing dungeons are rendered obsolete.
2) Ascended items will kill the market for crafted items.
Since there’s been no mention of any new crafting recipes to match this new tier of gear, we can only assume that there aren’t any. The few crafting niches that are still profitable will disappear, and the only reason to bother crafting at all will be for food (which we already have to compete with NPCs for) or for legendaries.
3) Ascended items will destabilize WvWvW.
This one speaks for itself. Introducing a stat bonus to those who do a specific instance forces players outside of their playstyles, and that’s something they don’t appreciate. Yes, I know there will be new ways to get ascended items “in the future,” but that still means that there’s a frustrating window of time during which WvWvW players need to do PvE to compete.
4) Ascended items will further destabilize lower level zones.
We already see this with rares and exotics, which have no low-level counterparts. A character that is level 60 with a full set of rare gear is substantially more powerful than a character of level 40 in full masterwork gear, even if both players are scaled to the same level. We are already seeing elitist PvE groups demanding level 80’s for low level dungeons. Ascended gear will only make this worse.
5) Players feel that their work over the past months has been discredited.
Perhaps the most universal and distressing concern, certainly in this thread, is that we are being lured into a game where we climb a ladder that keeps getting taller as we reach the top. We’ve done that before. Games have been born and died on that philosophy. Many of us who came here did so because we wanted horizontal progression, which this is not.
Now, I propose two possible courses of action.
1) Pull the plug on the initial concept, and adjust ascended stats to match exotic stats. Doing this shows the player base that you have listened to our concerns and that there is still some shred of faith in the original design philosophy, while remaining very simple to accomplish. Literally just a few numbers need to be tweaked.
2) Make sure that ALL ascended items introduced include the magic find stat. That way, they will be better than exotic magic find sets (so still allowing characters to progress) but will not be better than more combat-oriented gear. Many of us already carry a magic find set. In short, keep exotics at the top of the power ladder, and just give everyone a new PvE-focused set to work on. Doing this also makes lodestones more likely to drop, further bridging the investment gap between exotics and legendaries.
