Guild Wars 2

“We have never said there would be no vertical progression. We do intend to focus on horizontal but we will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve.”

when you add up statements like “we don’t make grindy games”, “cosmetic only grind”, “we want to reward all gameplay preferences equally”, “focus on zero grind” and do something completely different, it causes resentment towards the development team and conflict among players. i’m sure there were good intentions for the game that didn’t seem profitable or retention worthy, so i’d like to quickly give some tips on how you can stay true to your words while still making money and keeping players logging in.

simplified description below…

step 1- refocus on gear acquisition with zero grind in mind and stick to it. keep legendaries hard to get because of the new stat change feature and ultra fancy looks.

step 2- offer a majority of the weapon and armor skins currently in game on the gem store as well so players have the option to buy them outright. players will still have the ability to earn all gear and skins through pure gameplay.

step 3- main gear progression through a greatly expanded infusion system and make it the go-to thing that players have to “work hard” for or “work hard” crafting. you don’t have runes or sigils beyond level 60, so this would be a great opportunity to develop an interesting secondary stats and effects system.

following these three steps will allow all players to have the gear stats they want easily, and getting a bunch of different armor types would be more desirable and less distressing. regular gameplay becomes way more rewarding through improved loot drops and acquisition. gem sales would boost because of the plethora of cosmetic options available. players will happily log in more to chase after carrots on sticks so they can continuously upgrade and change their gear. players will still have the ability to earn all of these rewards from regular gameplay and not have their time and effort diminished. also, these types of systems would be alt friendlier and encouraging. win-win!

moral of the story, stick to your words and make it so everyone can have their cake and eat it too.

thanks for reading

edit- ascended gear should be far easier to craft and sellable on the bltc as well.

John Smith.4610:

I’ve already banned Martha Stewart, so we’re ahead of the game.

great, now you can go add in quartz crystal formations throughout the game and remove the silly 1x per day transformation restriction too!

Doon.2364:

So what if Arena finally admit the mistake of Ascended Gears and decides to reverse their decision and remove the gears entirely? Would people be happy or would people be upset at this point?

I personally would be happy if they got rid of them, even though I have all ascended stuff already. Just compensate by giving us gold for each ascended piece.

I’d prefer anet make it easy to get ascended gear (across all activities) and stick with their original promise of having a cosmetic grind only.

Foehn.2489:

I played GW2 since release to about summer. Got “been there done that” and amassed as much skins as I could. I loved the game then but I find there is little to return to.

It’s not that I feel like I am missing out on the temporary content. Not too excited about having to kill an NPC with a background story slapped on, using the same old traits and skills that I can recite on the spot (attacks unlocked since lv 10 maybe). Or spend more time farming gold and punching in credit card info for new skins.

Where is the progression? What impact is there on my character if I complete LS after LS? From what I’ve caught up to on the update notes, the answer is skins.

The ultimate reward you get by playing Guild Wars 2 is skins. Skin Wars 2 is an old joke but more literal as time proved.

I guess I’m here because the game showed so much potential. Such smooth combat flow and systems in place, hitbox and projectile detection, etc. But it just feels like the same game one year ago. Couple moderate trait shifts and balances (does a 5% dmg increase on a trait really makes you want to use pistols more?), NPCs came and gone, just you know, more skins.

And what ever happened PvP? A big part of online gaming as it has highest replayability and each fight would feel different. Content aside, what progression awaits there? Skins.

A fart in the wind, be that as it may, what does everyone feel about the direction of the game and updates?

the direction of the game has done a 180 in terms of many things they advertised and wanted to offer to players. professions and gameplay are shallow, and most of the development effort goes towards slapping on gear stat grinds as the only form of character progression and temporary living story content to keep players grinding and distracted. both of these things are designed to be the driving force to generate gem sales.

they are nice enough to provide us a forum to discuss things and ask for feedback, but it does not matter much because they seem to do whatever they want and randomly implement experimental bits of incomplete systems (see ascended gear) anyway. this game does not to appear to be for the player, it seems designed as a cash machine that currently gives back as little as possible. you can argue against this, but then someone explain how we went from “we want a real sense of progression” and the advertised “cosmetic grind only” to what we have going on today?

if someone would have asked me a long time ago how I thought things would be a year into live, I would not have imagined describing it as… over itemized zerg grindfest where heroic combat mostly revolves around autoattack and dodgeroll to earns bits, pieces and parts of rewards, so you can sit in front of crafting stations for hours to create your statistically superior “character progression” items.

i do like parts of this game and it has potential, so i’m hoping for a development mentality turn around and a strong reinvestment for players that more closely matches the original design intent that was advertised.

DusK.3849:

I see a lot of complaining, and absolutely no suggestions.

I know this thread does not satisfy your need for suggestions, so maybe you could jump over to the suggestions forum and indulge yourself in all the lovely ideas that are largely ignored.

in the meantime, others will be here discussing what they feel about the direction of the game and will welcome you back with open arms whenever you’re ready to talk about the topic at hand.

have a great day!

zerging is encouraged and the most efficient way to win battles and loot, they are not going to punish or limit this in open world areas where they want mass amounts of people to participate in. not saying i’m a huge fan of the need to zerg or die design or don’t want different options for small teams (like maybe instanced areas), i’m just saying.

1. have map waypoints that are activated be unlocked for all account characters.

2. make all gear account bound on use and not soul bound so items can be reused.

thanks!

the real questions are… will there be fractal competitive seasons and how are the servers going to be matched up initially?

uri.6521:

Swag i like your suggestion, but there is a “tiny” problem with it, wich is:

ANET ALMOST HAVE TO MAKE ANOTHER GAME TO IMPLEMENT IT

thanks! ok, how about we all buy lots of gems to help them have the resources to make it happen in this game?

uri.6521:

Hi everybody

I want to express my suggestion on how my idea of balance is respecting cast times of skills.

Right now there are many skills that have very long cooldowns and very strong effects/ are instant cast, to fix this i recomend doing this to all skills unless they already do that.

Supposing this is implemented, then mos skills would recive the folowing changes:

1. Should have longer (in some cases much longer) casting times, and in other cases, they should have a chanelling part added on top of the casting time.

2. Should be less powerfull in a burst point of view but better in a DPS / aviavility point of view

3. Should have much lower cooldown (i think skills should be balanced in a way the longest cooldown possible was 120 secs, to erase the “He won because he had his elite off cooldown and i didnt”)

Same goes to weapon skills, in this case, i think they should have 20 secs cooldown at most.

To give a better idea of my propossal, here is a post that i did long ago about a suggestion on Necromancer’s marks

What about making necromacer’s marks chanelled skills skills so they work similar to ranger traps: ill give you an idea:

Mark of blood

This skill now inflicts 1 stack of 4 seconds bleeding and 1 stack of 3 seconds regeneration up to 5 stacks on its full duration, as long as the necromancer keeps chanelling the skill, the mark will be pulsing every second up to 5 times
Cooldown reduced to three seconds

Mark of evasion
This skill now ow inflicts 1 stack of 4 seconds bleeding and 1 stack of 3 seconds regeneration every pulse, it pulses 2 times.
Removed internal cooldown

Chillblains
This skill now inflicts 1 stack of 1 seconds chill and 1 stack of 3 seconds of poison on every pulse up to 5 stacks on its full duration, as long as the necromancer keeps chanelling the skill.
The mark will be pulsing every second up to 5 times
This skill is now ten seconds cooldown

Putrid mark
This skill will now transfer one condition from allies to foes every pulse up to 5 conditions.
The mark will pulse every second as log as the Necromancer keeps chanelling it.
This skill is now fifteen seconds cooldown

Reapers mark
This skill will now inflict 1 second fear every pulse up to 2 pulses, starting the first pulse two seconds after the mark is cast
The mark will pulse every three seconds as long as the Necromancer keeps chanelling it.
This skill is now 20 seconds cooldown

This will make Necromancer’s marks easier to counter while making them more powerfull if not countered.

This kind of mecanic can be inplemented on other skills like lava font for example, but giving something in exchange like reducing its cooldow to 2 seconds so they can have something similar to two Auto attacks.

Thats just to start, but this kind of changes can be applied to most of the skills to mee them more counterable, rewarding to land, easier to understand for those who are new to the game and more entertaining to watch

i’m not a fan of your suggestion, i think they should do this instead

how about they make everything instant cast on the move. get rid of combat movement suppression. put everyone on equal “footing” by adding cool movement abilities on the ui cast bar tailored for each profession. make 10 button weapon sets and lower cds on everything by 50% so we are not just spamming #1. increase and equalize hp on all professions. tone down the ridiculous burst damage capabilities on some professions and increase them in others. change the silly nightcrawler stealth mechanics to something less bad. have any and all condition stacks max out at 10 total combined.

some super starter ideas and dreams right?

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the responses!

Most of the responses here seem to revolve around actual combat, builds, and lastly conquest.

With these three things in mind…how would you redesign the tutorial to cover all of these points? (As a thought, when we introduce new game modes our current tutorial is going to seem fairly of outdated, considering it only shows you how to cap points.)

Thanks guys. Hope you’re having a good weekend!

missed this post somehow.

with all due respect, clearly profession designs and builds that affect the way combat unfolds should be the main priority. until you have a strong foundation for players competing against other players, game modes and tutorials will be meaningless fluff that don’t address the core issues.

Josh Davis.6015:

Thanks for the post, Jonnis.

Imagine you just made it out of the introductory tutorial – in your opinion, what’s the most confusing thing for a new player, right off the bat? Traits, builds, items, conquest? How to get into PvP? Feel free to mention whatever.

honestly, there really isn’t anything “confusing” for players of any experience level. across the various game play areas (spvp, wvw, pve, dungeons…), i would say there is frustration because of the “gimmicky”, unbalanced and over limited profession designs. basically, profession development here revolves around shuffling trait numbers and tossing new gear (outside of spvp, but im sure that more gear will be one of your spvp “fixes” soon too) at the problems. there is much more potential, but currently the individual profession designs are extremely poor and that’s clearly evident outside of the zerg for loot meta gameplay (very noticeable in dungeons/fractals though). until you seriously improve professions, thus making combat for the sake of combat more interesting and fun, you will never have a respectable amount of spvp involvement by players of any skill level. if you all seriously reinvest in making a much bigger and better profession “tool box” for players, you will have a healthier and more interesting meta throughout the entire game.

Shirk.6421:

Yes, I’am and yes, it’s a qq thread.

Something has to be done with stealth, It can’t be that someone in stealth can ress/stomp (also get rid of this mesmer “start stomping, port away, port back – stomp” crap) /dish out dozens of blast finishers to heal full without being “noticed”.
This stuff should break the stun:

-Applied Burning
-Ressing
-Stomping
-Finishers

ANet wanted to enable counterplay to stealth, too bad that it’s just utter crap, 4 seconds of reveal on a 40/32 second cd from a class which isn’t even able to burst down a squishy thief when full zerker geared in this 4 seconds.

Write L2P, I dare you, I double dare you.

i agree. anet has implemented the absolute worst stealth/counter stealth mechanics in any game i have ever played.

overall though, there are just way too many “gimmicky” and poorly designed profession mechanics in this game. it’s sad because there is much more potential, but they just keep on shifting around trait numbers and tossing new gear at the problems.

edit- one of the devs likes nightcrawler way too much lol

Behellagh.1468:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Speculation ppl. 10k gold owning people, trolling the market basically. Weither they succeed to make gold or not, it’s their way of playin this game.

Just like ancient wood log is finally dropping again, this will drop too.

That’s right because there are so many players out there with 10K of gold that they decided to screw the rest of us over with their shenanigans. It’s those “evil” tp traders up to their no good again.

The question is why on the 7th suddenly Quartz became attractive, we has 250,000 supply at that point. Is there a recipe we don’t know about? Is their a rumor about needing charged quartz for winterday so get quartz now and start converting one a day so when the recipe drops you will be ready? Or is it just newbie TP traders being lemmings?

Supply seemed to have stabilized at 18K now. Even with the decrease, prices haven’t risen by that much relative to the size of the supply drop.

i don’t pay enough attention to market trends pre and post patch, but i bet one of the main reasons for these occurrences are related to players privy to test server info. i’m sure anet tries to avoid this as much as possible by continuously adding in new mats and currency, but they can’t fully exclude using current items on live at times so it becomes an easy situation to take advantage of. could be wrong about this, but if someone has market data history, i’m sure you can find some correlations between large quantity material purchases and the ensuing needed materials to craft x item after patches drop.

thinking about it all, the game economy is the only reason why public testing is not done.

phys.7689:

morrolan.9608:

Squid.6903:

So why aren’t there multiple pathways to getting these items? I mean from the start. From release. When Legendary/Ascended Weapons were released, there should have been a WvW method of getting them, or some sort of equivalent.

And the ability to sell a drop which has stats you don’t use. Its utterly absurd.

One of the key facets of ascended is they have an earned component. If you could sell them directly. That would no longer be the case

So explain why precursors and legendaries can be sold but not celestial and ascended?

fellyn.5083:

Squid.6903:

I believe that the way Ascended Gear is released goes against what made GW2 so fun in the past. It didn’t force you into doing stuff you didn’t want to do.

An Ascended weapon means I’ll be doing 10+% more damage than with my Exotic Weapon. That’s pretty huge in any kind of PvP.

So why aren’t there multiple pathways to getting these items? I mean from the start. From release. When Legendary/Ascended Weapons were released, there should have been a WvW method of getting them, or some sort of equivalent.

I don’t mean to say that it should be easy to get these items, but I find PvE boring—This is a game killer for me, and I know it is for some others, too.

Fix it, please.

Precursor weapons drop in wvw. I’m pretty sure you can get most of the other materials to make a legendary weapon in wvw too, except for the dungeon tokens.

Therefor Legendarys can be obtained in wvw. Same goes for all the materials required to make ascended weapons.

And complete ascended weapons have a chance to drop anywhere that ascended materials drop as well.

we are talking about wanting more paths to earn rewards than the two options that are present. what you mentioned still revolves around overgrinding mats and/or spending hundreds of gold just to sit around crafting stations for hours, and hoping to get lucky with the abysmal drop rates. then again, if you were to spend hundreds of gold, you can maximize magic find to get a 0.3% boost to improve your chances lol.

Fluffball.8307:

It’s a PvE problem more than a weapon problem. The community has reduced the endgame to berserker skill 1 spamming on ALL classes, and if Anet adds anything that changes that, people flip out and say the content is too hard and only caters to the elites.

Use the ranger weapons in PvP and they become much more fun. Critical even. You’ll be screaming at your monitor for your skills to recharge quicker because you need them right now.

With the exception of class’ bunkers builds. Those are just dull. Like the spirits skill 1 SB build. Ugh. Get rid of capture points.

ultimately, the real problems are poor profession designs, the turtle paced % reshuffling “improvement” philosophy and the continued band aid use on gushing wounds.

the overall profession designs are gimmicky and limited, and that needs to be seriously addressed if this game wants to have a solid foundation. Professions and combat are the most important aspect of this game, but sadly these two areas happen to be the most neglected by the development team.

RyuDragnier.9476:

This post says it all. As much as Anet doesn’t want to admit it, they messed up majorly with the majority of this class. It needs a massive overhaul.

yes, a massive overhaul indeed.

Squid.6903:

I believe that the way Ascended Gear is released goes against what made GW2 so fun in the past. It didn’t force you into doing stuff you didn’t want to do.

An Ascended weapon means I’ll be doing 10+% more damage than with my Exotic Weapon. That’s pretty huge in any kind of PvP.

So why aren’t there multiple pathways to getting these items? I mean from the start. From release. When Legendary/Ascended Weapons were released, there should have been a WvW method of getting them, or some sort of equivalent.

I don’t mean to say that it should be easy to get these items, but I find PvE boring—This is a game killer for me, and I know it is for some others, too.

Fix it, please.

not looking up the dev statement, but the cop-out answer is that they want you participating in all areas of the game. in reality though, it’s just a cover for throwing things in all willy nilly for experimentation and not wanting to invest the time and resources for multiple paths to achieve the same end results and rewards. it’s basically drop something in with the least amount of effort and move on. you can tell where priorities are given when there were 4 new teams hired to churn out living story to keep the gem sales machine churning while most other things seem to be tossed by the wayside. i know things take time and money to develop, but it appears the “bottom line” people are unwavering in this over itemized and give less for more agenda.

hopefully they change items from soul bound to account bound to make things a bit easier and less wasteful for players.

Howdy y’all,

I am now moving to the discussion phase of this initiative that actually started way back in beta. The topic with the most votes in this area of the game was, and still is, Rangers Need Lovin’ (Note: The topic tally was aggregated across all Community Forums per supported languages). The Coordinators for this thread will be myself and maybe Jon??? if he has time or the desire.

First, I would to lay down some rules as we move forward regarding how we collabo with one another:

1: This initiative is all about the Ranger needing lovin’.

2: We will be disclosing information pertaining to why so little progress has been made for the Ranger profession specifically and what is currently in development.

3: Anger and emotion leads to Ranger hate. Ranger hate leads to player suffering. Player suffering leads to less gem sales… and we don’t want that to happen so, we will finally have an impactful and intelligent discussion about how the Ranger is going to be fixed!

4: Together we will empathize with the pain Rangers have endured, and share what meaningful things we are going to do to move the Ranger forward ASAP. This discussion will be the catalyst needed to change our current “slower than all get out” profession design philosophies to a new “git-r-done” philosophy!

5: Aggression and disrespect to me, any other outstanding community member or developer will be met with great justice! Extreme cases of being mean will lead to infractions, but no force in the universe will ever shut down this new Ranger initiative!

6: The teams primary focus now will be on gathering information from this thread and implementing things right away. Please do understand that the Ranger initiative is taken very seriously by us all and that we will be reading the discussions and joining in as often as it is possible between 12 hour coding sessions.

We will never close this thread because it will be the go-to place for ongoing discussions about what worked and what did not in regard to Ranger development.

Until we get it right, thank for your patience and support. We are looking forward to the day that all Rangers can log in proudly!

Swagger.1459

P.S: We will keep our eyes on this discussion like a hawk (pun intended).

honestly, I think this map should be an individual server pve zone where pve players and those in wvw queue can earn points for their server. like I mentioned before in this thread, revamp the battle isles from gw1 or something and then toss this in when you’re done so it’s not a waste of coding time.

all this zone will do is fragment wvw players more, not resolve population imbalances and remind pve players why they don’t like pvp when they are spending half their night getting tossed off cliffs by organized zergs.

is this basically going to be one big map where defending areas equates to zergs camping out at the best knock off spots?

if so, let me know which profession has the coolest knockbacks because I think my ranger will be inadequate for these activities as well.

while the specific profession subforums are nice, can we have an area for focused discussions about general profession designs and development, and the way combat unfolds in various aspects of the game?

there are a plethora of ideas to make larger scale improvements to professions and combat gameplay mechanics/systems, but they are spread out all over the forums and not given the proper attention they deserve.

thanks for reading and make it so!

DevonCarver.5370:

I wanted to further discuss a couple of ideas. Firstly, several posts have called for reduced map caps in WvW. The problem that would create is that we’d be allowing even fewer people to play in a given period of time if we were to do that. So I wonder if there is another way to accomplish the same goal, while not disenfranchising people who would now be unable to get into the maps? It’s a hard problem because the more populated servers face long queues while the less populated ones face empty maps. From my perspective there aren’t a ton of good options, which is why discussing this problem is pretty important.

…disclaimer… i have not played gw1 so forgive me for my ignorance.

part of the larger problem is that most players do not like pvp related things, so some servers will be hit or miss for wvw participation. in order to bridge that gap, i propose that you introduce a mists area (that makes sense from a lore standpoint) where players can gain points for their server and earn rewards in the process. having something like this would be great for those waiting in queue, and possibly help lead more players on pve heavy servers to eventually test the wvw waters. even if some players never step foot in wvw, at least they would be making some type of server contribution that is more on their terms.

after doing a little research on the wiki for some ideas, i came across information on the battle isle from gw1 and thought an area like that might have some potential. i have not fully thought out the details, but you could introduce a revamped clashing sea map where players have to fight along side the zaishen order against demons from the rift. there could be open maps and instances where players have to hold points and clear out areas against hordes of creatures to gain server points and boosts to the power of the mists stats. you could design these additional server based rewards to favor the lowest to highest scoring servers respectively to help balance numbers out.

in addition to standard loot rewards, players could earn copper zaishen coins to trade in/covert into other game currencies and possibly even for ascended gear (provided you did the same ascended acquisition across all activities). doing it this way would allow players to earn all of the various rewards while still doing the noble service of supporting their server.

also, the battle isle could serve as a new home base for spvp, and you could introduce guild halls and gvg arenas here as well.

overall, there seemed to be a lot of interesting ideas and lore from the battle isle that could be used positively for many aspects of gw2 so it’s worth a thought.

high fever induced dumb idea maybe, but that’s all I’ve got.

thanks for reading.

lunyboy.8672:

Protip: If you are a downed Ele, you can just mistform in the direction of your loot bags and grab them that way.

Totally fair.

lol nice.

on the topic of dying… I know in some cases it’s not a major issue to hit the collect button, but during skirmishes and battles you end up all over the place trying to survive and when you go down your sol. there are also instances where you just can’t get back to the area and claim your loot so players are losing out at times.

lordkrall.7241:

Well it is quite easy to just activate AoE-loot and bind it to a key that you press now and then during the fight, doesn’t take more a second and doesn’t really influence the fight.

ok i’ll try that. would still be a nice QoL change to not manually collect your loot so players can fully focus on play and not pick up.

It’s frustrating to retrace your steps for loot bags while participating in wvw. There are more important things to worry about during battles and competitive play than scavenging around for earned rewards.

Have there been any statements regarding considerations for loot to be automatically placed into your inventory bags after a kill? Perhaps a mention of a pop up chest that accumulates your rewards? Something? Anything?

DevonCarver.5370:

Speaking as someone who has only gotten Ascended gear via WvW vendors, I’d say that’s nonsense. Speaking as a developer, we are continuing to make this better, which is not to say perfect. There will be more ways to acquire the ascended mats as part of the season and we will look into adding yet additional ways after that.

heard it here first folks, crafting is the only way to get ascended gear!

speaking as a customer, that’s nonsense and bad business.

Erick Alastor.3917:

I’ve just made this.
Any resemblance to real events and/or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This is just how I think part of the community feels.

haha I like it!

can you make videos?

Sleel.8365:

Welcome to being screwed. All the resources, and most importantly, ectos you put into discovery. May as well have tossed em in the garbage for all the use they were

have no fear! i’m sure they will compensate players with a cute mini and a temporary booster that enhances other temporary boosters for 30 minutes!

have a great day!

Castaliea.3156:

Swagger.1459:

DevonCarver.5370:

Bailey.6892:

Sadly my money is that they will be a large advantage. This is based on how anet has handled things in the past (poorly). Being forced to pve to enjoy wvw is a bad idea.

My goal is to eliminate the latter scenario. And I promise to do as much as I can to meet that.

the shroud of the dark side has fallen. begun the crafting war has.

You… I like you.

good relations with Castaliea.3156 I have. may the force be with you.

Karril Daltaya.4980:

I do not craft. I do not craft in any game, it is a terrible thing to me. This game has always been about ‘play how you want’ but now if I want to get this new item level you will be forced to craft.

Now, they have said that there is a really rare chance for the items (in boxes) to drop, but how realistic is that? Most characters need at least two weapons, some as many as four or more. (For my mesmer and guardian, I tend to use all of the weapons, my ranger I only use a few)

At two weeks a craft, that would take months, if not a year to fully outfit…but with these ‘very rare drops’?

I would not have minded if they were able to be bought on the TP from people who /do/ craft. Give people who like to craft something to make money off of! Go for it! Makes me happy, makes them happy, everyone gets money and items…but forcing people to play in ways they dont want to for progression is against what this game was supposed to be about, isnt it?

I don’t know if this is a joke, but here are some estimated materials for 1 ascended weapon I found in the crafting section…

“-Ascended Dagger

1xDeldrimor Steel Dagger Blade (3x deldrimor steel ingot, 5 crystaline dust, 50 Thermocatalytic Reagent)
1xDeldrimor Steel Dagger Hilt (2x deldrimor steel ingot, 5 crystaline dust, 50 Thermocatalytic Reagent)
1x Ascension Crystal (1x augur crystal, 5x Empyreal star, 5x dragonite ingot, 5x bloodstone brick)
1x Ascended Inscription (10 dark matter, 1 exotic inscription, 1 deldrimor steel plated dowel, 10 crystalline dust)

Total:
20 Pile of Crystaline Dust
350 Thermocatalytic Reagent
1 Augur Crystal
10 Dark Matter
500 Pile of Bloodstone Dust
500 Empyreal Shard
500 Dragonite Ore
160 Iron Ingot
80 Steel Ingot
160 Darksteel Ingot
400 Mithril Ingot
10 Globs of Ectoplasm
40 soft Wood Plank
40 seasoned Wood Plank
40 Hard Wood Plank
100 Elder Wood Plank
1 Exotic Inscription
30 Obsidian Shard"

glhf y’all!

is this a joke?

Helicity.3416:

Serious question, what about the players who do not enjoy crafting, have never crafted?

You’re going to make only one avenue for obtaining AWs, and make that avenue based on a sidemechanic that a lot of players find tedious, uninteresting and is biased towards PvE play? Really?

What happened to “play how YOU like” and “Every player can get the same rewards via THEIR preferred mode of play” ?

I’m actually very annoyed with this short-sighted and obvious money grab.

Why?

Because Ascended weapons are only being implemented to boost Gem sales.

Because Arenanet knows that a lot of us have no crafting leveled up, and Arenanet knows that a lot of players will end up needing to buy a massive amount of low-end materials off the TP, which in turn will entice some of them to buy gems and exchange them for gold.

It’s disgusting, the GW2 Manifesto is a lie.

a few choices…
1- play 16 hours per day collecting a carp ton of mats for crafting to stay competitive.
2- break out credit cards to buy mats for crafting to stay competitive.
3- take a break and monitor the forums for ascended gear options that are not money grabs. this option will save you lots of cash and sanity in the process.

champ.7021:

Is this really what the ascended greatsword looks like?
http://dulfy.net/2013/08/30/gw2-account-magic-find-ascended-crafting-and-legendary-weapons-revamp-preview/
scroll down to see it. Honestly if this is actually what it looks like thats just…..i mean time gated and we cant get an interesting skin

did you really think they were going to make good looking ascended gear so you didn’t have to buy gems transmutation stones and expensive skins?

Sitkaz.5463:

I’m curious about the purpose of ascended gear and weapons. They’re not necessary in PVE because we’ve been managing it with less for a year. They’re problematic in WvW for various reasons. So what is the purpose? Is it to give people more crafting, for the people who enjoy that? Is it to prepare us for a level 80+ area (seems unlikely if no expansion, but I don’t know)?

I’ve read the latest blog post. It says the new crafting materials “send players out into the world and make our existing content more rewarding.” So they want to give us reason to explore again. Is that it?

gold sinks and gem sales.

DevonCarver.5370:

Bailey.6892:

Sadly my money is that they will be a large advantage. This is based on how anet has handled things in the past (poorly). Being forced to pve to enjoy wvw is a bad idea.

My goal is to eliminate the latter scenario. And I promise to do as much as I can to meet that.

the shroud of the dark side has fallen. begun the crafting war has.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Swagger.1459:

you have not cleared up anything for anyone. stop trying to fool players into thinking that they are “taking responsible steps” by transparently trying to get more money out of players. defending these poor decisions only encourages bad business behavior and cheapens the player experience.

Okay, I’m curious, just how are they trying to get more money out of players through Ascended?

okay, now i’m curious, did you not read the second half of my post?

Desthin Sinkropht.4123:

There is a lot of hate being thrown around concerning the introduction of ascended gear and time gated crafting, so I feel the need to post here and clear something up for the general community.

ANet isn’t infallible (as the ascended gear being dropped on us with fractals shows), but they are showing remarkable levels of awareness in regards to what the players want out of gear, and they are taking responsible steps to make sure the majority of players get what they want.

TL;DR: Gamers as a community have condensed legitimate game design concepts into buzzwords that trigger kneejerk reactions.

condensed to make my point.

you have not cleared up anything for anyone. stop trying to fool players into thinking that they are “taking responsible steps” by transparently trying to get more money out of players. defending these poor decisions only encourages bad business behavior and cheapens the player experience.

they intentionally designed ascended gear to be a gold sink and cash cow through gem to gold purchases because they made buying a carp ton of mats for crafting the more preferred and realistic time investment method for most players to obtain this level of gear. that’s it. nothing more, nothing less.

Shiren.9532:

I don’t understand why crafting is getting 100 new levels just for ascended gear. What exactly is it we are supposed to craft for 100 levels? We can already make level 80 exotics at level 400. Why is there a need for players to grind 100 more levels before they can craft a level 80 ascended item? It just seems like grind for the sake of grind.

it is designed for players to buy gems and as a gold sink for player to eventually buy more gems.

Zindrix.1750:

I’m beginning to wonder if Anet has even considered the impact of all of this “vertical progression”(read: time sink). Ascended weapons will no doubt have higher stats than normal weapons, but they will also probably have higher base damage. This has an even greater impact on the differences between someone geared in full exotics vs full ascended gear.

The issue with this is what happens when you want to change your build? What happens if you dual wield 2 sets of weapons so you need 4 for just 1 build? What happens if you play more than 1 character? 2 characters? 3 characters? There have been other changes that haven’t been alt-friendly and that’s fine, but I think this is becoming too much. I can’t keep up with gearing all of the characters or builds that I play.

---

I realize people are just going to say “you don’t HAVE to get ascended gear”, but I like to play WvW and it’s silly to think that people are running around in gear that is 10-20% more effective than mine just because they play 1 character and I play 7.

here is what they ultimately want you to do…

option 1- max out your credit cards and/or spend thousands of dollars buying legendaries for your characters to stay competitive.

option 2- spend most of your game time for the next 3 years gathering up crafting mats so you can level up crafting profession to create the specific ascended gear for all your characters to stay competitive.

option 3- insert your credit card for gems to buy all the mats required to level up crafting professions to 500 and more mats after to craft ascended gear to stay competitive. this option would be cheaper than option 1 though

option 4- you will continuously get owned by someone else in ascended gear using their more powerful #1 auto attack and heal so you will either rage credit card or rage quit.

Charak.9761:

They went for quantity instead of quality. Nothing has changed in the world, all updates are removed after 2 weeks. If you’re a ‘normal’ gamer, you can complete these LS updates in the first day and twiddle your thumbs for 13 days waiting for the next update because guess what, thew content is so lacking its mind-numbing. So they had to put some constraints, so the last couple LS takes 2-3 days.

They’re boasting LS so much but they never accept the fact that they aren’t that great. Yeah it’s exciting to get an update every 2 weeks, but when you get them you just kind go:

with every update (and decision) they want to generate as much buzz as possible to generate more cash. this 2 week system is designed to get players to buy gems and as a gold sink so players eventually buy more gems for the next “sale” and update.

I understand making money is part of business but they are transparently trying to grab cash while offering little in return. it’s pretty awful when a “mmo” developer invests more effort into feeding player addiction and making temporary junk content while there are gaping holes where essentials should be. my gosh it has been a year and players still can’t move the user interface or zoom the camera out farther so they do get seizures with all the particle effects blowing up the screen. the core of professions are still terrible because they want gearing up to be the customization factor and the long list goes on…

essentially they are not giving back nearly what they are asking for in many ways. sure it’s nice to have good art and graphics, ability to move while attacking and shared gathering nodes, but this game is ultimately not designed for the players, it’s purposefully designed to get cash and produce less for more. bad business catches up though so we will see what the future holds.

I don’t have time to respond properly so i’ll leave this for now…

forcing players to spend time and resources leveling up multiple crafting methods is wrong.

forcing players to become crafters for gear to stay competitive is wrong.

providing no other alternatives besides crafting and abysmal rng lucky drops is wrong.

forcing players to not play their way for rewards is wrong.

transparent money making schemes and over the top gold sinks like this are wrong.

forcing players to do things without equal reward alternatives is wrong.

forced crafting is wrong.

fundamentally there are a ton of things wrong with the way ascended gear has and is being handled.

“At 500, crafters will be able to craft ascended weapons and armor. Once you reach 500, a new tier of crafting materials will be available to you; this new tier of materials will be made by combining lower tier materials. This tier is time-constrained, so each item can only be made once per day in order to help give high-level crafters their own economy of items to build and sell that retain their value and rarity.This new tier of crafting material, along with the new guaranteed material rewards mentioned earlier and some other materials we introduce will be used to craft ascended weapons, armor, and more. These weapons and armor will also be able to be found as rare drops from locations in the world. Ascended weapons and armor will remain account-bound like other ascended gear.”

warning, this is a wiifm (what’s in it for me) post but I gotta tell ya, the extremely transparent money grab agenda that gives back little in return is wearing players like me pretty thin.

given the dr and reward drop systems, access to more weapon sets in the future and the way crafting is set up, players will essentially be forced to craft ascended gear and break out their credit card even more. all of this means that players will have to learn and pay for at least 3 crafting methods for a single profession to stay competitive. not to mention players with various professions in need of specific gear having to learn and pay for most, if not all, crafting methods. either way, you are forcing players to be crafters because it will be advantageous to their gear progression and that is a bad business. also, the terrible reward drop system will not be a balancing factor and to think so is delusional. any customer here with half a brain can see that every decision and content update made is to strongly encourage forking over more cash to keep up with things because the alternatives of gathering and rng are not very realistic.

now I don’t mind breaking out my cc once in a while, but if you expect the majority of your player base to craft all this ascended stuff, grind for and buy mats with time gates and spend hours in front of crafting stations and on the bltc, I hope to grenth that the powers that be make some kind of effort to strongly improve the abysmal and over limited profession systems and add much better content to play in return. also, there are a carp ton of essential features missing that need to be implemented to make this a more respectable mmo.

long story short… don’t be cheap and greedy, putting more effort into core essentials of your game will make players happily part with their hard earned cash and not question your integrity when you want them to buy more stuff.

thanks for reading

cesmode.4257:

Sirendor.1394:

ColinJohanson.2394:

You won’t see legendary armor any time soon, you will see Ascended Armor in 2013 for sure though, yes.

Bye bye guild wars 2 then. The game is getting more rubbish by the day.

I would probably follow and leave GW2 for good if this happens. I say this a lot, but another tier of ARMOR beyond even ascended…too much for me to handle within the realm of GW2. I can deal with this stuff in other games like WoW which you expect this sort of thing, but I did not expect this in GW2.

I thought exotic was max stat gear. Then they roll out ascended accessories. Now in 2013 we will have ascended armor. And they are tossing around the concept of legendary armor. No. Im not grinding for another gear set after I acquire full ascended. No way.

By the time we have full ascended, it will be end of 2013. I would hope arenanet isnt silly enough to roll out legendary anytime soon after that(and by soon after, I mean Id like to have my ascended gear for a whole year at least before legendary armor). But when they get around to it(hopefully not for another 2 years), EQ Next will be around the corner probably, and I’ll be heading to that.

Too much bullkitten here if they roll with legendary armor.

oh don’t worry y’all! for the low low price of maxing out 5 credit cards you will have your very own sets of ascended and legendary gear!

+1

the pet/ranger mechanics are terrible. the current designs make the pet more of a liability and useless in most cases causing the ranger to be a subpar profession at everything.

more power to the ranger itself is my vote.

from the wiki…

“Legendaries will be scaled up to the level of ascended weaponry. You will also be able to change the stats on a legendary to any available stat combination while out of combat.”

Arkham Creed.7358:

Just as the title says; would you, as a player, prefer Arena Net to keep releasing buggy Living Story updates every few weeks, or to take a short break to address some of the long standing issues with the game? And by that I don’t mean adding new features people demand, but rather fixing things like balance issues, lag, and some of the many, many bugs that have plagued the game and certain professions (my poor engineer) literally since beta. Once again I’ll pull out my Simpsons clip to illustrate the “dig up, stupid” philosophy I believe Arena Net suffers from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b97zJxKEqAk

Put simply I believe that Arena Net has dug themselves into a metaphorical hole by releasing so much buggy and broken content, in hopes of driving up hype for the game and getting more box sales no doubt. And now instead of fixing these problems, they keep trying to get out of it by releasing more buggy and broken content. In essence they are digging themselves in deeper by trying to “dig up” to get out of the hole.

they are digging deep to feed the bottom line. bugs and other important things that need addressing will suffer or be pushed on the way back burner to make sales.

I believe that is no real direction for the meta. it seems as though they are trying to stuff silly tricks into a small profession and combat box and call it a day. at this point I kinda feel like they are holding out to consolize things or are assuming their professions and combat here are good.

kudos though on the gem store and hiring 4 teams to churn out content to make more loot while professions and combat are abysmal.