Guild Wars 2

If you don’t want to grind out the ingredients and don’t want to buy them, then wait. There’s gonna be other ways to get ascended gear. We’ve only seen the first of many installments.

I thought he hit the big question straight up. Good enough for me.

Maybe a 2-finger typer who failed keyboarding class?

Something unique about legendary item crafting is it takes all parts of the game except for pvp.

In explore mode, too, if it’s a total party wipe and no one reengages the mobs, the encounter resets.

Helps a lot if you bring someone who’s done it a few times to guide the group.

My first run in that dungeon, we tried to use the doors in the hall to separate them, which turned out to be an ineffective strategy.

Luchifer.8026:

Like a gladiator match, people will Q while they spactate others fight 1v1 in a arena or just duels in every map

Yeah, spectator mode is another thing in the “iceberg” still in development along with private dueling arenas.

It’s a shame, but it seems they released about 6 months too soon.

we live in a litigious world

incidentally, when I revisited the manifesto, I couldn’t actually see anything concrete that’s failed

Tolmos.8395:

Back when there was a stat plateau and exotics/legendaries were equivalent in strength, making exotics BiS, I was really hoping they would add dueling. Now that they have begun to add the gear treadmill, however, not so much.

As higher stats come out, it will become less about individual skill and more about who has the biggest numbers. That will imbalance dueling something terrible, and you’ll just end up with a bunch of well geared but unskilled players lording their victories over the less geared players.

you never have to worry about gear in GW2 pvp, and neither can you use gear as an excuse for losing

we all use the same vendors for gear and everything is free

we will have dueling (1v1, 2v2, or whatever you like) when they get private arenas into the game.

Here it is midnight on Monday following a major US holiday and only 5 of the servers are too full to transfer to.

We have a players-helping-players forum and specific class forums with prob’ly more helpful info than you’ll find here (this is mostly the rants and flames forum)

I wonder how much our market prices are influenced by active traders (those who are buying for resale, and selling more than what they personally farmed).

In particular, we can only place buy and sell orders, no options or short sales. So the pressure from our army of traders is all positive.

Sleepy.2647:

You are just assuming, if it was a 3% stats loss i wouldn’t make 1/2 less damage with MF gear.

I would like to join that test vs a MF warrior with my Ranger anytime. And you are just pointing out that wearing MF set in Orr doesn’t matter…no one said otherwise because you are playing ALONE there so you can do whatever you want…not like you need anything there to tag mobs.

The test it’s simple, 5 players doing the same dungeon that takes 1h+ with normal gear then do it again with full MF gear. People can’t just argue “Hey, i use MF gear and parties are fine” because most of the time they are the only leecher in the group.
With 5 players using MF gear no one will be “tanky”, no one will be “high DPS”…therefor dying faster and killing slower, it doesn’t take a genious to see what happens.

Umm… you really think that’s a simple test? Maybe it doesn’t take a genius, but I think you could get it easier and more quantifiable results.

I think it is unfortunate that the racial cities have no use except your story quest.
Frequently I wish L.A. didn’t exist, despite it being a great city in its own right. It feels like if you owned a huge house, but only kept the heat on in one room. We’re all squished in together, and all that work on the cities goes wasted.

I run with map chat turned off 90% of the time. I do wish we had other chat channels that we could join, like you find in basically every other mmo. I personally would avoid any global channel most of the time, but would love one for alliances of guilds, say.

As is, all of Tyria basically boils down to Lion’s Arch and a couple adventure zones. It’s unfortunate. But that’s the way they built it.

Sleepy.2647:

mulch.2586:

Well Sleepy, look at the actual numbers.

Wearing explorer armor instead of valkyrie, knights, zerker, or whatever, that’s gonna cost you about 3% of your character’s total stats. 3% isn’t a little kittened or puppied or anything. Given all the other variability in gameplay, it’s probably not detectible over the RNG of your weapon and crits.

Where does that 3% actually come from?
MF gear has less stats if you didn’t notice, not just the lack of a third stat.
Normal exotic chest armor = 101 main stat, explorer exotic MF chest armor = 72 main stat?
If you add to that, the lack of runes which boost your power/prec/crit as well as the completely lack of critical damage (roughtly 60%+ critical damage)…how can all that be 3% damage loss?

I have no idea where people pull these numbers from…3% difference…yeah…right. Someone who DOESN’T have MF set might actually believe you, people who has it won’t.

My difference between my own MF set and my glass cannon set = probably close to 1/2 damage loss…that’s “sightly” more than just 3%.

It’s not related to magic find, but I gave an algebra-free rundown of stats here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stats-or-why-not-to-worry-about-ascended/first#post843264

I do have a MF set, with Pirates, yaaarrr! Quite often I forget that I’m wearing it, and I take it to Orr and the Lost Shores without remorse.

If we had dps meters in the game, people would catch on quicker. Your gear stats don’t matter nearly as much as you’d think from playing other MMOs.

I haven’t done the test on this, but I wager a warrior in MF will substantially out dps a ranger, mesmer, or engineer in regular gear.

Sleepy.2647:

mulch.2586:

I think the important thing is to notice there is a cost in performance of wearing magic find, but it’s not all that huge. Given that most of a character’s performance is NOT from gear, your choices in weapon set, utilities, and deploying skills/dodge/positioning matter so much more.

MF gear does not make you a glass pea shooter. It’s a handicap, but not all that much. This makes sense when you think of how everyone wears magic find gear while farming in the highest level zones, and we get along just fine.

The issue is thinking that because you play well you won’t make your team worse by wearing MF, that might be the case if only ONE is using MF because you will hardly notice it out of 5 players (you can still tell when there is someone slacking or using MF).

For example, to me, wearing MF or not means hitting 1/2 of what i can hit with my glass cannon…doing that just feels like i’m doing nothing for the team…i’m just there to dodge and nothing else since i’m doing way too low damage to be effective in a dungeon where you need to kill fast certain stuff or something like that.
If i had a tanky build, but i’m using MF it defeats the purpose of having a tanky build…so it beats down the same argument, you can’t make a tanky build with MF gear and you can’t make a glass cannon build with MF gear.

MF wasn’t made to use it in dungeons, sure people could wear let’s say 40-50% MF at most and still be “fine”, a little kittened but fine. The problem is using MF gear that puts you well above 100%+ and still think you are doing fine for your group…no you are not no matter how good you play you are simply getting carried.

Well Sleepy, look at the actual numbers.

Wearing explorer armor instead of valkyrie, knights, zerker, or whatever, that’s gonna cost you about 3% of your character’s total stats. 3% isn’t a little kittened or puppied or anything. Given all the other variability in gameplay, it’s probably not detectible over the RNG of your weapon and crits.

Ohoni.6057:

This is a common misconception. You’re not automatically dropping the ball in MF gear if your build is designed around your MF gear. My point on MF gear is that while it may technically be sub-optimal, running in anything but a team of 5 lolbubblestomp guardians with perfect food and potions is sub-optimal for most content in terms of run efficiency. There’s a line to draw here I think, and that line is “Does every character need to be 100% optimal to meaningfully contribute to success?”

You’re deliberately missing out on, what, 200-250 points of strength-enhancing stats? That would be around 20 levels of trait points, more than the difference between a set of blue 80 gear and a set of orange 80 gear, if I’m not mistaken. It’s more difference than eating 2 different level 80 meals. You may not be complete kitten to the rest of the party, but you’re certainly doing less than you could be for them.

You are mistaken in a couple of ways, but it’s easy to remedy.

You get the equiv of 20 stat points for each trait point, not 10.
A complete set of 80 exotic armor has 763 stat points.
A complete set of 80 blue armor has 548 stat points. (215 fewer, divided between 3 stats)
Explorer’s armor has non MF stats of 448, all offensive stats, so it’s sorta like wearing knights without the toughness.

In another game where stats only come from the gear, those 315 stat points lost to magic-find would seem like a big deal. Applying that reasoning to GW2 is mistaken.

Naked, your character has the equiv of 7900 stats. Full exotic with no MF gives you 10050 total stats, not counting runes upgrades.

Missing out on 315 potential stat points, out of that 10050 stat points represents a cost of about 3% overall stat points. You could, of course, do MF on jewels, choose of the traveler rune, etc.

I think the important thing is to notice there is a cost in performance of wearing magic find, but it’s not all that huge. Given that most of a character’s performance is NOT from gear, your choices in weapon set, utilities, and deploying skills/dodge/positioning matter so much more.

MF gear does not make you a glass pea shooter. It’s a handicap, but not all that much. This makes sense when you think of how everyone wears magic find gear while farming in the highest level zones, and we get along just fine.

Well LightningL, since you brought it up, what do you think the rankings reflect?

Why is GW2 the number one rated there?

It’s so frustrating that these problems are still here, and seem to be getting worse rather than better.

Sylvari T2 are verdant, but the poster is asking about armor.

Cultural armor is for looks, not performance.

While you’re leveling, whatever is cheapest, imo.
Check the trading post. Most of the time you can find good gear (say masterwork) around your level that you can buy for just a handful of copper more than its vendor price. So buy it, equip it, never repair it, and sell it off to replace. It’s really cheap rent.

I’d say get to work on all the other parts of it. When you have all the ingredients for it, either buy or gamble.

In no way are rates good for mystic forge precursor attempts, not in any sense of the word “good.” But they have stated they’re making them easier to get, such as dropping more frequently.

I think what Warjin is wanting is that if you right-click and move the camera, that the character should be animated as if looking up and down and left and right.

Whereas the character animation doesn’t respond at all until you make him move.

It’s not the movement or the controls, but rather the lack of interaction with the animation.

I think if it’s a deal-breaker for you, better not hold your breath. They’ve had a lot of problems with the camera fov and feel. I think we have to accept it’s as good as they can make it.

I think you all are missing the mmorpg.com point.

They love GW2 there. It’s by far the top rated game.

But whatever that measurement represents, it’s not market share (or anything else relevant). They have WoW with equal market share to Aion? They have Secret World as a strong #2 of all MMORPGS?

GW2 is highly rated there, but I think the numbers could just as well be random.

plasmacutter.2709:

mulch.2586:

plasmacutter.2709:

Additionally, it rewards people who cripple their effectiveness for their parties in dungeons and dynamic events, making them harder to down.

You won’t cripple your effectiveness, because gear stats only comprise 21% of the stats affecting your character’s performance. Most of it comes from your level and traits. Not to mention skills and how you deploy them.

I’m not buying the 21% effectiveness thing.

I have a pretty standard GS build on my mesmer and all rares on it.

People in exotics hit spatial surge for 1.5k

I hit it for 900.

Gear matters more than 21%

I’m not saying it’s 21% of your power. I would have to see your character to calculate it. My mesmer on a light armor target from max distance my hits are 260-508 (Knights & Soldiers/Divinity with 10 points in domination).

But you have 916 in every stat, naked. You get the equivalent of 1400 stat points in traits, plus whatever effects you have selected. Your weapon itself adds about 1000 to your damage multiplier.

In contrast, a complete set of exotic armor gives you a grand total of 763 stat points, divided among 3 different attributes. If one of those 3 attributes is MF instead of vitality or precision or whatever, you’ve still got all the rest.

The reason I went to look closer at the GW2 math is I kept finding myself wearing my MF gear and not noticing any changes. I wear MF for what’s supposedly the most challenging zones in the game. Am I a brilliant player? No, it’s just that gear stats don’t matter very much, mostly because they make a relatively small contribution.

Other games you play, all or almost all of your stats may be on the gear. If you’re used to playing those games, you can have false beliefs about their efficacy here in GW2.

plasmacutter.2709:

Additionally, it rewards people who cripple their effectiveness for their parties in dungeons and dynamic events, making them harder to down.

You won’t cripple your effectiveness, because gear stats only comprise 21% of the stats affecting your character’s performance. Most of it comes from your level and traits. Not to mention skills and how you deploy them.

I think that site’s rating system is just screwy.

It had GW2 way up on top followed by the Secret World in the 2nd slot. Except even Funcom thinks TSW is stinking it up. And it has Aion ranked exactly equal to World of Warcraft.

Random numbers would have more validity.

Keep in mind that stats from gear are only 21% of the stats that affect your character’s performance.

So yeah, you could have had 165 more toughness if you’d gone with Sup rune of the guardian instead of traveler. But you were born with 916, and maybe have 300 from traits, and it turns out those 165 points just aren’t all that super important if you use your skills.

Give to an alt?

Horheristo.3607:

I this only happening in US servers?
I’m in Gandara EU and haven’t experienced any difference in any zone.

People are still attempting Balthazar, Orr chat is always active, everyone still do all the dungeons. Lucky server or American behavior?

Yes in the US we’re in the middle of a big family-oriented holiday weekend, second only to Christmas in scope. Myself, I’ve logged a total of an hour since Wednesday, whereas I’d usually spend a few hours per day.

If I plopped out the maths, I doubt you’d appreciate it.

But… look at the forumulas. I’ll do the simplified approach.

Power + weapon strength is in regular and crit damage both, straight up multiplier.

Precision * crit damage is a component of crit damage.

What you can see from this is there’s no cap. GW2 doesn’t need to build a cap into the equations, because the ceiling comes from itemization.

Most of your stats aren’t on your gear. Gear makes up about 21% of all your points. The lesson from that is you’ll get a lot more mileage from adjusting which traits you have and which skills you select, rather than puttering with your gear.

Looking at the equation, where you have the product of precision and crit:
Remember back to math class and maximizing quadrilateral area with a fixed perimeter. The max area comes when you have a square. Ergo you should strive for a balance of precision and crit.

There isn’t a single correct answer. If you have sigils and traits that proc off of crits, bump precision up a bit higher. But keep in mind that both regular and critical hits’ damage is proportional to power.

I think not actually very many of the 2 million are in a funk about fotm. I think an awful lot of people found they’ve run low on things to do in-game and there’s a whole pile of things to do elsewhere.

Planetside 2 free to play launched, actually a bunch of new games, holidays. The univ here dead week started, etc.

It was surprising to me to see only 4 full servers on a Saturday.

Me, I played a little on my 3rd alt, but meh. My gf’s given up a while ago, played for Mad King, and then came in for the karka event and hated it, said she’s so over GW2. She’s someone with a completely packed HoM.

Sometimes it’s time for a break.

When it’s ready™

Something I found reassuring was in an interview on mmorpg it was reiterated the value of being able to do fun stuff with your friends wherever

overdue but not neglected

Fortunately, only 4 of the servers were full today when I looked, so you can at least have some hope of transferring.

If you’re concerned about price, consider getting one of the “free” sets for armor, so you can save your money for accessories.

With the big increase in karma since launch, those sets are very accessible. I know someone who just got his first 80 and had more than enough to get a full 6-piece exotic set, no farming required.

There’s also dungeon armor/weapon, which is “free”. Whether you do it 1 run per day or do all three paths (60 tokens per path), you build it up pretty quickly.

In a game where you can just buy gold for real money, I can see that going the quick route and spending gold for it is definitely an option. But if you’re cost conscious, it’s prob’ly not the best way, because prices are inflated by the people who aren’t sensitive to cost.

It was interesting to log to the server-select screen and see only 4 servers on “full”

Jasher.6580:

mulch.2586:

Jasher.6580:

I agree with the OP. I think conditions should do MORE damage than direct damage, especially since they haven’t even fixed them doing damage to objects. They also need to fix confusion damage… right now confusion damage sucks.

As a Mesmer, I have a huge problem when it comes to how Confusion is handled in PvE.

Confusion is a lethal player-killer.

I get that people are sad their skills only work for parts of the game. But that’s true about a lot of things. It feels like you’re complaining that your screwdriver doesn’t pound nails right. Ok, but it’s an awesome screwdriver, use it for that.

It’s like me complaining that my guardian’s staff doesn’t have any range. Well, it’s not a ranged weapon. Could it have been? Yes, but not in GW2.

Any build/playstyle in GW2, think about it like something in your toolbox. What job do you want to do? Which tool is right for the job?

There’s only one burn on any target. It can’t be an object. Does that limit my guardian? Yes, unavoidably, because burn is central to guardians.

There’s only one poison. There’s only 25 bleeds. Those are the rules. Learn how to play with them.

I’m not sure if you play high end spvp extensively… but condition builds don’t do very well. That is a fact. So saying that Confusion is a “lethal player killer” is a bit laughable when placing it in a competitive arena. Control and high burst damage is the name of the game.

I do spvp frequently, but have only done free tournaments.

Being able to remove conditions is essential in pvp, much more so than in the pve world. I mostly play guardian, but I did get 50 wins on my thief. On my thief, if I had confusion on, and did an ability or two without removing it first, I’d end up dead. Do an unload or pistol whip and you’ve just dealt a couple thousand damage to yourself.

Condition builds don’t do well, but condition damage does matter. You get the screen while waitin to rez and can see what hits you took. I have extremely good condition removal, yet I’ll usually have 30+ bleeds showing. Maybe that’s just a function of me being high toughness defensive build with very high protection up-time, it takes a long time to kill me.

Regardless, the thing we as players need to do is take the rules of the game and do the best we can in that context. To the point I almost never play my ranger in spvp, because it’s a bad setting for a ranger (and who, incidentally, is extremely vulnerable to condition damage, sorely lacking effective removal options). My ranger was my first 80, but he’s mostly just my farmer because that’s what he excels at.
Do what you can in the context of the game.

I thought they were constant, based on your level.

It’s important to recognize that stats from gear make up only 21% of a player’s stats.

It’s important to recognize that, thus far, the increase from exotic to ascended has been very small.

Right now if you got all 3 of the new items, you’ll experience just over 1% increase in damage, for example.

This supposed change in the stat cap is so small in its effect on character performance that it functionally is the same as it was before.

So if you’re a casual gamer and don’t want to do what it takes to get it, you’ll be fine.
That 1% increase in performance will neither trivialize old content, nor lock you out of doing content from being underpowered, except for Agony. And of course the only places you need to protect yourself from Agony will be the places where you obtain that gear…

GW2 is a game that supports/encourages playing multiple characters. If you try just one you’ll very quickly run out of anything to do.

This is absurd. You earn loot in pve. Crafting mats, junk loot, vendor blues and greens, salvagable drops, money from DEs. All of which convert into gems, among a great many other things.

sPvP you don’t. You only get gems by winning paid tournaments, which cost tickets to enter, which are purchased with gems.

There may be a slight stat advantage, but there’s no performance advantage.

I pre-purchased the collector’s edition for my son.
It’s not worth it.

Buildcast at gamebreaker tv!! Cuz it’s better to watch a show than do icky homework.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Leonard.2867:

mulch.2586:

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

Its not the amount, its the principle.

Actually it’s the interest that’s killer.

(And yes, that’s relevant, if we look at the “treadmill” as a compounding interest curve we are in so much trouble . . . )

How? This compounding interest is like what my bank pays for checking accounts. I always keep a few thousand $$ there, but at tax time there’s almost nothing to claim.

Compounding fractions of a percent is non-zero, but infinitesimal.

Leonard.2867:

mulch.2586:

Merthax.5172:

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

Mindset is a big deal. Especially with a playerbase that really doesn’t understand how the stats figure in, and a game that lacks a DPS parser.

So some people react because they really just wanted something to work on, and this, no matter how trivial, is something to work on.

Other people react into panic mode about a gear treadmill without taking note of how very flat this treadmill is.

My hope in putting this thread up was to give a way that doesn’t rely on players doing algebra, and give some concrete information about how little the gear matters — in hopes of getting a more relaxed atmosphere about it in the community.

Um, in general treadmills are flat. Its not the treadmill itself, but the Gear part of the treadmill. If we look at it in the sense of +stats; the question we should ask is, why can’t people be satisfied with a visual treadmill? Esp. when +stats offer no true progression.

I wrote a thread about this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Vertical-vs-Horizontal-a-compromise/first#post839846

I think except for trivial amounts of stats, what the ascended is shaping up to be is a gating mechanism for some of the content – the Agony mechanic.

The stats are such a small influence that it’s basically horizontal. A 1% slope is 99% horizontal.

As to why can’t people be satisfied with graphics-only progression, I think if you visit gamespot, mmorpg.com, and sites like that, there was a lot of negative information about how easy you get to 80 and max gear.

My son said Pokket (who had an exclusive interview with Colin J of Arenanet) wrote of the experience of too easily, too quickly reaching max and then feeling lost and unmotivated. When I try to find what he read, I can’t find it because there’s so many hits to “guild wars 2 has no endgame.” To win back those who’ve left, and to win new customers, Arenanet needs to counter that perception.

Adding ascended gear and an infinitely progressing set of FotM dungeons gives an answer to those who need something to work on. People are dumb enough about stats that they’ll see it’s a higher color and just assume it’s meaningfully better, despite the actual math.

I think Arenanet intended it to be the compromise — throw a bone for those complaining about no endgame and nothing to do, whilst keeping a very horizontal progression.

Enzomiles.6197:

My response to this type of post is here…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Haggling-Over-the-Price/first#post842250

I saw that, funny! glad the moderators weren’t knee-jerk about it

On the other hand, so many of the 10k posts on ascension have been panics about having to keep up to compete in wvw, or feeling forced to get the gear — for those concerns, the miniscule influence is relevant.

Merthax.5172:

The mechanical advantage of the increase in stats from ascended will be fairly small once aggregated with naked stats, traits, and slots for which ascended doesn’t exist (yet?).

The problem is that it’s going to have a big influence on the mindset of the in-game community. For a lot of people, gameplay is going to focus on acquiring that higher tier gear, even though the benefit is small. Likewise, it’s going to add a sense of elitism in grouping…if they’re even running other content at all. What this ends up doing is dividing the community.

It isn’t the mechanics of the change so much as it is the meta-game aspects that bother me. If I could find a server that had a community that largely eschewed ascended gear and maintained the attitude of running fractals “just for kicks,” I think the addition of the gear would become transparent.

Mindset is a big deal. Especially with a playerbase that really doesn’t understand how the stats figure in, and a game that lacks a DPS parser.

So some people react because they really just wanted something to work on, and this, no matter how trivial, is something to work on.

Other people react into panic mode about a gear treadmill without taking note of how very flat this treadmill is.

My hope in putting this thread up was to give a way that doesn’t rely on players doing algebra, and give some concrete information about how little the gear matters — in hopes of getting a more relaxed atmosphere about it in the community.

Moddo.7105:

mulch.2586:

Another way of looking at the effects of statistics improvements via gear is to look directly at the damage formula.

Here I’ll take the simplified damage formula for direct damage skills.

Damage is (weapon damage + power) times some scalars, then divided by the target’s (armor + toughness).

Weapon damage depends on 1h vs 2h and all, and there’s a range with random variation, so let’s just take 1000 as an average for that. A typical lvl 80 exotic character may have 916 power while naked, say 200 power from traits, 236 from armor (that’s the max power karma set), 426 power from accessories, and 180 from weapons (going full zerker). In the damage formula, the variables that come from your character add up to 2960. Now imagine you get all 3 of the new ascended items, again going full berserkers. Each adds 11 power, for a total of 33. This is an increase of just over 1% to your actual damage output.
The relative improvement is a bit more if you have very conservative/tankish/defensive gear, potentially getting as high as 2% increase in damage, or so.

I’ll admit, I was as infuriated as anyone when I saw they were adding a new tier. And then I did the math. At this rate, all it’s doing is giving us something to work on. The actual effects on character performance will be so small as not to adversely affect the tuning of previous content. You also won’t actually see any relevant performance differences in wvw or how many skills it takes to kill a mob.

So what happens in months from now after they have added just a little increase 10 times over. IT is principle of how they changed the game from what they sold us.

Well, they’ve added maybe 2% to a defensive player’s dps by affecting a quarter of the item slots. If they do yet another complete about-face, even if they add ascended gear with stats that are double exotics, that’s still about +21% to total stats.

This illustrates how very flat and non-gear dependent the GW2 system is. Other games make stats really matter. GW2 makes them just eye-candy.

I find irony with this, given all the doomsday screams that the event (and Mad King before it) flooding the market with fancy salvageable drops was crashing the market.

I guess it both collapsed prices and caused rampant inflation at the same time?

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

Sincerely,
A very disappointed and frustrated player.

I understand being frustrated and disappointed. I have been disappointed with GW2, too, altho mostly with the farce of When it’s ready™

With the ascended gear, understand that right now if you got all 3 slots with an upgrade, you’ll see about a 2% increase in dps. It is something to work toward, but in no way will your character be kitten if you decide to skip it. The only thing you’ll need it for is pursuing content with Agony (which means you’ll be doing what it takes to get this gear just to deal with Agony).

Another way of looking at the effects of statistics improvements via gear is to look directly at the damage formula.

Here I’ll take the simplified damage formula for direct damage skills.

Damage is (weapon damage + power) times some scalars, then divided by the target’s (armor + toughness).

Weapon damage depends on 1h vs 2h and all, and there’s a range with random variation, so let’s just take 1000 as an average for that. A typical lvl 80 exotic character may have 916 power while naked, say 200 power from traits, 236 from armor (that’s the max power karma set), 426 power from accessories, and 180 from weapons (going full zerker). In the damage formula, the variables that come from your character add up to 2960. Now imagine you get all 3 of the new ascended items, again going full berserkers. Each adds 11 power, for a total of 33. This is an increase of just over 1% to your actual damage output.
The relative improvement is a bit more if you have very conservative/tankish/defensive gear, potentially getting as high as 2% increase in damage, or so.

I’ll admit, I was as infuriated as anyone when I saw they were adding a new tier. And then I did the math. At this rate, all it’s doing is giving us something to work on. The actual effects on character performance will be so small as not to adversely affect the tuning of previous content. You also won’t actually see any relevant performance differences in wvw or how many skills it takes to kill a mob.

Let’s look at stats and the GW2 character.

You get 5496 total stat points, while naked, just for being lvl 80. That’s 916 Power, 916 Precision, etc. Incidentally, you’re already born with 50% bonus crit damage, too, but I’m going to leave that out, because it’s built into the damage formulas already.

You get 70 trait points, each of which translates to the equivalent of 20 stat points (for example my guardian can spent 1 trait point and get 10 precision and 10 condition damage), for a total of 1400 equivalent stat points. Here I’m using equivalent stat points because of how the item budgets work. For example, you could have a helm with 45, 32, and 32 stat points, or you could have one with 45, 32, and 2% crit. Or with Traits, you can get 10 condition damage or 1% crit for a trait point.

Damage dealt is based off weapon strength, which for my guardian is 950ish or 1050ish, so let’s just call it 1000 which directly adds with power in damage calculations.

So… a character without any stats from gear already has 7900 equivalent stat points.

A whole exotic armor set has the equivalent of 763 stat points on it, i.e. less than 10% of your naked stats. An exotic 1h weapon has 218 stats. A ring 163. Earring 96. Amulet 218. Grand total is about 2150 from your gear (not attempting to count runes vs seals vs orbs – just leave them out, cuz they’re not on ascended anyway).

Your total character stats with equipment equate to 10050 (minus upgrades), of which 7900ish aren’t even from your gear, approx 79% of your stats. With gear making up about 21% of all your stats combined, making even what looks like a decent size increase on a single piece doesn’t affect your character’s overall capabilities.

Asglarek.8976:

EndlessDreamer.6780:

Exotic Berserker’s Ring (Without Slot item)

As you can see, Berserker’s Ring Exotic vs Crystalline Band Ascended are not hugely different. 10-11% difference overall.

Now apply that 4 more times over the entire trinket slot throw in the back piece as gravy and you have 50% increase in stats just from those 6 slots.

It’s 11 power per 3 pieces, if you’re going max power build. The net effect on your regular direct attacks, for a typical exotic-80 character will be about 1.25% increase in damage.

Here’s another way to look at it.
You get 5496 total stat points, while naked, just for being lvl 80.

You get 70 trait points, each of which translates to the equivalent of 20 stat points (for example my guardian can spent 1 trait point and get 10 precision and 10 condition damage), for a total of 1400 stat points.

Damage dealt is based off weapon strength, which for my guardian is 950ish or 1050ish, so let’s just call it 1000 which directly adds with power in damage calculations.

So… a character without any stats from gear already has 7900 equivalent stat points. (here I’m talkin equivalent stat points, because for example on a helm you could have 32 precision, say, or 2% crit, so those 2% crit are the equiv of 32 stat points)

A whole exotic armor set has the equivalent of 763 stat points on it, i.e. less than 10% of your naked stats.

That’s why if you add 11 power to a back armor piece, it really doesn’t add up to anything detectible. Even if you do it across the whole set, the vast majority of the stats that enter into your character’s performance come NOT from gear, so small-moderate increases on all the pieces still doesn’t add up to much.

A more direct way to determine all this is to look at the forumulas, but that takes algebra.