Well, glad I held off on spending 5g on the guild back item. It does suck about accessories/trinkets though, since I spent at least 15-20g across my 2 toons crafting the right mix of power/vit/crit/precision.
Ascended is currently only for trinkets and backslots, so dungeon and lvl 80 exotic armor sets are still the best around**
as for infusion******hmm** This is like the "end-game" content in GW1, where you needed to ***plete a quest to infuse your armor set so that it could withstand the Mursaat, which were the main baddies in that campaign** If you didn't have it, they would melt you in about 2 seconds with Spectral Agony and there was nothing you could do about it** The new enemy skill seems to be a push towards that**
New maps******that's what this game really needs** A handful of level 80 PvE maps and sPvP make sense** Dungeons******not sure it's really needed to be honest, outside it being tied to Infusion and new campaign content**
That's actually a relief, backpack and rings I can live with. It was too early to invalidate all the armor/weapons everyone's been working for this whole time, glad they didn't go that route.
I could have done without the reminder of those damn Mursaat, though. I actually ALMOST BEAT that level even without Spectral Agony. Over and over I tried it, getting very deep into the map... finally giving up and realizing I had to do another mission to survive Spectral Agony. Not fun times...
This game does need new lvl 80 zones, but I can only imagine the amount of work needed to come up with all that content. Something without any Risen. At least Frostgorge and the CoF map have different enemy types other than just the dominant enemy (Icebrood, Flame Legion).
i've kinda given up on this game after leaving stormbluff isle. the friends i transferred to play with quit playing like... a week after i transferred.
will SI ever open back up or is it going to be full/closed for good?
Good article on GW2 Guru about this, basically Anet didn't anticipate players getting maxxed exotic gear this quickly, and that the gap between exotics to Legendaries is galactic... Players wants something to work towards that isn't necessarily a year away, hence Ascended gear.
Not a fan of the name, it smacks of GW1 nonsense but thus far in the game Anet really has done no wrong. They've earned my benefit of the doubt.
Also, Guru had a screenshot of an Ascended ring compared to a regular exotic, the stats are almost inconsequentially improved. We're talking, 5 more points in power or precision. I'm only referring to the stats, obviously. The big question mark will be the defensive/offensive upgrades, which the screenshot doesn't show. No idea what these will do yet so will wait and see.
Gear statflation is always met with mob statflation resulting no overall increase in character power and that is only after grinding, I seen it enough in WoW and by almost every MMO ever and don't want it here especially when the design goal of this game is to eliminate gear treadmills. Thinking about it Anet purpose for this new tier of gear is a tactic to pressurize players to buy more gems to reskin their new Ascended gear.
You always have that population that is going to max level in a weekend, then grind their asses off. I imagine many of them set up bots to farm ore in the first week or so before that became a big issue. Or, as per ANet's desires, simply purchased legal gold and bought a significant chunk of the mats they needed. Some were able to exploit early glitches with the forge and pump out a stack of Dusks, now going for 300g each. Never underestimate the dedication of the jobless gear-grinders out there, ANet.
Is there a database of all the exotics and legendaries available? I was under the assumption that they were marginally better and just provided something extra to do.
I am finding that the expense of crafting exotic jewlery is just, just, way too much for a marginal improvement over the rare jewelery (which already requires 3 ecto each--wtf?)
I will be sticking to rare (or maybe just master) and heading straight to ascended, depending on the details of how it is obtained.
I would say that if you don't already have exotic jewelry, that you are best in waiting to see what the new stuff does. I didn't find that the exotics cost too much. Really the most expensive part was the ore. Ecto really isn't that hard to farm once you hit lvl 80 (heck, go kill the 3 dragons and you are pretty much guarantied to get at least 1-2 rare drops which can either be sold if they are worth more than 1 ecto, or salvaged with a chance of 1-3 ecto).
Haven't been able to log in this week yet.. but hope I haven't been booted yet. Played some on Sunday.
I seriously don't buy their argument that this new tier is a reaction to people getting Legendaries far sooner than they ever imagined. Really? Come on, that's maybe 1 or 2% of the population right now. Most people certainly aren't going to try, at least not grind for it.
I'll wait and see, this does not smack of a money to me but again, time will tell. Even if it was, there's no monthly fee, and you're not forced to get Ascended gear nor are you forced to run this new content that requires it. It's all gravy at this point.
That's just a lame argument because you aren't forced to acquire exotics do play either. The real problem is in people with ascended gear they will have a small but undeniable stat advantage in WvW because they can grind gear like a second job and not because they are better players which is a symptom of like every MMO ever, and I speak this as a college student with tons of free time to burn. At least the game in its current state doesn't allow this to happen because exotics are easy to get and the stat ceiling was supposed to there for a loooooong time. Both won't be true when ascended gear hits.
As for gear progression, the system currently in the game is already inherently unfair and this update does nothing to change that. If I have 10 hours to play each week and it takes me 2 months to reach level 80... and my gear is all lvl 75 blues when I get there then it's unfair that other people are wearing full exotics. There's always somebody that gets left out in the cold.
ah, exotics. that makes sense....but why would they think that would take so long to get? All this could be done with relatively easy crafting?
It really doesn't take long if you just ran some dungeons as well. Seriously, even with just 1 character, running all paths of just 1 dungeon, you can get a piece of armor every day. If you ran 2 dungeons, well, that is 2 pieces. At most it should take a week to have full exotic armor, 10-11 days for armor and weapons. Now, say you have 2 characters that can run a dungeon, well cut that time in 1/2...
Seriously, it doesn't take long for full exotic gear. Once you add in the income you make in the dungeons, in that same time you should be able to afford to purchase exotic accessories, or the parts to craft them (AC you make 41s per path, not counting drops, so figure 1.5g for running the 3 paths, and to craft an exotic ear/ring/pendant it costs about 2g if you buy all your mats, so you need about 10g, which you would have in 7 days of dungeon running, which you would have done anyway for the other pieces of gear).