Captain Bulldozer

If you're bored with it, you're not wrong.  But don't expect everyone to agree with your opinion either.  I, for one, really detest games with a gear treadmill.  To be honest, even the way GW2 handles gear is pretty poorly designed in my mind, since you pretty much only get "good" gear at the points where you really don't need it any longer.  Sometimes, you get rewarded for doing something with gear that's quite a bit below what you kind of needed to get through that content in the first place.  I see no reason whatsoever, for example, that for doing map completion in the Cursed Shore (a lvl 80 zone) I should be rewarded with at most lvl 78 gear.  I see no reason why one of the best ways to get exotic gear is to re-run the same dungeon (seen by many as end game content) 10+ times, only to finally get the gear and have no real reason to have it, except to do it all over again in another dungeon.

In GW1, you could obtain max level gear pretty early on, which made the game more about skill and strategy than simply having the best gear stats.  In my opinion, GW2 gets this wrong.  What the OP is proposing sounds to me like he wishes Anet got it even more wrong than they already did.

Ways of making money from Karma that I can think of include: (in no particular order)

1)  Using it to make food and then selling the food  -- This can be quite profitable as long as you are making/selling the right stuff.  You may need to buy/make additional ingredients, but if done right you can easily come out well ahead of your costs.

2)  Getting exotics and dumping them into the mystic toilet  -- This probably isn't a great money maker, but if you happen to get a precursor, it'll be well worth it.  Otherwise you might still get lucky with a valuable drop/rune/sigil.

3)  Orrian Jewelry boxes -- Others have covered this

4) ???  -- Some possible future use

Gilles VI, on 10 June 2013 - 08:47 PM, said:

From a statistical perspective, you're both a little bit wrong.  What you're referring to is called "volunteer bias", and it occurs when the sample consists only of those who volunteer to do the survey.  While it's generally believed that such surveys "almost only attract people with negative feelings" this is not quite correct.  In fact, various studies have delved deeper into the psyche of "volunteers" and found some interesting properties.  Volunteer surveys tend to attract both extremely positive and extremely negative people in almost equal measures.  More than that, those who volunteer are often more well educated, more interested in the results, from higher social standings, and several other unexpected features.  

At any rate, there's no real question that the survey results on glassdoor are not truly representative of the employee population at A-net.  Still, that doesn't mean that what these people have to say should be rejected or ignored, as they are still sharing their personal feelings (and as suggested those opinions may be coming from some of the more educated and invested employees overall).  

And yes, this topic has been brought up in SEVERAL other threads (at least once by myself), so there's not really much new to say regarding how these comments shed light on the behind-the-scenes operations of GW2.

Even though a lot of people are ignoring it, Necro with a staff and wells has crazy AoE damage and capacity for tagging.  Even though conditions are kinda so-so for group play (at best) they are actually really good for solo play... and many of Necro's AoE skills spread conditions like crazy too.  I've fought mobs of 10 lvl 80 risen solo just by doing a crap load of AoE and then running around while the conditions/well dmg dropped the entire mob.  Give em a shot!

Doctor Overlord, on 30 May 2013 - 08:19 PM, said:

For the record, at the game's last release, there were slightly over a thousand skills, not multiple thousandS. There were around 120 per class, with the core profs having slightly more than the others.  That means that any prof with a secondary had around 250 (or slightly more) skills to play with.  Even choosing 8 of those meant there were an enormous number of possible builds (pro-tip: to find out exactly how many, multiply 250 by 249 by 248 by ... etc. ... by 243 and divide the result by 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2.  Its a 15 digit number).  That being said, a lot (probably most) of those builds were utterly terrible and unusable.  So yeah, that's tough to do.  

However, that being said, the direct inspiration for GW1's skill system was the card game, Magic the Gathering.  That game has been printing expansions since 1993 or something, each one of at least 200 new cards.  You can use any cards in your deck you want (with some minor limitations), and at this point there are something like 11000 cards to choose from.  Despite that, the game has, not always but often, been quite well balanced.  The game's designers even write articles about how they manage to do it, with some very specific instructions and ideas.  I take this to mean that Anet could have done a lot better than they did, but just didn't have the resources/talent/desire to do it.  I still think GW2 could have been designed in a similar but less out of control way, to great effect.