koetje07

Anyone miss the days of going to playing an area is GW1 and hoping to get a storm bow, or a celestial skin or a chaos axe?

What about the icy dragon sword that only dropped in the imp caves?

Yes, I know that there are weapons that only drop in fractals, and if you farm a dungeon a million times, you get enough tokens to get some awesome armor - but what about doing some events in a area with the small hope of getting that perfect rare drop that only drops in a few places?

I miss that.

I think it is a way they could get players in to under-inhabited areas.

EDIT. PLEASE READ:

I am referring to specific skins of rare quality that would make them highly desirable being dropped in specific areas - not as chest rewards by specific bosses.

The idea would be that even though you may have a very small chance of getting said item, it would be enough to make people re-look at an under-populated area as a place to play and explore by adding the very rare change of getting a highly desirable drop in the form of a weapon or even a piece of armor.

I think the addition of such things would be most welcome.  Currently, most of the unique weapons/armor that can be obtained in game comes from the mystic toilet.  Even in GW1, there were unique (and highly desired) skins that were only obtainable from certain locations as well as special max weapons that dropped from certain bosses.  Every boss in GW1 had a unique name as well, so the weapons were generally named after the boss or other lore persona (i.e. Mallyx's Gluttony, etc.) .  As it stands now, even high level foes in the open world are non-entities, which takes away a lot of the flavor from a lore perspective... and who would want "Random troll champion's club of +100000000 HP?  Well, I suppose if it gave that much extra health we'd all want it, but I'm sure you get my point.

CalmLittleBuddy, on 03 January 2013 - 08:40 PM, said:

as some have already suggested (OP), creating map imbalance that favors the underdogs would be interesting. ontop of that, maps dont have to be one trick ponies. you could have a perma-dark area in an otherwise day/night cycle map, or a heavily wooded area in an otherwise open map. a section of the map that is a grand abandoned city.

right now, players arent actually running around looking for other players to kill. they are running around flipping camps, towers, etc, and the only time they run into the enemy is when one of them is beating on some door, and the enemy team decides that structure is worth enough points to bother defending. that is assbackwards. we should be running around looking to kill eachother to brag in eachothers faces (and gtfo out of here with this nameless invader bs) and only taking structures as an insult to the enemy when the enemy is refusing to come out and play.

Since the only legible part of your post is the subject, here's an answer: none of us care, its a completely personal question that is entirely subjective.  Make your own decision.

Ganondragmire, on 27 December 2012 - 05:31 PM, said:

The whole thread has zero constructivity in itself, the OP was merely stating a wide-known thing (namely, to use the Trading Post) while also letting the public know his current case he got (which is not the first story appearing on the forums), all the while trying to get sympathy (which by the some of the comments, you will see that he won't get based on the fact that scams already happened, Anet already said they don't have anything to do with trades outside the TP and by common sense of not trusting random strangers on the internet) in order to have a higher chance to regain his money.

All in all, the moral of the story: don't be greedy, otherwise that 15% cut you try to avoid may go up to a 100% cut. (and noone will give a damn about it other than yourself)

and the lesson learned is....

....don't trade with players because there is a TP.

What will realistically happen (best case scenario):

-Fractal improvements that were already stated
-WvW improvements that were already stated
-MAYBE 1-3 new fractals
-Small changes to dungeon rewards
-Another small boost to open-world loot (not enough to compete with dungeons/fractals)
-1 new map
-1 new jumping puzzle
-a bunch of stuff added to the gem shop and BLC
-some bug fixes and balancing

Don't put your hopes up people...

Dude no one cares.

Some people may argue that it is largely pointless to speculate about a future tier of gear when it has barely been released, and I would agree. However, it gets exceedingly tiresome to read thread after thread complaining about something that the vast majority of players hasn't put any effort into researching. This thread aims to remedy these misconceptions so we can have some constructive discussion.

I'd also like to apologize if this thread belongs elsewhere; I searched and hadn't found anything even remotely exhaustive pertaining to ascended items.

First of all, the goal of this thread is to provide a relatively sound prediction of the stat increases provided by the (relatively) new ascended tier of items. This is not a discussion of how incredibly game-breaking or difficult/expensive the gear is to acquire, nor is it a place to complain about some perceived "slippery slope." What this is, however, is a math-centric discussion where I wanted to project a reasonable estimation of the stat gains of ascended versus exotic tiers.

The first, and most obvious, problem is determining the power of the ascended tier relative to the others. The wiki provides a nice summary, but the data for the tier we want to examine is missing: http://wiki.guildwar..._rarity#Quality. We can draw two conclusions from this. Either the ascended tier will follow the pattern found between the rare and exotic tiers, providing a 185% power increase, relative to the base tier, or we could find a suitable regression. Obviously, to help choose our assumption, we can look at the already-released ascended items. Namely, the backslot items and the rings.

Rings:
Exotic: 67 + 48 + 48 = 163 + 55 = 218
Ascended: 108 + 68 + 68 = 244

Note that the extra 55 for the exotic piece comes from the stats provided by the jewel. I am also ignoring the agony and the extra stats provided by the upgraded infusions.

% Difference = (244 - 218) / 218 * 100% = 11.927%

Backslot:
Exotic: 22 + 16 + 16 = 54 + 48 = 102
Ascended: 56 + 35 + 35 = 126

Note again that the 48 is from the stats provided by the orb. Once again, the infusion stats are ignored.

% Difference = (126 - 102) / 102 * 100% = 23.529%

According to the wiki, if the 20% relative power increase pattern continues, the ascended tier should be 12.12% more powerful than the exotic tier. Proof:

Since the backslots tend to have reduced consistency stat progression-wise than rings (6.25% between rare and exotic, compared to 10.10% between rare and exotic for the rings), I chose 12% as my  overall conversion factor to approximate the ascended tier stats.

Next, I wanted to compare the exotic stats to the ascended stats. However, it is important to understand that you cannot compare the stat increase that the ascended tier provides over the exotic tier. This is because a very large and very significant portion of your stats are inherently provided by your character itself. At level 80, you have 916 base points in the four main attributes, and an additional 1400 that are gained via traits.

Character Based Stat Points = 916 * 4 + 1400 = 5064 stat points

The following are the calculations for the stat points for the gear tiers:

Exotic Tier:

So, for the exotic tier, your gear provides 43.05% of your overall stats.

Ascended Tier:

The ascended gear provides 45.89% of your overall stats.

To easily compare the two, we'll just find the difference.

45.89% - 43.05% = 2.84%

If, instead, the ascended gear turned out to be 20% more powerful than the exotic tier, the difference is 4.34%. If the ascended gear happened to be 40% more powerful than the exotic tier, the difference then becomes 7.70%.

To me, this seems like an awfully small stat increase to be complaining so much about. Furthermore, considering Agony resistance will undoubtedly become more and more widespread, I severely doubt it'll be anywhere near game-breaking. It may gate some content, but it's hardly the end of the world if you have to progress through earlier content to unlock further content. You didn't just start effectively traipsing through Orr at level 10, now, did you?

COMMENTS:

There are a few flaws, namely that I assumed zero stat point contribution via orbs placed in armor. However, since we are extrapolating the ascended gear stats off of their exotic counterparts, the results would be identical had we included the orbs. Furthermore, the rings show that the ascended tier shows an approximate 12% increase over the previous tier, including the jewel stats. Therefore, I believe it is a safe and accurate assumption to ignore the orb contribution.

Additionally, runes and sigils were ignored throughout. This was mostly to create an easier approximation and to form a sort of maximum "stat potential." That is, the effects of sigils and runes are far too diverse and varied to quantify into stat points.

In closing, please comment and correct any mistakes you find, or provide your own numbers/calculations so we can contrast and compare.

I thought it was like Dragonball Z where I can go Super Ascended Saiyan type of thing.

You are totally right.

Just finished this bad boy today.

So, I couldn't stop myself seeing what was possible with the notes we were given for bell choir. Turns out, since we got a dorian scale, things get a little trickier. Billie Jean is about the only well known song around that is written in the dorian mode. So, I pulled out a piano arrangement, adapted it to fit for handbells, stripped out all the notes that the Bell Choir can't play, and then started work.

Thanks to Arenanet for the awesome minigame that made this possible. Next time, maybe we can get a few more notes? Just throwing it out there...

Played nearly 3 hours last night with my brother, a serious rarity for me now that I have children, and we had a blast!

Bottom line is that we just did whatever we felt like, didn't sweat "progress" towards some ridiculous virtual goal, and mixed it up with different characters and events. In that 3 hours, we played four distinct game-modes, with 3 different characters each!

We started with an AC run, which was fun because we did a few things that we hadn't done before, rather than just speed-running it, and we had a few newer players to help along.

Then we went to EB to the jumping puzzle, which I'd never been to. It was a hoot. Didn't get far at all, but had some hilarious 3-way rivalries going with some FA & TC guys: yanking each other around and blasting each other off cliffs. Eventually, more TC showed up so we couldn't progress. Next time!

So the two of us ran around EB being obnoxious: taking camps, jacking yaks out from the middle of small zergs, stealing sentries, or drawing zergs to defend keeps from our two man "attacks". As a mark necro and focus mesmer, we eluded many zergs in some pretty epic chases. Didn't "accomplish" that much, but had some really fun cat and mouse going.

Finally, we dropped into tPvP, where we won our first tournament (we don't play much). We were mostly carried by a helluva thief player, but my brother and I had fun playing a psuedo-bunker-duo with strong team-fight builds. Our teammates were very nice people: didn't even complain when I bombed our first match (15 points maybe?)

So in 3 hours, we did a dungeon, ridiculous jumping puzzle + pvp, hit 'n' run WvW with some really fun chases (we had a group of 4 TC guys chasing us around for nearly 20 minutes), and a tPvP tournament. Never got boring, never felt grindy. We didn't really make much "progress", certainly not compared to focused grinding, but we had a lot of fun!

Much better than mindlessly trying to grind out some achievement, gear, or whatnot.

Well, I think for a third heavy armor profession we could have something like DK's from WoW.

We have a warrior.
We have a holy warrior.
We need an unholy warrior.

But this is only, if we want 3/3/3 professions.