I am a casual gamer with a level 80 Thief, and I have no time to grind, and I dislike grinding. Within 3 weeks of after hitting 80, I have got 4 exotics armor and an Exotic dagger on my Thief. All I did was doing normal quests and my other alts, and then leveling my crafting to Max. Then I craft my own Exotics. I bought some of my mats from the Trading Post, they were not that expensive, and I didn’t have to farm for stuff a lot or grind for gold a lot. I haven’t even visit ANY dungeon yet.
It is easy to get exotics - unless you really just want to get a particular look, then you are probably chasing down a particular set in dungeons or stuff.
Morrolan
4902
This is actually wrong. Exotics and legendary have/had exactly the same stats. When they talk about ascended sitting in between legendary and exotics they’re talking in terms of the time investment to get them.
Plus exotics do require a grind its just a relatively minor grind unless you saved like mad prior to 80.
We now have recipes for existing ascended items and they require pretty close to an insane grind just for 1 piece with full infusion.
Nesrie
4903
And combining enough rares in the forge is going to net you an exotic eventually.
Joe_M
4904
Can you blame people for not ascribing to your “horse is already out of the barn” approach to MMOs? I certainly don’t. While I don’t particularly care myself because I don’t like the game, I can see why they have chosen now to voice their concern.
Yeah, the thing that concerns me as a former player who might want to play again in the future is the gear gap if new and better gear is going to be continually introduced. The hope would be that you’d get to the level cap and by virtue of the leveling process you’d have competitive gear. I don’t know if this is going to be the case for returning players now.
Miramon
4906
Yeah, this is the quandary for almost all leveling MMOs.
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Cheapo approach. Offer no more level progression, just dribs and drabs of content, which isn’t enough to hold people’s interest. But at least you don’t have to spend much money while you watch your usage numbers decline.
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Smoke and Mirrors approach. Offer grindy gear progression with related content, to keep committed players involved (though even the fanatics will lose interest over time) but new and casual players may feel put off (or may even not be able to participate in content that requires it.) Periodically add yet more new gear and gear slots and gear adders with harder and harder bosses doling it out. Costs a bit more, but extends player retention, and since it’s very grindy, you don’t need all that much more expensive content.
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We-Love-You-Please-Come-Back approach. After first providing the grindy gear progression from 2 and then watching player numbers dwindle anyway, make an expansion, extending the level cap, making even ordinary level X+10 drops better than the old grindy elite level X stuff. This welcomes back lapsed casual and new players, but pisses off the grinders. And then you run out of content again, and the players once again go away.
I know very well those big zones with all their quests and events and stories and so on are a pain to produce. But I enjoy exploring them and leveling up that way infinitely more than crunching through dungeons over and over again. So IMO, the ideal design for GW2 would have been, let us say, a 100 level game capped at 50 for launch, with a new full zone every month, and a 5 level cap relaxation (with new skills) every two months so the original design is complete after 20 months of play.
A typical live team would be totally unable to manage this schedule, assuming that only the level 50 content was ready for the launch date. But if through some sleight of funding the main dev team had managed to do the whole thing ahead of time, and they were just releasing existing already-created content during the first year, I think the live team could scramble to add yet more stuff to keep the game fresh well into the second and even the third year, at which point they could let everything slide a bit while working on the magic 20 level expansion bundle.
This is actually wrong. Take a look at Mystic Claymore:
http://www.gw2db.com/items/68533-mystic-claymore-of-nullification
And then at Twilight:
http://www.gw2db.com/items/63469-twilight
It’s easy to see that Legendary Twilight is quite a bit better (by about 9%) than the Exotic.
Plus exotics do require a grind its just a relatively minor grind unless you saved like mad prior to 80.
From this point of view, everything in the game (and any other game really) requires a grind, only sometimes it’s minor. To get to lvl 80, to level up your crafting, to finish Personal story, to get a map completion. I guess when most people say “grind” they mean something that takes significant time. And “significant” is different for everyone, hehe.
We now have recipes for existing ascended items and they require pretty close to an insane grind just for 1 piece with full infusion.
I am not sure how many fractal relics you will collect by the time you are in lvl 10+ fractals (and that’s the only place right now where you need ascended gear with infusions) - I am at lvl 3 and have about 175 or so but I repeated a few with friends. I am guessing by lvl 10 you will have pretty close to 1350 relics required to buy the ascended backpiece.
If you want to simply craft it, there is nothing insane about 20g required to outright buy all the components. Not cheap or effortless but not insane either. It’s quite wasteful to pay ~14g to buy the globs as there are better ways to acquire them rather than outright buying but you could do that.
Besides, ANet said that as the time goes, they will introduce more ways to acquire ascended gear including WvW and stuff. We’ll see.
Contrai
4908
That site has the stats wrong, look in the comments and someone mentions that the stat is incorrect. I think in beta, legendaries had slightly better stats, but then people complained, and they made it so they had the same stats as exotics during release.
During the recent patch, they had altered the stats of legendaries to be the same as what ascended weapons would be, but I think they reverted that too, as they claimed it was a mistake and they wouldn’t do that until actual ascended weapons were released.
You can look at the GW2 Wiki, as atm it has more accurate stats of the various legendaries. They are pretty much the same as exotics. Here is a video showing the stats of an actual crafted legendary: Twilight
Ouch, my bad then. :) Obviously I don’t have any Legendaries and have to rely on out-of-the-game sources.
But jeez, if what you are telling is true about all that back and forth, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. :) I wonder if ANet really has a long term plan on what they are going to do with the gear in the game.
Sinij
4910
It appears that Anet long-term plan is to compete with WoW, so they will inevitably end up in an elephant graveyard alongside with TOR, LOTR, DnDOL, CoH and many more. Death by cash shop and irrelevance. We have seen that unravel more than once. The only difference this time appears to be that Anet didn’t even bother charging subscription, knowing F2P is all but inevitable.
Sigh, man, sorry but you seem to be so mad for whatever reason, you don’t even make sense anymore. No offense.
Last I heard LOTR and DnDOL are far from irrelevant, they make good money, have lots of players and are considered to be ones of the best F2P games out there. Whatever.
Wolff
4912
Grind = repetitive stuff you have to do to be able to do the stuff you want to do. GW2 is inherently less grindy then most mmos as the stuff you do in the game doesn’t change much at max level.
Amen.
We did dungeons, WvW and whatnot in rares all the same as we do them now in exotics, it doesn’t matter much. One of my friends, actually still has rares because he doesn’t care about gear and is too lazy to spend all the time to research and acquire it, even though he certainly has the resources to buy/craft/karma them by now.
We still managed to 3-man CM story a couple of days ago just fine, wiping only a couple of times mostly due to surprise and being overwhelmed by a bunch of stupid knockback Fighters.
Nesrie
4915
Sinji, I have certainly been a pretty harsh critic of games, especially games I want to like, but what I don’t fully understand is what you are unable to do with this game that you want to do? Are you unable to find a group? Is there content out of your reach? Are you having difficulty with PvP? WvW has some issues for certain… I mean really what is it you want to do that you feel is out of your reach?
Aeek
4916
I think its more likely that Anet’s long term plan is to continue with the Guild Wars model with their new iteration. Copying WOW has worked so well for others.
Having levelled a warrior to 40, I’ve now gone back to try a Guardian. Tried before but didn’t feel I grasped the game well enough to play them well. Dear god, I’m in love. Such a fun class.
When I wield a staff I feel like goddamn Gandalf. Then switch to 2 handed sword to become a highly mobile melee warrior with nice buffs and some cackle-worthy crowd control abilities. Fabulous.
Oghier
4918
GW2 has been clever about grinds. Some people enjoy grinding, or at least feel a compulsion to do so. For them, GW2 contains major grinds for neat skins, armor or weapons. Legendary weapons are absolutely astonishing in their requirements.
For those who just want to play, you still end up in the best gear eventually. There are many ways to outfit yourself in exotics. Even Ascended gear isn’t that hard to get, unless you consider running FoTM dungeons ‘grinding.’ I do not, as it’s good content.
I think this is a big part of their secret sauce, giving hardcore grinders long-term goals without making everyone else feel like second-class citizens. I hope they maintain it.
Unlike Guild Wars 1, Guild Wars 2 has progression! Mike OBrien talks about it during reddit AMA:
More generally, I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was. That’s why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PvE and PvP. In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2.
That’s why we’ve always said that GW2 rewards players through both progression and collection, whereas GW1 primarily rewarded through collection. Presumably players aren’t shocked that GW2 rewards through progression, since it has a level 80 cap.
Hehe, nope they haven’t been clear about that! :)
