Guild wars 2 is definitely no longer the same game as it was when it was first released. The addition of this ascended gear with fractals dungeon was like throwing a wrench in a functional near-perfectly working set of complex gears, only to have this working masterpiece go completely haywire due to theunnecessary wrench being tossed inside it lazily. Why lazily? I'll get to that.

The only reason ascended gear (Which is above exotic in the game, which WAS the best) was added into the game in the very first place, was because Anet felt the gap between making a legendary weapon and getting exotic gear was too huge. While that is in fact true (very much easy to get exotic gear), the legendary being made was just a cosmetic choice and something to keep a player playing. A goal if you would. It had the same statistics as an exotic-level weapon. IF the system needed an upgrade at all, all they should have done logically was to make the legendary weapon have more powerful statistics due to the insane amount of work it takes to create one. Adding in ascended gear into the game does not bridge a gap between exotic gear and something that is simply a cosmetic choice and goal, instead it makes exotic gear obsolete for literally no logical reason at all which is something that goes complete against their original designphilosophies.

Now I'll get to the lazy part of this wrench that was thrown into the game. The fractals dungeon themselves. First of all, in a nutshell it is basically like this... "We want you to play our fractals dungeon for ascended gear, but you will only have a CHANCE for the item to drop once a day, and if the ascended item drops it may not even have stats that you prefer or can even utilize." This is literally how it plays, the system revolves around RNG, luck if it drops and a random selection of stats for what you get, if you land the chance of it dropping. Normally this wouldn't bother me if everyone was rolling on the item however gear is distributed individually thus this literally makes about as much sense as bridging the "Gap" between legendary weapons and exotic gear in the first place. Right, it makes absolutely no sense at all.

Not included all the horrible design flaws, no group-finder mechanic, and problematic issues with the dungeon that drops ascended gear in itself, that's just the icing on this fail cake.

The games economy is completely destroyed as well in terms of legendary items. When the game was still a month old it was possible to get a thing called a "precursor" to make a legendary weapon with, for roughly 20-40g Which is still considered a lot of money in the game as Anet continues and continues to completely nerf any and all ways to grind gold into the ground. They have said, and I quote Anet developers, "We do not want players grinding gold, or grinding period." Yet this is one of the most grind-intensive games I have honestly ever played. A precursor for a legendary can go roughly 400-600g in the games auction house now. I have about 500 hours invested into the game at the moment and I only have about 220g at the moment. That is with INTENSIVE grinding and gold-per-hour calculations while finding the best possible exploits and spots for farming. What I'm saying is that every minute I spend in the game I literally try to maximize as much as possible because I am a hardcore min/max gamer. That being said, out of those 500 hours I've played the game, probably 350 of them has been a consistent back-breaking mind numbing grind including calculations for maximizing gold profit grinds and possible things considered as exploits by the developers. Still only 220g. The precursor is 500-600g and it is just one component to making a legendary weapon in the game. all together you're looking at 1200g or more for the rest of the mats. Now you can "make" the precursor item which is needed to make the legendary weapon. Only, its entirely based on LUCK lol. You put items into a forge and literally play a lottery game. 4 greatswords into forge, press button, hope for a precursor. I kid you not, I've put around 700 rare level 80 (max level) greatswords into the forge and have only received a mediocre amount of sub-par 80 exotic swords. What a fail of a game. What kind of game rewards hard effort with a RNG Luck-based system... ?? The ascended gear isn't as bad as this is, but it's still based on RNG as well.

Honestly at the moment I'm done playing guild wars 2. It became just like diablo 3 in a sense. The effort put forth, simply isn't worth the reward, because there is no reward in an RNG system. You either get extremely lucky, or you dont. I do not want to play a game where hardcore grinding effort put forth is rewarded with chance and luck. It's just stupid and it honestly feels like a free-2-play model, and truth be told, it is one.

I have a level 80 warrior who has a Full exotic tank set, a full exotic DPS set, and full Tier 3 cosmetic cultural armor and honestly, based on principles alone I can't play this game anymore with this fail ascended system and the fail legendary weapon system. It makes no sense and I don't agree with it at all. The sad thing is that you only realize this catastrophic failure after you put in a large amount of time. Everything else in the game is fantastic other than this ascended crap that was implemented and this legendary weapon thing. The economy is shot because nobody is playing so it makes attaining a legendary nearly impossible unless you want to grind for literally, plus my 500 hours in-game time, another 300-400 hours if PURE 100% grind to get it. No thanks, waste of time and fail system is fail.

Anet developers are the biggest hypocritesI've ever seen in my history of dealing with bullcrap gameplay.