Will ANB Gold 5 become the Big Bracer Lottery?

[Kobal]

For context, I am assuming the following:
- For most/all specs having the correct pair of bracers for your spec is essential. (Frost Beam, Shockwave, etc....) Bounty Hunters are the lucky ones here, they basically don't care.
- Unless you invest significant amounts of real life money it will be difficult to impossible to accumulate the 100 Glory necessary to unlock the Bracers of Master recipe for your class in time for the upcoming ANB Gold 5 event. In particular since there may be other essential purchases as well (Slayer weapon enchant etc.)

This means that during ANB Gold 5 your final ranking will massively depend on whether you were lucky enough to drop a set of bracers with the required ability boost during the 4-5 hours you realistically can spend on XP/material/gear farming. From my personal experience that is one big coin toss, and not even a 50/50 one.

Yes, those who spent real money had an advantage during ANB in the past, but it was never close to that blatant.

I can think of two ways to fix this:
- Instead of having one Bracers of Mastery recipe unlocable for 100 Glory, split it up into ability specific recipes. Like Bracers of Frost beam, Bracers of Shockwave, etc ... which cost 20 Glory to unlock.
- If that is not an option, at least allow the ephemeral equipment boxed to be used to create targeted bracers where it is possible to specify the desired ability bonus. They would be only level 70, so just an emergency fallback, but still a lot better than completely missing out on the drop lottery.

Another argument that will be made is that this likely is a one time problem, since with more events eventually everyone will have the required 100 Glory to spend. To counter that I ask you to consider newer players. The current Glory cost for the Bracers of Master recipe will just further widen the gap between newcomers and established players.

[Fytten]

Feels bad.

Edit: That's why I'm going with a BH this ANB

[Ozymandius]

It is not so "impossible" to earn the 100 Glory. You could earn about 35 Glory in War Supplies, another 55 completing Season 2 [w/o paying anything, plus another 35 if you pay a low $10 entry fee], and 45 more from ANB by the time you complete trial 100. That is more than enough to purchase the Bracer of Mastery recipe without spending anything.

I am playing BH, so I have not seen enough advantage in having the "right" BoM to pull the trigger on that recipe in the current ANB. So far, I'm just playing the ones that I have gotten via lucky drops. I got a 69% Snipe bonus BoM on one Stalker BH in the ANB, but it only shaved a couple of seconds off my trial 100 time compared to my other Stalker BH running a level 72 medium bracer.

Plus, as you point out, this is only a short-term issue. By the next ANB event, almost everyone who wants one will have unlocked the BoM recipe.

Ever since the updated crafting system came online, spending money to get an advantage in an ANB has provided a "blatant" advantage. If you never have to run Severed Mountain 100+ times to earn enough gold for crafting or if you can skip the boss fights when grinding trials because you already bought the materials that you need for crafting, you have a huge advantage over players who have to spend time grinding gold and mats.

[NoSuchReality]

I could spend enough gems to get the mats and gold to craft the gear and skip but even in ANB gold that means 4-5 hours mob only farming and TSM type leveling. Still don’t think I’d do that much better, probably add a few maybe several hundred extra CLs. I think I’d rather claw my eyes out though.