What is the purpose of Prestige Armor?

So, I played Guild wars back in vanilla, or I guess Prophecies as it's called now.

I've been trolling through the wiki's, to see my "goals" to catch up on and I see giant lists, such as:

• Ancient Armor
• Asuran Armor
• Deldrimor
• Elite Canthan
• Elite Judge
• Elite Woven ...the list goes on and on.

My question though, is if all the armor has a rating of 60... What's the point of the armor? Is it purely cosmetic? Do people seriously spend oodles of time farming millions of gold worth of materials... just to have them mean nothing stat wise?

What's the difference between all these fancy armors, and my 1.5K Drok's armor?

Solution 1:

There is no functional difference at all in the game. All Prestige Armor is purely cosmetic in regards to gameplay. Yes, people do spend oodles of time farming and a crapton of plat and ecto on this. People used to do it mostly for, as the name states, prestige, to show that they had the time/resources/etc. to acquire the armor and as a gold sink, as there's not much else to spend it on once you have all the skills/runes/etc. that you want.

The main non-gameplay reason to acquire Prestige Armor now is to fill out your Hall of Monuments for Guild Wars 2.

I had never planned on Prestige Armor for exactly the reasons you stated: it's purely cosmetic and it costs a ton of time and plat to craft. However, I now plan on getting the minimum needed for my Hall of Monuments.