Guild Wars 2

Hi.

First of all, I can’t consider myself a casual. I have a legendary with a second one in progress, 7 Character level 80 in exotic or ascended, 3 Weapons professions at 500, etc

I also love fractal and find that in general the last update was awesome. Love the 3 new fractal (even if 2 of them are deja vue), the boss new boss fight are more fun compare to Jade Maw and the instability are really nice (even if i found some of them lazy design).

That said there is my problem. In my guild we are only 4 with high level of Agony Resistance. 3 with 55 and one with 45 AR. The rest of the guild have between 0 and 15 AR. Some of them play for a while, but don’t give a kitten about AR and Ascended gear, others are new players, others are too casual for that, and others just simply didn’t do fractal up until now. Since most of us in the guild are friends in real life or became friend with GW2 or in another game in the past we always prefer to play with people from the guild and only take pugs if we can’t fill a party by our own. He never had problem to do level 30 or 40 even with people without any AR. We showed them a how fractal work with 3-4 level 10, then trained them in 3-4 level 26 and they were ready to come with us in higher level. They had the skill and knowledge to do just find. Hell i even ask our guildmate to postpone as much as they can the moment they gonna put Agony Resistance in their gear. Why? So they can learn how to dodge it. And it worked. Most of them rarely down from AR even with no resistance at all in level 30+. The only thing we had to keep in mind was to have 1 or 2 with a good amount of AR so they could rez the others at Jade Maw. With the new fractal update more guildmate wanted to join us in our quest to reach level 50 (AGAIN) even some that never played fractal before. We were thrill to show them and bring them asap to higher level were the fun and challenge begin. We did level 30 and 31 with no problem (with only 2 of us having more that 15 AR). Yesterday we did level 32 with a similar group (2 55 AR, 1 45 AR, 1 15 AR and 1 0 AR). Everything went just fine in Swamp, Molten Facility and Aetherblades. But then we go for the Beserk and Firestorm Boss. Two of us down immediately before of Agony so we rez them (we were expecting that no prob). But then they down right after. We rapidly understood that Agony was everywhere. In all attacks but also when you just walk next to the boss with no apparent reason. We had to complete the boss with only 3 or us. Nobody else online in the guild had enough AR to help us out so we finally had to replace the 2 with low AR with some friend from another guild. So now we simply can’t bring people with not enough AR to higher fractal level because this Boss can appear in any of our run (the fight itself i love). People that have the skill to usually go in higher fractal. People that can dodge, block, reflect, etc anything that fractal had to throw at us now can’t do any higher fractal because in this fight you will have Agony whatever you do or whatever your skill as a player are. Now what are our options?

- We can simply stop playing with our own guildmate so we can pug our way to level 50. This will let down a lot of our guildmate because we will not have enough time to also help them to go higher.
- We can also help them to do lower fractal level so they can get their infused rings and back items. But that punish a bit those of us that already have the AR and wanted to go higher in fractal. People that don’t play enough will also be left behind as we bring some of our guildmate to higher level of AR. Take the train now because we won’t do low level fractal that ad vitam aeternam.

And now i’m not even talking about those we don’t want to go all the way ascended. Rings/Back Items are easy to get if you do fractal, Amulet with laurel is a joke now, we do Guild Missions so for those we come with us earring will be easy to acquire. But what about Weapons and soon Armor? That is freaking costly for casual. I didn’t mind about that because they were optional. In our guild, ascended was even optional in high level fractal. But now a lot of our guildmate are gonna be left behind.

My guild had basically the same problem last night, except our 5th person actually had just enough to live through the first portion of agony, but he was almost instantly downed because the bosses start right off with their agony attacks(one of which puts up to 3 stacks of agony on someone). People will say l2dodge or whatever, but for once I have to say that there really is too much to dodge on this boss. You can jump over the Zerkers waves, but it becomes really hard to keep an eye on him when he blinks to another area when there are 40 fire rings on the ground.

Edit: Even with 55 AR I was getting autodowned if I missed a dodge on the Firestorms fire circles which at 32 is just stupid.

Yea, the ar is a much harder limit now than it was, at least molten. However, seems the fastest solution is get infused items and buy ar on the tp.

That said it shouldn’t be that hard to build ar now. Each fractal run basically gets you +3.
Just getting to reward 8 should give you 2 +4s or 1 +5.

Anyhow I think the ar change is so you can buy your alts ar and also so that just by beating fractals you guarantee more ar than before.

Also apparently makes higher difficulties more exclusive. Seeing how some don’t want to party with newbs, looks like ar is how people can show fractal commitment

I guess I would disagree to some extent. Higher level fractals are/never were meant for casuals. They are meant for people who take the time to AR infuse their items and progress in a manner that it takes to reach those higher levels.

Lower level fractals are just as casual friendly as they always have been. In fact, with this new release, they are too casual friendly right now. I can’t even get a decent PUG group for lvl 15 these days because people are joining fractals they shouldn’t be. On a side note, who seriously is at lvl 15 and doesn’t know how to at least follow directions in fractals like Cliffside?

Fractals are suppose to be high end pve content. You are basically asking them to make it easier, so some of your friends don’t get “left behind”. I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but it’s too bad if that happens. You either take the time and effort to increase your AR level so you can progress, or you find something else to do. I don’t see how anyone is being punished here.

No cranked i DON’T WANT them to make it easier at all. Hell, i even found them a bit less difficult that it was. Some of my best memories of Fractal was when we had max 30 AR and level 40+ Agony just kicked our kitten pushing us to be perfect and dodge everything possible because 1 single errors could lead to a party wipe. But this is the difference. We needed skill and not only gear. Some of my guildmate did 10 or 20 fractals and were doing level between 30 and 48 with us. They were just fine, they had learn who to do fractal and how to dodge agony and they learned it the hard way in these level no almost no AR. This pushed them to be better player. I’m not talking about the difficulty. I’m talking about Agony that just can’t be dodge. Before it was only 2 wave of that at the Jade Maw, where you could easily rez people since we always had between 2 and 4 people with enough AR anyway. Some of these guildmates would eventually get their stuff ascended with full AR. But now they have to do this in low level either by their own or if we go with them and give up on our own progression. Others are skilled players that can dodge the agony, but don’t play enough to get ascended gear for a long long time. Usually we could still bring them in level 30+ but now we can’t. And i repeat, i’m talking about guildmate that are good enough in the game to dodge pretty much all the Agony and learn how to do fractal like everyone else in our group. We didn’t brought guildmates that were poor and couldn’t dodge with a clearic gear on them. These guys were welcome to all the guild activities except level 30+ fractal.

Mhmm It took us from 4pm to 7pm to complete a full chain. This is pretty long.
Maybe make it 2 normal fractals and 1 boss for a chain. 4 fractals is just ridiculous.

You can always play at a level that is between yours and your guildies lvl, hence you having still a rewarding fractal with chances of stuff (starts at 10) and they having a chance to lvl and get AR, and AR is even easier to get now since for agony slots on infused rings and backpacks you can buy higher then +5.

There however is a certain lvl you need to have AR for, and that’s not a bad thing, the game is not locking you out of any content cause you can play at the lvl you want.

Level 1 fractals gets you a minimum of 1g + 4x(30s). Not counting drops, including a higher than average potential of rares and exotics, lodestones/cores, and additional bags of coins.

And it’s easier.

Fractals are more for casuals at lower levels than before, and more for hardcore players at higher levels than before.

Fractals are more casual than ever because the difficulty from non-agony mobs has been reduced and farming agony to reach absurd levels is now possible – even via the TP.

Worse: you can also by-pass all instabilities! Yes: just ask/pay someone to open x0 levels for you and buy agony at the TP, tadam!

Zelyhn.8069:

Fractals are more casual than ever because the difficulty from non-agony mobs has been reduced and farming agony to reach absurd levels is now possible – even via the TP.

Worse: you can also by-pass all instabilities! Yes: just ask/pay someone to open x0 levels for you and buy agony at the TP, tadam!

I am not sure if you are making fun of the updates, or are serious….

I have been a hard core fractal runner, and now, I will do only the following:
1 lvl 40 / day
1 lvl 30 / day
1 lvl 20 / day

I use to do the following
2-3 lvl 40s / day
3 lvl 30s / day
3 lvl 20s / day

I have 3 chars in the 40s zone, all could get daily chests… what does that mean… that means I use to do 3 runs, helping others get through, now my motivation and rewards are extinguished.

I am not saying “I carry teams”. What I am saying is many of us “hard core Fractalers” use to do multiple runs daily, helping others lvl up through, but now…
Why would we? What that means is the chances of Joe Smoe casual player to get on a good team is much rarer, and the rage quit chance of a team is much higher…

I was in similar situation yesterday. I joined a group of few players from same guild and another girl who only has AR20. She was down instantly AR tick in molten duo bosses. :p after a few wipes… the boys finally spoken to tell her tht they had to replace her.. after replacing her with a friend, we done it in first go (lvl 39)
I find this bosses are harder with certain debuff..
anet maybe should review certain fractal maps against debuff at each progressing lvl to ensure its not overly insane or overly time consuming to complete

Totally agree.

But also the random quit from some people feels much higher than it used to be. Did run lvl 33 today with some guildies and one random…well actually we went throught 4 different randoms. Some of them not up to the challenge, another one did join during cliffside, where we had 2 mates down…and did leave right away. Helpful-_-

Thad you are confirming my fears that this new content is becoming too bad for new and casual players.

I like this bit a lot – "We needed skill and not only gear. "
This is meant to be the whole principle of the game – skill > gear.
You don’t need legendary/ascended – exotics or rare in most areas will do.
Now at higher levels in FoTM you will want those ascended weapons for the additional AR (as it currently stands) or upgrade the existing agony infusions you have.

With FoTM you need gear (Ar resistance) and skill without the both combined there is not much point starting. With the jade maw – you didn’t need everyone with MAX AR to allow others in a guild to level up. With the new bosses this becomes more difficult due to no real safe res points during the encounter (think Mia and cannons).

I found it “fun” doing FoTM lvl 20 without any AR and dodging the AR being dished out from the end bosses – this now looks more difficult than ever without being carried extensively.

Why would doing a level 20 without AR before the change be any easier than the same thing after the change, especially when Agony scaling has been softened a little bit pre-30? And you still don’t have to deal with instabilities?

And mob damage has been reduced across the board?

I don’t get some people. Play the game the same way you did before, and see for yourself if the changes made it better or worse. Don’t get your opinions of the game off of a website with jaded and angry kids bashing every change made because it makes them have to relearn some aspect of the game all over again, screwing up their daily grind routine.

AKGeo.6048:

Why would doing a level 20 without AR before the change be any easier than the same thing after the change, especially when Agony scaling has been softened a little bit pre-30? And you still don’t have to deal with instabilities?

And mob damage has been reduced across the board?

I don’t get some people. Play the game the same way you did before, and see for yourself if the changes made it better or worse. Don’t get your opinions of the game off of a website with jaded and angry kids bashing every change made because it makes them have to relearn some aspect of the game all over again, screwing up their daily grind routine.

It’s harder (if not impossible) to dodge the agony in some of the new fractals.
Previously you could pretty much avoid getting hit by it all the way up to the maw.
Now you can’t. So yes, it used to be easier with that perspective.

3 TIMES TODAY…. Casual Players leading a team… “oh, its been an hr and half, I gotta go to bed” LEAVE PARTY…… this is what it is becoming!!!!!!

Max Gladius.6930:

3 TIMES TODAY…. Casual Players leading a team… “oh, its been an hr and half, I gotta go to bed” LEAVE PARTY…… this is what it is becoming!!!!!!

Sorry I didn’t quite understand what you were saying because you weren’t using enough caps or exclamation marks.

eekzie.5640:

AKGeo.6048:

Why would doing a level 20 without AR before the change be any easier than the same thing after the change, especially when Agony scaling has been softened a little bit pre-30? And you still don’t have to deal with instabilities?

And mob damage has been reduced across the board?

I don’t get some people. Play the game the same way you did before, and see for yourself if the changes made it better or worse. Don’t get your opinions of the game off of a website with jaded and angry kids bashing every change made because it makes them have to relearn some aspect of the game all over again, screwing up their daily grind routine.

It’s harder (if not impossible) to dodge the agony in some of the new fractals.
Previously you could pretty much avoid getting hit by it all the way up to the maw.
Now you can’t. So yes, it used to be easier with that perspective.

Impossible? There isn’t a single non-boss fractal where it’s impossible to dodge or avoid the agony attack aside from the 30+ instabilities which automatically apply it. Please, tell me which of the three new fractals it’s impossible to avoid the agony.

Max Gladius.6930:

3 TIMES TODAY…. Casual Players leading a team… “oh, its been an hr and half, I gotta go to bed” LEAVE PARTY…… this is what it is becoming!!!!!!

make your own

AKGeo.6048:

eekzie.5640:

AKGeo.6048:

Why would doing a level 20 without AR before the change be any easier than the same thing after the change, especially when Agony scaling has been softened a little bit pre-30? And you still don’t have to deal with instabilities?

And mob damage has been reduced across the board?

I don’t get some people. Play the game the same way you did before, and see for yourself if the changes made it better or worse. Don’t get your opinions of the game off of a website with jaded and angry kids bashing every change made because it makes them have to relearn some aspect of the game all over again, screwing up their daily grind routine.

It’s harder (if not impossible) to dodge the agony in some of the new fractals.
Previously you could pretty much avoid getting hit by it all the way up to the maw.
Now you can’t. So yes, it used to be easier with that perspective.

Impossible? There isn’t a single non-boss fractal where it’s impossible to dodge or avoid the agony attack aside from the 30+ instabilities which automatically apply it. Please, tell me which of the three new fractals it’s impossible to avoid the agony.

The aetherblade retreat as well as the molten facility both have way more intensive agony in almost all of the attacks. The impossible was related to the Molten Facility final fight, where you can’t get around not having any agony resistance. In the Maw you could get around it easily by having one person with the appropriate AR. You can’t do that any longer.

As someone who is still only on Level 8 Fractals, can someone confirm for me what the recommended AR should be now? It used to be:

1 – 9: None
10 – 19: 5 AR is useful, but all Agony is dodgable.
20 – 29: 10 – 15 AR, but Agony is still mostly dodgable if you’re very skilled.
30+: ???

gw2 is casual enough as it is, fractals are like the only “hardcore” stuff and you’re still complaining ? Live it be.

Sorry but choosing to bring people that have zero AR into high level fractals where agony scales is not the same as fractals not being casual. Your problem is that you chose to handicap your guild groups. It’s like me choosing to do a dungeon naked and then claim that it’s not casual anymore because I keep dying. There’s absolutely no reason for them to be that high anyway when their personal reward level is much much much lower.

Also be aware that one of the fractal levels (45?) has you take constant agony damage.

Thaddeus.4891:

Some of my best memories of Fractal was when we had max 30 AR and level 40+ Agony just kicked our kitten pushing us to be perfect and dodge everything possible because 1 single errors could lead to a party wipe. But this is the difference. We needed skill and not only gear.

With this patch, they completely changed how fractals used to be.

Before, high level fractals were a skill-check. All the gear in the game couldn’t save you if you were a bad player who couldn’t dodge. With this, AR acted as a safety net, enabling people a bit less skilled to still go to the middle-to-high levels. So for pugs, when you were grouping with someone on the higher levels, you knew he was skilled enough to support his own weight, so taking a pug wasn’t really a problem (it became less true as they released more AR. In the end I was finding more and more people who couldn’t dodge at all in my daily groups).

Now, high level fractals have become a complete gear-check. All the skill in the world will not save you if you didn’t grind to get enough AR on your gear.

I personnaly think this change is quite a bad one. Gear-grinding in itself is quite bad. But if you want to compare it with raids in other games, at least in those you can try the fights to play better, to get better positionning, to perfect your dps cycle, etc., to lower the gear requirement even by a little. Gear is still superior to skill, by far, but skill still is an important component for the fights. After this update, this is not even the case for fractals, especially with the lvl X0 instability, where you get randomly hit by agony, like every 10-15s.

If you don’t have enough agony resistance, don’t go high levels. Simple as that. If your friends won’t get ascended items, either make them do so, play lower levels with them or find other people. With the new agony infusions dropping in almost every end boss chest, increasing the AR is not a problem. If people still refuse to increase theirs, then fractals is not for them.

As a fairly casual player who has no interest in Fractals, they have one important function. This is where I can direct all the players who complain about how easy the rest of the content is. When they want to change various aspects of the game to suit their high skill level thus making it less enjoyable for me, I can say “but that’s what Fractals are for”.

Max Gladius.6930:

3 TIMES TODAY…. Casual Players leading a team… “oh, its been an hr and half, I gotta go to bed” LEAVE PARTY…… this is what it is becoming!!!!!!

I’m one of those casual players. I barely ever complete a full chain. Don’t blame the players, blame anet for making it so time-consuming.

I agree pugging new fractal is almost impossible.

They are longer than before, you have unlcear mechanics (unless you read dulfy) and its even less lag friendly.

this thred is trololo? Or joke? New Fractal are so easy……….. im at 36 lvl 0 wipes and do it wis pugs only.

Forced agony checks were there even before. People just had ways to skip them.
So, basically, nothing changed.

Manuhell.2759:

Forced agony checks were there even before. People just had ways to skip them.
So, basically, nothing changed.

No. You could run fotm scales 40-49 with 45 ar relatively simply by not being hit by bosses and using water fields/tome at maw. Currently, if you progress normally you need 50-55 ar to complete scale 40 which makes all other scales relatively faceroll since you have already nullified agony damage to 1%/tick. That in turn makes all agony inflicting mechanics virtually pointless, except maybe decreasing heals by 50% (I’m sure that’s the point of agony).

I am 41 now, and did 1/3rd of the re-levelling from 30 with pugs. It had its annoying moments but it wasn’t undoable. We were also lucky to never get the dredge fractal while pugging.

For me the biggest shock was doing lvl 40 last night with 50 Agony resistance and getting eaten alive by the spiders at the whisps part of the Swamp fractral. For those that do not know, this fractal’s instability is getting constantly hit by Agony. The agony itself wasn’t that bad, but combined with the regular mob fights it made healing quite a challenge. Mango pies and rejuvenation boosters (who doesn’t have some of those from the achievement chests) helped a lot and we were done in about hour and a half. Yes, it was annoying that swithching weapons reduced my AR by 5 and the underwater fractal would have been a nightmare since almost noone has ascended underwater weapons.

Scripted agony is the worse idea ever.

Forkada.8376:

this thred is trololo? Or joke? New Fractal are so easy……….. im at 36 lvl 0 wipes and do it wis pugs only.

Ya its easy. Actually the new Fractal are easier than before. But you also used to need skill to go through most of the Agony attacks. Now, you need enough AR to receive 1% or 6% dmg max or you gonna have a hard time at the two new boss. But with this amount of AR, then all the other Agony attack of the fractal are simply useless and do almost no dmg since they last less time and are less frequent.

sirflamesword.3896:

My guild had basically the same problem last night, except our 5th person actually had just enough to live through the first portion of agony, but he was almost instantly downed because the bosses start right off with their agony attacks(one of which puts up to 3 stacks of agony on someone). People will say l2dodge or whatever, but for once I have to say that there really is too much to dodge on this boss. You can jump over the Zerkers waves, but it becomes really hard to keep an eye on him when he blinks to another area when there are 40 fire rings on the ground.

Edit: Even with 55 AR I was getting autodowned if I missed a dodge on the Firestorms fire circles which at 32 is just stupid.

The boss takes a few tries to get used to but after that its nothing difficult. Just zoom your camera out to max.

It took my party about 5 wipes the first run. When we met him again twice in further runs, we cleared it first time every time, and I can guarantee you I’m not the best at gaming. You just need patience.

IceVyper.6810:

We were also lucky to never get the dredge fractal while pugging.

Could you please, please, please send me some of your luck? Three nights in a row now.

Not everything in the game should be targetted at casual players. For any MMO to have good retention, it needs to be accessible to gamers of all levels of dedication.

haviz.1340:

Manuhell.2759:

Forced agony checks were there even before. People just had ways to skip them.
So, basically, nothing changed.

No. You could run fotm scales 40-49 with 45 ar relatively simply by not being hit by bosses and using water fields/tome at maw. Currently, if you progress normally you need 50-55 ar to complete scale 40 which makes all other scales relatively faceroll since you have already nullified agony damage to 1%/tick. That in turn makes all agony inflicting mechanics virtually pointless, except maybe decreasing heals by 50% (I’m sure that’s the point of agony).

Then is just a matter of balancing that type of instability better (but still doesn’t void the fact that they didn’t add forced agony checks just now, they were there even before).

LordByron.8369:

I agree pugging new fractal is almost impossible.

They are longer than before, you have unlcear mechanics (unless you read dulfy) and its even less lag friendly.

Sorry, but while I think the OP is completly wrong, this postis equally wrong. The only fractal quicker than the new ones is swamp, and even this is debatable when you find mossman at higher lvls.

There seems to be weird things going on with the Molten bosses. At one point nearly halfway through the fight I was standing it what appeared to be a completely clear area: no shockwaves, no red circles nearby and I was still being hit with agony somhow. Or other times there’s rocks falling around me, I’m not in the red circles, but I’m still getting hit by agony. I can’t help but wonder if it’s buggy.

But I must say, the difficulty is WAY OFF from the Jade Maw. It’s no where near equal. Quite frankly I think they need to remove a lot of the agony.. just make agony checks like the Maw in order to equalise them. Or add a lot more to the Maw.

Lothirieth.3408:

There seems to be weird things going on with the Molten bosses. At one point nearly halfway through the fight I was standing it what appeared to be a completely clear area: no shockwaves, no red circles nearby and I was still being hit with agony somhow. Or other times there’s rocks falling around me, I’m not in the red circles, but I’m still getting hit by agony. I can’t help but wonder if it’s buggy.

But I must say, the difficulty is WAY OFF from the Jade Maw. It’s no where near equal. Quite frankly I think they need to remove a lot of the agony.. just make agony checks like the Maw in order to equalise them. Or add a lot more to the Maw.

While I like the difficulty of the encounter, I agree that those random AR strikes are quite pointless and really only reward equipement. An agony strike at the very beginning of the fight and one right after the first boss dies would be enough to me.

The point that needs to be made here is that now that Fractals is a gear/ar check, less people will be willing to bother with the content, making groups harder to find and making the content obsolete.

OP has problems already finding people in his guild willing to do fractals because of the time and money investment needed.

“Oh, but you can buy AR now!” you say. Yeah, but you have to infuse your items to use the new slot. Getting an infused item isn’t guaranteed even at 30+. Plus the new ar combining costs money. Infusing your rings is RNG locked still, completely dependant if you can get vials to drop. Infusing your backpiece, even if you got the southsun event one is another huge money sink.

I know you guys want hardcore content, but you need to realise that without the casuals and random pugs doing the content, the turnover of hardcore players is so quick that no one gets to enjoy the content if it’s all about time/money/rng gates.

Marna Nindar.8120:

While I like the difficulty of the encounter, I agree that those random AR strikes are quite pointless and really only reward equipement. An agony strike at the very beginning of the fight and one right after the first boss dies would be enough to me.

Definitely agree. One thing I liked about fractals prior to this patch is that we could easily bring someone in with little to no AR and even complete level 30 with them. Aside from the Maw, if you knew what you were doing or had a good plan, a lot of the agony could be avoided. This is much much harder in many of the new fractals or downright impossible with the Molten bosses it seems. I’ve not seen the Mai Trin boss fight yet, so dunno about that one.

Sirendor.1394:

Max Gladius.6930:

3 TIMES TODAY…. Casual Players leading a team… “oh, its been an hr and half, I gotta go to bed” LEAVE PARTY…… this is what it is becoming!!!!!!

I’m one of those casual players. I barely ever complete a full chain. Don’t blame the players, blame anet for making it so time-consuming.

Sorry for the Rant, it didn’t start out as one…

I was not hating on players, I was hating on what ANet is forcing on players….

“We want this to be more casual” yet instance owners leaving or having to leave and that causing the whole instance to be reset is not “in favor of casual players” this is like this in all dungeons, and especially noted in Fractals.

This is causing the following:
New Player – oh a fractal I will try these out (no clue to complete it can take 2 hours or more)
New Player – I will give one of these a try, the game said 20 – 30 mins, this should be quick and easy… (not realizing x4 and the quoted 20-30 mins each is with experienced team)
Casual Player – Hmm, I got an hour before I got to pick up the kids, I will run part of this then take off
Casual Player – I heard the update changed some of this stuff, guess I will try them again since I do have some AR.
Hard Core Players – I have 4 different chars I can bring in, I will let someone else lead so I can change up if needed.

With ANet changing all of the reward and difficulty mechanics there is so much confusion on what is what.

Since announcement of the patch, many more new to fractal players have been joining. They have been joining all levels of the fractals with no clue at all about AR or what Agony is. I did multiple 38 runs with players with 0 AR cause they just clicked “join party”

So, now my biggest point…. Casual players will not be accepted, will feel unwelcome and as if everyone on the team is “elitists” with many parties if questioned… ready for some of the expected and seen questions:
Show your AR
Show your armor / weapons
Everyone has 2+ hours to play?
No going AFK at all or you will be kicked
STOP / WAIT: I am going to explain this EVERY TIME to make sure you all really know what to do and how this works
I can make this list go on and on…

Now we have players appearing to be kittens, others appear to be big kittens, when it all comes down to no one wants to waste their time…. No one wants to get to the very end and the leader just leaves when the final boss is under 1/2 HP…

I am far from a kitten, I am sure some reading this have ran with me on multiple fractals… I take my level 40 guard, and my guidlys lvl 9 warrior (yes character levels) into the 1-19 fractals because we can… We do this so others realize it is not “oh I have the right gear” it is about knowing what happens and when… We get more “respect” from the teams we help on our Lowbies then ever seen on our 80s. This is because multiple reasons… the “elitists” who think they walk on water wont run with us (or they come to see us fail and then when we are last 2 standing realize they were the kittens)

I am all over the place on this… But ANet is giving false comfort to the casual players and that is making less teams want to take casual players with them, and many of the tactics required either need explained in detail to players, and or they will just get kicked or the party will fail….

I’ve been creating groups tagged with the fractal level on the LFG tool, and have been adding “Noob Friendly” to the party tag, and have had nothing but good times. I’m generally the only person who has any experience running fractals, and my best friend is working up the levels, so I figured this would be a good way to get lots of people up. We’ve had a blast. People that know they’re noobs generally follow directions and walk in with the understanding that they’ll probably die a few times, or take a bit of time in certain areas, or are aware that they might be in a group that can take a long time on a run. It’s saved my bacon SO many times.

Have I mentioned how much I love the LFG tool? Because it’s wonderful.

I don’t agree that they are less casual. My group in my guild did a 28 last night and it was far easier than 28’s used to be. They have fixed several issues (several glaring ones still exist and some new ones) but I do find them easier, the loot is better, and the new Fractals are a blast.

Thad, level your guild mates! I enjoy running fractals at any level and especially enjoy running with my guild mates who haven’t experienced fractals as much as me. Eventually, they will reach your level and you won’t have to pug the high levels.

Stinson.5972:

IceVyper.6810:

We were also lucky to never get the dredge fractal while pugging.

Could you please, please, please send me some of your luck? Three nights in a row now.

I guess we’ve really been lucky. Did 12 fractal runs so far and got dredge just once. Strangely enough the frost fractal hasn’t shown so far.

Can’t say this is too lucky, because we have been having dredge at level 48 almost daily for months now…