Guild Wars 2

Every run is now guaranteed as 4 fractals, and additionally you are guaranteed to get a mix of the harder/longer fractals now that they are categorized as such. Unless drop rates have been significantly increased (as in, high enough to virtually guarantee a drop within a few runs), IMO this is going to make fractals less rewarding than before. The Molten and Aetherblade bosses were also much more difficult than Jade Maw, and presumably they now have agony mechanics as well, raising the bar for pugs, many more of which will now fail.

All told, unless Anet has seriously nerfed these encounters, sped them up, and/or improved the rate of non-trash rewards, the right thing to do would have been to reduce the runs to 2 normal fractals plus the boss, not force people to run 3 normal (including guaranteed long) fractals and then, more likely than not, bosses of higher difficulty at the end of the run that has a non-trivial chance of invalidating all the work that was put into getting there. Though at higher levels I think you’ll see more outright failures at fractal 3 because of cliffside/grawl, one of which is now practically guaranteed to show up.

Keeping in mind that fractals has been pretty quiet even with the possibility of getting 4 fast fractals, and knowing how Anet handles RNG rewards, I don’t see how this update is likely to present much of an improvement over the current fractals, let alone overturn the Queensdale endgame. Can we at least MF the trash pinks now or are they still just 5 silver at the vendor?

We will see what the 30+ fractals bring before we say nothing is new. Cant really say that until it comes out can we