Guild Wars 2

This was conducted for research purposes. It was worth doing to see how fractal rewards have changed. Gold was rounded based on silver amount.

1000 Fractal Encryption Opened *(All purchased on Trading Post (TP))
Total Cost: 354 Gold *(120 gold was spent to obtain Stabilizing Matrix for keys)
Gold Made: 262 *(After TP taxes)
Fractal Mastery Rank: Maxed

RESULT

Ascended Crafting Materials:
1035 Empyreal Fragments
1035 Dragonite Ore

T5 Crafting Materials:
285 Vials of Potent Blood
435 Intricate Totems
280 Potent Venom Sacs
450 Large Fangs
300 Large Claws
305 Large Scales
315 Piles of Incandescent Dust

Ascended Recipes:
10 Unique Ascended Recipes *(you get to choose stats)(ACCOUNT BOUND)
2 Ventari’s Leather Breather
1 Recipe: Ahamid’s Leather Breather
1 Saphir’s Leather Breather
1 Zojja’s Metal Breather
1 Hronk’s Metal Breather
1 Tateo’s Metal Breather
1 Verata’s Metal Breather
1 Wei Qi’s Metal Breather
2 Keeper’s Leather Breather
2 Morbach’s Metal Breather
2 Forgemaster’s Metal Breather
1 Hronk’s Cloth Breather
2 Ahamid’s Metal Breather
2 Wei Qi’s Cloth Breather
2 Beigarth’s Leather Breather
1 Zintl Leather Breather
1 Ahamid’s Cloth Breather
2 Beigarth’s Cloth Breather
1 Leftpaw’s Metal Breather

Agony Infusion:
2291 (+1) Agony Infusion

Trophy (167 Gold Value):
3 Manuscripts of ‘Proposal for a 1:1 Scale Map of Tyria’
1 Manuscript of ‘Halfway There and…’
2 Manuscripts of "This Book Is False’
13 Treatises on Divergence
22 Treatises on Iteration
11 Treatises on Symmetry
19 Treatises on Convergence
15 Treatises on Equivalence
12 Treatises on Commensurability
5 Proofs of Neta’s Square Inversion Law
5 Proofs of Gott’s Integral Derivation
4 Proofs of Bask’s Theorem
8 Proofs of Drik’s Transformations
7 Proofs of Dekin’s Rational Cuts
7 Proofs of Gali’s Proportional Traversal
123 Postulates of Continuity
154 Postulates of Contruction
154 Postulates of Diameter
179 Postulates of Rectitude
147 Postulates of Parallels
116 Postulates of Superposition

Misc:
105 Fractal Encryption Keys
3 Mini Professor Mews

You should definitely post these results on reddit

Also, whats the total profit?

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

You should definitely post these results on reddit

Also, whats the total profit?

After taxes, the total gold made was 262 gold. Thus, it was a loss in profit. If the boxes were farmed solely from game play (which would take a while), the profit would’ve been 142 gold, considering the current cost of obtaining keys.

Which would mean that if the boxes were farmed solely from game play, we’d have an average value of 14 silver and 20 copper per box.

Thanks for the data!

it’s not really possible to lose, that is if you open them yourself using stabilizing matricies as keys, or buy encryptions at 35s or less, due to guaranteed 2 +1 agony infusions and making them into +9’s every 100 to +12’s every 600 and some.(encryptions with frac lvl 3.)

Zui.9245:

Which would mean that if the boxes were farmed solely from game play, we’d have an average value of 14 silver and 20 copper per box.

Thanks for the data!

Using stabilizing matrices for keys, you can cut the cost in half for keys, about, adding another 8s!

So if I read this correctly, even if you “farm” all the matrices instead of buying them you would make more money selling them instead of opening boxes?

Drath.9702:

So if I read this correctly, even if you “farm” all the matrices instead of buying them you would make more money selling them instead of opening boxes?

From my own experienced, when I opened 100 boxes I bought and also bought 50 matrices, I profited about 25g.

I take it those plebs were lying about getting aetherized skins from the chests, this loot is utter garbage tbh

Elomite.2396:

I take it those plebs were lying about getting aetherized skins from the chests, this loot is utter garbage tbh

my group has gotten 2 aetherized skins since the expansion dropped. i got the staff and they got the longbow.

I’ve purchased and opened probably around 10,000 of the boxes myself. I don’t have all the raw data but I would guess Aetherized skins are roughly 1 in 2000 or 1 in 2500. Check the prices on the trading post and you can see the sudden supply of them and people undercutting drastically before they tank.

Thanks for the data. You have confirmed my suspicions. Fractals is no longer worth playing for the better loot table it used to have.

Is this for real? I thought Arenanet wanted us to do fractals?

Drath.9702:

So if I read this correctly, even if you “farm” all the matrices instead of buying them you would make more money selling them instead of opening boxes?

Yes, that is true based on the data provided. If the prices of the encryption doesn’t change much on the TP, you would actually make more by just selling them instead of opening. Things may change depending on prices.

The Endless Fractal Tonic is still a lie. How to get it post expac?

Is it not possible to get ascended armor/weapon chest anymore in fractals!?

You can still get Ascended boxes just like normal. 1-20 is a tier. 21-50 is a tier. 51+ is a tier. Complete 3, get a daily chest, and it’s even shown in your Daily Fractal tab. Have seen a Golden Fractal Axe from 21-50 tier chest and a Raiders Boot Box as well (forget the tier on that one).

Takayuki.7485:

You can still get Ascended boxes just like normal. 1-20 is a tier. 21-50 is a tier. 51+ is a tier. Complete 3, get a daily chest, and it’s even shown in your Daily Fractal tab. Have seen a Golden Fractal Axe from 21-50 tier chest and a Raiders Boot Box as well (forget the tier on that one).

do you have evidence that ascended boxes drop from teir 1 daily boxes?
how do the daily fractal boxes fit in?
does reward level effect chances of ascended drops?
what if a level 5 guy gets a teir 3 box? what are his chances?

Soooooo

anybody doing an analysis of what drops from each teir of daily box since anet doesnt tell us when they change things?

ya only doing it dailies for about a week for everything under lvl 50 since i don’t have ascended armor.
the rewards are just plain out crap rng once again, If i wasn’t going for the backpiece I’d probably not do fractals cause its pretty much another gold sink. along with how no one is doing dungeons anymore there is literally only map event farming and cof mastery farming that is all pve has devolved to. hell SW chest Chain is now somewhat more profitable since piles of sand actually drop something useful and people want it.

I don’t get what you are complaining about.
Each fractal lvl takes much shorter now, since it is only one and not 3/4.
Meaning that you can farm out fractals much faster with an efficient group.
Also opening the chests is worth it! Ofcause it is not worth it to buy others loot and open it! That has to be a gamble, but if he had farmede the 1000 Fractal Encryptions and spend 120G on opening them he would have made: 262-120=142g.

Or am I missing some point here?

Akamatzu.6812:

I don’t get what you are complaining about.
Each fractal lvl takes much shorter now, since it is only one and not 3/4.
Meaning that you can farm out fractals much faster with an efficient group.
Also opening the chests is worth it! Ofcause it is not worth it to buy others loot and open it! That has to be a gamble, but if he had farmede the 1000 Fractal Encryptions and spend 120G on opening them he would have made: 262-120=142g.

Or am I missing some point here?

The time to farm out 1000 boxes/keys, could yield more gold in the nerfed reward state dungeons.

I think that is the point you are missing.

So much for “decentived” dungeons in favour of fotm & better fotm rewards. ( which are now worse than before hot)

Those breathers making my eyes bleed such a slap in the face

i’m not going to craft ascended breather anyway, because i would lose the chilled effect from the christmas breather. it isn’t a skin so i can’t transmute it.

Yes if he didn’t buy boxes he would profit 142 gold.
But if he had boxes he could have sold them for 200 gold right away so that is -58 in gold.
Are there still people that can’t understand that?

Akamatzu.6812:

I don’t get what you are complaining about.
Each fractal lvl takes much shorter now, since it is only one and not 3/4.
Meaning that you can farm out fractals much faster with an efficient group.
Also opening the chests is worth it! Ofcause it is not worth it to buy others loot and open it! That has to be a gamble, but if he had farmede the 1000 Fractal Encryptions and spend 120G on opening them he would have made: 262-120=142g.

Or am I missing some point here?

Yes. The 4-part old style fractal was worth more than 4 individual fractals now. And opening chests is not worth it for now, because you can sell them for more than the average worth of drops from one.

Of course, eventually the cost of chests on TP will go down, once more people will realize it, and even this meager income will dry down.

So, basically, nerf to dungeons didn’t help fractals any, because rewards there got nerfed as well.

It’s by design.

Free to Play games are not made to reward the player, if they did then they can’t monetize the game via a cash shop.

This game from the very beginning has abandoned set rewards (dungeon gold and tokens) for ever increasing RNG gamble boxes tied to TP trading.

TP trading is essential as it increases the value of gold, which is directly tied to gems so there is even greater incentive to buy gems to convert to gold.

These people have engaged in absolutely detestable game design practices at the expense of the ignorant.

They have virtually reneged on everything they hyped the initial game with.

Guaranteed tokens for guaranteed armor based on effort/time spent? Abandoned. Replace with RNG and more gamble boxes.

No gear tiers? Abandoned, time and gold gated ascended grind introduced, making switching gearsets and trying builds more cumbersome.

Branched instanced content? Abandoned, who cares about a varied dungeon running experience when you can do more open world Silverwastes style farm?

Branched personal story? Abandoned, all personal stories virtually play the same and have the same outcomes. *

They just keep introducing more gimmick features only to discontinue or abandon them. No follow up or real iteration, just change for the sake of change.

The only constant in this game is the cash shop and the majority of skins gated behind their gamble boxes or outfits.

I mean, compare the ratio of PvE acquired armor/weaponskins to the gem store and black lion tickets.

Compare how many armor/weapon sets the vanilla game gave via dungeons with the few sets we got this xpac.

And now these new sets on the xpac don’t even come from instanced content, but RNG drops for collections from dynamic events.

Forget about instanced content being a supported playstyle in this game, just hope raids are enough because that’s all instanced PvE players are getting.

Not going to lie, when put like that, it does make me feel ignorant.

Yup. Zenith nailed it pretty hard. This thread just proves there is no need to do Fractals if you do them for the rewards. Pretty sad as it was my favorite content. Now all I do is just socialize with my guild. Thanks, Anet.

One thing to keep in mind is that many of the TP items have crashed since this research was posted. For example, +1 agony infusion cost half as much as they did at time of research.

Source: +1 Agony Infusion

There is not always a daily, today 51-100 want the daily (and this is the most important one to do but we cant do it).

There is no point to do Higher levels now (once you get the AP for doing them one time). You will just do the easiest levels in that tier;
1-20) 2, 10, 20
21-50) 21, 30, 32, 40
51-100) 56, 57, 60, 67, 70

Also why is it 51-100? and not 51-75 and 76-100 like to match the Fotm AP????

The bosses HP is just WAY to high, you will just sit there pounding them over and over and over and over and over again. It REALLY!!!!!! Pushes Zerker meta even harder now more than every!!!

Granted I made something like 700g from fotm now (but I sold my ALL my Fotm rewards that even includes the 1 time reward for doing lv 1-20, 21-50, 51-75). And I sold the boxes and AR you get FROM DAY ONE of the patch, AR was 10s+ easily, within a few weeks it will be less than 3s for one, and I will never have access to those One time rewards ever again.

Buying both encryptions and keys should return a loss because of the account bound stuff.. If it was profitable people would buy them until it wasn’t anymore.

What Account Bound items are you referring to? The ascended Recipes that you have maybe a 1 in a 100 shot at getting? Or possibly the Mini Cat Golem that you have about a 1 in 500 shot at getting? Everything else in those boxes is Able to be sold on the trading post. There is No Reason you should not be able to break even Buying everything you need to open a box, opening it, and then selling mats.

I checked the numbers and they don’t fit.

You can sell all the tier 5 for 20.23 Gold, giving you 17.19 gold in profit

The +1 Agony can sell for 117.75 gold, giving you a profit of 100 gold.

The 167 gold is sold directly to the npc so it’s still 167 gold in profit.

That give you a total of 284 gold and not 262 gold. And that’s not counting the Breather recipes which can vary a lot. For 1000 encryption you got 28 breather, which should give you around 1-2 gold if you are not lucky and get a Zoija Recipe. Which mean the total should be 285 Gold at worst, after TP tax. This change a bit the numbers.

This mean that you gonna have on average 28.5 Silver from each box.

If you have rings to salvage, each key should cost you 9 Silvers. If you buy matrix on tp, it will be 12 silvers per key. Counting the fact that you should get 1 key back each 10 box on average that mean that.

If you have rings to salvage, you should then sell box only if you can sell them at more than 24 silvers.

If you need to buy matrix from TP, then you should sell them if you can sell them at more than 21 Silvers each. Since the price right now, is around 25 silver, in theory it’s a good thing to sell box, but it’s near the line.

It’s also good to notice that, if you want to increase your AR to 150, you gonna need 3584 +1 Agony Infusions. Until you have all of those, it’s better to open box than to sell box and buy +1 on the TP.

IMO. As long as you need the +1 Agony Infusion and you can salvage rings. You should open your boxes, not sell them. If you don’t need the +1 Agony Infusion and don’t have any ring left to salvage, then you should sell them for now.

Thaddeus.4891:

I checked the numbers and they don’t fit.

He also has 105 unused keys sitting there being valued at 0. If you know those are coming in at roughly 1 every 10 boxes, then you only buy 450 matrices per 1000 boxes, not 500, saving you roughly a silver and change per box; it would have made the OP another 13 gold or so, raising the value of the box higher.

I’m on board with the fractal boxes feeling really unsatisfying, but the money is there – the accounting is just pretty convoluted.

Ensign.2189:

Thaddeus.4891:

I checked the numbers and they don’t fit.

He also has 105 unused keys sitting there being valued at 0. If you know those are coming in at roughly 1 every 10 boxes, then you only buy 450 matrices per 1000 boxes, not 500, saving you roughly a silver and change per box; it would have made the OP another 13 gold or so, raising the value of the box higher.

I’m on board with the fractal boxes feeling really unsatisfying, but the money is there – the accounting is just pretty convoluted.

Exactly. And if you have rings to salvage those matrix would cost you even less. If you are doing dailies, you get keys, matrix and ring to salvage to drop even further the cost of keys. I will personally, won’t have to buy matrix for a very long time.

But ya, the reward system is garbage even if the gold is there.

Thaddeus.4891:

Exactly. And if you have rings to salvage those matrix would cost you even less. If you are doing dailies, you get keys, matrix and ring to salvage to drop even further the cost of keys. I will personally, won’t have to buy matrix for a very long time.

Uninfused rings never gave me more than 3 matrices which is a huge loss compared to buying them for 20s per matrice. Infused rings are a crap shoot. I’ve had as much as 15 and as little as 2 matrices from them. Hard to take them into account when estimating profit potential.

Manasa Devi.7958:

I’ve had as much as 15 and as little as 2 matrices from them. Hard to take them into account when estimating profit potential.

No it’s not. You use the average. We are talking about rings. A lot of person have a LOT of them in their banks. And we continue to gain them. If someone doesn’t have enough of them accumulated then he can still buy matrix on the TP.

For uninfused rings, you are right. My numbers didn’t took that into account since when I salvaged my rings I salvaged everything without checke if they were infused or not. I guess that over the next couple of week we’ll have more raw numbers to get better average.

Thaddeus.4891:

Manasa Devi.7958:

I’ve had as much as 15 and as little as 2 matrices from them. Hard to take them into account when estimating profit potential.

No it’s not. You use the average. We are talking about rings. A lot of person have a LOT of them in their banks. And we continue to gain them. If someone doesn’t have enough of them accumulated then he can still buy matrix on the TP.

For uninfused rings, you are right. My numbers didn’t took that into account since when I salvaged my rings I salvaged everything without checke if they were infused or not. I guess that over the next couple of week we’ll have more raw numbers to get better average.

You need tons of data. Averages of how many infused rings pop up (not a lot in my experience so far) and averages of how those particular rings break down. The sheer amount of data it takes makes it, as I said before, hard to take into account. Verging on the impossible to arrive at any kind of useful number at this moment in time anyway.

Another thing that makes it hard to take into account, is that the amount of rings someone gets depends wholly on his playstyle. Someone doing no more fractal runs than it takes to get all daily chests will end up with a far better rings per encryption ratio than someone doing more fractals than necessary to get daily chests. That’s because the rings only drop from those daily chests as far as I’m aware. Doing more fractals on a given day will give you guaranteed extra encryptions with zero chance of extra infused rings.

Manasa Devi.7958:

You need tons of data. Averages of how many infused rings pop up (not a lot in my experience so far) and averages of how those particular rings break down. The sheer amount of data it takes makes it, as I said before, hard to take into account. Verging on the impossible to arrive at any kind of useful number at this moment in time anyway.

Another thing that makes it hard to take into account, is that the amount of rings someone gets depends wholly on his playstyle. Someone doing no more fractal runs than it takes to get all daily chests will end up with a far better rings per encryption ratio than someone doing more fractals than necessary to get daily chests. That’s because the rings only drop from those daily chests as far as I’m aware. Doing more fractals on a given day will give you guaranteed extra encryptions with zero chance of extra infused rings.

Wow calm down man. What are you talking about. Personnally, I had a lot of infused rings in my bank from fractal pre-hot. So I have for me and everybody that have a lot of rings, each keys cost me 9 silvers.

If you don’t have rings, then you can buy matrix on the market and each keys cost you 12 silvers.

That’s all. I never tried to do the math on how many rings you get and all that kitten. Simple. You have rings = 9 silver per keys. You don’t = 12 silvers per keys.

When I talk about getting more numbers was to differentiate between uninfused and infused rings. So we know exactly what is the return in matrix from both and know if uninfused are worth salvaging or not and what is the exact return for infused rings only.

I’m calm. I’m just responding to your denial of my statement that it’s hard to take rings into account when averaging the profit (or loss) from “cracking” encryptions.

Whether or not anyone has a sizeable number of keys stored up shouldn’t be taken into account at all when doing such calculations. I had a fair number, by the way, and I got a huge spread of outcomes when salvaging infused keys, with a worrying trend toward the lower numbers.

Funny when u can buy 5 matrices at the ascended salvage tool cost. And you won’t lose ring Ring drop ratio has been nerfed severely (i personally didn’t drop one for 4 days or so, doing all dailies) so it is really stupid to salvage them now. Moreover if they are infused. Thus, if u don’t profit at least 1g per ring – there is no point risking in salvaging it.

From my experience normal rings return maybe 2 matrices so that is -60s and -fractal relics. Infused rings as i noticed drop 2+5 matrices, thus making you ENTIRE 40-60 silver depending on matrices prices. That is pretty low if u ask me.
So, considering fractal boxes – the best way to profit is just sell that kitten. Easiest, fastest, no RNG and prices will go down for some idiots who actually buy that.

Well you can buy Matrix at 23-24 silver right now on the TP. You can sell a ring a almost 5 silvers. So 105 silvers (salvage kit + sell the ring) / 23.5 (buying price of matrix) = 4.46

So as long as salvaging a ring will give you a average of more than 4.46, it will be worth salvaging them. Which is definitively not the case of uninfused ring, but totally the case for infused rings.

Now if someone don’t like the rng of salvaging infused rings, that ok. For someone doing a lot of fractal, i also get a lot of glob, vial and shard of condensed stuff. It will probably worth it to infuse rings to salvage them. As long as you have enough vial at least. It won’t be worth it if you need to break glob into vial, i’m pretty sure. Or if you think you may need to infuse rings later.