Guild Wars 2

IMO, would be nice if you could pick your fractal path and have rewards scale (gold and relic increases) the more difficult path you take. I think the only hard part is getting a consensus on which paths are “hardest.”

My guess would be dredge is the worst, swamp the easiest… It’s just a matter of tuning rewards to compensate people who want to go the more difficult route to the final bosses.

At present the tiers are:

1. Aquatic Ruins, Swampland, Urban Battlegrounds, Uncategorized.
2. Uncategorized, Snowblind, Urban Battlegrounds, Molten Furnace, Cliffside.
3. Aetherblade, Volcanic, Thaumanova Reactor, Underground Facility, Cliffside.
4. (Boss fractal): Solid Ocean Fractal, Molten Boss Fractal or Captain Mai Trin Boss Fractal.

In a choose your path option, folks could decide on Swamp, Snow & Thauma and be done fairly quickly, or they could go urban, cliff and underground and get a bit more reward for it.

From a lore perspective, at this point, with all the fractals we’ve done, i’d think that Dessa may have learned enough to allow for that… Just a thought.

Pixels.6532:

IMO, would be nice if you could pick your fractal path and have rewards scale (gold and relic increases) the more difficult path you take. I think the only hard part is getting a consensus on which paths are “hardest.”

My guess would be dredge is the worst, swamp the easiest… It’s just a matter of tuning rewards to compensate people who want to go the more difficult route to the final bosses.

At present the tiers are:

1. Aquatic Ruins, Swampland, Urban Battlegrounds, Uncategorized.
2. Uncategorized, Snowblind, Urban Battlegrounds, Molten Furnace, Cliffside.
3. Aetherblade, Volcanic, Thaumanova Reactor, Underground Facility, Cliffside.
4. (Boss fractal): Solid Ocean Fractal, Molten Boss Fractal or Captain Mai Trin Boss Fractal.

In a choose your path option, folks could decide on Swamp, Snow & Thauma and be done fairly quickly, or they could go urban, cliff and underground and get a bit more reward for it.

From a lore perspective, at this point, with all the fractals we’ve done, i’d think that Dessa may have learned enough to allow for that… Just a thought.

From a Lore perspective Dessa is much like the rest of the Fractal denizens. Destined to repeat the same experiences over and over again.
The Observatory is a fractal. :P

Not sure why everyone wants to roll swamp all the time and then you get in there and not a single person knows how to run the wisps. It’s like people were told it’s the easiest so they do it blindly, but you could do uncategorized twice as fast because it takes 2 hours to run the wisps.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

From a Lore perspective Dessa is much like the rest of the Fractal denizens. Destined to repeat the same experiences over and over again.
The Observatory is a fractal. :P

meh, i still want options… make the lore fit! :o)

OP- Did you do fractal story mode during the factured update? During this, we learned that Dessa forgets everything after the experience- so all this work we’re doing to help her “learn” is useless.

I like your idea, but unless the reward scaling was exponential for difficult fractals (ie: much, much better chance at ascended/fractal weapon drops), it would involve the same 4-5 fractals being chosen by everybody. Nobody does fractals for the gold reward, and the relics run out of use pretty quickly unless you’re making ascended backpieces for multiple alts. I’d much rather my fractal run always take 45 minutes for a 1% chance at a fractal skin than it taking 4 hours for a 1.5%, but if it was 4 hours for a 10% chance, maybe I would consider it (But even then, the aggravation factor is something to consider)

Cranked- The reason why everyone wants to roll swamp all the time is because if you know how to run the wisps the entire fractal takes less than 10 minutes. It’s a technique fractal and the technique doesn’t change from level 1 to level 50, so therefore the difficulty doesn’t scale like it does in the other fractals. At level 49/50, that means the first fractal goes by quickly and painlessly (people will most likely kick/leave if the wisps fail even once) and there’s only 3 more fractals to deal with. Urban Battlegrounds takes forever at high levels because of the ridiculous mob scaling in the courtyard, and Uncategorized is just a huge pain in the kitten with the knockdown harpies. To go through all that trouble and then be done with just one fractal is very disheartening.

At lower levels, however, those fractals are a joke. Personally, I would consider Urban Battlegrounds to be the easiest level 1 fractal because there are no mechanics, it’s just killing vets which are easy as pie at that level. Uncategorized doesn’t have knockdown on the harpies at that level, so it’s just an annoying jumping puzzle without the trolling. Swamp and Water, on the other hand, have those technique parts, and if you’ve never done them before, they can take a long time and be very frustrating.

@Atriusthegid

I realize why people roll swamp, I do it as well. I was being somewhat facetious given the fact that 50% of the groups I end up in don’t know how to run the wisps well and yet every single lfg post is “lvl x, swamp rolled”

if you will be able to chose fractals people will choose the “path of less resistance” and fractals will be a glorious cof1. ( lf WAR zerk only) etc

Lalangamena.3694:

if you will be able to chose fractals people will choose the “path of less resistance” and fractals will be a glorious cof1. ( lf WAR zerk only) etc

couple things…

1. you still have to pick 1x of each tier including the boss
2. you would not receive the same reward for choosing the “path of least resistance” as you would for more challenging paths
3. there could be a system of diminishing returns put in place, so that you would have to pick a different path for your second run of the day and so on
4. this might highlight areas of improvement (dredge) that ANET could make when certain fractals are almost never chosen…