Guild Wars 2

I was discussing exactly this with a friend the other day. Thank you for framing all this so coherently. I find it a pity that fractals went from a fun, reasonably challenging, and ever-changing bit of content (so nice to be surprised by which fractal you’re getting!) to just being able to swamp your way through them.
I wonder though, what is your suggestion for improving this?

Summed up the situation nicely, needs some serious changes regarding both rewards and levels. Ideally we’d need a whole new set of fractals for more variety but I don’t think Anet have even mentioned adding new ones.

Alphard.6529:

So I’ve hit FoTM lvl 100 and I’d like to post some feedback. Unfortunately it is mostly negative because I believe the update actually made fractals worse in many respects. It seems to me like the fractal updates were rushed and as a result the quality suffered. There are a number of problems with the new system:

1. The Boon Fumbler instability (when you dodge roll, you lose all your boons) is just bad.

Fractals used to be one of the few places in the game where skill and knowledge of each specific encounter (boss attack tells, etc) mattered. Dodging mattered in most cases. Why would you punish skilled play? Becoming better at fractals is fun, being punished for applying skill is not. There are ways to reduce the effectiveness of dodging (see Mai Trin) other than a blanket ‘f*** you if you dodge’ rule. Suggestion: remove this instability and add specific boss mechanics at higher levels (if you must).

2. Huge health pools and nerfed boss damage make fractals tedious, boring and requiring less skill

This is related to the previous issue too. Mai Trin at lvl 100 hits for less than Mai Trin used to at lvl 50 before HoT. This makes skill and encounter knowledge less important, while making boss fights slow, boring and unfun. Why learn the boss attacks and mechanics when they don’t actually threaten to kill you? High level fractals (51+) were supposed to be even more challenging than the 40-50 tier we had before HoT, but most of them are not. Now some fractals are actually somewhat challenging, but many need to be balanced individually. I’d suggest you make some bosses (maybe depending on the level/intability) have high toughness but low vitality, wheres others have low toughness and high vitality, but not both.

But the biggest issue of all is this:

3. Once a player is done with their achievements, almost all fractals (esp. lvl 51+) become dead content for them.

Remember how the aquatic fractal before HoT was dead? For exactly the same reason almost all 51+ lvl fractals will be dead. The reason is that fractal rewards are tied to dailies, and the single 51+ daily will be completed by doing a combination of Swamp and Molten Duo fractals, because they are the quickest, just like how everyone used to roll for Swamp which meant they never do the Aquatic fractal. The game doesn’t reward you for doing the hard fractals at all. There absolutely need to be multiple specific lvl 51+ daily fractals. But even this will solve the issue only partially. Before HoT, in order to get the best rewards (at lvl 50 daily) you HAD to potentially do the hardest fractals in the game every day! There isn’t an equivalently hard + rewarding option now.

4. Rewards

I don’t have detailed statistics on how good the rewards from dailies are, but my feeling is that the rewards aren’t even as good as they were before HoT. I’ll just say that I’m happy I did the 40/50 dailies for the past year and a half before HoT so now I’ll never have to craft another ascended weapon or armor piece.

Let me know if I’ve missed or misinterpreted something.

Yes I totally agree with everything that was said here. With the previous system, you might be able to roll swamp as the first, but the rest of the 3 fractals were unknown and random. Now you can select the same ones every single day to make it easier for yourself. The rewards are also very bland. I would really appreciate it if we could get a dev response here to hear their opinion.

My biggest beef with fractals was how terribly repetitive they were. It caused me to completely lose interest in doing them after a very short period of time. But seeing this feedback, it makes me glad that I was not crazy about them since I feel like I’d be overcome with disappointment in the changes.

Considering how much I love both dungeons and fractals. Probably like 70% of the reason for my pveing activities, I really hope that Anet is reading our comments and implements changes.

Rewards are only from “dailies” and NOT from the actually fotm now.

So if a daily is 51-100 you can do the 3 easiest Dailies and get rewarded the Same for doing lv 98-100 (other than some +1’s and a few relic’s, mind you that no one see thoses as rewards b.c you get them all the time).

After the 1st time you do “Higher” levels there is NO reason to do them again other than if a daily says “Do a level 87”.

I Like the ALOT of things about these new fotms, but the daily system need to add sometype of scale to give bonus chances of Tonics/boxes/fotm weapons for completing higher tiers.

Suggestion Have another Daily for level 85+

not to forget how incredible uncreative the instability-ranges are.. before you had another insta every level.. and funny things like stunning bolts from the air, or a mossman stalking you.. now its just for 10 lvl the same which is very boring and uncreative.

and the “rewards” are really lackluster. i dont see the gold from dungeons shifted to fracs…

my personal guess is, that anet wants to kill fractals just like dungeons so everyone just plays those openworld maps (which are too easy anyway…)

Cant agree more, but ALL is Vain. No suggestion no CDI no nothing from this “trashcan” gets there.
All embrace fractured 2.0 and dispair.

Exactly my thoughts. Once I get to 100 I don’t see myself doing fotm – if I did, it would be for the daily. I haven’t done enough high levels to corroborate all your comments (I’m only on 65), and the break bar mechanic seems at least new and relevant for some of the islands (cliffside).

There is no reward for doing the challenge other than the completion and the “challenge” seems to be a time sink, like the rewards are a gold sink.

Edit: I did some more higher levels today and I think some of the instabilities do make it more challenging. Getting trolled by the fear on thaumanova was funny and we had a hard time with it — tho the boss was a GIANT bag of HP. I do think some of the levels encourage someone to play something a bit tankier and I have had to switch my build around quite a bit.

HOWEVER after spending 40 min to beat a hard fractal there is literally no sense of satisfaction or reward. Rewards really need to be addressed to make it feel… well.. rewarding.

IMPORTANT: You can now buy and sell fractal weapons (golden and regular) on the TP. This makes all my farming for a fractal wep… well, a waste. You can also get nearly ALL fotm rewards with gold, since you can buy stabilizing matrices on the TP and boxes to open on the TP.

Foon.5384:

I wonder though, what is your suggestion for improving this?

I’ve edited my point 3 and added some suggestions.

I was really excited for a new fractal experience, after hearing all of this, I probably wont touch it now. I really hope they can clean it up and make it better

I enjoy all the new changes to fractals

I agree fully and am semi hopeful that they are going to make additional changes to fractals considering they still have to add the legendary backpiece.

Honestly, the best way to guarantee fractals remain viable content at all levels is to have the complete x-y achievements infinitely repeatable. We can already sell the rewards boxes for that achievement upon the Trading Post, so there is no reason they shouldnt be infinitely repeatable.

The biggest offender here is the damage nerf. Why trivialize fractals by making the damage mobs deal nearly insignificant? I was doing a 59 on HoT release day and the archdiviner was hitting me for 3-4k a swing. Compared to 50+ fractals when they were initially released where 50+ enemies hit so ridiculously hard that you HAD to use defensive skills, utilities, food and even gear to have a chance at surviving. 60+ archdiviner at fractal release was hitting for 20k in toughness gear. Now it’s just “oh I’ll just tank all the damage, who cares about dodging, amirite?”.

I have no desired to progress in fractals because of this change. It makes fractals feel like dungeons: entirely trivial and easy and boring. Why would I want to do trivial content that bores me to tears? Screw the rewards, I play games to have fun, not for pixels. New fractals aren’t fun.

1. The intent of the fractal challenges is to push players out of their comfort zones and think on their feet. It sounds like they succeeded.
2. Ehh, yeah. One of the oldest RPG design problems. We have about a thousand ways to get around this now. Here’s hoping they pick one and implement it.
3. Dailies used to be more specific like you suggest, but it proved unpopular.
4. I’m pretty sure that’s why they’ve added rewards beyond the dailies. Whether those are sufficient or not, I won’t try to judge.

Just exactly what I was talking about with a friend some time ago.

I was hyped going into fractals till the level 100 and also got all the 150 AR required almost straight away (after trying a few new levels first of course) and… I was disappointed.

I should say – I really like almost every change in the expansion, except some changes done to the fractals. Before expansion I was doing all daily fractal categories every day for like a year as it actually felt rewarding – I got tons of ascended stuff, gold, skins and fun doing them with friends.

Now fractals just feel tedious. Like a second job. It sometimes takes the same time to make 1 fractal dungeon when previously I was able to do 3-4 in the same time gate. So instead of 4-5 daily categories I now barely manage to do three. Unless you actually have a full damage specced and perfectly playing setup. Even then it still takes much more time. Bosses have much lower damage and MUCH higher HP and toughness which results in really long and boring fights. There is no challenge in that at all. Hell, why killing a 5-man content boss should take much more time than 10-man raid boss?

About the rewards – I guess its fine, I think it was actually improved overall – it’s just hard to tell straight away. I don’t even mind having a bit less rewards if the time fractals take will get back to something we previously had.

On the daily categories – I agree with OP, unless new ones are introduced for levels 51-75 and 76-100 – those categories will soon be abandoned by players. That will surely have a negative impact on the community.

Golden weapon trails please

I completely agree with this.

Fractals are in a very bad state atm, the rewards seem pretty bad considering what they were pre-HoT. Why are new/returning players who did not do Fractals much pre-HoT punished? Ascended gear is now harder (more expensive) to craft, and it seems ascended armor/weapon boxes are rare/nonexistent.

I fully support the predefined fractal maps because of the advantages it gives. Most importantly having map specific instabilities and fine tuning the difficulty. Unfortunately neither exists. But it’s a good start.

Based on my data, Archdiviner did 7682-8663 damage with his swing prepatch on scale 1 and 18644-21024 damage on scale 50. If he now does 4k on scale 59, something is seriously wrong. Also hopefully they remove that toughness scaling to balance direct and condition damage (haven’t tested how severe it is).

I think dailies should be predefined to encourage doing different scales. Daily reward should be bigger when you need to do harder fractals.

Also why dungeons weren’t recycled to fractal instances? Pick/combine some best fights for a decent encounter.

In ~2 weeks or so, Fractals will have been in the game for 3 years. In that time, 4 new fractal zones have been added.

HoT brought 0 new fractals. Re-skinned weapons that already existed, and two masteries that use fractals (as the legendary one needs a bunch for collections) that brought nothing interesting.

Where is the content? If dungeons are no longer being done in the game, how come nothing real was added to fractals. What we got with HoT was recycled.

Would have been a good time to add the Fall of Abaddon Fractal.

Thank you for this. The rewards are not as good as Pre-HoT IMO. I refuse to do fractals now, because there’s no incentive to do them right now. This is the worst change they made with HoT and yet they haven’t said anything about it which is disheartening to say the least. I thought the dungeon reward nerf was going to funnel those rewards into fractals, but this doesn’t even seem to be the case.

Let’s not forget the absurd amount of agony res you need for high lvl fractals. I don’t want to pay 500g+ just on agony infusions, or t. reagents for infusions. Ascended gear is/was meaningful, agony resistance gold gating just isn’t.

I waited so eagerly for this update, and now I only managed to get to lvl64, since we all got bored after 111ing most of the bosses for around 10 minutes. . I don’t find there’s anything with skill involved anymore in there, now you can facetank so many attacks even with just a zerker staff ele.

And the rewards, oh the rewards..

You only need 2 11s and 310s to hit 150 AR, which with how often you get +1 agony drops now is not particularly expensive to achieve, especially since they’re down to 3s each!

IMO fractals are too easy that’s why you see people complaining about it, keep the instabilities (boon fumbler included it’s fun subjective) keep the Hp pool add more dmg to the bosses attacks, and ofc increase rewards if you can:D there it’s now fun and challenging. Increase dmg so that Mai trins spinning Attack will 1 shot KO anything medium or light in zerkers:D I do however agree with the OP about the achievements part, also the achievement chest rewards are sellable now I dunno if that’s intentional (probably not) Anet might wanna look into that.

I’ve gained about 10 reward levels since the release. My biggest concern right now is the HP sponging. Why wouldn’t the devs increase difficulty by increasing the damage done by enemies? HP sponging is boring, and you could actually punish full zerkers with an inverse system rather than reward them.

I agree with this and so do a lot of people lets start putting ideas on the table. Like a player run CDI.

1) and 2) Yes change the mechanics. Like you said some high toughness but low vitality, were as others have low toughness and high vitality. You can also have the some bosses have a high Condi with lower CD we the players have to worry about condi clear. Another would be a boss that has a high healing where you have to bust down the break bar to interupt the heal.

I agree the daily needs looked at too. Fractal daily needs to count toward your account daily like they did. As it is now I have to run the account daily to get any AP and then do my fractal daily. Depends on how PVP goes by the time I get to fractals it’s late and can’t help any guild mates with things. Moving them back into the account daily you will have covered all game types the players are interested in. (PvE, PvP, WvW, Fractels.)

3) I think the daily format in fine the way it is. 2 Recommended Fractel- Scale “X” and the run 3 Adept/Journeyman/Master. I agree with you the players are going to be picking the same ones to get it done faster. So I would make those three random for that given fractal range. So if the player decides to do Journeyman he could end up running a 21,34, and 45 but the next day end up running a 29, 37 and 50. If they add the Fractals back into account daily (see above) the players would run the 2 run scale “x” and then choose 1 of the Adept/Journeyman/Master. This would keep it interesting and not have any advantage over the other game types for dailies.

4) Rewards- The bane of every game. For me the rewards are at a good point for what fractals are now. For the same reasons you pointed out and what’s wrong with the fractals. Just long and boring fights without any real challenge. So Anet philosophy of high risk high reward is still good here. It just the 51+ are time > risk.
Now if they go back and look at the Queen’s Gauntlet with the Gambits. That was a good system. The more Gambits the more reward. That is a system they need to look at for fractals, but use the mist locks instead. Add this by 1) adding Fractal Mastery 5 for a player to choose 1,2,3,4,5 mistlocks to your fractal. Or reserve adding mist locks to lvl 75+. But the point will be the more mistlocks the more reward. That follows Anet philosophy of high risk high reward.
Changing some of the fight mechanics and having the ability to add mist locks. A guild can use them as training rooms for 5 man parties to use against raids. (Something like) Hey guys Raid Boss Monkey King has this same type mechanic as level 77 Mossman with x,y,z mistlock. Lets go practice our team comp.

Ok getting of soap box. To many ideas in my head. Over all Fractals have a good base to start building them up.

I didn’t see any dev feedback about our feedback about Fractals. Are they at least READING?

Wethospu.6437:

Based on my data, Archdiviner did 7682-8663 damage with his swing prepatch on scale 1 and 18644-21024 damage on scale 50. If he now does 4k on scale 59, something is seriously wrong.

Considering they restructured fractals to be casual friendly, I can see why they nerf-batted them.

Refering to my old napkin math fractal comment, Old FOTM lvl 10 is now New FOTM lvl 40

fish.2170:

I didn’t see any dev feedback about our feedback about Fractals. Are they at least READING?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Static-fractal-schedule/first#post5335118

This was my question to a Dev way before patch. It went unanswered and un-iterated upon. Now you see a rise of players complaining about there being less variety in fractals you do because of the new daily system coupled with fixed islands.

This could have been avoided if they had read and gave us feedback

3 and 4 were predicted by players months ago. We were promised that 1 will never happen and 2 is pretty much complete 180 on condi/power build balance they managed to achieve few months ago. Cool.

I just want my tonic

If I have to sit through another 20 minute Mai Trin fight at 100, I swear to kitten m8.

I agree… while I’ve come to like the 1 fractal per lvl idea, the lack of creativity concerning high level fractals kills it.
Those of us who did 50’s before, running full zerk for fast runs, understanding the mechanics to allow full zerk teams that don’t wipe, was part of the draw, part of the fun.

So having to only do one fractal, makes it less time consuming, easier to get new people to try.

Maybe instead of having set instabilities for 10 levels, perhaps set it up so that within those 10 lvls you can get 1 of 4 random instabilities, then 2 of 8, etc. While trying to keep those instabilities “fun”.
I personally enjoyed exploding enemies (though Cliffside was rather bothersome due to it), I also enjoyed having Mossman hang out with us occasionally.

And yea, the nerfed damage was kind of pointless, what’s the reason of having scaling fractals if you’re going to make it easy?

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

fish.2170:

I didn’t see any dev feedback about our feedback about Fractals. Are they at least READING?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Static-fractal-schedule/first#post5335118

This was my question to a Dev way before patch.

I really like the suggestion in the first post of the quoted thread, to leave a “classic mode” for the fractals, which would auto-send you to another fractal, and give you greater rewards for running a random set. It seams rather straightforward to implement something. Just select a tier (51-60, 31-40, etc), and you get random selections within that tier. My wife and I really enjoyed the random nature, and the time commitment of running a full set of 4 is fine. It’s not any more time than watching a movie.

pls add lupicus fight to fractals while buffing him a lot

My biggest issues with the new fractal systems are:

1. Larger health pools. I like that the bosses won’t one shot you with an auto any more, auto attacks one shotting you was never skillful or cool, or w/e, it was lack of tuning. At least in a game where you are suppose to be able to fulfill any roll (all dps, all tanks, all healers) in a group that you want. The problem.. is that the larger health pools also don’t create a challenge. If a fight had no mechanics, nothing to look out for, nothing to combat, having it take 4x longer doesnt suddenly make it harder, just makes it, well, longer. I didn’t mind some health increase, but the amount is ridicules, fights taking upwards of 10 minutes just because of a bloated health pool is not fun at all.

2. Rewards. Dear lord, I open the chest at the end of the boss, there is no bouncy chests now, no, just these fractal boxes and a lack of keys for them. What’s inside these boxes? Oh… Grey vendor crap, that sells for gold. Nothing more, nothing special. I could probably accept this if the keys that dropped in fractals ended up in your wallet, and more keys dropped and less chests BUT the chests also had more gold coming out of them.

3. RNG. During the 60+ bracket (I think? Correct me if im wrong) the instability you get is ‘random conditions applied when hit’. Alright… Sounds annoying, but what ever. Doing thuamo and getting hit once, feared, and walking right off the edge. Yeah. Right. So bad luck is now an element to completing this fight. Or you can be immob’d while a platform is going down, or crippled / chilled while trying to get off the platforms. So much can go wrong, and none of it is within your control. But the worst part, is that due to the health pool on the boss being 500% larger then before, the boss also took like 15 minutes to kill. 15 minutes of waiting for bad RNG and if it happened at the very end, well.

4: Spirit of fractals. Now I am not fractal 100 yet, mostly because the fractal vendor has been disabled for a while and my team needs it to open up again so they can obtain more AR. But when I do get there and I run one each day …. The spirit of fractals is going to be an issue. Before HOT I would run a 50, every day, finishing it within around 25 mins. I would (as with every one) roll swamp and go from there. But the next 3 fractals were always randomized, this always gave me a sense of some thing different, instead of running the exact same mundane content over and over it would change up on me making it feel just that little bit fresher and therefore, a little bit more repeatable.

The are probably my biggest issues.

So, I’m mostly new to fractals as of HOT, having mostly done dungeons for PVE group content in vanilla.

I think fractals are pretty good (except the dolphin section, which is boring and terrible), but I agree with people who say HP vs. damage needs to be tuned on fractal bosses (and maybe in general). Decreasing hit points and increasing some damage sources would be a pleasant change.

The other major criticism is fractals basically don’t give rewards. If you buy a key, there’s a good chance, depending on your mastery level, you outright lose gold, and that’s simply unacceptable. The dungeon rewards were supposedly removed to fractals, but even with 4/4 fractal mastery, we still don’t see it.

I don’t mind converting from liquid rewards to, say, ascended gear (my preference), but I feel like with the exception of the daily rewards, fractals offer so little, I’m basically paying to play them not only in terms of negative value lockboxes, but in terms of opportunity costs.

Sublimatio.6981:

pls add lupicus fight to fractals while buffing him a lot

I would love to see some of the more challenging boss fights from various story mode instances and explorables like lupicus added to encounters for fractals.

With that said I have been around for several attempts to ‘improve’ fractals. While I can appreciate the content they have added and the attempts to make them more rewarding (anyone remember when they said they added weapon boxes only to realize they hadnt actually done it?). They have pretty consistently made fractals not terribly rewarding to play. I still played them anyways all the way up to 50 prior to HoT because even though the rewards sucked it was my favorite type of content in the game.

After playing them pretty extensively there are a few things I wish had been done in the over haul for fractals.

1. The reason people rolled swamp is to guarantee they didnt start with dredge or cliffside and then get one of the other long ones later. Changing there to be short medium and long fractals didnt change the desire to have swamp first since it is by far the shortest fractal. Add one more puzzle to this to make it as long as underwater and the endless re-rolling stops. Most people would be happy to not always have to do swamp if the length was truly comparable.

2. Old style Fractals are long but one fractal seems too short. Why not have 2 Fractal islands and then a boss every other level. This seems like a blend of the old classic style fractals but there is more to it than just a single island.

3. instabilities – I loved when these were introduced. I am sad to see them truncated to only a couple of instabilities. I think it would be better if it changed every level or every other level instead of 10 levels with the same challenge. These were fun and some were insanely hard.

4. Rewards – I love fractals but the reward system leaves a ton to be desired.
4a)These give practically no experience what so ever. I once brought a level 29 necromancer into a level 30 fractal because my guild wanted the challenge of it. I finished all 3 and jade maw and didn’t even gain a level. 0.o Shouldnt they contribute exp so you can actually work on fractal mastery while in fractals?
4b)Liquid rewards – why is it rewarding to get vendor junk worth X silver or gold? Why not just give gold? Is there a technical limitation here? I was under the impression that dungeon gold was moving here? Is that no longer a thing?
4c) Non liquid rewards – Fractal skins and ascended chests.. the drop rate on these is garbage. I think at my worst streak I ran 29 straight level 48 fractals without a single one of either dropping. When I finally did get a fractal skin it was the shortbow right after I got the legendary shortbow. Why is the drop rate on cosmetic items so horrendously low? It is not rewarding to get blues and greens and vendor trash.

5. Increased difficulty – So they added 50 new levels of difficulty and mainly utilized what is known as fake difficulty (hit points of mobs increased, armor and damage adjusted). Why couldnt the fights have added mechanics? Telegraphed attacks and such? I think I was hoping it would be more like wow heroic dungeons where in lower difficulty the boss does x but in higher it does x and y. Don’t get me wrong I love a ton of the boss fights in fractals. The molten alliance boss fight is one of my favorites in the game. I just wish the higher scale fractals did more things.

6)risk vs reward – Why not give people a chance to double down on attributes of the instances for additional rewards. Extra agony or additional instabilities to increase magic find or gold rewarded by a %

last but not least -

Add additional fractals. I love the addition of the aetherized, reactor etc. Why cant we keep adding them? Loads of people would love to see more lore based fractals like abbadon or something using the forgotten or the mursaat.

apologies if this sounds like a rant. I love the expansion so far and I am keeping my fingers crossed that fractals will get improved.

I wanted to give my opinion on this matter. I am not a “hardcore” player, more of a filthy casual I do spend real life money in the gem store, so I do really love the game!

I used to love dungeons and had given them up to run fractals. I normally tried to run a 40 or 50 whenever i got to play, and i loved it. Rewards were great (despite sometimes getting nothing other than gold).

The newer fractal system pros for me:

1. Single level fractals
2. Fractal Masteries

New fractal system cons for me:

1. Rewards seem terrible so far (compared to the old 50 reward bouncy chest)
2. Rewards seem like a gold sink
3. Same Instabilities are for 9 or 10 levels at a time

Please make the GOLD fractal skins have the tracers like the original fractal skins. The old skins seem better with the cool white tracers that really drew attention to the skin.

My personal opinion is that Anet seems to be pushing everyone out of dungeons and fractals because they want everyone raiding when that starts.

I look forward to raids, but right now i feel bored with dungeons and fractals, which used to be my favorite content.

The new expansion is great on a side note, but I feel like maybe fractals were put on the back burner due to working on the expansion and us fractal lovers got the short end of the stick.

I am hoping fractals get adjusted some how, reward wise, for at least maybe 80-100 or something.

I guess I will just wait for raids to come

Anet, i want to love fractals again!

Went up a few fractal levels and did the 60 something urban battleground. The captain’s meteor shower hit me for 6k. Without protection. Without the defensive consumable. But it sure took forever to kill. FGS still hurts though, news@11.

The strength of bosses needs some serious rework. They are way too weak atm. Also, there is no reason to ever do the high levels again once you got all your achievements. There should be an additional daily for the levels from 90 – 100, and at least one of the fractals for this daily should be fixed (and changed every day). This daily should reward with a golden fractal relict.

I’m just really frustrated with how end game pve is looking so far. Dungeons appear to be gone with the wind, no new fractals ( if you are making them the defacto pve end game I would except multiple new fracts…) and it seems there is this push for pve players to turn towards mindlessly zerging map meta events.

I play mmos for pve content, if I wanted to play competitively I’d go back to shooters. So with that being said, most mmos I’ve ever played the focus was progressing your toon to max level and going through the constant gear treadmill. It would legitimately take years of playing to max out your toon in levels in top end gear which was the primary pve focus. This game abandoned that, and I actually like that they did although I sometimes miss that grind. However, in absence of that being the focus of pve you need to replace it with something that can engage the playerbase at the end game. In its current state there is no way in hell fractals achieve that goal. It’s tedious chipping away at the health of the boss with the new increase in hp, we have done these same fracts for months/ years, and the rewards honestly suck.

GW2 pve for me ever since I joined the game has been marked by a strong focus towards generating gold so you can fully customize your characters to your liking. If that is only accomplished via hopping on your staff guard or whatever tags mobs well and riding a map event train then I’m going to look for alternative games. For me that is not what end game pve should be, and it is just not interesting to me. Ideally, reverse the decision made a long time ago to neglect dungeons and make new ones/ revert the nerf and customize the gold to the time taken/ difficulty of the path. Also, buff fractal rewards, make new fractals, etc. ( am excited for raids though having not played any of the betas)
I don’t think this asking for much to be honest, as the end game pve has been stagnant ever since I joined a year ago, and according to a lot of people it hasn’t really changed since fractals were introduced.

The big problem with the encryption boxes is that it requires an amount of 20 silver (or 20s) to buy a key creating a small gold sink on rewards. In essence, the momentary value of opening a box should be at least twice the cost it took to buy a key so that the box and key are both equal value. While the +1 agony Infusions were 10s to 14s and you had the appropriate mastery level, the boxes maintained value as you could easily make money by opening a box and selling the +1 infusions and vendor trash. However, this created an oversupply in +1s since the fractal merchant who converts the +1s into higher infusions being disabled, and its market crashed to the current price of 3s-4s or 26s per box as the current research posted on the 1000 Fractal Encryption Research thread shows. Now the oversupply is so great, I do not see the +1 infusions rising in price even when the fractal merchant returns from his vacation.

So, we either need a way to bypass the silver requirement for a key or we need guaranteed gold for completing a fractal to cause fractals to be worth running for money. The advantage of bypassing the silver requirement is that it could eat up some other oversupply such as Shards of the Mist (If you have run fractals constantly you should have stacks of these). The advantage of giving guaranteed gold is that you can weight it based off of Fractal level encouraging people to actually run lvls 90+ instead of spamming low 50s to get the best fractal daily.

Ultimately, the rewards in Fractals relative to the rest of the game is in a worst place than before the update unless another rework happens.

What bothers me about the rewards is that the higher you go, they don’t change that much. 50 is a lot easier than 100 but the rewards are the basically the same.

Ok, update: finally got 1 single ascended drop getting to the end. A lunaria. And that’s pretty much it for me… just gonna go back to my usual 1 daily per day.
Thanks for completely ruining fracs! You made it so annoying I don’t even wanna play it, and now I actually lose money when I do! Ha ha.
I explained the situation to a couple of friends who play other mmos and they didn’t believe me…

Wethospu.6437:

I fully support the predefined fractal maps because of the advantages it gives. Most importantly having map specific instabilities and fine tuning the difficulty. Unfortunately neither exists. But it’s a good start.

Based on my data, Archdiviner did 7682-8663 damage with his swing prepatch on scale 1 and 18644-21024 damage on scale 50. If he now does 4k on scale 59, something is seriously wrong. Also hopefully they remove that toughness scaling to balance direct and condition damage (haven’t tested how severe it is).

I think dailies should be predefined to encourage doing different scales. Daily reward should be bigger when you need to do harder fractals.

Also why dungeons weren’t recycled to fractal instances? Pick/combine some best fights for a decent encounter.

predefined has its merits, however mostly its good for practice.
There should be a randomized mode with better rewards
the instability change is uncreative, and does eliminate skillfull play (31-40)

what people say about 60-100 seems very bad. Long fights doesnt=better fights.

also nerf to getting ascended(weapons/chests) in fractals far as i have heard.
most likely, the new 100 reward level= the old 50, but with less possible attempts at ascended

feels like honestly, fractals need another rework to be the main 5 man content. Unfortunately, it took them 2 years to do this rework, so its pretty hopeless.

Totally agreed with the OP. Personally I find the high toughness the most horrendous part. It pretty much renders power builds useless. It’s so boring…