Guild Wars 2

I’m getting the impression that diminishing returns is unfairly hammering people here. In the last 4 days I’ve been doing 3-4 fractals in the Casual and adept scales for dailies and the like, but my loot has dropped to blues and junk items worth less than the keys to get them. I’m not repeating the same fractals every day, and I’m picking pretty much randomly out of the list of ones I had left to do. Is anyone else having similar experiences?

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 did 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.

Edit: Further suggestion for a fix — add 4 more specific fractal island dailies, 2 randomly selected from the pool of levels 51-75 and 2 from 76-100. Make daily rewards scale with the fractal level and make these dailies give the best fractal rewards possible (even some unique rewards from the daily chest from these only). This will ensure people can’t get the best rewards (or at least as quickly) by only doing the easy fractals. Balance the 51+ fractals (read: make Swamp, Molten Duo and Jade Maw hard). The balancing will likely require mechanics/instability changes which unfortunately makes it unlikely.

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.

This is very disheartening, I’m currently grinding like crazy to get into this content and it’s this good?

Maybe it’s best to quit the game and come back after a few months and see if they’ve fixed it. =(

i have to say, i am can only aggre with everyone here. plus:

1. u have to do diffrent fractal levels now to complete the daily. why do i have to return to LA for every level switch. Its so anoying. particularly on low levels the time for the fractal is sometimes shorter than everyone gets out of fotm and load LA + port back in for another level.
2. is there a chance of getting anything usefull (asc. boxes, frac skins etc) out of the chests? i dont care for the recipes. i have tons of karma and if i need a recipe i buy it. + i always role leather or heavy recipes while only using ele + necro. RNGesus all the way -.-
3. i am not a meta player. i am not using any high dmg gear if its not necessary, cause i always (before HoT) wanted to have a fight, where the boss can fight u back. not like all this 10 sek fights on punch bags. but holy moly. everything takes so long. first u anounce enrage timers on raidbosses (=|= skillbased encounters, which would mean u master the mechanics and should be able to win the fight, but thats another topic), now u bring up the live and thoughness to new highs… i can understand raising hp but really, fighting an enemy for minutes without getting his hp really dropping is just frustrating. + i can facetank everything, with ele on cele gear.. not challanging, not skillbased, not fun.
4. last point: why do you deleted the champ bag of “old tom”? was he to old for loot?

some examples of bad mistlock instability:
lvl 61+ random conditions:

1. Underground facility: dredge rng fear u and u walk of the plattform -.
2. Thouma: was alreaddy said. rng fear/immob = u fall and die. cause of the length of the fight and to much bad luck we could only do it with someone staying back and keep the boss from resetting after wipe.
3. underwater: jelly hit u, u get immo = jellys completly overrun u like a truck
4. harpies: random rng fear = dead

no offense, i really enjoyd the explosions on level 59 cause they where predictable and u had make a plan for it. but the rng conditions is just hillarious bull.

edit: just reached 71 and was happy rng condis are done. but hey another 10 levels of this uncreative ****. please tell me 80+, 90+ are even enjoyable.

edit 2: just thought of the reddit data mining post from 1 year+ back in time. things like airborn, tag and double tag team or die as one sounded really good and hard. to bad they didnt made it in the game.
[now we only got 7 diffrent instabilitys changing ever 10 level. before we got 19 diffrent (agony instability twice). before HoT u had to do 50x 4 fractals for max level. now u only need 100. doesnt really sound like expanded.]

Fractals are more boring and slow than CoF Mastery Farming, gimme a break.

I have to agree with this, I realy love my fractals , but I kind of feel kitten at the moment… The First run to 100 was realy fun , but what is the reason to do lvl 90+ fractals a second time ? The rewards are defenetly Not bringing people to play them … Bosses are just overlysized punchingbags with way to much hp and no thread due to no dmg …. I already miss the old fractal System :/

Here are my thoughts on the new fractals.

To start on a positive note, the first run to 100 was enjoyable. I liked progressing again and seeing the new instabilities and mechanics. But now that it is behind me and I have ran fractal dailies for a few days, I have the following comments:

Toughness scaling and lower damage

At higher scales bosses have so much toughness that it takes ages to kill them. I used a condi engineer but my damage was still low. Couple this with lower damage from all boss attacks (Mai Trin at 100 does less damage than she did on old level 50) and it makes most fights tedious and boring. I don’t think I will ever repeat 80+ scales unless it is necessary for a daily achievement.

Mistlock Instabilities

When they announced each scale would only be 1 island, and that they would be able to better tune the mistlock instabilities this way, I got really excited. I thought each scale would have a unique mistlock which would fundamentally change the way the fractal was played. Oh how wrong I was. The mistlock instabilities are extremely uninspired, RNG-reliant and sometimes even punishing good play (dodging removes boons – really?). They do not feel like a challenge to be overcome, they just feel like an annoyance. For most of them you could not even change your build or tactics to “outplay” the instabilities, you just have to suffer the consequences.

I liked the Fractal Avenger that pops up on 71+ when you down that tries to finish you. This is in my opinion a cool new mechanic that actually gives additional depth to the gameplay instead of just annoying the player with random conditions and boon removal. I want to see more things like the Avenger!

Daily Achievements

I have ran all dailies since launch and still working on the achievement for 21-50 scales, but I already feel like the daily system is much worse now. The recommended dailies are always low scales (not sure if that is to stay) and we just blitz through them with almost no regard for mechanics or whatsoever. Same goes for the 1-20 achievement. On low level snowblind, after being teleported by the Elemental Source, we did not even have enough time to get back to the middle before it was killed by the condis still on it. There is no challenge whatsoever present in these low tier dailies.

For the 51-100 dailies we have done Swamp (56), Jade Maw (60) and another one around these scales depending on what we felt like. Fractals at 80+ are just too long and tedious to do every day so we just opt for the fastest ones at lower scales. Not like you get a better reward from the daily achievement for higher scales, so what’s the point right?

The future of these dailies saddens me. Once we have all achievements for 1-100 we will only do the fastest fractals each day, spend about an hour speeding through low level fractals where everything dies incredibly fast and deals almost no damage, then do the higher tier where everything takes longer to kill than on old 50 but deals less damage so still not posing any threat. At least old 50 was a little challenging and you had to actually pay attention.

Rewards

Right now, rewards seem very lackluster. I can’t give any numbers but having to buy keys to open boxes that have pretty much only crap inside doesn’t entice me. I have gotten some rings but no armor/weapon chests or skins yet.

All in all I feel like Fractals has gotten significantly worse after these changes and once I have the legendary backpack I will probably not play them anymore, at least not daily.

dutchiez.7502:

Here are my thoughts on the new fractals.

Mistlock Instabilities

When they announced each scale would only be 1 island, and that they would be able to better tune the mistlock instabilities this way, I got really excited. I thought each scale would have a unique mistlock which would fundamentally change the way the fractal was played. Oh how wrong I was. The mistlock instabilities are extremely uninspired, RNG-reliant and sometimes even punishing good play (dodging removes boons – really?). They do not feel like a challenge to be overcome, they just feel like an annoyance. For most of them you could not even change your build or tactics to “outplay” the instabilities, you just have to suffer the consequences.

I liked the Fractal Avenger that pops up on 71+ when you down that tries to finish you. This is in my opinion a cool new mechanic that actually gives additional depth to the gameplay instead of just annoying the player with random conditions and boon removal. I want to see more things like the Avenger!

I totaly agree with that, instabilities aren’t fun yet and the fact that bosses are now just a bag of HP not hiting hard at all are making fractals boring to me we lost the depth we had before HoT where evading/blocking was a must for almost every attacks of the boss, instead of the curent state where we can face tank a good part of it.
Something else that decrease the fun of the fight (and here it’s to every PvE content not only fractals) is that cripple/chill/immobilize now is useless because it goes in the break bar, which delete an entire part of the gameplay we had previously.

I used to run them on 3 different scales everyday but now I don’t have fun anymore doing them. Adding the fact that dungeons are void now (friend list and even PuGs) result in the overall PvE experience being worse than it was before.

I hope Anet give some love to balance that, because I don’t see myself staying around very long if nothing change.

From someone who loves the game way to much to stop it this way, please.

Just increase the rewards of specific fractal levels dynamically when they are done less than other fractals.

This already exists for mob xp in pve, so why not for fractals?

This would really encourage people to do harder/ more time consuming fractals.
(And would also work for dungeons)

Agree on most of the things said here and i hope they improve fractal rly soon or this will be dead content like dungeons ….

Kinda said that i dont do fractals before HoT, is there still a prober chance to get something usefull (asc. boxes, frac skins)?

Pre-patch: Used to FOTM 50 daily.

Post-patch: 0.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Pre-patch: Used to FOTM 50 daily.

Post-patch: 0.

That’s where I am at now.

No fractals and no dungeons. No point anymore to either. I already told my guild don’t ask me to run until they fix the HP sponges and the rewards. After that I will consider it.

TheFantasticGman.9451:

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Pre-patch: Used to FOTM 50 daily.

Post-patch: 0.

That’s where I am at now.

No fractals and no dungeons. No point anymore to either. I already told my guild don’t ask me to run until they fix the HP sponges and the rewards. After that I will consider it.

Sigh. I ran through 1-76 really fast, and have since quit. Any one of my friends I ask to fractal, refuse to do so after the toughness patch.

dutchiez.7502:

Here are my thoughts on the new fractals.

To start on a positive note, the first run to 100 was enjoyable. I liked progressing again and seeing the new instabilities and mechanics. But now that it is behind me and I have ran fractal dailies for a few days, I have the following comments:

Toughness scaling and lower damage

At higher scales bosses have so much toughness that it takes ages to kill them. I used a condi engineer but my damage was still low. Couple this with lower damage from all boss attacks (Mai Trin at 100 does less damage than she did on old level 50) and it makes most fights tedious and boring. I don’t think I will ever repeat 80+ scales unless it is necessary for a daily achievement.

Mistlock Instabilities

When they announced each scale would only be 1 island, and that they would be able to better tune the mistlock instabilities this way, I got really excited. I thought each scale would have a unique mistlock which would fundamentally change the way the fractal was played. Oh how wrong I was. The mistlock instabilities are extremely uninspired, RNG-reliant and sometimes even punishing good play (dodging removes boons – really?). They do not feel like a challenge to be overcome, they just feel like an annoyance. For most of them you could not even change your build or tactics to “outplay” the instabilities, you just have to suffer the consequences.

I liked the Fractal Avenger that pops up on 71+ when you down that tries to finish you. This is in my opinion a cool new mechanic that actually gives additional depth to the gameplay instead of just annoying the player with random conditions and boon removal. I want to see more things like the Avenger!

Daily Achievements

I have ran all dailies since launch and still working on the achievement for 21-50 scales, but I already feel like the daily system is much worse now. The recommended dailies are always low scales (not sure if that is to stay) and we just blitz through them with almost no regard for mechanics or whatsoever. Same goes for the 1-20 achievement. On low level snowblind, after being teleported by the Elemental Source, we did not even have enough time to get back to the middle before it was killed by the condis still on it. There is no challenge whatsoever present in these low tier dailies.

For the 51-100 dailies we have done Swamp (56), Jade Maw (60) and another one around these scales depending on what we felt like. Fractals at 80+ are just too long and tedious to do every day so we just opt for the fastest ones at lower scales. Not like you get a better reward from the daily achievement for higher scales, so what’s the point right?

The future of these dailies saddens me. Once we have all achievements for 1-100 we will only do the fastest fractals each day, spend about an hour speeding through low level fractals where everything dies incredibly fast and deals almost no damage, then do the higher tier where everything takes longer to kill than on old 50 but deals less damage so still not posing any threat. At least old 50 was a little challenging and you had to actually pay attention.

Rewards

Right now, rewards seem very lackluster. I can’t give any numbers but having to buy keys to open boxes that have pretty much only crap inside doesn’t entice me. I have gotten some rings but no armor/weapon chests or skins yet.

All in all I feel like Fractals has gotten significantly worse after these changes and once I have the legendary backpack I will probably not play them anymore, at least not daily.

I can only say: yes. Exactly.

Oh there is one hard fractal… it is Cliffside after they “repaired” it (i would said kittened it), and made with some instabilieties almost impossible to finish – with random condition on mobs attack it usually mean 1 bad fear and it mean wipe, as warrior I don’t have enough stun breaks / condition cleanse to survive how fast you have to do it.
It made me Rage Quit (so I lost all my will to play GW2 today). I did it with exploding instability, and I didn’t felt accomplish (as it is also very BSy one).
I won’t do any cliffside above 50 ever agiain (great job Anet) it is not worth time/health to do so.
Before changes sometimes we (I and guildies) had problems with vulcanic fractal boss, but I never felt it is as cheap, as new CF.

Most bosses are dmg sponges. Death to berseker meta you wish. I see swapping for CF that one seal for something more tanky (for 1 person). The way the bosses are they reward glass cannon builds by being one huge pinatas.

Rewards… Lackluster! For 3 fractals 50+ 1 gold, and the thing that I love → wheel of fortune. At least for now I never felt that I lost something by buying keys. There are no gold from dungeons here. On side note there is no gold in dungeons anymore, or in new maps (yes the materials are quite expensive (for now)). In other word there really is no way to earn respectable amount of “liquid gold” (And I don’t see Raids to be reliable source – especially since they are going to aim for pro-s). Also Anet added new gold sink ascended salvage (after salvaging 18 rings I didn’t got single black matter or how it is called). Yep for now we won’t see how it affect market, but I would love to see It after amount of gold in some pockets dwindle.

it really is amazing they straight up selected no dodge and boon on crit, for 20 levels. it actually seems like anet fractal change plan was to mechanically make berserk gear inferior.
Which is fairly stupid in fractals. No single gear set should be punished when gear is a long term goal, especially in fractals where infusions increase gear investment.

that aside
10 levels with the same instabilities, its totally lame.

phys.7689:

it really is amazing they straight up selected no dodge and boon on crit, for 20 levels. it actually seems like anet fractal change plan was to mechanically make berserk gear inferior.
Which is fairly stupid in fractals. No single gear set should be punished when gear is a long term goal, especially in fractals where infusions increase gear investment.

that aside
10 levels with the same instabilities, its totally lame.

Especially when those instabilities reward terrible gameplay/skill level, and good RNG.

phys.7689:

it really is amazing they straight up selected no dodge and boon on crit, for 20 levels. it actually seems like anet fractal change plan was to mechanically make berserk gear inferior.
Which is fairly stupid in fractals. No single gear set should be punished when gear is a long term goal, especially in fractals where infusions increase gear investment.

Yes that + the ridiculous scale on toughness, I hope Anet stops with this “berserker hate/fear”. So many people are compalining that bosses aren’t fun because we don’t do damges and they don’t do damages to us either even when we are running berserker gear. Now think what it would have been in the past if we wouldn’t have berserkers (or sinister for some professions) parties, the same would have occured : face tanking bosses and taking long time to kill them without any fun or challenge.

I can’t even imagine me running with people not running full glass canon builds right now without leaving the party where I used to not care at all about what my party was running, all of that because it’s already to boring/slow to do with viper/berserker gear…

If they want to make diversity in the gear the way they took is not the right way at all.

I sincerly hope that all of the replies on this subject will be read and that Anet will take the time to think about everything that is said here because it’s one of the only subject of this forum where feedbacks have quality replies.

ADTempys.6382:

phys.7689:

it really is amazing they straight up selected no dodge and boon on crit, for 20 levels. it actually seems like anet fractal change plan was to mechanically make berserk gear inferior.
Which is fairly stupid in fractals. No single gear set should be punished when gear is a long term goal, especially in fractals where infusions increase gear investment.

Yes that + the ridiculous scale on toughness, I hope Anet stops with this “berserker hate/fear”. So many people are compalining that bosses aren’t fun because we don’t do damges and they don’t do damages to us either even when we are running berserker gear. Now think what it would have been in the past if we wouldn’t have berserkers (or sinister for some professions) parties, the same would have occured : face tanking bosses and taking long time to kill them without any fun or challenge. If they want to make diversity in the gear the way they took is not the right way at all.

And yet people are still whining because berserker is still perfectly usable (I won’t say optimal to prevent phiws from having a stroke— too late). Not sure what more do they want exactly, deleting it from the game? /shrug

Battle on the Breachmaker fractal when

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Battle on the Breachmaker fractal when

Uh? English plz, no phiw expressions here

deSade.9437:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Battle on the Breachmaker fractal when

Uh? English plz, no phiw expressions here

Sorry I’m still new to this game

Waiting for the Nike post complaining about people complaining.

Ok, I’ll wait here too.
/waits
No hold on.. I forgot my scarf and mittens. It’s cooold. I’ll be back!

still no sign of any developer. i feel like a unwanted, neglected child. NO HOPE? (…i assume not, but u can craft it in a few weeks…)
it feels like they put more work in halloween than to fractals

I am getting real close to feeling that they should revert back to pre-HoT Fractals of the Mists. Even if they never touch Fractals again pre-Hot fractals were more fun than the mess we have now.

The rewards from fractals are horrible. ANET really needs to do something if they want people to continue playing them after the initial excitement wears off.

DrEckers.2039:

I am getting real close to feeling that they should revert back to pre-HoT Fractals of the Mists. Even if they never touch Fractals again pre-Hot fractals were more fun than the mess we have now.

I do like the individual fractals vs having to do 4 in a row. I just think that as part of the daily, a reward should be the exact same bonus chest we used to receive.

style.6173:

DrEckers.2039:

I am getting real close to feeling that they should revert back to pre-HoT Fractals of the Mists. Even if they never touch Fractals again pre-Hot fractals were more fun than the mess we have now.

I do like the individual fractals vs having to do 4 in a row. I just think that as part of the daily, a reward should be the exact same bonus chest we used to receive.

I know I am in the minority, but let me explain why I think the old system of 4 islands per level (which I will call 4in1) was better than the current 1 island (1in1).

1) Reaching Max Fractal level previously was a harder and longer task. This one is pretty straightforward as it took 200 islands to reach max level previously as opposed to the only 100 islands it now takes. I get that people did not like dedicating 1 hour+ to completeing all 4 levels if they pugged it, but I would rather have the 4in1 Longer but funner system since we had to go to multiple locations and do multiple things than the shorter snoozefest of chipping through a single boss’s hp we have now. In my opinion this makes reaching fractal 50 in the 4in1 more prestigious than reaching 100 in the 1in1.

2) While in the 4in1 everyone rolled swamp to start, there were still 3 random fractals which the player had no control over choosing. This kept the content fresh as you could have swamp, ascalon, thaumanova, and molten due one day and swamp, snowblind, cliffside, and Mai another. Even having different random paths in the same fractal like how swamp could give either bloomhunger or mossman helped keep the content fresh. Now, one of the biggest complaints about 4in1 was that people would spam swamp instead of other fractals in its tier like Krait. But, we are now in a much worse situation as people will only pick the easy, quick, and the lowest reasonable level fractals to complete their dailies such as swamp and maw once they complete their collections. Whole fractals that were challenging but fun including but not limited to Snowblind, Mai, and Cliffside will be straight up dead content.

3) 4in1 required more general party compositions as you had to be prepared for a wide range of challenges. Now you just tailor your party to the specific fractal.

Honestly while I did not present as such, I made my comment about rolling back to the previous 4in1 in the hopes that anet would look at the feedback for the 1in1, make appropriates changes like what the Op lists to increase the fun and reward of the new system, and then rerelease the new Fractals with Raids. In the mean time, the fractal playerbase would still have the old fractals which they enjoyed a lot more than the 1in1 system.

Based on my test, Archdiviner has 5k armor on scale 94. Prepatch he had 2597. I still have to double check values though.

And vit?

steffen.4317:

still no sign of any developer. i feel like a unwanted, neglected child. NO HOPE? (…i assume not, but u can craft it in a few weeks…)
it feels like they put more work in halloween than to fractals

Are you new here?

I’m actually quite surprised. The forums are a very small minority of the community, but lots of difficult people here have come to complain- and there are plenty more in-game unhappy about the Toughness, Rewards, and kitten-RNG and/or Skill Punishing instability mechanics.

So- knowing that this many people are unhappy, and no response? That’s not really great for their playerbase.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Are you new here?

???

tienak.5406:

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 did 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.

Edit: Further suggestion for a fix — add 4 more specific fractal island dailies, 2 randomly selected from the pool of levels 51-75 and 2 from 76-100. Make daily rewards scale with the fractal level and make these dailies give the best fractal rewards possible (even some unique rewards from the daily chest from these only). This will ensure people can’t get the best rewards (or at least as quickly) by only doing the easy fractals. Balance the 51+ fractals (read: make Swamp, Molten Duo and Jade Maw hard). The balancing will likely require mechanics/instability changes which unfortunately makes it unlikely.

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.

This is very disheartening, I’m currently grinding like crazy to get into this content and it’s this good?

Maybe it’s best to quit the game and come back after a few years and see if they’ve fixed it. =(

Fixed for ya.

steffen.4317:

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Are you new here?

???

What you described is pretty much the norm for anything dungeon/fractal related.

Instabilities in general are a spreading cancer in the once-rich gameplay of Fractals. The Boon Fumbler instability is terrible as explained in the OP and No Pain, No Gain is incredibly harsh and tedious when fighting bosses (what if you just flat out described it as [Bosses have 30%-40% more damage, take 33% percent less damage, have perma regen, deal 250 damage on your strikes, and are rarely susceptible to crowd control]. Likely the only reason Resistance isn’t in that lot is because it was introduced after No Pain, No Gain was originally instituted. It’s something designed to nullify practical playing and reward tailoring and running specific builds (no precision, no boons/dodging), something entirely counter to what Guild Wars 2 is supposed to preach.

One Fractal one scale was an amazing opportunity to tailor Instabilities to each island and change factors within the islands, creating a rich dynamic where instead of an overall atmosphere of penalty each scale would be given a new challenge rather than a penalty for knowing how to play (how to dodge, how to boon, how to damage, how to stack). It’s both disgustingly lazy and incredibly disappointing. And alongside the lack of reward scaling it will kill peoples’ interest in doing Fractals of the Mists.

I’m just going to come out and be honest. We told you so ANET. We told you these ideas for changing fractals were terrible and were going to ruin the fractal experience. You announced some of these changes …specifically the toughness, vitality, and precision scaling of fractal mobs and we immediately told you that those were bad ideas. We explained why they were bad ideas. We explained that changes like this were not going to accomplish what you thought they would…which is to cater to the zerk hate of the phiw crowd. The logic just doesn’t make sense. How did anyone make the logical leap to make you think that making bosses/mobs more resistant to damage…would make anyone happy? Now you have these huge hp/toughness bags for bosses that take everyone a ridiculous amount of time to kill. I’m positive that has not increased the happiness of the phiw crowd….as now it takes them even longer to do fractals in their nomad gear. It has not increased the happiness of the zerk crowd (also your paying customers btw…in case you forgot), since all you have accomplished is to prolong the fights artificially…no new encounter mechanics to reward skilled play. On top of that…you add in the worst ideas ever (instabilities that punish skilled play, take away control of our characters, force involuntary deaths as a result of taking away control of our characters, and punish us for the core mechanics of your game..namely boons and dodging). You also go as far as to seemingly eliminate the rewards from fractals at the same time as removing all the fun from fractals. They don’t even reward decent experience/mastery. You removed the randomization of fractals as well…now just predictable and boring. Are you guys trying to kill our interest in fractals so you can stop supporting them…just like dungeons? If that’s the case, then maybe you are on the right track. Fractals were one of the few reasons I logged in most days. I see no reason to enter a fractal with the current lack of rewards and marathon boss fights. The funny part is that you didn’t even accomplish what you were after with the boss fight changes…now you definitely don’t want to play with low damage dealers…because it will take even longer to complete…for the even crappier rewards (fractal boxes that you have to pay to open…with crap rewards once you do). I’m amazed that someone actually got paid to come up with this stuff.

I hear people saying “I’ll just go do X while we kill this boss”

X being a random householdtask / surfing the internet / playing other game.

Isnt it ridiculous the level of concentration and skill you require of your players in the new fractals?

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

I hear people saying “I’ll just go do X while we kill this boss”

X being a random householdtask / surfing the internet / playing other game.

Isnt it ridiculous the level of concentration and skill you require of your players in the new fractals?

What fractal are you playing? Lol there are hard fractals and there are easy fractals, ofc if you do mossman all day you can practically afk with enough support from your teammates. Other than that I think your statement is bullkitten. I wanna see you do 100 while doing household chores, or 97 or 94, even 64, well I could go on and list a bunch of somewhat more challenging fractals for you if you want a challenge. Oh but wait people just wanna do the easy ones to get the rewards and than complain how easy it was. There are easy fractals and there are hard ones that’s how it has always been.

Zach.2618:

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

I hear people saying “I’ll just go do X while we kill this boss”

X being a random householdtask / surfing the internet / playing other game.

Isnt it ridiculous the level of concentration and skill you require of your players in the new fractals?

What fractal are you playing? Lol there are hard fractals and there are easy fractals, ofc if you do mossman all day you can practically afk with enough support from your teammates. Other than that I think your statement is bullkitten. I wanna see you do 100 while doing household chores, or 97 or 94, even 64, well I could go on and list a bunch of somewhat more challenging fractals for you if you want a challenge. Oh but wait people just wanna do the easy ones to get the rewards and than complain how easy it was. There are easy fractals and there are hard ones that’s how it has always been.

I have yet to push past 90, but until now there was barely anything that actually challenged us. Most of the time it was tedious as all hell because of the insane toughness on mobs.

Daiboru.5792:

I’m actually quite surprised. The forums are a very small minority of the community, but lots of difficult people here have come to complain- and there are plenty more in-game unhappy about the Toughness, Rewards, and kitten-RNG and/or Skill Punishing instability mechanics.

So- knowing that this many people are unhappy, and no response? That’s not really great for their playerbase.

Well the people you see on the forums are the ones complaining about it, pretty sure a lot more players also enjoy the new fractal system. It’s just that they don’t have a reason to come to the forums to say oh we enjoy the fractals. Take this thread with a pinch of salt, it does not represent the entire of the fractal runners population, myself and many others do enjoy the fractals now. IMO the title should be changed, this is not a general discussion/feedback of the new fractals, it’s more of a thread for people who dislike it to whine and complain about.

Most of my contacts hate fractals now, the few people I know enjoying them are people who didn’t played PvE before and aren’t past lvl 30 yet.

Sometimes I go to fractals with the LFG system and I discuss with my party, no one from the LFG told me they liked fractal now.

Zach.2618:

Well the people you see on the forums are the ones complaining about it, pretty sure a lot more players also enjoy the new fractal system. It’s just that they don’t have a reason to come to the forums to say oh we enjoy the fractals. Take this thread with a pinch of salt, it does not represent the entire of the fractal runners population, myself and many others do enjoy the fractals now. IMO the title should be changed, this is not a general discussion/feedback of the new fractals, it’s more of a thread for people who dislike it to whine and complain about.

Nice copypaste Mr. Representative of The Silent Majority.

Zach.2618:

IMO the title should be changed, this is not a general discussion/feedback of the new fractals, it’s more of a thread for people who dislike it to whine and complain about.

Do you even know what feedback is? do you know what criticism is? do you know that most game developers don’t play their own game, so things are iterated upon based on player feedback, if you want an echo chamber to preach about how amazing the new fractals are and how great it is that we did not receive any new fractals as part of the expansion maybe you should go back to reddit, you can censor all the bad things your can’t bare to read.

Where else will you find feedback outside of the fractal forum? most of the people here have been playing the exact same fractals for a very long time and they have a pretty good idea what they want. Unfortunately anet isn’t a normal developer and they will not build upon feedback and they are willing to completely destroy content if it means getting better numbers into other areas of the game.

Zach.2618:

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

I hear people saying “I’ll just go do X while we kill this boss”

X being a random householdtask / surfing the internet / playing other game.

Isnt it ridiculous the level of concentration and skill you require of your players in the new fractals?

What fractal are you playing? Lol there are hard fractals and there are easy fractals, ofc if you do mossman all day you can practically afk with enough support from your teammates. Other than that I think your statement is bullkitten. I wanna see you do 100 while doing household chores, or 97 or 94, even 64, well I could go on and list a bunch of somewhat more challenging fractals for you if you want a challenge. Oh but wait people just wanna do the easy ones to get the rewards and than complain how easy it was. There are easy fractals and there are hard ones that’s how it has always been.

I akitten at 80+ archdiviner, came back and I was about half health. Akitten quickly at mai 100, went back and I was about 30% (I apparently got hit by mai once and Horrik a couple of times, which would’ve downed me in old 50). Your statement is bullkitten. Bosses had their damage nerfed to hell, and it shows. Even my dog would notice it.

True, some are slightly harder, but the only fractals I found remotely challenging were cliffside with last laugh (mostly 30% challenging 70% tedious, since we finished seals with 4) and aetherpath last boss at 80-90, when we didn’t cheese it with pets. That was genuinely harder than others, but because of the 10-12 stacks of agony you got if you messed up. Sounds kinda fair to me, though, especially because golems DIDN’T HAVE kittenING 20 BILLION HEALTH AND TOUGHNESS, making it a somewhat fair and tolerable fight despite being a bit harsher.
The new anomaly? unbearable. I would’ve akitten if it weren’t for the collapsing floor.

What’s the point of bosses if trash mobs do more damage and pose more of a threat than them? If you think people wanting to go afk in the middle of a fractal 80-100 because of sheer boredom is ok, you seriously need to get your head checked. The old 50 archdiviner was harder, jesus kittening christ. How is this normal?
You can say that some fracs 75+ are much harder until you’re blue in the face, doesn’t hide the fact that some bosses had their dps kittening cut in half! Or more! and that now you can facetank 2 attacks in full zerk!
What in the hell.

P.S. No, I never wanted to afk in the middle of fractals before, despite being burnt out. Why? because archie, mai, mossy, they all posed a kittening threat if you didn’t cheese them. At least the molten berserker doesn’t die in a spit anymore, that’s good. Problem is, it’s also non-threatening.
P.P.S. Oh, and they also killed 2manning for me with these changes. Who wants to hack at mossman for 20 minutes now? I’d rather smash my own fingers with a rusty hammer.

ODB.6891:

I’m just going to come out and be honest. We told you so ANET. We told you these ideas for changing fractals were terrible and were going to ruin the fractal experience. You announced some of these changes …specifically the toughness, vitality, and precision scaling of fractal mobs and we immediately told you that those were bad ideas. We explained why they were bad ideas. We explained that changes like this were not going to accomplish what you thought they would…which is to cater to the zerk hate of the phiw crowd. The logic just doesn’t make sense. How did anyone make the logical leap to make you think that making bosses/mobs more resistant to damage…would make anyone happy? Now you have these huge hp/toughness bags for bosses that take everyone a ridiculous amount of time to kill. I’m positive that has not increased the happiness of the phiw crowd….as now it takes them even longer to do fractals in their nomad gear. It has not increased the happiness of the zerk crowd (also your paying customers btw…in case you forgot), since all you have accomplished is to prolong the fights artificially…no new encounter mechanics to reward skilled play. On top of that…you add in the worst ideas ever (instabilities that punish skilled play, take away control of our characters, force involuntary deaths as a result of taking away control of our characters, and punish us for the core mechanics of your game..namely boons and dodging). You also go as far as to seemingly eliminate the rewards from fractals at the same time as removing all the fun from fractals. They don’t even reward decent experience/mastery. You removed the randomization of fractals as well…now just predictable and boring. Are you guys trying to kill our interest in fractals so you can stop supporting them…just like dungeons? If that’s the case, then maybe you are on the right track. Fractals were one of the few reasons I logged in most days. I see no reason to enter a fractal with the current lack of rewards and marathon boss fights. The funny part is that you didn’t even accomplish what you were after with the boss fight changes…now you definitely don’t want to play with low damage dealers…because it will take even longer to complete…for the even crappier rewards (fractal boxes that you have to pay to open…with crap rewards once you do). I’m amazed that someone actually got paid to come up with this stuff.

the sad part is that anet generally misses the point of feedback fixating on just one part of it. The point of anti zerk players was to encourage team play and skilled play, their solutions dont do that.

And it will be months to years before they can deal with the feedback we give now. Screwing with fractal incentives and dungeon incentives at the same time was a bad idea as well. Instanced content post hot is extremely slim. And 5 man content is about to be non existant.

Heres what fractals needs, imo

• drop rate indicators this doesnt need to be s mystery, most of the progression is about this, so we need to know.
• more varied instabilities the ones yall left are some of the least engaging/interactive of the lot.
• some sort of randomized mode with added benefits as predicted, this basically becomes a system where you repeat the easiest fractals most of the time, and makes harder fractals pointless. If you still want fractals to be short:
  • random fractal tier 3* cool down 40 minutes unless completed
  • also, not for shortness, but a randomized survivor mode, or old fractal type (3-4 randoms with a boss fractal) wouldbe nice.
• rewards we know if you want people to do content at all, it needs rewards, fractals has a huge investment in time, gold, and challenge. Acc bound ascended was a good reward, you need to get those rates back up. legendary isnt enough. back[ack is low stats.

• new fractals, regularly* its been two years since we had a fractal, thats too long for the only endorsed 5 man challenging content.

Before HoT I did a few scales of fractals nearly everyday for 1,5 years and I enjoyed the content most of the time. It was the only thing I did in Gw2.

Dungeons had become too brainless for me and in open-world zerg content player skill isn’t rewarded.

Now, you can do 1 fractal at a time. Which is nice if you only wanna do each fractal once from 1 to 100. Or if you only wanna get a daily done and wanna get the rewards (hard to believe since they have become crap)

Before, the randomness of the fractals added fun (or frustration depending on which you got). Now that’s removed, you basically removed all fractals except 3 once you’ve reached 100. Because who would wanna do a frustrating fractal if you can just do one of the 3 easiest fractals.

Forcing us to do others with the daily system is hardly a solution.

In all honesty I’ve stopped doing fractals all together, just got the skins I was still missing (though instant gratification didn’t make me happy) You see everyone walking with the skins nowadays anyway. And the gold ones aren’t my thing, they are a cheap recolor!

Reverting back to Pre-HoT would be the easiest solution. From there we will see.
Since just increasing the boss dmg isn’t a solution in my eyes, because you could just take off your gear to archieve the same result.

The fractals revamp is probably the shadiest stuff Anet has done with HoT. Its almost as if they didn’t even try and just figured they had to put some sort of fractals content in HoT because people would be kittened off if they didn’t.

Theres zero difficulty at +50 because they nerfed the difficulty at earlier levels and moved it up to higher levels. What an absolute joke. To add to it, there arn’t any new cool mechanics with the fights at higher levels or interesting ways the encounter changes with a mistlock instability, just that the bosses have a huge health pool. Thats not difficult, its time consuming. An absolute joke basically.

Its literally like they didn’t listen to anything in the Fractals CDI. With how little effort they put into fractals with this expansion, I seriously doubt they have any interest in further contuining with this part of the game. I think they will abandon it, just like with dungeons.

Alright… I just soloed 33 Cliffside on my Nec and… Idk. I really don’t know. It was something I always dreaded to do, even on lower scales, simply because of the mechanics there.
First off, I know, yeah, 33 isn’t exactly a high scale but if you put it in relation, pre-patch that meant you ran over 100 islands, now it means you’re done with 1/3rd of the scales, so you would expect some degree of difficulty. I also usually don’t mention this either because I see no reason to, but I have dyspraxia, which means I have terrible timing and often mess up key-presses by simply pressing the wrong key or doing even more kittened things. And I have to say, the biggest threat during the whole fractal was… my own stupidity. I haven’t really felt at danger from the mobs once (Though I admit, Archdiviner would’ve probably caused more trouble without minions. His Leap still only hits for roughly 6k on this scale, though. lol) and my total of four deaths didn’t happen because the enemies were particularly threatening, but because I went with the wrong approach once, managed to Death’s Charge myself down the platform, I dropped the hammer too late and because thinking you can just walk through the fire at the chest seal is a dumb idea.
Yet, I was able to solo the fractal without really struggling a lot overall. Before someone goes ahead and says “yeah go do higher scales”, I did various fractals (or at least part of them) between 50 and 80 solo. I can’t say I often felt actually threatened, though there were some scales that actually proven to be pretty difficult solo, for example 64 Thaumanova, basically every Aetherblade Retreat because kitten those Thugs and the beginning of Molten Facility (those Dredge hurt like mad idk how they do that). The main reason for them being so threatening (solo) is actually the damage and HP they have; they’re killable but they don’t blow up immediately and if you don’t watch out, they do hurt. I liked that.

Imo, such balance should be achieved throughout the whole fractals. Enemies, bosses in particular, that don’t die immediately but also don’t take 10 minutes to kill (not that this is a bad thing in general, but most bosses in fractals have mechanics that get tedious and boring if you’re forced to do them for such an amount of time in one go)
There’s also some point around 50 where the game seems to just flip a switch for bosses, at least it felt like to me. Enemies in 41-50 survived some time because of the instability, but looking past those levels it quickly feels like their Atk-Stats started to get a bit lower again/stop rising while they get toughness for breakfast every day, whereas before you look at them and they die. It would be better if it starts scaling faster or at least more constantly.
Now, I know I can’t back this last part up since I don’t have any numbers, but from my observations it really feels like this.

change is scary.

So is not having a single way you know will always win for you.

The whole POINT in boon fumbler (for instance) is that you can’t use boon stacking as a shortcut.