Guild Wars 2

Let’s talk 2nd tier.

Pre-patch a daily fractal run consisting of 6 islands (2 random and swamp-duo-swamp-duo or swamp-duo-swamp-swamp) earned me an average of 8 keys. Now to get the same amount I still have to do 6 islands, 2 of them being random and rewarding no keys at all, the rest a choice of the most long and tedious the game has to offer. Guess what? 3 swamp runs are still shorter than a single snowblind one, and it’s not even the worst of them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all up for engaging content, but instead of buffing the bad fractals they effectively annihilated the good ones. The rewards slightly even out at tier 3, but something tells me that majority of players don’t run lvl 76+ anyway.

Surely this can’t be ANet’s idea of a fix, so am I missing something important here? So far it feels like spending 15 minutes in a PvP farm map doing dailies for 2g is more profitable than running fractals at all.

well, gives people motivation to l2p and do 76+. Along with the agony check..
better rewards for those who are able to do it – I don’t see any problem here.

Also swamps of the mists was never how fotm was intended to be played ( proved by the rework of daily achieves for it)

Also the daily loot boxes didn’t seem to have bad loot last night ( on top of the encryption keys).

Should point out I got 8-9g+ liquid gold from vendoring junk.

But my group cleared yesterdays 3 76+ fractals in around 30 mins. So maybe that is why it feels better than the slow but easy daily 2g.

76+ is not l2p, it’s “grind for ascended” or “spend a fortune on infusions”. The problem is not that people able to do it are getting more, it’s that all the rest (and I believe it to be the majority) are getting less all of a sudden. If they didn’t want people running swamp they could’ve removed it from the game entirely. Would it have been much different from what we have now? Probably not.

So less loot for those who aren’t geared, meaning more loot for those who are geared ( I disagree, 76+ is too hard and is a l2p issue for some, or many, w/e) is a worse solution than removing content from the game?

seriously?

Yes it is, since those who aren’t geared need this loot to gear up. You can raid in exotics yet you HAVE TO have ascended for fractals, how is that an indicator of skill? The only real trouble I’ve ever had in the first half was lvl 47 Cliffside arm seals. Not because it was hard but because it was less faceroll than all the rest and required coordination which people in pugs aren’t used to. Got kicked out of a lvl 50 group for being 5 AR short of the cap, found a new one and did it on our first try with one guy locked behind the door for the entire fight. How’s that skill? How is it harder at higher lvls if all the difference is damage and HP pools? (This is, in fact, why I like the cliffside rework so much. Not the rework itself but the philosophy behind it.)

Right now doing swamp gives you no credit for anything and no rewards beside the actual loot chest which no one cares about. What’s the point of it being in the game if you ever wanna do it if it happens to be the daily? Isn’t it exactly why they tried to fix the longer fractals in the first place?

Wow, I am surprised that within a day someone is already calling for Swamp of the Mists to return. That was an incredibly toxic environment that convinced many long term fractal players to just give up on fractals.

As for how it is harder besides just more damage/hp. Take a look at some Mistlock Instablities that you can experience at higher levels. Not to mention that above level 71, a enemy will spawn whenever you down that will attempt to finish you. Finally, almost always the number of mobs increase making it hard to spread that active defense like blinds across every enemy due to the target cap limit of 5.

On the financial side of it, high level fractal players have not only spent the time to learn all these mechanics, but also spent 1000s of gold on ascended armor, weapons and agony infusions to be able to run this content. There should be some return on that investment.

On a logistic side, if the higher levels are not more rewarding there is absolutely no motivation to reach them or do them regularly. People will only ever do the easiest or quickest fractals like swamp, Molten Duo, or Jade Maw. This led to the hell that was Swamp of the Mists. I was not the only experienced fractal players who got so down right bored of it we quit the content all togethor. Arty should tell you about my rant.

Point is Death to Swamp of the Mists. May it rest in peace and never return.

I was letting you dig your own grave, with things like after swamp.. maw? molten duo? will you stop before there is no fotm?

But drEckers post does that so much more elegantly.

Kabansky.9160:

Yes it is, since those who aren’t geared need this loot to gear up.

Not like ascended gear can’t drop from lower tier chests, not like you get ascended materials from dailies now, not like you’re supposed to plow through scales 1-100 in no time…

It’s much better now and actually makes you run different fractals again, even though it is forced.

You just don’t get it, do you…

Look at dungeons. I can run whatever I want, whenever I want, as much as I want, and still get my reward in the end. The only requirement is that I don’t run the same path over and over again. That is a good solution that has brought many players into actually playing dungeons. The bad one was slaughtering profitable content (pre-HoT dungeons) in favor of less profitable content (HoT fractals). In the end they had to significantly buff both.

Now look at fractals again. I love Cliffside and Uncategorized for the aesthetics, and I absolutely loathe both Dredge ones. Earlier I had a choice to do or not do swamp-duo, and I did run longer fractals when I had the time or simply felt like it. Now I’m forced to do all of them and still get less out of it than before. How exactly is that a good thing? Making longer fractals award 2 chests instead of 1 (and balancing loot accordingly) would have been a good thing. Make it a dungeon-style do-whatever-you-want achievement would’ve been a good thing. God knows how many other good things they could’ve done, but instead they just destroyed some fractals in favor of others. Same thing all over again.

And you know what? You’ve just proven my point by calling swamp dead. Do you really think it was ANet’s goal to have dead content in their game?

Swamp isn’t dead, but Swamp of the Mists is. Today’s specific fractal was 21, which is Swamp with Mossman. Plenty of people, including myself, ran it. Also, I would be very surprised if there is no daily adept through master fractal to do a Swamp. It just has not popped yet.

What is Dead is people running Swamp, Swamp and maybe Duo to get all their dailies done. Aka Swamp of the Mists. Look at what was run previously, 9 total fractals dailies of which 5 were going most commonly going to be 5 swamp, 2 molten duo, and 2 of the specific fractal dailies (and only these if they were short like Snowblind). All of these were always ran at the lowest level possible. So only around 10% of the fractal content was consistently run. Besides this just being poor game design, this also bored most players out of the content.

Now people will run the three different dailies fractal types at the highest level a player can run plus the two specific daily fractal levels. This encourages players to get to a higher fractal and do every type of Fractal like Cliffside (which was never ever, ever run previously people would skip it when the daily came up) for the best rewards. As for you being forced to run every daily, that is false. If you do not like a specific fractal, you can just skip that daily for the day. There are other runs you can run as well as the fact there will be new ones to run tomorrow. Is it a perfect system, no, but infinitely better than what we had previously.

Also, they buffed the ascended drop rate from 25-50. So that should help you gear out your toons as you go higher. And do to the fact the daily chests have a buffed drop rate of ascended gear and they added ascended mats to the chests, you will be able to gear out alts or alternative builds much easier once you get that first toon kitted out.

I would have to say FoTM is now more accessible, forgiving and accommodating than ever before….. perhaps too much so judging by some of these discussions.

Today, with the same amount of time as my daily play time, I collected less Keys and less golds than usual.
Note that I’m sub scale 50 for now (43).
Even if I have 120 agony resistance, I can’t LFG for 51+ fractal, the section is unavailable.
I will have to grind them ..
I had the feeling that -mid- player are now in disadvantaged than before. Low scale are the same and high scale have been buffed.

LFG for fractal is a bit more tedious than before. I don’t know all fractal name vs their scale lvl.

DrEckers.2039:

Also, I would be very surprised if there is no daily adept through master fractal to do a Swamp. It just has not popped yet.

Alright, that might be or might not be true. I admit I got a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of dailes and only now realized there’s only 3 of them. Still, there hasn’t been any short fractals (including Aquatic and Volcanic) in 2 days. I serioulsy hope that’s just bad luck.

DrEckers.2039:

Also, they buffed the ascended drop rate from 25-50. So that should help you gear out your toons as you go higher. And do to the fact the daily chests have a buffed drop rate of ascended gear and they added ascended mats to the chests, you will be able to gear out alts or alternative builds much easier once you get that first toon kitted out.

For this we’ll have to wait and see as well. They were supposed to buff ascended drop rates back in February I think. Doing fractals almost every single day since then got me 2 chests.

And yes, this is not a perfect system. I’m not even saying it’s all that bad. It just doesn’t solve anything. The fact is, people were never forced to do Swamp. They had the freedom to do any fractal they wanted to get daily rewards. Swamp turned out simply shorter than the rest, but it was still their deliberate choice to run it every single time. I somehow managed to climb all the way to 50, and finding a group was never MUCH of a problem. Well now if the short fractals aren’t on the daily rotation there’s simply no point doing them, just like the long fractals before, which was my main concern. Maybe I’m overthinking this. I hope I am.

As for rewards, I’m just stunned by the arrogance people show here. Of course it’s more rewarding than ever when you’re getting 4 chests per run. Some people get 1. Maybe even most people. Yesterday I spent half an hour doing 34 Underground cause EVERY kittenING AOE killed half the group and we had to spend ages ressing them while the boss healed to full again and again. The total reward for this was a trash item worth 25 silver. I’d much rather run a couple Swamps than go through this again, thank you.

Rewards for sub 50 fractals are good enough. You must be joking!
The reward system was absolutely imbalanced before the last patch, you have to keep that in mind because it was nonsense to run higher than 77 (yeah exactly: swamp of the mists!). Now it is way more averaged since fractals before lvl 50 are no real challenge at all. 5 players in full zerk are plowing their way through there without any difficulty.

Also for those that find it too hard to lvl up in fractals and/or need to play to get asc boxes: We got satisfying dungeon rewards back, run these, run lower fractals and you have a lot of gold/items to go ahead.
Most of us who are running fractals for a longer time span had to craft the whole ascended armor. There weren’t drops that could have been changed via mystic forge. The crafting took a very long time and cost us lots of gold. Be happy that this has changed dramatically!
I mean it’s cool to get things done easily but lower fractals are fine. If you need 30 minutes for lvl 34 Underground, you, your party or all together are horrible in this game. No offense but that is actually the painful truth.

Also, especially for TheArtOfMouts, leveling up to get above lvl 50 isn’t rly an issue. You can join any lvl higher or equal to 43 till 50 to rise a level. You don’t need to maintain the order (or is it psychologically important for you?). Just take whatever you can get, there are enough you can hop onto or ask friends/guild mates running a higher one with you and you will be able to get to next tier in the lfg. It’s easy. Can’t even believe having to read such a statement like you did. Playing 7 levels isn’t even worth calling it grind.