Guild Wars 2

Yes, it’s that time again, folks. Time for me to point out how ludicrous it is that you can do a Fractal 50, having done all the work of getting your reward level that high and getting all ascended swag to max out your AR, and get…nothing for it. “Oh, wow, empyreal fragments…thanks.”

So few people do fractals, moreso because the reward system is borked than because of difficulty and time investment, I think. While the third item you get other than a pristine relic and empyreal fragments is technically, at this point, considered a “bonus” item…if it’s something you get MOST of the time, those odd times when you don’t get it make it feel like a ripoff.

Especially when higher difficulty doesn’t seem to equate to higher reward. When there’s no difference in your reward chances between a 29 and a 50, why bother?

Why does everyone forget the rewards you get throughout the fractal. They really are not nearly as bad as people make them out to be. While I’m sure they’re lower than dungeons, I’m very curious to know what the actual values are. Has anyone done research or kept track of things? Or is it simply that you spend like 3X the length of a dungeon for the same final chest reward enough for people to go ape kitten?

I want more healer’s shoulder chests. 4 wasnt enough.

Fractal drop rate research in terms of rares: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2s35nz/fractal_rare_drop_research_potential_problem/

The amount of rares is decent, but not really that good IMO. Compare it to what you can get in a world boss train in the same period of time, and it’s really underwhelming especially when comparing difficulties and the fact most of the world boss train can actually be spent AFK instead of playing the game.

Zui.9245:

Fractal drop rate research in terms of rares: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2s35nz/fractal_rare_drop_research_potential_problem/

The amount of rares is decent, but not really that good IMO. Compare it to what you can get in a world boss train in the same period of time, and it’s really underwhelming especially when comparing difficulties and the fact most of the world boss train can actually be spent AFK instead of playing the game.

AFK or actually working doesn’t matter. They’ve set this game up so you can get comparable rewards for doing nothing. The game isn’t made so that the most skilled players can receive the most rather that the most unskilled can still gain everything. I don’t necessarily agree but I see their reasoning in that they don’t want people to feel that they can’t get what they want simply because they can’t excell at the game. It makes sense, they want this to be a game where it’s about simply being around and getting your highly costly items. It promotes gem sales (moneys) without requiring a ton of effort (more people in that position).

My question is simple, how does fractals rewards actually compare to dungeons? Do people actually have the raw data to compare?

My point is not to claim that fractal rewards are good, or even reasonable. But to simply ask the question at the end of the day, how much money value do you get from fractals? I simply feel as if it’s grossly exaggerated in the area of “worthless” while I simply feel that it’s wrong to feel that way.

Appreciate the link Zui ( you’re awesome btw ) I just have a feeling that fractals are more rewarding than they are portrayed. I end up with half a dozen rares quite often, and a few exotics sometimes which translates to inscriptions/insignias and dark matter.

Could fractals use a boost, of course, but I really don’t want to see them as the go to gold farm because I simply don’t like the atmosphere that dungeons have been thrust into because of that.

You dont get that much loot in fractals. And i still dont believe the fractal atmosphere will change if gold reward is increased. Thats a result of easy and overdone old dungeons in addition to good guaranteed rewards. Fractals need some good guaranteed rewards just to make them worth doing. Since they are not completely faceroll and actually requires some time and effort to complete..

Making a fractal 50 give 5g at the end would still seem too low for me. But its a pretty big improvement and still less gold per hour than dungeons. Theres plenty of room for increase before we even get close to the territory of turning it into a gold farm.

But we all know that the average guild group takes around 20min for a super casual lv 50 run no scope. So increasing rewards would make it more worthwhile than dungeons and totally ruin everything including cantha /s

Zui.9245:

Fractal drop rate research in terms of rares: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2s35nz/fractal_rare_drop_research_potential_problem/

The amount of rares is decent, but not really that good IMO. Compare it to what you can get in a world boss train in the same period of time, and it’s really underwhelming especially when comparing difficulties and the fact most of the world boss train can actually be spent AFK instead of playing the game.

The problem with that research is its only looking at rares and not any of the other common valuable drops. On any given run you’ll get a bunch of Cores, maybe a Lodestone if you’re lucky and normally 1+ account bound exotics (insignia/inscriptions sell for 1.5-3g). The +1 agony infusions also sell for ~8s each. I’m not saying its going to beat dungeons for income but if you add everything together its really not that bad, especially if your groups runs are on the faster end of the time scale.

I also think its difficult with the daily end rewards. Things like fractal skins and ascended boxes are supposed to be special. Getting that one fractal skin you want is probably more difficult than it should be, but if it was too easy then you probably wouldn’t care about having it in the first place as everyone else would have it too. A ring or nothing should be the normal reward, if you get a skin you didn’t have or an ascended box its a nice bonus.

Its really not that bad as in atleast its not nothing. It is still terrible though. :P

Im honestly surprised so many KING members try and justify the rewards. Dont you guys spend most of your time in fractals? :P

Veydar.5017:

But we all know that the average guild group takes around 20min for a super casual lv 50 run no scope. So increasing rewards would make it more worthwhile than dungeons and totally ruin everything including cantha /s

groups that can do this, can do p1 & 2 of arah in 20 minutes and get 6.5g

So upping the lvl50 gold reward to 5g would still be below par for regular dungeons.

And i would say the average time for a fractal 50 for a decent group is about 30 minutes. And even thats a quite generous on the speed. Using the times only a very small minority pulls off isnt exactly good justification for rewards. If you can complete something faster than whats intended then good for you, you can make more gold per hour than the average player. Which is fair. Dont know why you would want to be barely rewarded for completing at above average speeds and under rewarded for completing at regular speeds. It doesnt make sense for any type of player.

spoj.9672:

Its really not that bad as in atleast its not nothing. It is still terrible though. :P

Im honestly surprised so many KING members try and justify the rewards. Dont you guys spend most of your time in fractals? :P

Most of us are doing Fractals because they are fun, not for the rewards so perhaps thats why we’re not underwhlemed by them. It probably also helps that our runs are fast, doing a full set of fractals (50+40+30+20) gets me 15+g and takes around 2hours plus time to form the parties, that’s definitely not terrible. Its enough gold at least that I’ve never felt like I had to go farm to buy something I really wanted.

That definitely is terrible lol. I do fractals for fun aswell. But i also need gold for various things and with my limited play time its just not an option to earn 4g in 30 mins. When in that same time i can earn about triple that if i did something else.

Even if you personally dont need good rewards thats no reason to say they are fine. Wouldnt you rather be rewarded more appropriately in addition to having fun?

PS. Ive counted the amount ive earned in frac 50. Its about 3-4g total. Looks like its about the same for you based on your numbers. How anyone can justify that i dont know.

I wouldn’t complain if they gave me more gold for it but neither do I feel the reward is inappropriate. As I said before I’ve not struggled to buy anything I want and fractals is pretty much my entire income. If I had to make the choice with my playtime between having fun or having enough money to buy the things I want then I’d complain but at the moment I have both.

Just did a level 50 fractal with a pug. Got 2 rares, no exotics and didn’t even get a ring at the end. I’ll admit that normally I’d get about a handfull of rares in most runs, so this one was particularly bad.

I play fractals, because I like them and because I want the fractal hammer skin. Problem is that without my friends, who don’t play high level fractals, it’s hard to be motivated to even do a level 50 fractal daily, when the rewards are so underwhelming compared to other parts of the game.

I also have all the gold I need, but for me it would indeed increase the fun factor of fractals, if I’d feel rewarded after every run, instead of dropping my head and sighing after losing the RNG game yet again.

i’m not gonna bother this time

While the guaranteed rewards are kind of lacking, you need to look at what has a possibility of dropping.
Chances for ascended weapon and armor boxes which each would normally take 50-60g to make. Yes, a lot of times the stats aren’t useful but you still have a chance for Raider’s for Zerker, Healer’s for Cleric’s, and if they ever add Sinister to Malicious chests, then those will be useful as well.
The bad stat weapons become new weapon unlock skins.
There’s also a chance for a Fractal Tonic.

For guaranteed rewards, a partial solution would be to up the increase in rewards from 1 silver per level to 10 silver per level with a base of 1g. So a lvl 1 completion rewards 1g, a lvl 10 is 2g, and so forth up to a 50 which would then give 6g. Increasing fractal relics would be nice for those of us who need Obby shards or skill points especially since Fractals don’t have the xp rewards like dungeons do. Speaking of which, adding an xp completion reward for each fractal similar to dungeons would be nice as well.
The big fix would be to increase drop rates for ascended boxes, ascended rings, and fractal skins. Adding a Fractal weapon box where we can pick the skin would help out greatly or having a vendor where we could trade in unwanted skins for tokens which could then be traded for a skin of our choice would be nice. Heck, how about just being able to buy fractal weapon skins with fractal relics.

Being able to forge or salvage unwanted ascended items would be nice as well. I currently have around 400 ascended rings that I have no use for except to hold on with the hope they eventually allow us to salvage them for ascended mats or be able to toss them in the forge to re roll them. Ditto for ascended weapon and armor boxes.

Everyone’s looking at this from a gold vs time viewpoint. For everyone that holds up GW1 in such high esteem, compare. People ran UW and FoW for speed and also for the chances to get the rare weapon skins that dropped from there. Those drops didn’t happen that often. The guaranteed drops you got weren’t that great as even Obby Shards and Ectos were RNG but there was no penalty for doing multiple runs a day.

The main difference between UW and FoW is that you could run them as often as you want and people could actually get good at them just from repetition.
If you want full rewards (ie the daily chest), you can’t do that with Fractals which means a lot of people don’t run them often enough to get good at them. KING obviously as a guild does them often enough that they can form runs quickly and do them quickly. My guild is primarily dungeons but for the guildies that actually put the effort into learning Fractals and doing them well, our 50s are around 20-30 minutes as well. 20-30 minutes of time for a chance at a drop that’s worth 50-60g is not that bad plus whatever drops you do happen to get along the way but those are all RNG.

A suggestion I made in a different thread is that if you have done a 50 already that day, you could do another 50 and get the next highest reward tier still available to you. So if you do a 2nd 50, you would get the 40 reward. If you do a 3rd 50, you’d get the 30 reward and so on.
This would actually allow those of us who are interested in FotM be able to do more runs with different groups and possibly get more people up to speed on them so Fractals wouldn’t be the head bashing against wall that so many people see it as.

It’s been a year and a half since the fractal CDI, in which the fractal rewards were unanimously described as too low: either with the gold (many saying we should get +1g per 10 levels instead of +10s), and the lack of use for pristine relics.

All we got from the CDI since then was the suppression of the clown car at dredge fractal, nothing else…

Fractals is unrewarding… blabla… cry… blabla… Why did you start this thread again? There were a ton of other threads where you could have commented.

Whatever. Good day.

Fractals are fun, even though i didn’t like them for ages! My only issue with them is the pure RNG to actually drop stuff you want. In one week i dropped 5 raiders chests (yeah 5, I’m one of those hated luckers) in a row, this and last week i dropped nothing so far!

I don’t even fret about the rewards. Buffed rewards would be nice but I just use the TP for money and play fractals because I enjoy them.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

Veydar.5017:

But we all know that the average guild group takes around 20min for a super casual lv 50 run no scope. So increasing rewards would make it more worthwhile than dungeons and totally ruin everything including cantha /s

groups that can do this, can do p1 & 2 of arah in 20 minutes and get 6.5g

So upping the lvl50 gold reward to 5g would still be below par for regular dungeons.

The /s was meant to indicate sarcasm. There was a post about this topic a month ago that eventually got deleted since people were just boasting of top tier Fractal clear times and assumed these were a decent average for merely “good” groups discussing Fractal clear times.

My only wish for fractals is to finally get higher levels ANET! Because I could care less about the rng or gold reward lets be honest most people at 50s fractals have all the gold they need and their gear is BIS. What I want with this persistent RNG is the FRACTAL WEAPON BOX! That is the simplest solution to this problem that has been since that ridiculous fractured patch.
I will do my daily fractals 50s/37s but when I get multiple copies of the same skin (7 warhorns) it starts to get past frustration. The fact that leader board hype for fractals was thrown out the window, the terrible reward, the many bugs in fractals has broken lots of regular fractal runners. I know lots of people aren’t bothered by not having a fractal title after getting all the achievements but I am. Some of those achievements are actually hard to do. To be honest I am only missing 4 skins and tonic but at this point, I don’t even know why I even bother. atleast let me salvage these skins for some ectos like before. Its the reason I’m not so hyped for the expansion, because over hyping like in the past years has lead to a lot of dissappointment

Jay.1085:

My only wish for fractals is to finally get higher levels ANET! Because I could care less about the rng or gold reward lets be honest most people at 50s fractals have all the gold they need and their gear is BIS. What I want with this persistent RNG is the FRACTAL WEAPON BOX! That is the simplest solution to this problem that has been since that ridiculous fractured patch.
I will do my daily fractals 50s/37s but when I get multiple copies of the same skin (7 warhorns) it starts to get past frustration. The fact that leader board hype for fractals was thrown out the window, the terrible reward, the many bugs in fractals has broken lots of regular fractal runners. I know lots of people aren’t bothered by not having a fractal title after getting all the achievements but I am. Some of those achievements are actually hard to do. To be honest I am only missing 4 skins and tonic but at this point, I don’t even know why I even bother. atleast let me salvage these skins for some ectos like before. Its the reason I’m not so hyped for the expansion, because over hyping like in the past years has lead to a lot of dissappointment

Just wondering but why are you runnings 50/37 instead of just 50/40?

Enko.6123:

Jay.1085:

My only wish for fractals is to finally get higher levels ANET! Because I could care less about the rng or gold reward lets be honest most people at 50s fractals have all the gold they need and their gear is BIS. What I want with this persistent RNG is the FRACTAL WEAPON BOX! That is the simplest solution to this problem that has been since that ridiculous fractured patch.
I will do my daily fractals 50s/37s but when I get multiple copies of the same skin (7 warhorns) it starts to get past frustration. The fact that leader board hype for fractals was thrown out the window, the terrible reward, the many bugs in fractals has broken lots of regular fractal runners. I know lots of people aren’t bothered by not having a fractal title after getting all the achievements but I am. Some of those achievements are actually hard to do. To be honest I am only missing 4 skins and tonic but at this point, I don’t even know why I even bother. atleast let me salvage these skins for some ectos like before. Its the reason I’m not so hyped for the expansion, because over hyping like in the past years has lead to a lot of dissappointment

Just wondering but why are you runnings 50/37 instead of just 50/40?

I was thinking the exact same thing..

edit:
reduced rng, or some meaningful value ( 4s,95c is hardly meaningful)to the junk we really don’t want from the rng roll would be good.

Yes we know, “kitten loot in fractals thread no. 1000”, got it, next topic please.