Guild Wars 2

For those Fractal runners, I have a question. I now that agony is at level 10+ of fractals, and it can kill you pretty quickly, yes? And the only way to defend against it is with the agony resistance from infusions which you infuse into ascended gear. But you can only get pristine fractal relics level 10+ fractals, and you need that to get Ascended gear. I think I’m doing something wrong here, because I can’t see how Anet would do this. Could you please explain to me how you are supposed to get the ascended stuff and their corresponding infusions? Thank you

Yes agony can kill you at 10+ with no resists. You can dodge agony from everything but Jade Maw. When you get ascended rings you can buy AR and put it in the upgrade slot for 5 AR. Then you can upgrade the rings to infused with gives 5 for infusion but you’ll have to add another 5 AR from the vendor bought item because infusing a ring destroys anything you had in the upgrade slot previously.

There are good guides out there but from what I read general rule of thumb is you need -5 AR the level your running. i.e. if your running fotm 20 you should have around 15 AR. So thats 2 ascended rings and backpiece all with the vendor bought AR item.

You are supposed to do the first lv 10 and some of the following ones with 0 AR. Yes the agony will hurt, but from what I remember you surviving it won’t be that hard. Otherwise, just buy an ascended amulet with laurels and stick a +5 agony resistance infusion in it. It will be more than enough.

It may be though first few times on lvl 10 but you will get used to it (it was pretty easy for me as necro (use DS) or guardian (just heal))
You will get many rings if you continue to do FotM so don’t waste laurels on rings, buy amulet.

Thanks for the info

I did 10 with 0 AR and was fine, even at maw.
At level 20 FotM you will fully die without 15+ AR at maw
At level 30 you will fully die without 25+ AR
At 40 you will fully die with any amount of AR (takes about 3 ticks to get downed)
At 50 you will die with any amount of AR and heal combo (1 tick down, 1 tick dead)

This can vary though depending on whether or not you are healing specced or if your group is healing specced.

There is a way to get 5 AR before lvl 10. Do what I did and cough up the gold to craft a backpiece. By doing levels from 1-9, it is highly possible that you have looted at least 1 vial of condensed mist essence. Check the GW2 wiki for the specific recipe to make an ascended backpiece.

Also, I don’t know how feasible it is for the advices suggesting you to learn to dodge since it probably is your first time in lvl 10+ fractals (you have never even seen which moves cause agony yet). Better bet to help yourself and your group is just spend 20-30 gold and craft the backpiece. You can always continue using that backpiece into the later fractals so its not a complete waste of gold.

You can do 10+ with no AR. As long as your party is a little understanding if you are not a great dodger, they will rez you without moaning too much.

At 15+ I would expect a party member to have some AR by then. If not, just keep grinding 10+ until you can get some AR.

And I don’t expect anyone to spend the amount of gold it costs to make a quiver/book backpiece. Just save up some relics for the capacitor. Do daily 10s until you get a ring drop from the daily chest or collect enough pristine relics (10 days worth) to buy a ring.