Guild Wars 2

An idea occurred to me.

Fractals in its current state are a one big contradiction to the vision of the game.

Here is the issues I see with it:
1. It makes normal zones more empty, as apparently a person can level in fractals throughout his\her whole career, never seeing the rest of the world. And it is much easier to just sit in place and do the same, instead of a normal course that was initially intended.

2. Gear found there now and especially in the future being better when exotics, which could be found elsewhere force those who like WvW grind fractals (even if they don’t want to).

3. It have its own progression in terms of levels and gear (later on) and which is not needed for the rest of the world.

4. Fractal levels are not account wide because they are effectively just a
difficulty levels. So you are stuck with only one character if you wanna play fractals instead of having a free choice of what class do you wanna play.

5. It doesn’t have any connection lore wise to the rest of the personal story, unlike other dungeons are.

So here is what I suggest to alleviate those issues and make a fractal system more easily accessible.
Make a fractals system as a separate game subsystem, like sPVP now.

A. It should have its own icon in top left menu, near the PVP button which we can click to get in and out to the \ from the system.
We should be able to access this system from anywhere in the main world and be able to transport back to where we left off. Fractals dungeon door should be removed from LA because it will no longer be relevant.

B. It should have its own lobby.
This lobby has its own vendors, a separate bank for a fractals gear and items, it’s own Zamoross thing, a practice bots with different amount or levels of agony attacks to check your gear against them. It should also have its own scoreboard where a top 100 players are listed and top 100 teams respectfully.

C. It should have its own gear, much like sPVP now, only you don’t get an end gear like in sPVP but gain it in the manner of normal PVE world. Vendors still can sell a white Fractal gear of different tiers. In normal world you wear your normal gear. when you travel to fractal system, you gear is replaced by a fractal gear you gained this far. Unlike sPVP, a fractal gear can break and needs to be fixed or replaced. It could also have its own skins which can be transferred to a normal PVE gear. Fractal gear cannot be used outside of the Fractals system.

D. It should have its own levels much like now, only you see those in the place of a normal levels in a lower left corner. The “xp bar” is replaced by a fractal progression, every completed map fills up this bar and winning over the final boss “dings” you.
This level is an account wide, so no matter which character are you playing, you should be able to just go there and continue your fractal progression where you had left off.

E. Optional but I feel it is worth discussing:
A two doorways to join a fractal instances: as an individual and as a team. For a team a password option might be handy so only those you want will be able to join you. When you join as an individual, you can choose to join a team in progression or from the start. depends on that you will get a full reward or only a partial one. This should make up for those situations where a team mate boils out, leaving the rest of a team in cold. Joining as a team doesn’t have this option, obviously.
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It goes without saying (and apparently will be implemented) that if you get disconnected you can always reconnect to your team no matter the way you choose to take – individual or team.

p.s. Maybe some other changes are in order but this is all I can think of about for now.

No No No No and No!

grinding AC, TA, and others is already a much faster way to level a toon (fractals need AR to make worth wild which you need 80 to get, and also give much less exp for the time invested and no real tokens twords exotics at lv80).

if we put this into its own hub like sPvP it would just move most of the population there, still keeping the main world empty as you say. Also keeping the next tear of gear kept to just fractals limits game progression down the road. if anyone really thought that exotic would always be the top gear in the game (even years from now) they do not understand how MMOs keep alive. While they have already stated they are not going the treadmill of new gear set every few months, it is reasonable every year or so that you will need to work for something new to stay at the top (and this is nothing more than that).

I could argue that exotics are no more needed in the open world than ascended gear, the only advantage they have over yellow is they are better gear and better stats are better. ascended is better then exotic in terms of stats, thus a very valid reason they are just as needed everywhere as exotics are. I can see why someone who only wants to WvW might not like the gear, but this isnt just a PvP game, and if you only do one aspect of the game you shouldnt be as good as everyone who does all aspects. the additional stats from ascended isnt enough to keep it out of WvW, and if it becomes that large of a gap they will scale it back in WvW or do something to address this when the time comes (with just 2 rings and the back available it isn’t noticeable enough)

account wide issue is being addressed next month, but you still need AR on all to go into higher levels, but i guess that is account bound and can already be taken care of.

agree with OP, in fact people were asking for this in the three days prior to the patch

Koga.7215:

if we put this into its own hub like sPvP it would just move most of the population there, still keeping the main world empty

so the world was empty of players before fractals because everyone was doing spvp….

Koga.7215:

I could argue that exotics are no more needed in the open world than ascended gear,

why not commit to this line of reasoning, all the way down to whites?
the game is balanced around exotic gear, you can play naked with no weapons but the game isn’t balanced around that

Koga.7215:

if you only do one aspect of the game you shouldnt be as good as everyone who does all aspects.

you seem to contradict yourself with this, perhaps consider another way of explaining what you mean

I like this idea, provided it includes the functionality of the Challenge Mode Missions from GW1.

Having records keepers with Leaderboards for different levels of fractals, with completion times and highscores for each separate fractal as well as combined scores of the 3 fractals in a run.

The freedom to have a different set of traits and maybe free trait resets in the Fractals staging area, would probably help me a lot seeing how different dungeon mobs are from normal PvE mobs.

Denis.5019:

C. It should have its own gear, much like sPVP now, only you don’t get an end gear like in sPVP but gain it in the manner of normal PVE world. Vendors still can sell a white Fractal gear of different tiers. In normal world you wear your normal gear. when you travel to fractal system, you gear is replaced by a fractal gear you gained this far. Unlike sPVP, a fractal gear can break and needs to be fixed or replaced. It could also have its own skins which can be transferred to a normal PVE gear. Fractal gear cannot be used outside of the Fractals system.

Took me a few reads to actually see what you mean here, but if I understand correctly.
You enter fractals with your normal PvE gear and can use that for your first fractals. While doing fractals you can buy (with tokens) or loot (with a quality based on the current fractal level) special fractal items that you can wear only while doing fractal dungeons. When you leave the fractals the gear you have equipped would be returned to how it was when you entered. So you could add agony resistance sigils to your PvE gear in fractals, then when you exit to do WvW or Arah the sigils would be returned to what they where before. Then if you went back to fractals later the agony resistance would magically reappear in the sigil slot you put it in.
Instead of equipping the fractal gear you gain you could also salvage the skins from it and use those for your PvE gear. (maybe add a skin transfer item for 1 token, that works only on fractal items, so I don’t have to use up the few lvl 80 skin swappers I gained from monthly rewards)
Did I get that about right?

Denis.5019:

D. It should have its own levels much like now, only you see those in the place of a normal levels in a lower left corner. The “xp bar” is replaced by a fractal progression, every completed map fills up this bar and winning over the final boss “dings” you.
This level is an account wide, so no matter which character are you playing, you should be able to just go there and continue your fractal progression where you had left off.

While I agree that if you can do level 10 fractals with 1 toon, you are probably good enough to do them with another toon. But if the gear you need to do so is earned slowly, like the agony resistance I mentioned earlier would not be present on that different toon… unless fractal tokens are account wide too, so you could earn some extra tokens on your main, then enter fractals with brand new lvl 2 and use the tokens to gear him up for whatever fractals level your main has achieved.

It kinda sounds like the effort I’d spent gearing up my Koss and Ogden and all the other Hero-Henchies in the correct runes and sigils in GW1. It worked there and it was a pretty big gold sink, so I suppose there is nothing wrong with something similar in GW2, special fractals armor with scaling armor values but you have to buy/find stat bonus gems and sigils for it yourself.