Guild Wars 2

I’m excited for the new dungeon, it looks awesome; but I was wondering how exactly the scaling difficulty will function. Each trip back to the hub causes the dungeon to scale in difficulty. So does this escalation reset upon completely leaving the dungeon or after a set period of time? Or is the difficulty progression saved permanently on characters that run it?

Sounds like its saved permanently per player. This will create an issue for pugs since it scales to the lowest common denominator. I’m curious about this too.

Hmm. I was under the impression it keeps track of your progress while in the dungeon. so it tracks each time your party as a whole has entered and re-entered the “hub” otherwise you could start the dungeon and leave right away to increase your personal dungeon scaling.

but maybe I am misunderstanding it.

Yea i’m not really sure. I was under the idea it reset after you leave the dungeon too, until today. Now i think if you enter it evaluates your number of completions and then after you do a set of 3 mini dungeons you go back to the hub and it scales you up permanently.

It’s not like I can know for sure, but the way I interpreted it, it works like this: Your party starts the dungeon, do 3 mini-dungeons, goes to the hub, increased difficulty, do another 3 mini-dungeons, and so on untill you quit or are defeated. Then I suppose the difficulty will start anew when you go again from scratch.

actually, it may mean highest level of everyone reached

“The dungeon will remember your progress, and will poll the party’s levels when you enter, scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level.”

The way I read it, the dungeon “remembers” your progress – that is, if you leave and come back, it’ll remember your progress from before – and it scales to the lowest common denominator.

I’d much prefer the scaling to reset, myself (provided that if you crash/disconnect you can still go back in with your party) – if it remembers my progress it could mean wasted trips if you missed a chest or disconnected before you got the instance done, and then you’d be punished for it (since the next time you went in, the difficulty would be higher).

Or perhaps just the option to choose the difficulty level – you’d have to unlock the higher difficulties before they become available, though. Since the rewards also scale maybe this wouldn’t be a problem.

“The dungeon will remember your progress, and will poll the party’s levels when you enter, scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level.”

This is pretty obvious that it “remembers your progress” from previous runs.

What this means is that it saves your personal progress, and in a group of 5 people it starts at whoever has the lowest progress.

So say there are 5 people, A, B, C, D, and E.

Say A, B, C, and D are a dedicated dungeon group and have completed the the mini 3-dungeon event 10 times in previous runs, so they are at tier 10.

They are missing their 5th person, so they pick up random person E who has only made it to tier 2. They enter the dungeon and the dungeon is scaled to level 2 difficulty because this is the highest common attained level., level 10 is not common among them because 1 person has only made it to level 2.

Seems pretty clear to me, not sure what’s confusing. It’s similar to these type of dungeons in other games. Progress is saved, you attain a rank, and most of the time high rank people will find other high rank people knowing that this will weed out bad or undergeared players if the rank is high enough.

Ah thanks Strifey I was wondering what common attained level meant. It’s simply the level that everyone is at or above. Wouldn’t it be easier to say the lowest level in the group?

Ren.7539:

actually, it may mean highest level of everyone reached

Which is equivalent to the lowest person’s level.

That means that asking to have rings / back posted prior to joining a PUG can no longer be considered bad manners. It’s necessary.

If 4 players want to progress, they need someone who’s been there about as often as they were. Otherwise, one player can waste 4 players’ time.

So, what we need with this model of progression is a way to know how many successful runs of FotM others have done so far. At least we need to know how many such runs groupmembers have done.

This clears it up nicely.
“From Mistlock Observatory you’ll be able to go into the fractals themselves. You’ll be sent into three random fractals and returned to the Observatory after you’ve successfully defeated the foes in all three. Each time you beat three fractals, your difficulty scale will increase by one. If you’re going in at a later time, you will be prompted to enter at the highest common difficulty. (So if you have unlocked level five but someone else in your group has only level two difficulty, you’ll be unable to enter at anything above level two.) However, you always have the option of selecting a lower difficulty.”

source: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/11/15/a-spoiler-free-jaunt-through-guild-wars-2s-lost-shores/

copy/paste for best results as always.