Guild Wars 2

Watery Depths: It’s far far far too easy to die and on top of that you take armor damage every time. It’s rather ridiculous to have a party coming to the end of that run with full damaged/broken gear. And a bit broken given how easy it is to die. Also the boss at the end, the Jellyfish Beast has an absurd amount of health given the relatively low amount of damage given from the average underwater combat skills of many, if not all, professions.

Solution: don’t take durability damage on death or make it much harder to die during this particular event(s) (both the dolphin and the darkness ones) i.e. reduce the haste of the luminous plant pickups but lower the damage of the swarms lurking in the darkness. Lower the health of the final boss to be on par with much lower damage output of aquatic weapons/skills OR finally raise the damage of all aquatic weapons/skills (which may warrant its own topic).

Swamp: Wisps seem to despawn on their own randomly right after picking them up, well before the 30 second timer. Clearly a bug. Also the spawning walls seem to go down and come right back up ‘randomly’ in front of a carrier keeping them from moving anywhere and thus rendering the event nearly impossible without a massive stroke of luck. RNG is and never has been a desirable/fun dungeon mechanic.

Solution: De-randomise the wall spawning somewhat. Find out what causes the random despawns of the wisps 5-10 seconds after they are picked up and fix it =).

Possibly more later but hopefully not!

As an aside I do want to say that fractals like Cliffside (my personal favorite) and the “Uncategorised” fractal are very well done. Big hand to Anet for those. I personally haven’t had the Jade one yet but I’ve heard conflicting things about it so I will wait until there is a better experience on my end or someone else may wish to contribute.

Just ran fractals again and both Watery Depths and Swamp leave me feeling the same. One is a bit too cheese (instant death way too easy with durability damage) and the other is too RNG. Beyond that both could be extremely fun and well put-together if a few tweaks were made.

While I agree about the Jellyfish fight being a tad tedious (because boring) I think there’s a fight mechanic where you can damage him using the sparking cages. That might help with DPSing him down faster.

As for the Dolphin/Luminous Plant phase. I’ve done it like 3 or 4 times…..and haven’t died once. I really don’t know what’s supposed to kill you. Even the Dolphins phase can just swim past most enemies and spam 2.

Imo it’s by far one of the easiest Fractals.

As for the Swap…well that relies heavily on coordination and team setup. As ususal, a Mesmer makes this very easy while other setups have to work harder. But I found that once you reminded people to make use of their mobility traits and abilities that it was very doable.

The wisps despawning randomly is often caused by one of the runners doing something. One group I was in had an elementalist who used mist form no less than 10 times before he realised it was him screwing the wisps up.

waterfractal: light/piranha stuff: do it properly and you wont have any dead people
aka: l2p
dolphinstuff, never noticed loosing durability

swampfractal: the wisp dont randomly despawn, there is something that triggers it, aswell as the walls
if you do it properly you can bring all wisps from all possible spawning locations to their destination with 20 seconds left, without mesmer

Mist form causes an Ele to lose whatever they are holding.

As for swamp, it is amazingly fun. I enjoy it thoroughly. The spawning walls can ruin many runs, but there are many places where you can actually jump over the walls.

I like both of those maps. Just learn how to dodge and use #2/#3 then the water maps is fine. As for the swamp, try changing your utilities for ones with teleport/swiftness/condi removal.

I agree about the dolphin one.

They reduce you to ridiculously low stats (and give you vulnerability to boot) so you die in two hits, but somehow that does armor damage?

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the hitboxes for Dolphin’s weren’t so much larger than their model. Too much getting stuck in places you should fit.