Guild Wars 2

If you haven’t yet read guildwars2hub’s detailed guide to the new Fractal Mists mechanics, yet (http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/basics/complete-guide-fractals-mists), the TLDR that I wrote up for my own “casual” guild’s internal forums is at the end of this post.

I think Anet has nailed it, and I want to applaud the design team that came up with these mechanics and overall design. I can’t see anything in this design that bothers me. Instead, it seems very carefully thought out to be as inclusive of all play styles as possible: hardcore and casual alike can benefit equally and play at the level of challenge they find the most “fun”. And the hardcores and leets who enjoy pushing further into painful difficulty levels do get rewarded for doing so by the better loot scaling of the random/chest drops. But everyone has equal access to ascended gear, and therefore everyone has equal access to future content that requires ascended gear to deal with. This feels very much like how the ascended mechanic versus the Mursaat in GW1 worked.

Best of all, it means that if you have only 15-30 minutes to play, you can still get 1 or 2 fractals done and earn some tokens. This is very friendly to a casual guild like mine where we might have a full 5 members online at the same time for somewhat short time windows. 5 or more of us online? “Hey, anyone want to go run some fractals while there’s 5 of us here?” Then one person has to go after not even completing a full run. No biggie: everyone still had fun and earned some tokens for ascended gear.

This win-win design is just pure WIN. And it certainly beats the current diminishing returns and “all or nothing” token rewards of the existing 8 dungeons. I sure hope some of these same basic mechanics/rewards changes eventually make it over to the existing dungeons too.

TLDR:

Each person individually gains access to a starting difficulty level based on the highest difficulty level they’ve ever completed. Lets call this your “unlocked level”

Every time a group goes in, all members are scaled to level 80, and the group gets an option of how high a difficulty level to start the first set of fractals at. However this option is constrained to a range of 1 through the LOWEST unlocked level in the group. So if four people are at unlock level 5, but one person is only at unlock level 2, then the group can choose to start the first run at either difficulty 1 or difficulty 2.

The cool part is that the group is not forced to start at difficulty 1 each time. If you’re all at unlock level 5, you can start the very first set of fractals at difficulty 5. Why start at a higher level? To get better rewards from the random drops and chests at the end of each fractal, and to possibly unlock the next highest level in only a single run.

Best of all, the new ascended gear is NOT a random drop that only drops from higher difficulty levels! Instead, it’s paid for with tokens, and you get a guaranteed 5 token per fractal (15 per run). Even if you only ever farm a difficulty 1 run over and over and never try the harder difficulty levels, you can still earn your ascended equipment at the same rate as everyone else. That’s very very VERY casual friendly!

Also quite different is that there is no more waypoint zerging possible if you are completely defeated. If the group cannot revive you quickly while you’re only downed, and they cannot revive you at all while you are totally defeated, then you stay put on the floor until the remaining group members wipe. Then you all rez at the nearest invisible “checkpoint”. It will still probably be a very bad idea to try and rez a player who is completely defeated; it will probably be best to just slog on with the remaining players to try and kill everything so they can finally safely revive the defeated player. But it will now become more important than ever to really try and revive downed players before they’re defeated. Getting defeated will hurt much much worse than before.

Finally, each fractal should take only 15-30 minutes. So when first learning the 9 different fractals, it might take us 90 minutes or so to do a complete “run”. But after a while, it should take only about 45-minutes for a complete run. Bump that number up slightly while learning the new mechanics of each difficulty bump.

shaktiboi.5194:

Best of all, the new ascended gear is NOT a random drop that only drops from higher difficulty levels! Instead, it’s paid for with tokens, and you get a guaranteed 5 token per fractal (15 per run). Even if you only ever farm a difficulty 1 run over and over and never try the harder difficulty levels, you can still earn your ascended equipment at the same rate as everyone else. That’s very very VERY casual friendly!

I’ve read through the guildwars2hub article a few times, and I’m just not seeing where you got the information quoted above. It does say that you get 5 relics per fractal – but the list of items from the NPC does not include Ascended rings. The only Ascended quality item is the “Gift of Ascension” – and I’d assume that is similar to the other “Gifts” you acquire from dungeons at 500 tokens. You can trade Relics for Infusions, it looks like, but those will be worthless without the Ascended gear with the slots for them. So where do you see that we can trade the Fractal Relics for Ascended gear?

kmortonson.2154:

shaktiboi.5194:

Best of all, the new ascended gear is NOT a random drop that only drops from higher difficulty levels! Instead, it’s paid for with tokens, and you get a guaranteed 5 token per fractal (15 per run). Even if you only ever farm a difficulty 1 run over and over and never try the harder difficulty levels, you can still earn your ascended equipment at the same rate as everyone else. That’s very very VERY casual friendly!

I’ve read through the guildwars2hub article a few times, and I’m just not seeing where you got the information quoted above. It does say that you get 5 relics per fractal – but the list of items from the NPC does not include Ascended rings. The only Ascended quality item is the “Gift of Ascension” – and I’d assume that is similar to the other “Gifts” you acquire from dungeons at 500 tokens. You can trade Relics for Infusions, it looks like, but those will be worthless without the Ascended gear with the slots for them. So where do you see that we can trade the Fractal Relics for Ascended gear?

Head-desk: you are correct. :/ I confused that item in the list with the “Yakkington’s Ring” shown in Linsey Murdock’s developer article.

In that case… Hrmmm. My former glee is bridled somewhat. But not completely. I guess it will depend on what the drop rates are in the lower-difficulty levels that most “casual players” (in the sense of limited time to play, not limited skill) will be able to consistently farm.

Another confusing thing is that the mmorpg.com article states a very different mechanic for the difficulty scaling! They claim that once you unlock a certain level (say, 4), you cannot choose to reenter later at levels 1-3 unless you bring along one person in the group who is at some unlock level lower than your own. And that this “hard locking” (as I’ll call it) is reset once per week and everyone starts at difficulty 1 again.

If that’s true, it would IMO be VERY VERY BAD in so many ways. And would totally change my opinion of Anet’s design. (to a big thumbs-down)

But… In the guildwars2hub article I link in the OP, there is clearly a dialog shown that clearly includes a “select your desired level” type of control. And the guildwars2hub article never states anything even remotely like the mmorpg article.

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

If things indeed work like is stated in the mmorpg article, I can think of at least 4 different ways to totally “game” that system and defeat it. So it doesn’t make much sense to enforce some hard-gating mechanism like that when it’s so easily defeated and players can choose to grind difficulty level 1 over and over as long as they like. It only penalizes the leet players who’d like to make real progress and play consistently in the harder difficulty levels all the time for the best reward chances and challenge. Why on earth penalize them and reset all players to difficulty 1 every week? That makes no sense at all.

but then, neither does the current design mechanics of the original dungeons make any sense at all, so go figure.