Guild Wars 2

Good day Ladies & Gentlemen,

Instead of posting a rage topic about why I think X and Y about Fractals I decided to start a discussion topic about Fractals as a whole. Also excuse me for calling some fractals by mobs rather than the names they are given, it’s a habit. (underground facility fractal = “Dredge” for example)

Some things I would like to discuss are;
1 “rolling” paths before starting.
2 Fractal “skins” or weapons without stats.
3 Reward/Difficulty (higher levels more worth it?)
4 Levels 40 and higher.
5 The variety in fractals.
6 The balance per path.
7 Agony.
8 Npc vendor “rewards”

1. Rolling paths, in my experience my parties always do it and there’s nothing really to prevent players from doing it, they just want the easiest first. Example would be the Swamp fractal. In my opinion the solution would be; if a party does Fractal swamp as the first, fractal Dredge/Harpies should be inserted as 2nd or 3rd. Not as a punishment perspective but a balancing one to make each run some what equal.

2. In my opinion they are weapons without stats because I am not going to buy gems for them to get fine transmutation stones. I don’t go wild over skins so unless Arenanet makes these real skins, they rot away in my bank until deletion.
(https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Fractal-Skins)

3. Rewards for higher difficulty, I can be short about it, I don’t feel the rewards increase when doing a higher level. Chests can be found at any dragon/boss that is simply auto-attacked to death by a zerg, fractal skins (see above), ascended rings.. I only need 2 rings.
(https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/FotM-high-level-loot-How-much-better-is-it)

4. Level 40+, I can’t say much about these since I am only reward level 39 and people don’t enjoy pugging higher levels but from what I heard these are barely doable unless you run with rangers that rise from the death(?) or people with revive orbs stacks.
(https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Fractals-past-lvl-40)

5. Fractal variety, now I don’t really have a problem with it but I wouldn’t mind seeing some new ones… maybe a Skritt themed one. As long as you stay away from the karka’s.. cause I find these creatures disgusting to look at.

6. The balance, not every fractal has the same difficulty/length which can be seen in the first point, people pick swamp because it’s easy and incredibly short when done right. Dredge on the other hand is a lot longer.

7. Oh the Agony… I did Fractals on my necro till about level 16 without any agony resistance (AR) because Death Shroud can absorb the damage, I still think the whole “you must have x amount AR” is a joke for some fractals; Jellyfish & Ascalon since these bosses barely hit you with agony. The mossman usually sticks on one target. Cliffside isn’t too bad, Dredge suit is probably the best mechanic since it’s an all-hit regardless of position and you can avoid it if you pay attention to the boss. The ice one has a spot that never gets hit by the red circles. The one with Harpies is kind of acceptable as the attack follows the player but is easily reflected by guardians.

Personally I don’t think agony raises the difficulty, it’s mainly the rest of the mobs that start hitting a lot harder. Only the almost-unavoidable Maw would be a problem.

8. Normal tokens;
20 slot boxes ~ nice to get.
Backpiece, I guess it’s an alternative, already crafted one before hitting 1850 tokens.
Obsidian shard, waste since karma is so easy to get.
Skill points, probably the only reason to do FotM at some point.
Relic tokens; rings, there in case you didn’t loot them already from a daily reward or for gearing up alts but that’s about it for the usage of relic tokens.

1. No. Absolutely not. Forcing players to do unfun things is a stupid idea. There’s a reason we skip them. Decipher our magical code (HINT: Dredge SUCKS) and look at more interesting solutions (such as not making specific fractals way worse than the others).
2. N/A to me, I dont like any of the skins.
3. Rewards may need an increase at higher levels yes.
4. Barely doable is a bit of a misnomer. You’re hit 9 times by agony. At 35 AR (2 infused rings, 1 ammy, 1 backpiece[infused]) you will take 270% of your hp. However if you have 2 guardians who time their books properly, it is doable to survive. (The guardian full heal can be seen as a 99% heal, thus you have a collective 298% hp with just their tome heals.) It’s hard, and not really viable, but it is doable. Also if you’re lucky you may already have an ascended accessory, which means you only actually need to get about 1 tome heal in there to survive.
5. Yes. New fractals would be nice.
6. Which is why they should work on making fractals take similar times, rather than forcing us to do the crappy ones as you suggested.
7. The thing is 16 with no AR is only 12% damage per tick. In higher levels it hits you for more than that. For example, if you have 25 AR in 30 you’re taking more damage than you were with 0 in 16. If you do 40’s or above, you’d need 50 AR (currently impossible) to lower it to the same damage amount. The Agony in the highest level fractals is basically just a 1 shot if you get hit. Which is fairly non-lenient compared to most other bosses in the game. Although yes, the normal monsters are the main issue for most groups outside of say the lava shaman.

8. backpiece – excellent for those of us without tons of gold to throw around
Obby shard – use tokens, save karma for something else (Boxes to gold? Gear? Whatever you want. I know a guy who made a legendary using nothing but his fractal tokens for the shards)
Skill points – Also good
The relic tokens are good. Not everyone has supreme luck. It took me 18 days to get my first ring drop.
While perhaps there could be more variety, the actual token usage is pretty ok. Better rewards should probably come from the fractal itself.

After running FotM for 3-9 hours a day for the past 3 months, excuse any complains or aggression that may appear in these comments. I am dead tired of this dungeon and want it to go away once I get the skin I’ve been aiming for over these months.

1. First, rolling for a specific fractal is just fine. The problem here lies in the unbalanced nature of the length and difficulties of the fracals. Dredge is hands down the longest fractal, especially at 48 where a million and a half dredge pop out of the clown car. One guaranteed “short” fractal is always a boost in morale. But at 48, none of them are short.
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   If you want a structured and balanced high skill dungeon, it should be made in the vein of GW1 elite dungeons. Urgoz for example, was a two to three hour dungeon, with changing mechanics and group sized throughout the dungeon.
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2. Many fractal skins look good, and drop Account Bound until transmuted. Pay a few gold, or not if you want to trade the weapons between characters. But, the reward system for acquiring them is absolutely terrible. RNG drops should remain for that lucky moment where you can celebrate (doesn’t exist right now because any skin you don’t want just hinders your progress), BUT there should be a means to make progress towards the weapon you want, preferably using high levels as a means to get them.
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   I’ll talk more about the reward system in. well. the reward section bit.
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3. Difficulty vs. Reward do not scale well. The value of loot does not improve at higher levels. The difference really comes with the daily chest. At 48, an average of 1 player per party will get a weapon skin. Often, the rest of this takes 2-3 hours and the loot is often abysmal, with the exception of dredge (because 30 min clown car spawns).
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   The individual fractals also do not scale well relative to each other. Swamp and Underwater become longer because of health pools, but are generally not more difficult. Harpy, Cliffside, Ascalon, and Snowblind become longer and require more coordination to pass. Dredge becomes the length of Arah because of health pools and number of enemies, but also harder because of the way agony scales at higher levels. Volcano has the most massive spike in difficulty because of health pools and damage amounts of numerous enemies in a confined space that require both reflective skills and near perfect coordination.
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   Cliffside, Ascalon, Underwater, Swamp, and Snowblind boss fights become very boring due to the size of health pools.
   The Champions on Harpy become stupid because of even larger health pools.
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4. All of my above stuff comes from 48. Dodge your agony do it.
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5. Variety is interesting. The Jade Maw is wonderful because I love Cantha. Snowblind has amazing lighting (it looks like nighttime for the first time ever in Guild Wars 2), and giant stone men are full of mystery.
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   Of course, after many months, it wears off. I still enjoy the areas created, but have lacked an enthusiasm for them. Because of its modular nature, it should be easy to add in more fractals.
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   Quaggan and Skritt living toooogetherrrr.

• 6. Talked about path length/difficulty balancing earlier, but here is a little more. Swamp should be lengthened slightly to bring it in-line with other fractals (please no more health on mobs), but not too much longer to reward well coordinated wisp teams. Dredge needs to be shortened considerably to bring it in line with other fractals. Colossus should have the boss’ health reduced to shave a little time off of the fractal. Harpy needs to reduce Champion health pools to help bring it in line with other fractals at high levels. Other issues have to do with health meat shield fights that are boring as all hell.
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• 7. I don’t like agony. Agony adds no difficulty to encounters. It acts as a gear check in Maw. I have no ideas on how to fix it, but it is nice that player skill can outdo Agony Resistance when it comes to avoiding damage.
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• 8. Personally, the vendor rewards in right now seem reasonable, even if I see the daily tokens as a quick fix for ring RNG. However, I wish there was more of a construction/crafting component to Fractals. What if you found fractured mist components that you could put together to create rings and weapons.
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  Boxes are useful, skill points are good, obsidian shards work for those who don’t want to use karma, and backpieces are good ways to gear up without spending hundreds of gold on T6 mats.
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  On the Weapon Skin rewards, it would be nice if there was a crafting recipe that you could use to create the skin you want. Components for the weapon can be bought with existing fractal relics, and higher levels could reward Mist Cores instead of Mist Shards that can be used to create your weapon in the Mystic Forge. It would feel like more of an accomplishment if you put together the weapon yourself instead of rolling the RNG dice for three months and turning up nada.
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  I wrote up the specific recipe here. I feel very strongly about this topic.
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  Also can these 50 rings I have be salvagable? Please?

Again, my main issue is with the infuriating reward system that flips you off, laughs, and then slams your head into a rail. There are other issues with FotM, including some bugs and issues with length and difficulty that add to the frustration that it causes at higher levels.

But overall it is an interesting idea that was executed in an okay manner. The flaws are more glaring at high levels though.

With ArenaNet working on a million and a half things at once, FotM looks to be on the backburner, which is unfortunate because I want it to stop slamming my head into a rail and give me back my play time.

tl;dr look at this thread this is what you got yourself into

Unknown.2796:

;
1 “rolling” paths before starting.

thanks anet to make some paths unnecessary difficult due to glitches or bad design still there since release but promptly removing workarounds….

I don t want to stay 1 hour in dredge fractal nor to lose armor at 1st fractal at uncategorized (the most glitched stage ever).

so its 1 fast first at least

2 Fractal “skins” or weapons without stats.

should be skins…

3 Reward/Difficulty (higher levels more worth it?)

well rewards are bad

4 Levels 40 and higher.

they just put higher stats to mobs….its actually more difficult to complete a pgg 2X than a pug 3X just to say……

5 The variety in fractals.

We’d like to have more

6 The balance per path.

if its easy “FAST FIX IT NOW!!!put 3500 tics Attacks underwater and 16746 dmg Attacks in ascalon/svanir”
if its unnecessarily hard “well we are aware of the issue and maybe we will fix it someday…..”

8 Npc vendor “rewards”

nothing to say about it….we all are there for the skins :P
If they make them craftable, expect to see fotm deserted…..

1. in short, it won’t matter to me why we roll a fast first. I just do not want to do dredge. It’s just poorly designed and a giant waste of time. I’d prefer it to be a large amount of dredge that do not respawn. Rather than a large amount that do respawn.

2. keep as skins or make em consumable so we don’t have to waste stones.

3. higher levels should get more rewards, nuff said.

4. can’t comment, i don’t see much need to go higher than 30 at the moment.

5. more variety is always a good thing.

6. The balance is really whacky, for example dredge will take over an hour, but swamp or water can take less than 15 mins.

7. agony is okay, just the formula is weird. at 26 with 25 ar i only take 500ish damage on jade-maw agony. at 30 with 25 ar i take about 30k damage from jade-maw agony.

8. I think the rewards are good, but there needs to be another use for pristine relics, because i only play my guardian as a main i just pile up stacks of pristine relics with no use after getting the rings i want.