Guild Wars 2

I refer to scripted agony as the agony attacks that are generated by the dungeon script rather than by mob attacks. Scripted agony is unavoidable. Therefore scripted agony is bad.

What are your thoughts on scripted agony? If you share my opinion that it is bad please express it as loud as you can.

Do you mean the thing people wear Agony Resistance for?

I think the point is, what’s the use of having skill when the artificial barriers are so high. Move that agony to something meaningful instead of having a mysterious “you lose” lingering, at least that’s what I take from it.

Other than maw im pretty sure you can dodge most agony attacks?

kaapo.1075:

Other than maw im pretty sure you can dodge most agony attacks?

All end bosses have scripted agony and every ten fractal you get an instability that periodically inflict scripted agony (fotm 40 & 50).

Some people will say it’s bad because there’s no skill involved since it’s unavoidable. As for me, a player who has had many inexperienced players lie or randomly join a level 10-28 group with no AR and cause wipes, I’m not complaining. I’ve had too many group wipes because of a single player not having the minimum amount of AR (typically minimum AR = starting tier level such as 10, 20, you get the idea).

It is good, otherwise it would completely remove the point of having AR and remove one the the biggest reasons why Ascended Gear only have a very slight stat increase from Exotic.

AR is a perfect way to have progression, while not effecting the balance of the game itself. Removing the only thing where AR is required would remove the point of progressing it.

lordkrall.7241:

It is good, otherwise it would completely remove the point of having AR and remove one the the biggest reasons why Ascended Gear only have a very slight stat increase from Exotic.

AR is a perfect way to have progression, while not effecting the balance of the game itself. Removing the only thing where AR is required would remove the point of progressing it.

You are taking the problem upside down

Zelyhn.8069:

You are taking the problem upside down

Hm?
Explain.

It’s not supposed to require skill, it’s their gear check. If you have 55 AR (old cap) you’re still fine in the lvl 40 instability while the lvl 50 instability you will want 70 AR (replace 3 +5’s with +10’s or wait for more slots via armor).

My opinion is this:

Four months ago they fixed the Temple of Lyssa encounter. By fixing it, I mean they added a big kitten gorilla that one shots people with invisible rocks.

Scripted agony sucks but its better than being killed by invisible rocks.

PvP should be about skill checks for progression.
PvE should be about stat checks for progression.

Fractals are PvE progression, thus the presence of a stat check mechanism.

mtpelion.4562:

PvP should be about skill checks for progression.
PvE should be about stat checks for progression.

Fractals are PvE progression, thus the presence of a stat check mechanism.

Why can’t Fractals be skill based? Every agony attack except the agony on the three bosses can be avoided, why shouldn’t you be able to progress if you’re good enough? Agony is just a really lazy time/gold sink, and it really is making fractals a lot less enjoyable.

I used to wind up with low AR people in my groups a lot, but it didn’t matter because I knew they were good and could avoid the agony attacks. Now I can’t do that because if we get Mai Trin or Molten our group is toast.

Progression requires the feeling of progress over a period of time. Without the gear check that agony provides, skilled players can reach the end of the current program extremely quickly which eliminates the “feeling of progress over a period of time”. This leads them to become bored and either complain or leave.

Using the gear check, ArenaNet can impose an artificial roadblock to your skill level that forces you to play longer than you would otherwise have played.

You get the enjoyment of having the feeling of progress for a longer period of time, while they get to keep you playing longer, it’s a win-win, which is why it is the system used by just about every MMO to date for PvE progression.

JohnnySupernova.9182:

mtpelion.4562:

PvP should be about skill checks for progression.
PvE should be about stat checks for progression.

Fractals are PvE progression, thus the presence of a stat check mechanism.

Why can’t Fractals be skill based? Every agony attack except the agony on the three bosses can be avoided, why shouldn’t you be able to progress if you’re good enough? Agony is just a really lazy time/gold sink, and it really is making fractals a lot less enjoyable.

I used to wind up with low AR people in my groups a lot, but it didn’t matter because I knew they were good and could avoid the agony attacks. Now I can’t do that because if we get Mai Trin or Molten our group is toast.

or they can do it skill based like GW1, where any single regular mob (Mursats) will cast agony on you. Infused or endure.

mtpelion.4562:

Progression requires the feeling of progress over a period of time. Without the gear check that agony provides, skilled players can reach the end of the current program extremely quickly which eliminates the “feeling of progress over a period of time”. This leads them to become bored and either complain or leave.

Using the gear check, ArenaNet can impose an artificial roadblock to your skill level that forces you to play longer than you would otherwise have played.

You get the enjoyment of having the feeling of progress for a longer period of time, while they get to keep you playing longer, it’s a win-win, which is why it is the system used by just about every MMO to date for PvE progression.

I felt that sense of progression every time I climbed a new level with my friends. I definitely did NOT feel it when I grabbed a new laurel every day so I could wait out the time gate on amulets, and I’m not feeling it now that I need to collect infusions. There’s no enjoyment in grinding past a gear check, but there IS enjoyment in overcoming a challenge with your skill.

JohnnySupernova.9182:

I felt that sense of progression every time I climbed a new level with my friends. I definitely did NOT feel it when I grabbed a new laurel every day so I could wait out the time gate on amulets, and I’m not feeling it now that I need to collect infusions. There’s no enjoyment in grinding past a gear check, but there IS enjoyment in overcoming a challenge with your skill.

The fact that they have botched their implementation of progression so far does not change the underlying concept of what they are trying to achieve.

The gear check is supposed to feel natural so that you are “progressing”, not “waiting”.

they only do that AR check on the last bonus fractal, and tbh I’d want it for every boss encounter in the fractals if it was up to me, it would help keep those pesky liars that slip in by lying about how much AR they have out of my runs for good.

it’s the only place in the game that has gear check so leave it alone !
if it was up to me I would add gear score or AR check to normal dungeons as well.

if you do not have the minimum gear / AR to do the content well sorry but GTFO of my group PERIOD !

Mesket.5728:

JohnnySupernova.9182:

mtpelion.4562:

PvP should be about skill checks for progression.
PvE should be about stat checks for progression.

Fractals are PvE progression, thus the presence of a stat check mechanism.

Why can’t Fractals be skill based? Every agony attack except the agony on the three bosses can be avoided, why shouldn’t you be able to progress if you’re good enough? Agony is just a really lazy time/gold sink, and it really is making fractals a lot less enjoyable.

I used to wind up with low AR people in my groups a lot, but it didn’t matter because I knew they were good and could avoid the agony attacks. Now I can’t do that because if we get Mai Trin or Molten our group is toast.

or they can do it skill based like GW1, where any single regular mob (Mursats) will cast agony on you. Infused or endure.

Actually it’s more like the Environmental Effect in GW1.

Agony is a lazy mechanic. It really is. Whether its avoidable or not. Ive said this from day one.

Instead of making the fights interesting and challenging(which they have for fractals), they need to tack on a condition that cannot be cured once you have it. It just has to run its course, and you hope that you have enough AR ot survive.

Its like in vanilla and TBC WoW where you needed a certain amount of elemental resistance for certain boss fights of a raid.

Raid leader: “Everyone have at least 100 fire resist for the first boss? Ok lets go”.

Its lazy. Scale the actual mechanics of the fight. Instead of an incurable condition, make it curable. If no one has a group-wide condition cure, then you are either SOL or you have your trust AR to negate it.

Let’s face it: no one actually encounters scripted agony and tell themselves “wow that’s cool I am so glad they implemented this!”

It’s bad.

But it’s also completely ignorable if you gear properly. That’s the value of having more infusion slots. That’s why +20’s cost so much more than 2 +10’s. They want you to get the gear, and they want that to be the value for getting that gear.

Easy.

It’s called “Hard Gear Check”.

Have x AR or do not progress.
Period.

(at least on paper – see rez orb gimmick)

A cheap, lazy, old, and kinda sad way to intend “progression”, and to artificially extend the content’s life.

But in those terms: “Working as intended”.

Zelyhn.8069:

Let’s face it: no one actually encounters scripted agony and tell themselves “wow that’s cool I am so glad they implemented this!”

It’s bad.

It went more like this…

“Wow it just keeps coming. Looks like they gear checked fractals now.”

I have mixed feelings about scripted agony. On one hand its nice to have a gear check so at least you can’t survive without the required gear (infusions in this case) keeping inexperienced players from harder content.

On the other hand since it isn’t avoidable there is no skill involved. All I need to do to avoid scripted agony is have the required AR and face tank the attack.

One thing I really liked about the patch was the Mossman Instability. Now that is an agony attack you can dodge AND you have to be aware when he pops in.

Just my 2 cents… back to 1hour flood control

Zelyhn.8069:

What are your thoughts on scripted agony?

Why did you ask people to share their thoughts if you’re going to respond to any contrary opinion with drivel like this:

Zelyhn.8069:

Let’s face it: no one actually encounters scripted agony and tell themselves “wow that’s cool I am so glad they implemented this!”

It’s a gear check. Beyond that fact, anything stating that it’s good or bad is merely opinion.

My issue with it is that now I if wish to run a different build with different wep sets then I require a full 55AR again.. So I have to go and make ascended weapons to get the AR back.

It’s sort of not really motivating to me because fractals are not worth the investment money wise.

However, /meh because from day one agony was added because A-Net was too lazy to increase the challenge of boss mechanics. Only difference is now you have to endure with it even if you don’t want to. No amount of skill or dodging will help you there. Best thing you can do is just skip that level by riding up on someone’s else’s level.

Peetee.9406:

By fixing it, I mean they added a big kitten gorilla that one shots people with invisible rocks.

I want to use this method to fix things in real life.

I dislike it because of the way AR has been implemented into the game.

To get to 55 AR, one needs to either spend tons of gold on special infusions, or get Ascended Weapons.

To get ascended weapons, you need a bunch of crafting materials, at least one of which – Dragonite Ore – requires that you champ train.

To progress in Fractals I have to champ train. Ugh.

Also getting a Craft to 500 costs a TON of money. More money than most players can ever hope to achieve in normal gameplay.

And indeed, honestly, if Agony was all avoidable by skill, then it’d be fine. But scripted agony, when combined with incredible grind to get Agony Resistance, is just dumb.

Well it started with unskipable cutscenes and trashpacks and it will continue to go that way. You will probably see a change of boss design towards consistent, fast and medium hitting hits (instead of slow but very hard) and a “necessitiy of the trinity” – or more likely a necessitiy towards fulltank builds during the next year. Most people will probably happy with GW2 becoming WOW2, but there wont be any “skill” involved when fighting bosses anymore.
I like that anet is finally starting to fix some exploits, but it seems that pretty much any thing they develop nowadays promotes lazy/passive play (e.g. nerfing confusion, retaliation). The last at least somewhat decent thing was the queens gauntlet. Sure most people were using cheesy builds in order to beat the fights, but for the ones who “developed” these builds or did not use them it was nonetheless a nice change.

The real issue with Agony is not the damage or the Agony Resistance; it’s the path towards acquiring the AR. In most MMOs, if there is a gear requirement for progression, the way you obtain said gear requirement is to climb the lower rungs of the progression path until you are geared enough. In Fractals of the Mists, the path towards this gear leads you out of Fractals of the Mists. (Dailies, Crafting, Guild Missions, etc.) Worse yet, it can be fast-tracked by buying the agony infusions with gold. How is this progression when someone can just throw money at something and obtain the skeleton key to “endgame”?

What a joke.

Nokaru.7831:

The real issue with Agony is not the damage or the Agony Resistance; it’s the path towards acquiring the AR. In most MMOs, if there is a gear requirement for progression, the way you obtain said gear requirement is to climb the lower rungs of the progression path until you are geared enough. In Fractals of the Mists, the path towards this gear leads you out of Fractals of the Mists. (Dailies, Crafting, Guild Missions, etc.) Worse yet, it can be fast-tracked by buying the agony infusions with gold. How is this progression when someone can just throw money at something and obtain the skeleton key to “endgame”?

What a joke.

My issue too. I really do not wish to go out and farm dragonite ore in open world, and I’m sure as hell not going to make enough money to level up my crafting through fractals which do not provide adequate reward vs time input. Perhaps the fractal skins that drop should have agony infusion slots and etc.

Nokaru.7831:

The real issue with Agony is not the damage or the Agony Resistance; it’s the path towards acquiring the AR. In most MMOs, if there is a gear requirement for progression, the way you obtain said gear requirement is to climb the lower rungs of the progression path until you are geared enough. In Fractals of the Mists, the path towards this gear leads you out of Fractals of the Mists. (Dailies, Crafting, Guild Missions, etc.) Worse yet, it can be fast-tracked by buying the agony infusions with gold. How is this progression when someone can just throw money at something and obtain the skeleton key to “endgame”?

What a joke.

That would of course have held merit before the Fractured update.
Now however you can technically get more than enough AR from simply doing Fractals, due to the Infused Rings AR-slots.

lordkrall.7241:

Nokaru.7831:

The real issue with Agony is not the damage or the Agony Resistance; it’s the path towards acquiring the AR. In most MMOs, if there is a gear requirement for progression, the way you obtain said gear requirement is to climb the lower rungs of the progression path until you are geared enough. In Fractals of the Mists, the path towards this gear leads you out of Fractals of the Mists. (Dailies, Crafting, Guild Missions, etc.) Worse yet, it can be fast-tracked by buying the agony infusions with gold. How is this progression when someone can just throw money at something and obtain the skeleton key to “endgame”?

What a joke.

That would of course have held merit before the Fractured update.
Now however you can technically get more than enough AR from simply doing Fractals, due to the Infused Rings AR-slots.

True but once you have them you “get” more AR by champion farming.

Agreed. Artifical gating of content through gear (AR) contradicts their mmo manifesto. Player skill should always be more important than gear in this game.

This is what happens when they don’t have the resources to make new, quality content. They gate kitten out to keep people playing.

I think a major part of the problem is the fact that they put the agony instabilities at the BEGINNING of each fractal tier rather than the end. If they had it at every 9th level instead of every 10th then at least players could work their way up to the gear check rather than being required to have the specific amount of AR from the start.

Black Box.9312:

I think a major part of the problem is the fact that they put the agony instabilities at the BEGINNING of each fractal tier rather than the end. If they had it at every 9th level instead of every 10th then at least players could work their way up to the gear check rather than being required to have the specific amount of AR from the start.

The very purpose of a gear check is to prevent people from completing content, even if they should otherwise be able to complete the rest of the content with skill. Putting the gate at the front of a fractal tier and preventing players from moving forward is working as intended.

And it sucks. I hate the agony-system being reliant on getting Ascended gear, most of which you get from doing things OTHER THAN FRACTALS.

Strontius.6478:

Agreed. Artifical gating of content through gear (AR) contradicts their mmo manifesto. Player skill should always be more important than gear in this game.

We all know how much they care for their manifesto. But yeah, gear checks in such a game are incredibly stupid.

swiftpaw.6397:

My issue too. I really do not wish to go out and farm dragonite ore in open world, and I’m sure as hell not going to make enough money to level up my crafting through fractals which do not provide adequate reward vs time input. Perhaps the fractal skins that drop should have agony infusion slots and etc.

We could have had dragonite from fractals. Would have been the logical thing.

Eitherway it is the combat system thats broken to the core that prevents them from putting in challenging content. They went all out with permablinds, 100% critchances with critdamage as a stackable stat, 100% reflection uptime, lots of invul moves and tons of flat damage modificators.
Seeing how gw1 did not need any time gated content to entertain people for years (they tried once in the first game, although it was a very soft gear check) saddens me.

lordkrall.7241:

That would of course have held merit before the Fractured update.
Now however you can technically get more than enough AR from simply doing Fractals, due to the Infused Rings AR-slots.

It’s going to hold way more merit once you get 6 more slots worth of Agony Resistance with the upcoming Ascended Armor update. Just sayin’.

Fractals exist to cater to players who enjoy vertical progression. The idea is to work towards something over time.

The agony system allows this to happen without affecting the value of the gear of players who don’t choose to participate in the system.

You can experience all of the fractals without agony, and you can survive the agony to level 20 without AR.

What exactly is the problem?

Arkimedes.8730:

Fractals exist to cater to players who enjoy vertical progression. The idea is to work towards something over time.

It’s all clear now. We’re just wrong audience.

Neko.9021:

Black Box.9312:

I think a major part of the problem is the fact that they put the agony instabilities at the BEGINNING of each fractal tier rather than the end. If they had it at every 9th level instead of every 10th then at least players could work their way up to the gear check rather than being required to have the specific amount of AR from the start.

The very purpose of a gear check is to prevent people from completing content, even if they should otherwise be able to complete the rest of the content with skill. Putting the gate at the front of a fractal tier and preventing players from moving forward is working as intended.

And it sucks. I hate the agony-system being reliant on getting Ascended gear, most of which you get from doing things OTHER THAN FRACTALS.

Requiring so much AR at the beginning of the tier that AR is effectively a non-factor for the rest of that tier makes it meaningless as a mechanic. It becomes a solely a gear check. Huge mistake by Anet.

Neko.9021:

The very purpose of a gear check is to prevent people from completing content, even if they should otherwise be able to complete the rest of the content with skill. Putting the gate at the front of a fractal tier and preventing players from moving forward is working as intended.

Then Anet really didn’t think it through when they implemented that instability.

By putting it on the start of the tier, it forces you to get enough AR or gtfo. Because you have enough AR to take 1% damage from Agony from the start of the tier, Agony becomes obsolete during the rest of the tier. Hence, making it a completely pointless mechanic.

haviz.1340:

It’s all clear now. We’re just wrong audience.

Well it would be quite silly to demand that every single piece of content in the whole game would cater specifically to you. Don’t you think?

lordkrall.7241:

Well it would be quite silly to demand that every single piece of content in the whole game would cater specifically to you. Don’t you think?

I fully agree. Can you show me a single piece of content in the whole game that caters specifically to me?

Technically, it is the end of each tier. At least daily chest wise.

That aside, I’m not happy with the “have enough AR or go home” instability or the scripted AR of the “bonus fractals” as well. (Not much of a “bonus” anymore since they pop up at all levels now.)
We have quite a few players in the guild I run fractals with that could do those higher fractals as far as player skill is concerned without a problem. But their lack of AR mostly prevents them from doing those (unless they enjoy death by script.)

Silberfisch.3046:

That aside, I’m not happy with the “have enough AR or go home” instability or the scripted AR of the “bonus fractals” as well. (Not much of a “bonus” anymore since they pop up at all levels now.)
We have quite a few players in the guild I run fractals with that could do those higher fractals as far as player skill is concerned without a problem. But their lack of AR mostly prevents them from doing those (unless they enjoy death by script.)

What I’m the most disappointed with is the management of alts. I have 1 main character in high levels fractals. Cool now all my characters can go there… Heck no! They don’t have enough AR and getting 45 AR on each char is already a pain (time-gated by either laurels or guild missions). Now they want us to have 55 on each char, then 70? …

haviz.1340:

I fully agree. Can you show me a single piece of content in the whole game that caters specifically to me?

Since I don’t know what you like that would be impossible.
My point however was that the game caters to different type of players, which means that not all parts can cater to all players.

Fror.2163:

What I’m the most disappointed with is the management of alts. I have 1 main character in high levels fractals. Cool now all my characters can go there… Heck no! They don’t have enough AR and getting 45 AR on each char is already a pain (time-gated by either laurels or guild missions). Now they want us to have 55 on each char, then 70? …

I agree. I have my main fractal character with solid AR. Now since the levels are accountwide I wanted to get another one ready.
But since I’ve invested a lot of recources to optimize a third toon for WvW, I’m stuck at 30 AR on the fractal alt right now.
And I alreay have comparatively considerable recources available. I shudder at the thought how much of a brickwall someone with less playtime hits with that.

The accountwide levels are a bad joke since you simply won’t be able to sport that much AR on mutiple characters.