Guild Wars 2

I have been reading the GW2 reddit and the GW2 forums about fractals a lot. There are critical concerns about Fractals post-HoT:

If you did not purchase HoT you will not be able to do fractals past level 70 or so due to agony becoming too high.

There is no more gold reward for fractals even though it was promised that the gold taken away from dungeons would go to fractals.

You have to pay 20 silver to open your reward boxes. Anet is actually punishing players who want to claim their reward. From what I have seen when opening the chests so far is you get those trophy rewards, same ones you get throughout pve where you go to a merchant and sell instantly because they are garbage. Anet claimed that the rewards would be improved, yet no evidence of this.

The health pool of bosses the higher you go are too dramatically high. They claimed that you should be able to beat a fractal island during a lunch break, which is not the case for some levels. Raising the health of bosses does not make a fight more fun or challenging, just more annoying.

In order to get your full daily reward you have to run specific fractal levels that might not be of any interest to you. Meaning, Anet is stopping you from running the fractal levels you want to run.

All those ascended rings you have stored up from Fractals, you have to now pay 1 gold to salvage one ring.

This is everything I can come up with so far. If I missed something please add it to the comments.

P.S: I posted this to reddit, but wanted to post it here too for people who don’t use that site.

Responses:

1) Infusions are worth on the TP and you get a ridiculous amount of them. I got dragged into a 57-59 4-man run with half the requisite AR (cause I didn’t really do Fractals before) and me as the only elite specced player, and we still finished Ascalon/Molten/Cliffside in about an hour. I got like 20 fractal boxes + 120 infusions + an ascended armor box. That’s like 80g worth of stuff for an hour of work with a suboptimal party on long fractals. Even minus the ascended drop it’s stil like18g/hour.

2) See: Ascended box.

3) Health pools are necessary because of power creep from elite specs. Reapers, Chronomancers, Druids, and Heralds are all stupidly strong and wreck existing health pools super fast. Imagine if they had vanilla-dungeon tier health.

4) You had to run 3 before. I don’t see how dropping that to 1 is a bad thing.

5) As opposed to throwing it away or vendorng it, whiich is what you had to do before.

Tbh the fractals are ok right now, the high health pool bosses are challenging as they drag out the fight making sure that you actually know how to do the boss fight flawlessly. Eg. Reactor fractal, dredge fractal, even some of the middle stage bosses. IMO it’s more fun now than it used to be. After completing a Super Long fight it feels good. It’s either they increase the dmg of the boss dramatically or they increase the health pool dramatically. IMO it’s balanced now combined with the mist instabilities. The bosses could use abit of a buff to their dmg though because right now some of them aren’t hitting that hard. I do agree with the HoT gate to fotm being a problem though, I think fotm should be part of the core game upgrade and not HoT.

Look at the +1 infusion prices. It was 14-15 silver pre-HoT and in 5 days its price has crashed. It’s nearly 4 siver today and it keeps going down. Agony infusion is nothing but garbage loot.

Ascended gear drops are totally RNG. It was before and still is and I don’t really mind that. You don’t get them so often but it’s a nice carrot to chase. Problem is, other than Ascended drops you won’t get anything even worth to look at from daily chests. Also, Anet specifically said they will shift liquid rewards from dungeons towards into other pieces of content.

As a part of that process, we’ll shift some rewards away from dungeons and into other pieces of content…The shift in rewards is a direct representation of our focus on raids and fractals and our commitment to make them the best they can be.

I don’t see it’s happening. If anything you lose money or call it even if you want to open these so called reward chests.

Health pools were in a good place before and i’d imagine them buffing slightly but as you go higher in fractals that hp creep made most of the fights boring. Pumping more hp into bosses doesn’t make fights challenging,interesting or fun.

Yes we had to vendor rings before but it doesn’t change the fact ascended salvage tool is overpriced. There’s no question about it.

I don’t mind running random daily fractal then again main issue is with this patch is fractal rewards. They’re so terrible and gated behind masteries that once i get my 50-100 done i probably will stop running fractals once and for all.