Guild Wars 2

The only meaningful mechanical changes as you limb fractal levels are instabilities. When I heard about new fractal difficulties, I was excited.

Then I discovered that all of the new instabilities were only extremely minor inconveniences, which didn’t significantly change the play of the encounters at higher levels.

Then I discovered that in stead of using further instabilities, you simply decided to stack two boring instabilities together.

We don’t need more “and then they got boons, or you lost a boon, or some conditions happenned” instabilities. They do nothing to change the play of the fractal, and thus do nothing to increase the longevity of the content.

We need more interesting and fun instabilities that change mob types, give them weird abilities, bomb the fractal with traps and aoes, force people to reconsider builds and playstyles, and add real meaningful variation as we progress through fractal levels.

As they stand right now, instabilities are barely noticable.

Further, using the same exact instability for 9 fractals straight is just lazy. by the time you get to instabilities in the new system, you’ve already seen the content. The same ignorable variation nine times in a row does not add meaningful replayability to the content.

I thought the whole point of instabilities was to make repeating fractals at higher difficulty feel meaningfully different, and require the development of new strategies and playstyles. As it stands, only afflicted and social awkwardness are even noticable. The rest are just boring and lazy condition or boon modifications.

Compared to the pre-HoT instabilities they’re extremely lackluster and create no memorable achievements or gameplay moments when climbing from 30-100

Why get rid of all of the interesting and fun instabilities? Where’s mossman? Where’s random lightning strikes? Frosty? Antielitism? These were game changing, memorable instabilities that really added replay value to fractals by making the encounters play and feel remarkably different. Surpassing them felt like an achievement, and they made climbing fractal difficulties fun.

Agree. Fractals are now a chore and completely ruined in my opinion. There was merit in completing a fractal with speed before. Now Anet have created a rat-race for dailies. All the fun has been removed, and just as another inconvenience, the rewards STILL are not adequate?

Anet’s creativity for fractals seems to be nonexistent. They should at least have added new fractals before nerfing dungeons.

Concerning dailies, doing X swamps and Y molten boss fractals is a chore mainly because it’s so boring.

I really fell they didn’t put the effort they first wanted into the new Fractals. Basically they should have had a specific insta for each island depending on its level.
For example swamp is a short one and having the really punishing (and a bit stupid) insta for this one makes sense but those that are intrinsically harder should get a balanced instability to compensate.
Before Hot I was dreaming about having path that were pre determined like rolling swamp first would give you a higher chance to get Cliffside and Mai Trin. It is a matter of balancing content.
Globally the blogposts they made about Fractals since 2012 are always full of promises but since it is the only small group content they want to continuously develop there should be more work force on it, able to react quickly. The islands are already made, so now they “only” have to tweak numbers for instabilities, damage, health pools and rewards but this can’t be a side-job.