I find that the higher the difficulty goes, the less I enjoy the dungeon.
•Mobs and bosses start to get to the point where it just isn’t feasible to facetank them. The best form of damage mitigation seems to become just ranging them and kiting. I think this is stupid and really just poor design. Some fractals become almost exclusive kitefests. I’m not fond of the idea of the further I go in fractals, the more likely it is that I’m going to spend more and more time circlestrafing with a ranged weapon for an hour.
•Certain added mechanics feel poorly implemented. The added agony mechanic in the harpy fractal is awful. He has no limit on how many times he can target someone, so he can spam you until you have nothing left to dodge/block/invuln through and you eventually go down through his attrition-esque attacks, and even then he can still focus you when you’re down meaning agony against your downed state = dead. Agony attacks should have a tell, be reasonably spaced out, and should punish the player for not avoiding them. But this isn’t reasonably spaced out, every single attack the boss does applies agony and he spends the entire fight spamming it and has no filter on how many times in a row he can attack the same person.
The harpy knockback is also bad in my opinion. The size of the circle in comparison with size of the platform means it can manifest in a way that you won’t even see the circle. This part of the tell is thus, potentially entirely eliminated meaning you have to watch for a bright blue ball in a bright blue sky which is just bad design in terms of color scheme and contrasting dangerous mechanics with the environment. Also, to add insult to injury, there’s also a bug where you can fall and not be teleported back onto the platform and fall to your death, meaning now your entire party has to suicide if they don’t want to 4man the rest of the dungeon.
Jade Maw’s agony effect is also really poor. Every single phase transition he inflicts agony on everyone, it isn’t avoidable and lasts a long time (Something like 5-8 seconds?) Even with resistances, at higher difficulties it still just plays the same role of unavoidable party wide % based damage that kills. It gets to the point where it heads into this gear treadmill of acquiring more agony resistance to deal with it. Required resistances in PvE weren’t a good idea in other MMOs, they aren’t a good idea now.
The underwater fractal is one of the worst designed fractals. The dolphin path is horrible for the fact that dodging does not work against the sink because it hits multiple times in a chain. If you dodge the sink, it shouldn’t just sink you anyway. Trying to rely solely on the 2 ability to distract the krait just makes it slowpaced and boring. The boss also suffers from the same problems HotW bosses have which is just having an obscene amount of HP for essentially 1 mechanic the boss has. At higher difficulties, the boss applies agony when he devours someone, which by the way can’t be dodged and has a massive range on which he can devour someone and during his devour, takes no damage AND regens making a boring fight even longer. The agony isn’t even much of a factor because since the boss does like no damage outside of agony and the agony doesn’t even last long enough to kill you (especially if you have resistances), the mechanic just becomes a stupid nuisance that forces people to stay at range which coincedentally even further lowers many classes dps output underwater. The entire fight becomes about keeping your distance at 1000+ range which is just a 10 minute underwater kitefest against a boss that does like no damage on his own outside of agony. Absolutely terrible design.