Guild Wars 2

I love doing dungeons and run a few every day, but the dredge fractal is the single reason I try to avoid fractals of the mists. Every time a new fractal loads I cringe and if my party is unlucky enough to get the map my heart sinks followed by everyone in the party expressing their frustration.

The main problem with this dungeon is that there’s no way to combat the dredge. They respawn faster than you can defeat them and it’s impossible to survive a prolonged fight, especially in higher level fractals. This turns the strategy of beating the two most problematic areas, the cage and door, into “res rushing” as there is no way to combat the hoard of dredge.

For example:

At the cage 2 people stay dead on the switches so the other 3 can keep respawning and going back in, hoping that one of these times they get lucky and the person on the panel doesn’t get interrupted.

At the door (if you get the bombs) the party runs into the army of dredge, grabs a bomb, places it at the door, and then retreats (often with a few people getting killed in the process). This then needs to be repeated depending on how many bombs went off, sometimes taking 6+ runs.

Running in, hoping your team gets lucky, and if not respawning and trying again, just isn’t fun and can be extremely frustrating. We need some concrete mechanics and strategies to complete this fractal that don’t rely on luck, constantly respawning, specific classes, glitches, or exploits.

The main problem is that this fractal is extremely long compared to others. At higher levels the amount of mobs after the bomb event (the ones with the champion boss) you have to kill is way too much. They pose no threat whatsoever, have invulnerability for a few seconds when they spawn and you just lure them group by group and wait for the car to crash into gate so you can finally kill the boss and be done with it.

Bri.8354:

At the cage 2 people stay dead on the switches so the other 3 can keep respawning and going back in, hoping that one of these times they get lucky and the person on the panel doesn’t get interrupted.

Extremely bad idea. A lot better way to do this is to get one person to aggro the dredge and die on right switch, then 3 people camp at the left switch and pull the aggro of the party member that does the gate. Works fine most of the time and you don’t have to rely on luck.

In my opinion protection buff should be removed from those dredge and their numbers could be reduced by half. Also get rid of trash mobs between the events – they make it more tedious and serve no other purpose.

The ArenaNet dungeon team seems to think “improve” means “add HP, trash mobs, and more damage” to the dungeons, rather than rebuild the parts that people have issue with. I’ve been playing since the headstart, and have yet to see an improvement. Heck, it was the same way in GW1, with the dungeons only ever getting harder and harder, more impossible.

JungleNin.8379:

The ArenaNet dungeon team seems to think “improve” means “add HP, trash mobs, and more damage” to the dungeons, rather than rebuild the parts that people have issue with. I’ve been playing since the headstart, and have yet to see an improvement. Heck, it was the same way in GW1, with the dungeons only ever getting harder and harder, more impossible.

Not really. In GW1 (before the Shadow Form gimmicky teambuilds), you had to build your team around the mobs you’d encounter. You needed to take interrupts, knockdowns, AoE, tanks etc. The difficulty in GW1 was that your team needed to be able to counter a lot of things. In GW1, you couldn’t just build a full DPS team and expect to finish DoA, UW, FoW, Urgoz, Deep… On the contrary, you’d get your kitten handed to you probably.

And in GW1, the addition of HM was more than just “more HP, more damage”. They gave the foes extra skills and made their skills synergize as well, making them actually more challenging fights, not solely based on HP and damage. Whereas the artificial difficulty from GW2 with bloated HP bars and more raw damage is hardly creative. It’s just tedious.

People hailed the HM in GW1 because it was implemented pretty good. People hate the ‘hard mode’ Fractals gives because it’s unimaginative and boring.

Bright.9160:

JungleNin.8379:

The ArenaNet dungeon team seems to think “improve” means “add HP, trash mobs, and more damage” to the dungeons, rather than rebuild the parts that people have issue with. I’ve been playing since the headstart, and have yet to see an improvement. Heck, it was the same way in GW1, with the dungeons only ever getting harder and harder, more impossible.

Not really. In GW1 (before the Shadow Form gimmicky teambuilds), you had to build your team around the mobs you’d encounter. You needed to take interrupts, knockdowns, AoE, tanks etc. The difficulty in GW1 was that your team needed to be able to counter a lot of things. In GW1, you couldn’t just build a full DPS team and expect to finish DoA, UW, FoW, Urgoz, Deep… On the contrary, you’d get your kitten handed to you probably.

And in GW1, the addition of HM was more than just “more HP, more damage”. They gave the foes extra skills and made their skills synergize as well, making them actually more challenging fights, not solely based on HP and damage. Whereas the artificial difficulty from GW2 with bloated HP bars and more raw damage is hardly creative. It’s just tedious.

People hailed the HM in GW1 because it was implemented pretty good. People hate the ‘hard mode’ Fractals gives because it’s unimaginative and boring.

I really miss hard mode from GW1. You’re right, fotm is just awful and boring even at higher lvls. -.-