Guild Wars 2

Why does it seem so difficult to PUG fractals? Seems like anything not AC/COF is a disaster, and half the time you get people who haven’t ever done those dungeons, don’t ask for help, and if told what to do, refuse to listen.

How do I go about finding competent players to play with?

Personally I’ve just made friends and hope for invites while I search through PUGS

Guilds are great too, recently joined 2 different ones (one speed run one, and one more focused on teaching, both are amazing and great people)

Other than that just learn to PUG, that means basically soloing while keeping in mind to take things slower and give a little instruction and hope they listen and deal with the unexpected.

There are 2 ways to make your experience “hard mode” in this game. PUGing and Speed Running. Both are enjoyable for the challenge but certainly different.

I pug 50 a lot. Some runs are terrible and last 2.5 hours. Some runs are incredible and last 30-40 minutes. It kind of comes with the territory.

I honestly think one of the issues with pugging fractals is there still isn’t a “pug strats script” for every part of every fractal. There are some basic ones, like if you have a thief in snowblind, pugs expect it to solo the first bonfire; and “keep one alive” at the arm seals on Cliffside, but most of the rest you’ll have 5 people expecting to do each encounter 3, 4 or even 5 different ways. Then things turn into a clusterkitten.

Compare that with a generic “CoE path 1, zerk” pug, where 99% of us can script out exactly how it will go. Even though that script is like, 7 months out of date and stupid with stacking Alpha in FGS corners, having everyone on the same page is pretty valuable. Especially in fractals.

I don’t know, but in my experience FotM is still the place with the highest chance for getting good pugs, at least at level 20+ .
Sure, if you go for min-max-super-speed-record-times, you might feel lost, but if all you want is a smooth run within a reasonable time, I’d say 9 out of 10 runs go just fine.
Example: yesterday there was “do one level of fractals” and “finish a fractal 21-30” on the daily. So my wife and I decided to give fractals a shot. Opened 21, searched swamp (well, got swamp right away so I hadn’t to search at all ), set up lfg, sth. like “fotm 21, relaxed after work run, plz have enough ar and know what you’re doing; swamp rdy”.
Filled within seconds and even though I played the first time with an adjusted guardian build I’m not yet 100% used to and we didn’t get the shortest levels at all (swamp followed by uncategorized followed by cliffside, luckily molten boss level in the end) it was done within 45 mins.

I admitt, the 1 out of 10 runs not going so well can be anoying (thinking about that fotm 49 lately at the fire shaman… duh…) but hey- it’s a game after all and live goes on

I’d go with Nash, fractal pugs are pretty clean usually, the worst are the 10-15 range in my experience.

It takes a while to find your groove in it as well. My first experience with Fractals was miserable, and I didn’t do it again for a good while. Eventually I decided I wanted to get up to 50 (which I have yet to do, though I have enough AR), and as I worked my way up the tiers, I got a lot better not only at playing effectively, but also finding good PUGs. At least, it seemed that way, since I almost never had a bad group during that time.

The other day, I tried going into Fractals for the dailies, which was probably a major contributing factor to this, but the group I joined was not as experienced / prepared as I am used to, and I just had to bail after we failed Mossman 4 times. FotM is pretty challenging content, compared to the rest of the game, so it’s unsurprising that joining a group of randos can easily go wrong.