Guild Wars 2

Toughness scaling is fundamentally an attempt to make Berserker gear and direct damage builds obsolete for high level fractals. But the decision isn’t to stop DPS from being good – instead, it’s to arbitrarily promote Condition Damage as the optimal way to clear high level fractals.

As people here have focused on the fact that high level fractals are pointless right now due to lack of rewards, I also want to bring attention to the fact that high level fractals also arbitrarily favor Condi Damage over Direct Damage for no good reason other than to “challenge the Berserker Meta” (because I guess a Sinister/Viper meta is somehow fundamentally better?)

Regardless, if the developers ever do another iteration of fractals in the future and actually make high level fractals worth revisiting, they should consider removing all Toughness scaling. There is no good reason to favor Condi DPS over Direct DPS.

I agree that having a few mobs or encounters to counter Direct Damage or Condi Damage can lead to interesting variety. However, setting a global rule that from level 60+ fractals onwards, Direct Damage just becomes bad is nothing more than an invalidation of the Ascended Berserker Gear many of us have worked to get, which fundamentally goes against the principle that this expansion wouldn’t obsolete our gear.

Is that hard just to give some mobs/bosses much more toughness and thats it, for the variety? Does all this general downgrade to direct dmg really have to happen?

kluster.1308:

Is that hard just to give some mobs/bosses much more toughness and thats it, for the variety? Does all this general downgrade to direct dmg really have to happen?

Indeed. SOME enemies being resistant to direct damage (and some enemies resistant to Condi damage) is fine, if it isn’t all over the place. Making it for all fractals 60+ is huge overkill, however.

I agree, as others have pointed out in different topics.
Condition damage isnt balanced, only 3-4 classes excel at it. Any class can deal direct damage without creating an immense gap between everyclass damage wise.

Give every class as much acces to burning as Ranger,Guardian,Engineer,Warrior and we call it even.
I don’t think thats the solution, but Anet should start realizing that the current state isn’t acceptable.

OP did mention in the last paragraph about variety in mobs. So read the entire post.

There would be no variety. If they only made high Toughness for some fractals, people would just do non-condition fractals and ignore the Toughness fractals.

I’m really unhappy with the farmy nonsense enabled by the new fractal system, even if i appreciate the smaller time commitment

There could be variety within one fractal, not the entire fractal or one specific fractal. Though I do agree that the current system can still be easily abused and basically what you described is happening already, ignoring the high toughness fractals.