Guild Wars 2

point of reference: I do 51+ dailies daily, I did lvl 50 before the change regularly. Right now, fractals end up being swamp and molton duo and 2 other random ones if you do them all or 3x swamp if you only do 51+ because rewards really dont scale with length. I also dont feel like the current structure is very friendly to either progression of difficulty of a given instance (there are 30 levels between the first 2 urban battle ground instances) or is it friendly to expansion. So, I got to thinking how I would structure fractal content to keep the benefits of the changes that were made (1 instance per run required), bring back some of the randomness some people enjoyed, make expansion of new fractal and instabilities easier and scale the rewards to length.

NOTE: This assumes that fractals are modular. That is, an instability and difficulty scaling can be applied to a given instance programatically and that it is not the case that each combination must be manually coded.

Here it goes:

Fractals are split into tiers, not individual levels. Each tier adds an amount of randomness and difficulty. For HP, toughness and attack damage would scale like this, T1 = current level 10, T2 = lvl 20, T3 = lvl30 etc and all the different fractals in each tier is scaled the same. Within these tiers different mechanics can be added just like they are now, T1 uncategorized doesnt have knockback harpies, T2+ does etc.

Tiers

1) You get to pick the fractal. there are no instabilities. To access T2, you have to have completed say, 10 individual fractals (there are currently 14, as new are added, you can just stick with 10, current players are grandfathered in based on their personal fractal level)

2) You get to pick the fractal and 1 instability from a list of “easy” instabilities. To access T3 you have to have done 10 different fractals and experienced some number of the easy instabilities (no specific combinations).

3) Fractals are randomized, and 1 easy instability is randomly applied. To access T4, do 10 fractals in T3.

4) Fractals are randomized, you pick from a list of “hard” instabilities. To access T5 (and T6), do 10 fractals and some number of different instabilities.

5) Fractals and 1 hard instability randomized.

6) Fractals and 1 hard and 1 easy instability randomized.

Optional tier: 7) Dev’s choice (muahahahaha). Devs may put together specific fractals and some number of instabilities along with bonus mechanics like the extra elites at mai trin at 100. If the fractals and instabilities are coded modularly, this entire tier could be a single fractal released every 2 -4 weeks (4 weeks…like a monthly achievement? :O ) or something with the normal patch that is only available those weeks and can be completed once for a bonus reward. This might also be a way to introduce a new instability every once in a while.

a reward change:

Events within each fractal should give chests like the raid. This is where you get encryption boxes along with maybe a champ bag, a bag of gear or even bonus relics. Some extra chests given at the end of certain areas under certain conditions (like killing all trash, harpies for istance) on top of what we see now (like the chest for killing dulfy of the champ at molten duo) may be warranted. For instance, opening the 3 doors in the dredge fractal would be an ‘event’, bombs/guns would be another, the champ another and clearing the hall before the boss another. This allows longer fractals to contain more events and thus reward more loot based on length of the fractal rather than the difference between molten duo and dredge being a couple encryption boxes. These chests should also be once a day account bound but rewards per tier to avoid some situation where you just do 1 event and reset or something.

Dailies can be 3 fractals within each tier with some bonus goodies if you (you, not anyone in your party to avoid dc issues and quitting issues) complete the 3 fractals without going back to the lobby or to LA. If it is just bound to the player who must complete 3 without leaving for the bonus, then some people can go 1 at a time and leave while others can stay for the bonus and pull more people in, jut like goes on now.

Tiers should address expandability as well as experienced difficulty of a given fractal, event rewards should address fractal length vs reward concerns and, combined with randomness of higher tiers, avoid swamp spam.

EDIT: Also, yes, I know this would be alot of dev time and that there are other things they could be working on other than another change of content they just changed. These are just some ideas that I have had.

In all honesty on top of this, agony shouldnt really be a thing. The lock out should be completion of the requirements to advance, not agony. Infusion slots and infusion recipes can be restructured to allow the +1s to become a material used to craft offensive and defensive infusions of +1 to +5 stats including concentration/expertise. and maybe some interesting things like a % bonus outgoing healing or something. Attuned and infused slots on rings and backpacks can become utility infusion slots that allow people to use karma infusions, magic find etc. In this way those slots dont add a small amount of combat stat creep but still give them a purpose.

Simpler solution

Fractal Hard Mode….More rewards, less choice.

You do 3x random islands, with unique and random instabilities per level selected and 1 Boss fractal with again unique and random instabilities per level.

I know this sounds sorta familiar, it’s because it worked before and it shouldn’t have been broken in the first place.

Wouldn’t we just be back in a situation were people restarted the fractal until the desired one appeared?

It’s still faster to restart 10 times until a swamp came than do Cliffside or Thaumanova Reactor.

Kyuff.4875:

Wouldn’t we just be back in a situation were people restarted the fractal until the desired one appeared?

It’s still faster to restart 10 times until a swamp came than do Cliffside or Thaumanova Reactor.

that would count as leaving and nullify the 3 at a time bonus for each person that did that. Disconnects would be a concern though

Kyuff.4875:

Wouldn’t we just be back in a situation were people restarted the fractal until the desired one appeared?

It’s still faster to restart 10 times until a swamp came than do Cliffside or Thaumanova Reactor.

… and ?

Who cares. If the group doing hard mode chooses to re-roll to swamp under the system for their starter, what difference does it make. They wont be getting swamp more than once anyway.

Even if you do see this as an issue there’s plenty of ways to stop it from happening from just a simple design standpoint, like removing swamp from the Hard Mode Rotation of Fractal maps or having all Hard Mode Fractals on a set daily rotation, that you can only do once per day for unique daily loot.

I’d prefer just new fractals. Hampering people who want to play swamps of the mists seems unnecessary. I really like the idea of a random mode / dev pick mode with a slight bonus to rewards! I think such a mode would get a lot of people fractal levels they may need and it just seems like it would fit perfectly with the fractal lore. * It kind of bothered me that we always knew where we were going when Dessa is doing something as amazing as stabilizing places in the past.

How I think it should work:

• has to be a random number and random instabilities, or dev picked
• can only do it once per day!
  -you get exploding Cliffside, then that’s what you got
  -no 10 reroll nonsense
• if the mode is exclusively random number then I suggest it goes by the difficulty and range already set up by current fractal lfg system with scaling rewards.
  - meaning you can go 1-20 for easie peasie with surprise instabilities that aren’t normally there like when you know which fractal you’re going to. Or if you go for 76-100 range you have the chance of the best rewards, but you could end up with 100 whether you’re ready or not.
  -So I’m wondering, but what if they get a hard level with easy new instabilities. I’ll just leave that to whoever would work on balancing this if it ever came true. If it’s truly random I think you should be able to roll a 20 like in D&D since a 1 will definitely be possible and apart of the the challenge and reward.
• Everyone in the party has to agree to the mode and range when it pops up and the same for leaving since its only once per day, is a gamble, and could potentially whisk people off before the reward.

Forced randomness is pretty sweet when farming fractals but awful for progression.

As long as you can quite easily complete any fractal it doesn’t matter that much which one you get. But when that is no longer true it becomes really annoying to just keep rerolling until you get favorable conditions. Also when farming it’s bit annoying to get harder fractals over and over but I would say the increased variety matters more.

Simply changing the daily achievement to force random specific fractals would encourage variety. However based on how people think I doubt it would work that good. When people see a hard or long combination they might just skip the daily.

So the question is, how to encourage variety to players who seek the path of least resistance (without randomness)?

My idea is to split fractals to 3 or 4 tiers based on their difficulty/length just like we had before. Then the fractal scales should be reordered so that a continuous set of 3 or 4 levels would have a map from every tier. For example tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, tier 4, tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 and so on.

Then the daily achievement would be a random continuous set. Because of reordering, every random set would include a fractal from each tier being about equally difficult and long.

i hope the instabilities rework makes them work like queens gauntlet gambits.

I sometimes do 70, 80, 98 for 51+ dailies
or 56 instead of 80.

98 is so quick and easy, I dunno why people don’t do it more