Guild Wars 2

Fractal difficulty scaling is flawed design. Nothing can grow exponentially over time for infinity. Basic arithmetic proves it. Would regular NPC’s one shot players with auto attacks? What would the rewards scale to? A chest full of precursors?

Developers would end up being forced to downscale their upscale system. This is redundant; waste of resources and time.

Reduce the scaling to something more realistic. You proved you can make something challenging with Liadri.

Easy: Play for the story, play for the adventure and some rewards. Risk is very low and likelihood of success is very high.

Normal: Midway point between difficulty and reward. In the middle of 2 extremes.

Hard: Play for the challenge, play for the rewards. Time limits, one shot mechanics, and environmental hazards. Assumes high end gear, level 80 and consumables. High risk, high reward. Failure is punishing and drains gold from the player.

To infinity and beyond!
No seriously the fun ends on fotm 80.

Calae.1738:

Would regular NPC’s one shot players with auto attacks? What would the rewards scale to? A chest full of precursors?

A chest of green gear and a 1% chance at a rare or account bound exotic.

Calae.1738:

Fractal difficulty scaling is flawed design. Nothing can grow exponentially over time for infinity. Basic arithmetic proves it.

Mathematically speaking, that statement would be false.

Calae.1738:

Would regular NPC’s one shot players with auto attacks?

Some regular mobs at 48 already hit hard enough to take some low HP classes down if you’re positioned just wrong.

Calae.1738:

You proved you can make something challenging with Liadri.

I agree with something a bit more like this. What if each tier of fractals added in new and different abilities to each fractal scenario? I know some people on the forums here have already suggested some.

Imagine if in the 40-49 tier bosses got a frenzy mechanic. (Think like champ risen abomination.)

Calae.1738:

Easy: Play for the story, play for the adventure and some rewards. Risk is very low and likelihood of success is very high.

Normal: Midway point between difficulty and reward. In the middle of 2 extremes.

Hard: Play for the challenge, play for the rewards. Time limits, one shot mechanics, and environmental hazards. Assumes high end gear, level 80 and consumables. High risk, high reward. Failure is punishing and drains gold from the player.

It’s already set up like this, though. Easy mode is anything below 10. Normal mode is 10 to whatever level your AR isn’t enough to make an agony hit trivial. Hard level # is based on a personal ability to handle essentially what you’ve mentioned in your Hard mode section. For some people there might not be a hard mode. That’s okay, though, because there will always be people who will feel that something isn’t hard enough.

The Potential of Fractals was, when it came out, that the difficulty level would become so insane that you’d find your own personal “maxed out” level. At least, that’s what I had thought.

Mobs hitting harder the higher up you go is fine, IMO. Mobs having more health is annoying, but I’m not gonna complain about it. I’d change a few things, like for the Dredge Clown Car, instead of having more waves of the same number of dredge popping out, I’d have the same number of waves with more dredge in each wave. (This might be a moot point if they actually shorten up dredge, as mentioned by Anthony Ordon in GD.)

And again, just to reiterate an above point, if each tier gave each boss new techniques that we’d have to watch out for, I think that would be cool.