Guild Wars 2

Jerus.4350:

I’m actually all for a random daily. As phys pointed out I’ve been pushing for choosable fractals for a long time. But, with the caveate of having a daily random series then being able to finish the rest as you pleased 1 by 1 (or forgot the tour and do 1 by 1 with a lesser reward).

Random does add something. But, God I hate doing bad combos at 2am (generally when I start my last for the day). So i see value in that, but overall, I still prefer the new method to the old one. Especially if they reward doing different setups. Personally I’ll still do a good variety of them. I’ll probably do a lot of mai Trin and Grawl Shaman as I find them entertaining, unless they have horrible instabilities or get to a one shot mode I’d probably do them daily just for fun. But, yeah kinda rambling, but I support the idea of an additional full “tour”.

I get why you and others like being able to select, but that being the main way of playing them is very unhealthy for fractals as a whole.

Theres basically gonna be like 3 fractals you can play outside of guild premades

This should just have been a game mode

phys.7689:

Jerus.4350:

I’m actually all for a random daily. As phys pointed out I’ve been pushing for choosable fractals for a long time. But, with the caveate of having a daily random series then being able to finish the rest as you pleased 1 by 1 (or forgot the tour and do 1 by 1 with a lesser reward).

Random does add something. But, God I hate doing bad combos at 2am (generally when I start my last for the day). So i see value in that, but overall, I still prefer the new method to the old one. Especially if they reward doing different setups. Personally I’ll still do a good variety of them. I’ll probably do a lot of mai Trin and Grawl Shaman as I find them entertaining, unless they have horrible instabilities or get to a one shot mode I’d probably do them daily just for fun. But, yeah kinda rambling, but I support the idea of an additional full “tour”.

I get why you and others like being able to select, but that being the main way of playing them is very unhealthy for fractals as a whole.

Theres basically gonna be like 3 fractals you can play outside of guild premades

This should just have been a game mode

If they properly reward mixing it up, no. If they fail to do that then yes. Seems they understand the concern so we’ll see what they do.

The more I read it sounds like there is the standard chest, then multiple dailies to accomplish. If they have like 3 dailies requiring different levels and maybe 1 or 2 for any, well, then you’re going to be different ones each day gathering your 3 specific and 1-2 general.

It all depends on the details.

Here is a suggestion to break up the static fractal schedule.

An infinitely repeatable achievement called Fractal Cartographer that required you to complete every single fractal level: 1-100.

If on average you completed 3-4 different fractal scales a day, it would take you about a month to complete all 100 fractal levels. So the Fractal Cartographer would be the “monthly” version of the fractal rewards. I would model the reward off of the current monthly achievements such as giving your account a permanent +1% magic find inside fractals and a choice of one of four different Big Rewards such as Asc Fractal skin (what I assume the upgraded fractal skins mentioned in the article will be), an ascended Weapon, Armor, or Ascended Aquabreather, etc. etc.

The main reason for this is of course to give everyone motivation to compete every different fractal instead of just farming swamp. Another reason would be to give a genuine pay off for long term fractal commitment.

Jerus.4350:

phys.7689:

Jerus.4350:

I’m actually all for a random daily. As phys pointed out I’ve been pushing for choosable fractals for a long time. But, with the caveate of having a daily random series then being able to finish the rest as you pleased 1 by 1 (or forgot the tour and do 1 by 1 with a lesser reward).

Random does add something. But, God I hate doing bad combos at 2am (generally when I start my last for the day). So i see value in that, but overall, I still prefer the new method to the old one. Especially if they reward doing different setups. Personally I’ll still do a good variety of them. I’ll probably do a lot of mai Trin and Grawl Shaman as I find them entertaining, unless they have horrible instabilities or get to a one shot mode I’d probably do them daily just for fun. But, yeah kinda rambling, but I support the idea of an additional full “tour”.

I get why you and others like being able to select, but that being the main way of playing them is very unhealthy for fractals as a whole.

Theres basically gonna be like 3 fractals you can play outside of guild premades

This should just have been a game mode

If they properly reward mixing it up, no. If they fail to do that then yes. Seems they understand the concern so we’ll see what they do.

The more I read it sounds like there is the standard chest, then multiple dailies to accomplish. If they have like 3 dailies requiring different levels and maybe 1 or 2 for any, well, then you’re going to be different ones each day gathering your 3 specific and 1-2 general.

It all depends on the details.

The dude said for the daily people may end up doing the same 3 fractals all the time. (on reddit)

Its a wrap, fractals are just dungeon paths without unique rewards with a 3 path a day limit.

Fractals for the thrill is over. Fractals as grind farm is the future.

Unless they change the design from what they tols us today.

He said people may do the same ones but you won’t be rewarded as well as doing a diverse set as well… so… yeah.

I don’t know the changes seem promising to me. Mostly the time commitment is the killer for why I don’t run them as often.

Jerus.4350:

He said people may do the same ones but you won’t be rewarded as well as doing a diverse set as well… so… yeah.

He said that with respect to doing the exact same one over and over.
He said people may do the same 3 over and over for the daily just fine

This might mean a group picks their favorite set of scales (3 to 9 or so islands) to clear each day, but repeatedly farming the same scale or same island will not be as beneficial.
"

Repeatedly farming the same level not profitable, but doing the same 3 is fine.
And that only applies specifically to the daily.

You will basically end up doing the non farm fractals as much as people do uncategorized as the first fractal now.

Playing anything but the easy set will become that self imposed meta game that barely anyone does.

Just imagine dungeons with no specific tokens, no daily bonus per path. And some new dailies where you get bonus money for doing any 3 unique paths a day.

You can predict exactly how people will play if

Jerus he also said the new system promoted more variation, but if youre going to farm you 50 Daily Fractal Scale you will now ALWAYS face the same fractal there. Its going to be forever 50 cliffside or whatever one gets placed there.

Thats a downgrade from the old one. Thats less variation.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Jerus he also said the new system promoted more variation, but if youre going to farm you 50 Daily Fractal Scale you will now ALWAYS face the same fractal there. Its going to be forever 50 cliffside or whatever one gets placed there.

Thats a downgrade from the old one. Thats less variation.

There is only one daily that promotes playing anything besides the standard 3.
And its unknown how rewarding that daily will even be.

Fractals will never be unpredictable again.

Either way they are limiting the amount of FOTM you can now do – with the new scales + schedule.

e.g. up to 20, 21-50, 51+ – regardless of what personal level you are at.

Right now its 0-10,11-20,21-30,31-40,41-50 (5 times you can do it daily and get rewards).

Will be scaled back to 3 times daily – max.

Now instead of which fotm are we going to get – its a oh well we best pick x or y path as its better.

What this does also promote is a couple of things like:
Snowblind – which we know is buggy as hell (with the swirler and necro only being able to kill it) being picked less often and ANET not knowing why people are picking that path less often. It will be hidden behind the fact no-one is picking it.

At least by forcing people to do it – this meant that we found out it was bugged (and will find out if it gets subsequently fixed).

There was already content in the game that you could do if you wanted something quick and fast. I understand there reasoning for trying to make fractals more accessible to newer players and just people who don’t have an hour to devote to a pug. But this is too big of a change to fractals, they just do not sound like they will be the same thing after the update One persons suggestion was pretty good i felt like, they suggested that they start out with this new static idea at fotm 1 and then as you move up they increase until eventually ending up back at the original setup somewhere around 70. That would open up fractals to people with not enough time but would still have the randomness and the extra difficulty that comes with that randomness for people who wanted it at the higher levels

I don’t think i have seen anyone put it in as easy to see terms as this. Swamp for my guild group that do fractals every week, once a week takes about 15-20 minutes. So that means if we wait a week or so and let one of them grind up the levels, He get’s to lets say 76 which is a swamp with a negligible instability. It would only take us 8.6 hours to catch up to him. That is already halfway to 100.

Therodin.2970:

One persons suggestion was pretty good i felt like, they suggested that they start out with this new static idea at fotm 1 and then as you move up they increase until eventually ending up back at the original setup somewhere around 70. That would open up fractals to people with not enough time but would still have the randomness and the extra difficulty that comes with that randomness for people who wanted it at the higher levels

Yeah this was my suggestion. A couple of my guildies and I had talked about having this be a thing when we started studying into the fractal changes. Apparently my idea got buried by other responses, but I’m glad you noticed it. Ya the solution seems simple enough. I know they have the tech to make different levels give different numbers of fractals because before the fractured update. All odd numbered fracs would roll 3 then all even-numbered fracs did 3+jade maw. I feel like using that tech will still allow fracs to be difficult while also allowing for ease of access. As I said before one frac is not difficult when I know what that fractal will be. Oh we’re doing cliffside? I’ll bring a bunch of AoE cleave and/or blinds. We’re running dredge? I’ll just bring my thief. Yes maybe the instabilities could possibly counter these such as stealth lasting half as long or dealing half damage with melee, but I think three years of GW2 has made it painfully obvious that players will find a way to optimize this system so creating less variation on the fractals we run is only going to make them easier for us. Naturally we are going to find the fractals that give us the highest reward in the shortest amount of time.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind easy rewards, but those already exist in dungeons. People already complain that the game doesn’t have enough challenging end-game content. So the solution is to make the hardest instanced content easier? Yes I know Anet is promising challenging end-game content in HoT, but I don’t want to rely on them. I like fractals. I consider lvl 50 a challenge every time I run them on any of my 9 toons with the appropriate ar. Anet if you read this I support what you guys do and I love this game. This is why I’m trying to do what I can to protect one of my favorite things in this game.

So to repost my idea from before (also the TLDR part for people):
-lvl 1-20 fractals we get the one static fractal that was suggested in the stream to allow for players to learn the mechanics
-lvl 21-50 fractals we get one static fractal then one other frac picked at random afterwards to slowly increase difficulty
-lvl 51-70 fractals we get one static fractal then two random fractals similar to what odd numbered fractals did before the Fractured update.
-lvl 71+ fractals have one static fractal then three random fractals almost like they are now. Players will get the maximum challenge out of these fractals and potentially the greatest rewards.

And just like that you have 4 scales for rewards also. I also didn’t mention that 51+ as its own reward tier seems rather large when the other two tiers have 30 or fewer scales tied to them

1. OMG a recent red post in the dungeon forums!!!

2. On topic: given the few informations we have it really seems that there won’t be any benefit in doing more than 3 fractals a day, a 1-20, a 21-50 and a 51-100. That’s playing 3 levels, getting 3 rewards. Spent 30 mins on it, now wait for the daily reset. Not really appealing imo. Therefor I strongly support sprhavkdogi.9408’s suggestion with more reward tiers and increasing level randomness.
Or at least make it “semi-random”, like (using the example above for lvl 71+) “start with a static level, followed by three more fractals. Whenever you finish a level, your party gets to chose from 2-3 randomly chosen levels”. Pretty much like we already do in explorer dungeons.
Example: starting lvl 77, static fotm is swamp. Swamp is done, everyone clicks “ready” → new pop up window with a fuse on top appears on screen, asking everyone wether to proceed with Molten Facility or with Ascalon. Party members make their choice, the selected map starts. And so on.

Could be nice if they allowed you to get a stacking bonus for continuing inside of fractals. From 51 onwards you only have 1 daily,, they could add in that you get an extra 5% of the base reward for a fractal shard if you continue on without returning to dessa’s lab. Then you’d have a reason to do a 95,96,etc.. and run a set of shards instead of 1-3 and done after 30mins.

The entire lore behind fractals is that you were trying to stabilize the fractal’s instability throughout multiple fractals, does anyone realize how stupid it will sound at the end of each fractal when the npc says something along the lines of “get ready for the next fractal”, she even talks about them being an individual fractal out of many. when you finish the snowblind fractal she says something like “this fractal is cold hopefully the next one will be warmer”. Whoever made this change on the dev team is going completely against what the original creators vision was, the randomness is what made me play fractals that I wouldn’t have played otherwise and I think that’s a good thing. I think you’re an idiot if you think anet will balance the rewards appropriately considering they don’t even play the game never mind know what is a suitable reward, after this update unless it is crucial to progress, people will never do dredge, pugs will never do mai trin and no-one will ever do jade maw.

It’s a complete joke how they didn’t mention in that blog post whether or not they would add new fractals and fix all the bugs plaguing the current ones, this game will be a complete joke if this update is released and half the people are still bugging mossman underwater and the rest are doing that stupid res bullkitten at mai trin, those players can’t even admit they are bad so I am very doubtful it will ever be fixed.

The only thing we really need from this update are bug fixes and fractal weapon boxes, kitten the rest and those piece of kitten gold skins.

sprhavkdogi.9408:

Therodin.2970:

One persons suggestion was pretty good i felt like, they suggested that they start out with this new static idea at fotm 1 and then as you move up they increase until eventually ending up back at the original setup somewhere around 70. That would open up fractals to people with not enough time but would still have the randomness and the extra difficulty that comes with that randomness for people who wanted it at the higher levels

Yeah this was my suggestion. A couple of my guildies and I had talked about having this be a thing when we started studying into the fractal changes. Apparently my idea got buried by other responses, but I’m glad you noticed it. Ya the solution seems simple enough. I know they have the tech to make different levels give different numbers of fractals because before the fractured update. All odd numbered fracs would roll 3 then all even-numbered fracs did 3+jade maw. I feel like using that tech will still allow fracs to be difficult while also allowing for ease of access. As I said before one frac is not difficult when I know what that fractal will be. Oh we’re doing cliffside? I’ll bring a bunch of AoE cleave and/or blinds. We’re running dredge? I’ll just bring my thief. Yes maybe the instabilities could possibly counter these such as stealth lasting half as long or dealing half damage with melee, but I think three years of GW2 has made it painfully obvious that players will find a way to optimize this system so creating less variation on the fractals we run is only going to make them easier for us. Naturally we are going to find the fractals that give us the highest reward in the shortest amount of time.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t mind easy rewards, but those already exist in dungeons. People already complain that the game doesn’t have enough challenging end-game content. So the solution is to make the hardest instanced content easier? Yes I know Anet is promising challenging end-game content in HoT, but I don’t want to rely on them. I like fractals. I consider lvl 50 a challenge every time I run them on any of my 9 toons with the appropriate ar. Anet if you read this I support what you guys do and I love this game. This is why I’m trying to do what I can to protect one of my favorite things in this game.

So to repost my idea from before (also the TLDR part for people):
-lvl 1-20 fractals we get the one static fractal that was suggested in the stream to allow for players to learn the mechanics
-lvl 21-50 fractals we get one static fractal then one other frac picked at random afterwards to slowly increase difficulty
-lvl 51-70 fractals we get one static fractal then two random fractals similar to what odd numbered fractals did before the Fractured update.
-lvl 71+ fractals have one static fractal then three random fractals almost like they are now. Players will get the maximum challenge out of these fractals and potentially the greatest rewards.

And just like that you have 4 scales for rewards also. I also didn’t mention that 51+ as its own reward tier seems rather large when the other two tiers have 30 or fewer scales tied to them

If something similar to this is not done, i don’t think that i will do as many fractals as i currently do because most of the difficulty for me was not knowing what we were getting. You put it really well that if you know exactly which fractal you are doing you can build your build/class around that.

SlyDevil.3952:

Could be nice if they allowed you to get a stacking bonus for continuing inside of fractals. From 51 onwards you only have 1 daily,, they could add in that you get an extra 5% of the base reward for a fractal shard if you continue on without returning to dessa’s lab. Then you’d have a reason to do a 95,96,etc.. and run a set of shards instead of 1-3 and done after 30mins.

This would be cool.

As someone who runs fractals more than would be considered healthy, I have to admit not loving the assigned scales thing. I love the randomness, having to be prepared for whatever combination of fractals you might get in a given run and I HATE the idea of having to run certain scales to run certain fractals. I really do. I saw and still see no reason to mess with the way the fractals are assigned – just add new ones and an option for people in a hurry to practise single fragments. Really, I can’t stress it enough. Making it easier or simpler makes little sense in a game mode that is all about a continuous grind for people who enjoy such a thing.

You won’t get any new fractals for “a game mode that is all about a continuous grind”.

SlyDevil.3952:

Could be nice if they allowed you to get a stacking bonus for continuing inside of fractals. From 51 onwards you only have 1 daily,, they could add in that you get an extra 5% of the base reward for a fractal shard if you continue on without returning to dessa’s lab. Then you’d have a reason to do a 95,96,etc.. and run a set of shards instead of 1-3 and done after 30mins.

People will just run a script so they don’t auto-log out and they can camp their fractal foreverz!

Gav.1425:

SlyDevil.3952:

Could be nice if they allowed you to get a stacking bonus for continuing inside of fractals. From 51 onwards you only have 1 daily,, they could add in that you get an extra 5% of the base reward for a fractal shard if you continue on without returning to dessa’s lab. Then you’d have a reason to do a 95,96,etc.. and run a set of shards instead of 1-3 and done after 30mins.

People will just run a script so they don’t auto-log out and they can camp their fractal foreverz!

You would cap though, each time the level increases by one, so you’d have to miss 1-2 fractal dailies skipping on the pristines to get the increased base rewards of gold/emph frags/normal relics.

I haven’t seen any official responses and i worry that they are already too far into working on this to change the assigned fractals thing :/

Therodin.2970:

I haven’t seen any official responses and i worry that they are already too far into working on this to change the assigned fractals thing :/

they arent going to change anything overarching, they are already commited to this concept. They have decided fractals should basically be mini dungeons now.

That is very sad :/ i will really miss the old setup of random fractals and will probably not do them as often under this new static schedule. Not a threat of course as anet doesn’t care if i play fractals but just sad news.

well, all the cool info on this screen seems to make it pretty clear that they have decided to go through with the idea of a static schedule. Good luck to everyone. http://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/game/raids/