Guild Wars 2

Recently felt the desire to try and get back into the game now that there’s possibly another patch rolling around soon and seeing a lot of good activity on addressing old issues. Lo and behold a friend with similar thoughts said “let’s go try fractals.”

Gotta say, only needing to do a single fractal is a massive improvement over the olden days, and I really enjoy not having to worry about bringing repair canisters. Everything feels faster and more rewarding to boot when you’re getting loot in nice, manageable chunks without investing a couple hours (or more) into a run. Especially when you’ve got a day-job that limits your free time.

So that got me thinking and I have a suggestion to make: would it be at all viable to use similar logic with how dynamic events are managed to cause fractals to scale with party size?

Admittedly this might mean being unable to complete certain content without a minimum where simultaneous actions are required, but now that we can simply ditch out without losing a whole run, that might not be so bad a compromise for solo, paired, or even trio play.

Anyway, a little background
The idea came to me when I realized that October (and the Mad King) aren’t that far out, and how much fun I have every year rampaging through the Mad King’s Labyrinth for a ludicrous amount of sugary stuff (to promptly sell on the trading post). But there was something equally rewarding about just getting piles of bags and loot for having fun and fighting an infinite wave of foes (or pugging a boss spawn) and opening doors that got progressively more intense the greater the population of adventurers was.

So that got me to thinking that it’s a real shame there’s no equivalent for us year-round. Obviously there’s the monetary issue (but then again, this IS a virtual economy saturated with mithril and sticks of butter…), but with fractals, most rewards are exclusive to fractal vendors or the fractals themselves (i.e.: agony resistance / infusions). Thus the only influx is the same thing we would see already in the form of the occasional rare and exotic piece of gear or materials floating around.

That said …

TL;DR:
It’d be cool if fractal difficulty and their rewards would scale to your party size with respect to the current fractal level / scale being played, thus allowing players to engage content without waiting on LFG if they feel themselves capable.

Edit:
Minor addendum here:

I realize you can attempt to enter a fractal even without the requisite 5 party members, but only once have I seen a 4-man team survive (and thankfully we were on the jade sea so it wasn’t too bad).

Compared to many Group Events in open world PvE where you can cleverly (albeit arduously) complete them on your own, or dungeons where undersized parties can still complete a path competently, there just doesn’t seem to be an equivalent in the world of fractals.

Fractals are fine the way they are. The fractal level is all the scaling that they need, if you are having trouble, go down to a lower scale of that same fractal.

And honestly I don’t think there is any fractal that requires a 4 person party, and I know there aren’t any that require a full 5 person party, for you to succeed. Hell there are people who can solo fractal 100. But back to my point most fractals in the lower tiers can easily be done with 2 or 3 people who know what they are doing, or even 1 person who has completely mastered their class. If you have only once finished a fractal with a 4 person group then you guys all need more practice. Downscaling it is not the solution.

My group was doing fractals when it was 3+1 with 4 people, and right now we sometimes do the lower ones with 4 people. I know people who do fractals with 2-3 people. I think there’s not really a need to have scaling other than the fractal level.

What they do need are new fractals though, and it seems like it’s coming (new trailer).

Old fractals (most of them) were solo-able and we used to two man them, back when selling fractals scale 50 was a thing.

Players regularly solo Mai Trin 100 and sell it for those who need the achiev. So if one person can do it in under 25 min and some players struggle with a group of 5 they need to step it up The Jade Fractal is probably the easiest to solo as you don’t even fight a boss per se.

I agree they should adjust the difficult to the recommended party size of 5 man.