Rather than going to the extreme of removing the dredge fractal entirely, or simply spitting it into two fractals, I have thought up some “quick and easy” modifications that could be done to make it a little easier while still retaining the challenge.
Since the majority of these are just changing values (assumption), I feel they the coding and testing should be minimal. I feel that minor tweaks should be made and the adjusted after that based on player feedback. It should be a continuous process rather than be hit or miss attempts. If the changes don’t work, then they can just as easily be reverted back.
Reduce the time need to channel the console to open the final gate by 5 seconds.
I believe that the channel time currently is about roughly 20 seconds. This should help the groups that decide to stand on the panels and just eat the damage from the dredge.
Reduce the number of bombs to take down the door to just five.
This should make it considerably easier for all groups no matter the method they use and should save a lot of time. Reducing it to five bombs will mean that you do not need to wait for the bombs to respawn at all assuming they all successfully went off. It should shave off about two minutes if you’re using a thief for stealth, 4 minutes if you’re clearing the dredge first, and a variable amount if you’re using the kamikaze method (never has been consistent).
Reduce the time it takes to use the drill on the door by about 10%.
This challenge relies on proper timing with the three people using the drills at the same time while the other two players protect them. Having a guardian and/or thief makes this part considerably easy. When groups don’t have either of these two classes, then it puts them at a disadvantage. Reducing the time (likely the health) of the door should alleviate this to a degree.
Reduce the dredge waves for the dredge car by 50%.
I actually have two suggestions for this than just what I listed above. The second one will likely require more programming.
It’s pretty unanimous that the dredge car is pointless and just a time sink. At the higher levels you can expect to spend at least 10 minutes alone killing wave after wave. My suggestion is to reduce the waves by 50% so it only requires 5 minutes. This is still far from perfect but much better than what we currently have.
The other suggestion that I thought of would to have the dredge respawn infinitely until the mini boss (I keep forgetting his name) is defeated and then they despawn causing the car to break down the door. The only caveat to this is that the dredge must have room wide aggro.
Reduce the dredge count by 5-10% over entire fractal.
There are a ton of dredge in this fractal and most noticeably while doing the turret/bomb paths. A reduction in the number of dredge could alleviate some of the issues players have about being overwhelmed. I would not suggest anything more that 10%. A guesstimate is that this could shave off about five minutes for the average pug.