Guild Wars 2

For those people who often have buddies to party with or are lucky enough to find a good party, it goes just fine. People know how to dodge, the mechanics, don’t avoid the wisp running phase, etc. It turns out to be an encounter like any other except you have to be on your toes and not get hit.

For the others who are not as lucky…
For me at least, I have no problem soloing any other fractal boss, but this one, I can’t. If the party wipes then it simply resulted in a glorified chase to get OOC. Now that that has been patched then it’s just go die and watch the party wipe again for a long encounter.
So in most parties it just ends up being a gamble of getting competent people in the party finder, otherwise it’s pretty much not going to happen and is going to be a time sink. This just encourages me to only play with certain people and actually discourages the use of LFG for this single encounter.

That is actually not a bad thing in the general aspect, seeing how there is some content that is made for certain people, however, it should have it’s own place to be. Fractals used to be very PUG friendly but it’s slowly drifting away from that. So in conclusion, the swamp fractal is simply NOT tuned for your average pug; again, it’s not a bad thing but as it stands now it’s a very weird and awkward difficulty spike that is turning people off because in general, people don’t like difficulty spikes.

You mean because you don’t just stack and spam 1? That’s it’s not pug friendly? It’s not a difficulty thing it will be normal once people learn the mechanics everything new is difficult to begin with them people learn the mechanics and it is easy. All you have to do is dodge the easily telegraphed attacks and to move around and collect the wisps. Even for new players one wipe if gotten far enough will show the full fight.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

You mean because you don’t just stack and spam 1? That’s it’s not pug friendly? It’s not a difficulty thing it will be normal once people learn the mechanics everything new is difficult to begin with them people learn the mechanics and it is easy. All you have to do is dodge the easily telegraphed attacks and to move around and collect the wisps. Even for new players one wipe if gotten far enough will show the full fight.

Zephyric Reaper.3049:

Fractals used to be very PUG friendly but it’s slowly drifting away from that.

Naw, fractals for 8 months apparently were PUG friendly and overly easy. Pre-HoT (and before the previous spring update actually) Fractals were a decent challenge, one where you had to approach things with some actual tactical play. When i got back a month ago and jumped into Urban and saw people just charge the gate… well… lets just say I was greatly disappointed with what fractals had turned into.

These recent changes have turned some of the fractals into what I remember them being, and I love it.

I hate that fractals have become the new dungeons. They’re just a quick path to rewards for many people, and I just… that’s not what they were. Now I love the increased rewards, but that they had become that easy is what I think caused the shift.

And, well, we have a scaling system in fractals. Find t4 hard? Do a t3! it’s an option! Though a Swamp with exploding enemies would be quite interesting

Difficulty is something you want when it comes to fractals, as players will learn.
I don’t get everything you wrote, but I think that new players might be noob about swamp. It isn’t hard tho, dunno maybe something has changed, but there are just 2 ways. All needed is some AR and skill.

Tbh in this game people can do much with dodge. I don’t think that the wisp part is hard. I have been beating arah boss story once with some guys for like 4 hours so … this fractal is to be learned, because the main thing is to jump on trees …

And i think someone might blame me for everything i wrote but. MANY MANY AND MANY good EXPIERIENCED players LEFT. Look at friends tab, guilds. You will see why those maps are so hard with F2P players or just newbs. There might be no one to carry through it.

It’s easy to say something is too hard for PUGs without giving it some time. The day content comes out, most people have no clue and some won’t be able to manage it until they get some practice or learn from others explaining the “easier” way to do it. Two weeks is usually too soon to declare something is too hard, especially if lots of people are succeeding in PUGs on first or third try.

As a similar example, Snowblind’s updated second challenge (elemental source) is much harder if you try to run it the same way you ran it a month ago. It can, however, be much smoother (not to mention: faster), if you run it to take advantage of the new mechanics.

tl;dr give it some time.

I’m just avoiding swamp like the plague till people get better at it… It’s not worth the time & energy I put into finishing it at the rate that the party wipes… Once people get used to it I’ll happily do it again but as it currently stands it is a waste of time…

I ran the daily 21 with a PUG today. I foolishly assumed people would know what is up. Nope. I’m trying to run two wisps during the final phase because no one is going near the northeast. I’m yelling “someone go NE!” which was met with “can’t we just stand in one spot instead of moving around?” Thankfully at 21, the wipe move isn’t powerful enough to wipe you and after four wisp resets or so they manged to coordinate. Next time I will definitely ask people to call out wisps ahead of time.

sophiewhite.3149

last mmo i played they ramped the difficulty to a insane lvl on everything one patch. everyone sucked. i mean everyone. pugs would sit there attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting. it was a actual challenge there.

You are here as an advocate for “challenging content” / hard content / content offering the players the chance to improve etc. Because I guess, this is the meaning of “attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting”. And you insist that you can still continue. If in the other MMO you played the challenge was so high (meaning the fun was at extreme), may I ask you why you play GW2 now? Just my curiosity. And what you think GW can offer you over that level of challenge? Because, a lot of GW2 players are here now, playing GW2 because they did not like the high lvl challenge of the other MMO’s. And this was one of the selling points of the GW2: If you are not comfortable or you don’t like other MMO’s, GW2 is the game for you.
Again – why do you play GW2 when a lot of other challenging MMO’s are running all over the world?

Theoretically 2 necros should be able to do Swamp. Fleshworm during the wisp phase should allow you to travel fast enough to do 2 wisps each.

Just play a necro, and save another spot for another necro. Then carry the rest of the group.

Cristalyan.5728:

sophiewhite.3149

last mmo i played they ramped the difficulty to a insane lvl on everything one patch. everyone sucked. i mean everyone. pugs would sit there attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting. it was a actual challenge there.

You are here as an advocate for “challenging content” / hard content / content offering the players the chance to improve etc. Because I guess, this is the meaning of “attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting”. And you insist that you can still continue. If in the other MMO you played the challenge was so high (meaning the fun was at extreme), may I ask you why you play GW2 now? Just my curiosity. And what you think GW can offer you over that level of challenge? Because, a lot of GW2 players are here now, playing GW2 because they did not like the high lvl challenge of the other MMO’s. And this was one of the selling points of the GW2: If you are not comfortable or you don’t like other MMO’s, GW2 is the game for you.
Again – why do you play GW2 when a lot of other challenging MMO’s are running all over the world?

GW2 offer challenge without gear treadmill, being casual or hardcore is not the core philosophy of GW2, the core of both GW1 and GW2 is not having gear treadmill, as you can get basically the best gear pretty easy and never change your gear forever. Then when a new challenge come instead of farming forever for a new gear to be able to pass the DPS check, you can overcome the challenge at any time as you already have the best gear forever, just with player skill thats the reason GW1 and GW2 are the best MMO ( at least for me ).

Cristalyan.5728:

sophiewhite.3149

last mmo i played they ramped the difficulty to a insane lvl on everything one patch. everyone sucked. i mean everyone. pugs would sit there attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting. it was a actual challenge there.

You are here as an advocate for “challenging content” / hard content / content offering the players the chance to improve etc. Because I guess, this is the meaning of “attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting”. And you insist that you can still continue. If in the other MMO you played the challenge was so high (meaning the fun was at extreme), may I ask you why you play GW2 now? Just my curiosity. And what you think GW can offer you over that level of challenge? Because, a lot of GW2 players are here now, playing GW2 because they did not like the high lvl challenge of the other MMO’s. And this was one of the selling points of the GW2: If you are not comfortable or you don’t like other MMO’s, GW2 is the game for you.
Again – why do you play GW2 when a lot of other challenging MMO’s are running all over the world?

GW2 has a good combat system with more focus on actively defending yourself and overall self reliance. A good amount of diversity in play styles. And, at least it was a lack of trinity though that’s leaked in. On top of that in general it’s more casual (not gaming casual but actual casual) where I can pop in and in a 30minute session easily knock out something fun like a fractal. It’s not like other MMOs where you’re doing hour long group missions or having 4 times a week 4 hour raiding nights if you want to do challenging content.

Anyways, if we’re going to paraphrase things devs said years ago, they also said fractals would be the difficult group content. So…

Jerus.4350:

Cristalyan.5728:

sophiewhite.3149

last mmo i played they ramped the difficulty to a insane lvl on everything one patch. everyone sucked. i mean everyone. pugs would sit there attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting. it was a actual challenge there.

You are here as an advocate for “challenging content” / hard content / content offering the players the chance to improve etc. Because I guess, this is the meaning of “attempting to do it 15 or 16 times before quitting”. And you insist that you can still continue. If in the other MMO you played the challenge was so high (meaning the fun was at extreme), may I ask you why you play GW2 now? Just my curiosity. And what you think GW can offer you over that level of challenge? Because, a lot of GW2 players are here now, playing GW2 because they did not like the high lvl challenge of the other MMO’s. And this was one of the selling points of the GW2: If you are not comfortable or you don’t like other MMO’s, GW2 is the game for you.
Again – why do you play GW2 when a lot of other challenging MMO’s are running all over the world?

GW2 has a good combat system with more focus on actively defending yourself and overall self reliance. A good amount of diversity in play styles. And, at least it was a lack of trinity though that’s leaked in. On top of that in general it’s more casual (not gaming casual but actual casual) where I can pop in and in a 30minute session easily knock out something fun like a fractal. It’s not like other MMOs where you’re doing hour long group missions or having 4 times a week 4 hour raiding nights if you want to do challenging content.

Anyways, if we’re going to paraphrase things devs said years ago, they also said fractals would be the difficult group content. So…

Don’t forget paraphrased Dev Dungeon definition would be the most difficult content for elite players.

Zephyric Reaper.3049:

Fractals used to be very PUG friendly but it’s slowly drifting away from that. So in conclusion, the swamp fractal is simply NOT tuned for your average pug; again, it’s not a bad thing but as it stands now it’s a very weird and awkward difficulty spike that is turning people off because in general, people don’t like difficulty spikes.

Tier 4 fractals used to be pug friendly but now are (kindof) not in the case of swamp. Fractals in general are still easily accessible by any player of any experience level.

What’s even the point of having scaling difficulty if the highest difficulty isn’t hard?

Ging.6485:

Theoretically 2 necros should be able to do Swamp. Fleshworm during the wisp phase should allow you to travel fast enough to do 2 wisps each.

Just play a necro, and save another spot for another necro. Then carry the rest of the group.

Practically you don’t even need flesh worm. I carried 2 wisps on my own only with war horn 5 (speed), and shroud 2 (dashing a bit forward) whenever it was up. Actually it’s pretty pretty easy if you look at the percental hp of bloom and start to position near your first wisp. I recommend 28-27% because the last 2-3% are going down by conditions.

Vinceman.4572:

Ging.6485:

Theoretically 2 necros should be able to do Swamp. Fleshworm during the wisp phase should allow you to travel fast enough to do 2 wisps each.

Just play a necro, and save another spot for another necro. Then carry the rest of the group.

Practically you don’t even need flesh worm. I carried 2 wisps on my own only with war horn 5 (speed), and shroud 2 (dashing a bit forward) whenever it was up. Actually it’s pretty pretty easy if you look at the percental hp of bloom and start to position near your first wisp. I recommend 28-27% because the last 2-3% are going down by conditions.

Well there you go, the rest of the fight should be trivial with epi and minions.

Dinosaurs.8674:

Zephyric Reaper.3049:

Fractals used to be very PUG friendly but it’s slowly drifting away from that. So in conclusion, the swamp fractal is simply NOT tuned for your average pug; again, it’s not a bad thing but as it stands now it’s a very weird and awkward difficulty spike that is turning people off because in general, people don’t like difficulty spikes.

Tier 4 fractals used to be pug friendly but now are (kindof) not in the case of swamp. Fractals in general are still easily accessible by any player of any experience level.

What’s even the point of having scaling difficulty if the highest difficulty isn’t hard?

Idk, I’d have to disagree. Pugged it on the first day it was in daily rotation, and it was my first time since the change, and ran it with only one wipe. Even if 2 or 3 people die we can still res them once we circle back around, or just have someone kite bloom.

I’d say the dredge fractal is harder, but maybe thats because i play on a toaster PC. But I have more wipes on that fractal than even Chaos.

Zephyric Reaper.3049:

For those people who often have buddies to party with or are lucky enough to find a good party, it goes just fine. People know how to dodge, the mechanics, don’t avoid the wisp running phase, etc. It turns out to be an encounter like any other except you have to be on your toes and not get hit.

For the others who are not as lucky…
For me at least, I have no problem soloing any other fractal boss, but this one, I can’t. If the party wipes then it simply resulted in a glorified chase to get OOC. Now that that has been patched then it’s just go die and watch the party wipe again for a long encounter.
So in most parties it just ends up being a gamble of getting competent people in the party finder, otherwise it’s pretty much not going to happen and is going to be a time sink. This just encourages me to only play with certain people and actually discourages the use of LFG for this single encounter.

That is actually not a bad thing in the general aspect, seeing how there is some content that is made for certain people, however, it should have it’s own place to be. Fractals used to be very PUG friendly but it’s slowly drifting away from that. So in conclusion, the swamp fractal is simply NOT tuned for your average pug; again, it’s not a bad thing but as it stands now it’s a very weird and awkward difficulty spike that is turning people off because in general, people don’t like difficulty spikes.

I quit after playing this game since the very beginning in GW1 I do not like the direction the game developers keep taking. The difficulty in the fractals is a small part to a whole in regards to the things I didn’t like changed. Ill keep this short to make the point clear, any game that forces you to give away your life in order to do well in it… Its not worth it. The last thing I enjoyed doing in this game was fractals and they took it from me by making it like a raid… So goodbye Arena net you shall not have any more of my money…

Ultra Magnus X.3078:

I quit after playing this game since the very beginning in GW1 I do not like the direction the game developers keep taking. The difficulty in the fractals is a small part to a whole in regards to the things I didn’t like changed. Ill keep this short to make the point clear, any game that forces you to give away your life in order to do well in it… Its not worth it. The last thing I enjoyed doing in this game was fractals and they took it from me by making it like a raid… So goodbye Arena net you shall not have any more of my money…

Stop being a drama queen. I have consistently cleared t4 swamp and snowblind since the change with at max 2 tries. In PUGs. The encounters are not like raids, they have slightly more advanced mechanics, that require you to solve a simple puzzle instead of just standing still and dpsing, and that is it. There is no DPS check like there is in raids, there is no enrage timer, you have all the time in the world.

The only part I have seen groups have a problem with is getting the wisps in Swampland in the second to last phase, but this is because people are conditioned to go through these things without talking at all. If everyone picks a direction, it’s really easy.

FrostDraco.8306:

Dinosaurs.8674:

Zephyric Reaper.3049:

Fractals used to be very PUG friendly but it’s slowly drifting away from that. So in conclusion, the swamp fractal is simply NOT tuned for your average pug; again, it’s not a bad thing but as it stands now it’s a very weird and awkward difficulty spike that is turning people off because in general, people don’t like difficulty spikes.

Tier 4 fractals used to be pug friendly but now are (kindof) not in the case of swamp. Fractals in general are still easily accessible by any player of any experience level.

What’s even the point of having scaling difficulty if the highest difficulty isn’t hard?

Idk, I’d have to disagree. Pugged it on the first day it was in daily rotation, and it was my first time since the change, and ran it with only one wipe. Even if 2 or 3 people die we can still res them once we circle back around, or just have someone kite bloom.

I’d say the dredge fractal is harder, but maybe thats because i play on a toaster PC. But I have more wipes on that fractal than even Chaos.

I agree with you, my point is more that we have sliding difficulty in fractals so it’s stupid to not expect the highest difficulty to be challenging. Honestly it blows my mind that people are saying content which lets you choose the difficulty level is too hard.

Also I don’t think that any of the current fractals are as hard as they probably should be considering scaling difficulty for them exists. The best option to me would be to make every fractal available as a scale 100 and have additional “scale 100” dailies.