A message from John Corpening and John Smith:
Hello All,
Since the launch of Heart of Thorns the Team has been monitoring feedback regarding the changes to Fractals. We’ve noticed several issues with fractal balance and rewards that are especially prominent above Fractal Level 50, and the team is working on some adjustments that we are planning to ship in December. We wanted to give you an overview of what’s coming.
Balance
After reviewing stat scaling we have decided to make an adjustment to how toughness scales. From fractal scale 1 to 50 the toughness stat of creatures will scale up with the fractal scale. Beyond fractal scale 50 the toughness stat of creatures will no longer increase with the scale of the fractal. This is to make damage builds more viable in higher level fractals.
Ascended Drop Rates
We’ve noticed some changes to ascended drop rates that are below what we were expecting. In this iteration of Fractal changes we will be increasing the drop rate of ascended gear from your Fractal dailies with an emphasis on high level Fractals rewarding more ascended armor.
Mastery Experience
We plan for Fractals to be an effective place to earn mastery experience. Our first step towards that goal is adding additional experience sources to boss chests at the end of each Fractal. This experience counts towards earning your Masteries for Central Tyria, and increases both for more difficult Fractals as well as with increased Fractal Scale.
Gold
In this iteration, there will be several changes to how fractals give out liquid rewards (gold and items designed to convert directly into gold). The negative aspect of this change is a required decrease to the amount of keys you receive from converting a stabilizing matrix from two to one. However the upside is threefold:
- First, the quantity of free Fractal Encryption Keys you receive for completing all dailies will increase.
- Second, the amount of liquid rewards Fractal Encryptions contain will be greatly increased.
- Last, the variation of liquid rewards will be reduced. We noticed that the general perception of how much the Encryptions were rewarding players and the aggregate numbers didn’t agree, they weren’t even close. We believe that the variation was set to rely too greatly on the high valued rewards. This change will make liquid rewards from fractal farming and dailies much more predictable.
We look forward to getting these changes to you and would like to thank you for all of your constructive feedback on Fractals. We are committed to supporting fractals for the long term and we’ll be continuously monitoring them for future improvements.
Thank you,
John
Communications Manager
Guild & Fansite Relations; In-Game Events
ArenaNet