Guild Wars 2

I get that you guys want to have a minimal amount of vertical progression. I understand that logic. Not everyone likes it, but in terms of extending the life of the game and pleasing as many people as possible, the logic is sound.

But…..

What purpose does “Agony” serve?

I honestly don’t understand why it exists. My ONLY guess is that since Fractals goes on and on and on it must become more difficult, thereby providing a risk for going down further and further.

But here’s my proposition:

Get rid of Agony (cuz it’s more of an annoyance than a challenge, cmon now)
Get more creative with your encounters.

Right now Agony appears to serve as some hastily built wall meant to mask the fact that your design team isn’t creative enough to come up with encounters that provide challenge. As your fractal level increases, the encounters should become more elaborate and challenging.

Instead, we get some stupid status effect. Obviously the above assertion is false, once one plays the Colossus fractal, but in light of that fact I ask again….

….why does agony exist?

Why can’t you guys create challenge instead of producing some half-arsed developed condition. A condition whose only real purpose was probably to justify the increased stats of ascended gear.

And if that’s the case, then there’s a deeper question to be answered.

What exactly is this MMO trying to be?

for you to buy revive orbs of off gem store.

Nuka Cola.8520:

for you to buy revive orbs of off gem store.

riiiiiiiiiiiight

I bet you and I would probably be shocked as to how many of those actually sell

I think you’d be more shocked by how frequently they actually get used right now.

Anyway, I agree with this sentiment. Agony in nearly all cases can be easily dodged to begin with, and in the last case (Maw), the boss is pathetically easy without factoring in Agony. I think the whole Agony paradigm is a mistake, and that making the content actually harder is indeed the answer. Despite that, I harbor no faith that they’ll change the mechanic at all. It’ll just get worse when more ascended gear comes out and Agony hits for even sillier amounts in later end-game content.

They introduced this in Gw1. It was eventually removed.

Because they couldn’t come up with a better way of artificially gating content.

evo.8640:

They introduced this in Gw1. It was eventually removed.

Errrrr, what? It’s still in GW1, go back and play the later prophecies missions, it’s still there.

Agony is a gear cycle seemingly aimed at setting you back all the time and encourace participation in a cycle to gring up agony in order to reach higher levels.

You can play Fractals 1-9, but there is nothing preparing you for agony at level 10. From 10-19 you start to build up a resistance to agony. At best it is +15. Starting with Fractal 20, this resistance is about as strong as going into Fractal 10 without any resistance. You basically start over from scratch and need to grind up your resistance again.

All agony ever does is put you behind the curve. Agony isn’t even the most dangerous thing, as attacks from enemies might kill you just as easily. Best case is the Legendary Destroyer and his devastating PBAoE. Never mind the Agony this attack deals, beginning at fractal 18, this attack can one shot you straight, even though you are in full defensive gear and although you do not get any damage from the agony part of this attack.

The irony of agony being, that in the end it gets so bad that there never was any reason to build up a resistance in the first place and your “infused rewards” become hollow.

In GW1, agony was a story beat. A plot device to make certain enemies appear super strong, immediately divert the player to a certain mission in which they gain resistance and then feel empowered when killing the “super strong” enemy. I n total, agony was a ruse to make you feel more powerful when you were not.

I actually like the idea

Iehova.9518:

Because they couldn’t come up with a better way of artificially gating content.

Adding to this is the RNG associated with actually getting a piece of anti agony gear what lehova said is completely correct. They needed to keep people playing and grinding and this is the result.