Guild Wars 2

This is my take on the FotM dungeon after reaching scale 10 and my first pristine relic.

Who am I: I’m pretty much the definition of a GW2 fanboy, as my post history will prove. However I also have pretty limited time given my job, family, friends and other hobbies. I can’t and won’t play GW2 as a second job, I consider that a healthy position. Furthermore I see myself as a guy who learns extremely fast (which is the #1 requirement for my current job).

What I think of FotM: Yesterday I finally reached FotM scale 10. I like FotM, it is a fun dungeon with nice mechanics. It is hard and not predictable which I really like. I do like optimizing gear.

That being said.

FotM 1-9: FotM 1 through 9 are utterly pointless. I see no reason for them to exist. They give hardly any noticeable loot, no pristine relics, low amount of normal relics. Why I’m forced to do a useless dungeon 9 times is beyond me. After doing every fractal once, I consider myself a master in it given my learning skills. Relic gain is too slow for FotM 1-9 to reasonably lead to an ascended backpiece, which you need for FotM10.

Extremely variable time spent: while I do not mind the time spent in FotM, you never know how long it’ll take. Depending on the randomized Fractals, it can take between 30 minutes or 2 hours. There is no such thing as a “fast fractal run” which means I’m pretty much limited to doing fractals on wednesdays only when my fiancée is not at home. Ten weeks for a single ring???

Exorbitant vendor prices: The ascended back piece costs 5 stacks of relics. Two more to make it ascended, then two more stacks to infuse it. I currently have 2 stacks of relics after reaching 10.
A single ring costs 10 relics which is beyond stupid given I can only do 1 fractal a week under the current imbalanced times required. I learned the mechanics on FotM, give me my loot already …

Character bound progress: My main is an engineer. My alt is a guardian. Probably fractals would go faster with my guardian, but I’m not going through FotM 1-9 again. As said, they make no sense since I mastered the game by FotM 3 on my main.

Solutions!: Because this is constructive criticism.
- Reduce the cost for the Exotic back piece to 500 tokens.
- Reduce the cost for Gift of Ascension to 250 tokens
- Reduce the cost of rings to 3 Pristine tokens
- Put vials, globs and shard of mist essence on the pristine vendor for 1-2-3 tokens
- Put pristine relic on sale for 250 regular tokens
- Greatly reduce the HP of bosses in Snowblind, Underground, Cliffside fractals
- Make FotM progression account wide
- Remove the first 5 FotM scales. This makes you reach agony levels faster and removes non-rewarding initial levels. Basically make FotM4 function as FotM9.

All except the last 2 are basically vendor/number tweaks and could be implemented fast.

Conclusion TL;DR: Doing a perfect run should take about 40 minutes, independant of random fractals. In my opinion, smart casuals should have a realistic expectation of getting BiS gear through this dungeon. Currently, neither of these prime requirements are present.

EDIT:

And one of mine: Give players a “point” when they finish a Fractal, once you get 3 “points”, you can fight the Maw, much like how Domain of Anguish worked in Guild Wars 1. That way people with limited time can do 1-2 Fractals then call it quits for the day. Also, getting a very hard (and long) Fractal as your third wouldn’t cause a progress reset… (when you finally quit). To compensate, lower a bit the rewards for the first fractal, while increasing them on the third in row (again much like DoA)

I agree our points that:
- gear costs are insanely high, and a reduction would be welcome;
- when I only have around one hour to play, I’m reluctant to do fractals because if I get unlucky with the shards, it could take well longer than an hour (suggested fix: make sure that players get no more than one of the longer shards in a run);
- the difference between levels in FotM 1-9 seem hardly noticeable, but the same could be said about levels 10-19;

However I disagree that you absolutely need agony resistance at FotM10. I’ve done FoTM18 without agony resistance and without being carried. And at FoTM10+ you have a chance of being rewarded an ascended ring.

I have mixed feelings about character bound progress. I don’t feel like leveling fractals all over again with my alts, but just because I’ve reached high levels with my guardian it doesn’t mean I would fare that good with my elementalist. And if you think about it, when you’re working on an alt you have to do everything from scratch (leveling up, unlocking skills, map exploration, unlocking dungeons explorable mode, etc.), so I’m not sure why fractals progression should be any different.

marnick.4305:

Solutions!: Because this is constructive criticism.
- Reduce the cost for the Exotic back piece to 500 tokens.
- Reduce the cost for Gift of Ascension to 250 tokens
- Reduce the cost of rings to 3 Pristine tokens
- Put vials, globs and shard of mist essence on the pristine vendor for 1-2-3 tokens
- Put pristine relic on sale for 250 regular tokens
- Greatly reduce the HP of bosses in Snowblind, Underground, Cliffside fractals
- Make FotM progression account wide
- Remove the first 5 FotM scales. This makes you reach agony levels faster and removes non-rewarding initial levels. Basically make FotM4 function as FotM9.

FotM 1-9: while 9 levels seems extreme, it’s the best place to get to get Vials, of course you can transmute Globs or Shards to Vials, but still, the earlier levels are used to get Vials and learn the mechanics. Reducing them is something I’d love to see as well, but the this “initial” level is needed, before Agony starts.

Exorbitant vendor prices: the prices are high, of course, but not THAT high. There are few things to consider, first, you get a pristine relic DAILY, second you can get more than one by doing different daily tiers (do 10, 20, 30 and you will get 3 pristine relics instead of one), in addition, higher levels offer more regular relics as well. All of the above mean, that while the prices are high, they give an incentive to get to higher levels, offering some form of progression.

Extremely variable time spent: This is the main reason that lots of people, from what I understand the OP too, believe that the prices are extremely high. However, the rewards are daily, which means if you run FotM more than once a week, or even more often, like each day, the prices aren’t high at all and you see people with so many rings/relics that they can equip 5+ characters and still have loads remaining.

Fixing the variable time is the core issue here, not the price of gear.

Solutions:
- Greatly reduce the HP of bosses in Snowblind, Underground, Cliffside fractals
I totally agree with this, hit points on those bosses are needlessly high, and on some veterans too. While at it, reduce the hit points on the Underwater fractal, while it’s very short as a whole, the last battle takes too long (and it’s boring, to the point of afking it)

- Make FotM progression account wide
While making progression account wide help eliminating the entry fee (first few fractals) it won’t help much with the time issue.

And one of mine: Give players a “point” when they finish a Fractal, once you get 3 “points”, you can fight the Maw, much like how Domain of Anguish worked in Guild Wars 1. That way people with limited time can do 1-2 Fractals then call it quits for the day. Also, getting a very hard (and long) Fractal as your third wouldn’t cause a progress reset… (when you finally quit). To compensate, lower a bit the rewards for the first fractal, while increasing them on the third in row (again much like DoA)

The main counter to the above suggestion is repair costs, but, after the January patch those aren’t an issue anymore in Fractals, so there is nothing against it, or is there?

I can see your point of view but you are not in the core audience for fractals. Fractals are targeted at the the players who are short of content and want something to put their time into, day after day. You can put as much time as you like into fractals going up levels pretty much until you hit your own limit. It can become the top level end game content.

Fractals are not designed to be quick and easy for players without much time, but inevitably those players want the same rewards as the players who do invest a lot of time working up the levels (as always). In this case the fractal rewards are account bound so you do only need one character at a certain level and you can share the rewards across your account. You can also get the ascended items through dailies and crafting so nobody is entirely excluded.

The cost in relics for the rings seems expensive but you get plenty of rings from the daily chests. The barter relics provide you with a specific ring of your choice if you are not satisfied with the looted ones.

Just do lvl ten every time until you score a ring. It may not be the one you want but I was able to get 3 rings before I continued up the ladder.

maddoctor.2738:

And one of mine: Give players a “point” when they finish a Fractal, once you get 3 “points”, you can fight the Maw, much like how Domain of Anguish worked in Guild Wars 1. That way people with limited time can do 1-2 Fractals then call it quits for the day. Also, getting a very hard (and long) Fractal as your third wouldn’t cause a progress reset… (when you finally quit). To compensate, lower a bit the rewards for the first fractal, while increasing them on the third in row (again much like DoA)

The main counter to the above suggestion is repair costs, but, after the January patch those aren’t an issue anymore in Fractals, so there is nothing against it, or is there?

Totally support that. I will add it.

Stooperdale.3560:

I can see your point of view but you are not in the core audience for fractals. Fractals are targeted at the the players who are short of content and want something to put their time into, day after day. You can put as much time as you like into fractals going up levels pretty much until you hit your own limit. It can become the top level end game content.

Fractals are not designed to be quick and easy for players without much time, but inevitably those players want the same rewards as the players who do invest a lot of time working up the levels (as always). In this case the fractal rewards are account bound so you do only need one character at a certain level and you can share the rewards across your account. You can also get the ascended items through dailies and crafting so nobody is entirely excluded.

The cost in relics for the rings seems expensive but you get plenty of rings from the daily chests. The barter relics provide you with a specific ring of your choice if you are not satisfied with the looted ones.

As I said in my opening post… I can not and will not play GW2 as if it were a second job. I consider that a healthy position and I believe all content should be catered towards healthy play styles. That is my firm belief, I don’t think I’m alone in that. While progression in the form of AR, unique skins and leaderboards can be hard and arduous, the statbased progression should be relatively easy to achieve by people like me.

Although I can understand your frustration, I’m pretty much against everything you state here. Most things are implemented pretty well by now.

FotM 1-9: while 9 levels seems extreme, it’s the best place to get to get Vials, of course you can transmute Globs or Shards to Vials, but still, the earlier levels are used to get Vials and learn the mechanics. Reducing them is something I’d love to see as well, but the this “initial” level is needed, before Agony starts.

You can do level 10+ at any time you wish. You don’t actually need to do the lower levels. If you join a higher team, your progress on levels goes up as well.

Extremely variable time spent: while I do not mind the time spent in FotM, you never know how long it’ll take. Depending on the randomized Fractals, it can take between 30 minutes or 2 hours. There is no such thing as a “fast fractal run” which means I’m pretty much limited to doing fractals on wednesdays only when my fiancée is not at home. Ten weeks for a single ring???

Well, some content of Guild Wars 2 is just longer. If every piece of content would take 30 minutes or less, I think a lot of players would protest against it as well. Fractals, and Dungeons in general, just take longer.

Exorbitant vendor prices: The ascended back piece costs 5 stacks of relics. Two more to make it ascended, then two more stacks to infuse it. I currently have 2 stacks of relics after reaching 10.
A single ring costs 10 relics which is beyond stupid given I can only do 1 fractal a week under the current imbalanced times required. I learned the mechanics on FotM, give me my loot already …

Also disagree. Level 10+ already has a chance for ascended gear drop. Level 26+ already drops infused rings. You can also buy ascended gear with Laurers and Guild Commendations. By the time you really need to buy that backpack, you have more than enough. I got my backpack around level 25 Fractals, while I only need it for level 30 (and I haven’t bought anything with Laurels yet).

As for the Account wide, I agree. But again, you are allowed to join higher tiers if you wish. The lack of Ascended items might prevent this, but when you already have 1 character that is high, you will notice that you have more rings than you will ever need.

I do think the lower levels should give a lot more relics, at least for the daily chests. I was one of those unlucky ones who rarely got rings and when I did they were utter crap and so I was kinda stuck “relic grinding” little by little to finally get some AR for 20+.

Only thing I can say OP is to not think about it too much. Knock out a daily whenever you can just taking it slow. Eventually you’ll get AR and higher in level so don’t worry about it. However, there actually isn’t any real point to getting high level fotm as weapon skins have a really low rate and the dungeon overall is probably the least rewarding content in the game.

FotM 1-9 exist for players who want to enjoy the content without the gating Agony creates. They also serve as a stepping stone that new players must get through to reach the good rewards, forcing them to learn the encounters and coordinate better than your average player.

I think the rewards are fine because they do exactly what they were intended to do: they encourage you to rise in levels. I run Fractals level 48 every night, once a night. I get 14 relics per fractal, 60 from Maw’s level, and a bonus 40 for my daily. That’s 142 relics per run, which is a metric boatload. As a result of a few weeks of work at this doing one run a night, I have ascended backpieces on three of my alts, and enough relics to do it again for another alt.

I also have 50 something pristine relics. Once you get to a high enough level, you will loot rings enough that you will probably not even need to buy them. This all encourages you to rise in levels, which is the design reason for fractals at all: progression encouragement. I get basically an infused ring every night (or a fractal skin), and I have so many pristine relics I can basically not even spend them anymore. Note that this is all with less than 2 hours of time investment a night, usually more like 90 minutes.

I don’t disagree that the fractals should be better balanced. Dredge takes forever, and cliffside is long but easy. The asuran fractal is on the longer side too, but also fairly easy. Regardless, I do most fractals in less than 15m apiece with few exceptions like Dredge and Cliffside. I think these longer fractals should be refactored to move quicker and not be such a drag. That said, most of your suggestions would really serve to remove the entire point to progressing in fractals. You do not need AR to progress up to level 18. I didn’t have any AR until level 28 of Fractals myself, so don’t worry too much. Play well and you will do fine.

Also, I do not support doing 2 fractals now and 1 later. People would just abuse this to roll the water fractal or swamp fractal repeatedly and never have to do any of the other ones. That is not healthy and should not be supported.

tl;dr: Fractals encourages progression, and as you progress, you will find yourself being rewarded more and more. Eventually, when you get to be really successful, you will find the costs for everything more than reasonable. It actually gets to a point where you run out of things to buy with relics quicker than you might expect.

Have faith, keep running, and good luck.

The biggest problem really is the variable length. If I have two hours, you can bet on swampland/underwater/urban for a 30 minutes run. On the other hand, when I barely have 90 minutes, you can bet on cliffside, underground, snowblind. The fractals being a bit more deterministic in time required would fix a lot.

Sure, progression is a good thing and I fully support purely cosmetic progression just like in GW1. I even support AR progression. I can’t support stat progression because it’s against everything competitive gaming stands for.

Courageous Mithos.8745:

You can do level 10+ at any time you wish. You don’t actually need to do the lower levels. If you join a higher team, your progress on levels goes up as well.

Yes he can do level 10+ anytime he wants and totally skip the lower levels, but there’s little point doing so, since the rewards will still be of his personal level.

pdfrod.1948:

Courageous Mithos.8745:

You can do level 10+ at any time you wish. You don’t actually need to do the lower levels. If you join a higher team, your progress on levels goes up as well.

Yes he can do level 10+ anytime he wants and totally skip the lower levels, but there’s little point doing so, since the rewards will still be of his personal level.

Yeah, I guess that’s true. Still, at this moment, the maximum level of Fractals is 50, which I don’t find that high at all. Considering you only do 3 out of 9 Fractals at a time, you will only do each Fractal about 17 times on average by going from level 1 to level 50.

Personally, I don’t think playing 17 times the same content is not that much for achieving the maximum in where progression plays an important role. Most players have done several Dungeons way more than that. And most paths of Dungeons look quite alike, while every Fractal is very different.