Guild Wars 2

Thaddeus.4891:

You can’t complete any final boss or a level 50 because agony can’t be mitigate without AR. You use to be able to mitigate it by dodging the attack, now you can just absorb it with AR.

Yes but this isn’t really a bad thing. AR is easy enough to acquire, and serves as a built-in system to facilitate actually going up the FotM ranks instead of skipping to the final right away.

Carighan.6758:

Thaddeus.4891:

You can’t complete any final boss or a level 50 because agony can’t be mitigate without AR. You use to be able to mitigate it by dodging the attack, now you can just absorb it with AR.

Yes but this isn’t really a bad thing. AR is easy enough to acquire, and serves as a built-in system to facilitate actually going up the FotM ranks instead of skipping to the final right away.

The problem isn’t the availability of AR. I have 3 characters fully geared for fractal 50. My points is that it used to be harder to complete fractal 30+. It needed skill to survive and not just infusion. Agony attack had a big impact on the gameplay, now Agony only tickle and mostly just affect what gear I need. I don’t mind getting the gear, but I miss the challenge that fractal used to offer.

Right, so I run fractal 50 on a daily basis and I run with 85 AR distributed across my ascended armour set, trinkets, backpiece and weapon. I use only the versatile infusions bought with fractal relics and a few +5 crafted infusions on infused gear. There is no reason why you can’t do the same. It costs virtually nothing, it’s technically possible to drop all of the gear in the fractals themselves. Yes, the game is about skill and player prowess, but none of that actually comes into play if you take three stacks of agony and crumble. Experience and AR alike are garnered by running fractals, increasing your reward level as you go. It’s a grind, a contained one intended for grinding. If you want to run fractals just for the fun of it, there is no reason whatsoever to go for higher fractals. They don’t get any more fun to do, the higher you rise from a design perspective, but they do become harder/tougher (though still not exactly massively challenging) which in turn requires strategy and build/gear optimisation. This is where gearchecking comes in. The lfg is full of groups that are not totally random, but looking to fill a spot with random out of necessity. These groups have a certain style of play or a certain strategy, that calls for specific armours or builds to be played and that is perfectly all right. I for one do gear checks and get gear checked all the time, but I have nothing to hide. Yes, my gearing and build is not exactly imaginative (e.g. full berserker ascended warrior running phalanx strength) but that is beside the point. Groups that require gear checks do so for a multitude of reasons. It can be assumed, that if you own a full ascended set of armour and weapons with the right upgrades, that you know at least in part what your role in the party is or that you are capable of reading a guide online. It also goes to show if your style of play fits the group theme. You’re free to not join gear checking groups if it bothers you to have expectations placed on your shoulders. Many advertise it, some even predetermines with which stats you’re allowed in the group. That might sound harsh, but when running fractal 50 for example, it’s all about efficiency and speed, all of which cannot be achieved in general, in my opinion, if you just barrel through with haphazard builds and armours.

So no, AR or gearchecking is not an issue that needs addressing before they implement the new fractal 100 part of it all. Then, we’ll need to figure out how to obtain whatever insane amounts of AR required to pull that off efficiently, preferably without having to spend insane amounts of gold on infusions, because right now, that is not necessary.

All I see is people asking a way to skip all fractal content and go directly to level 50.

System works perfectly. Plz don’t change.

Thaddeus.4891:

DeceiverX.8361:

Nothing’s stopping you from running this way with your own groups. Or just running solo.

You can’t complete any final boss or a level 50 because agony can’t be mitigate without AR. You use to be able to mitigate it by dodging the attack, now you can just absorb it with AR.

Put on 60 AR on the boss. Build properly to offset the damage/heal out of it (Friend’s nomad ele with some extra support help has done scale 30’s with zero AR and survived Mai Trin’s AR checks) Take the same damage as you did once before. There is literally nothing stopping you from using less-than-maximum AR. Problem solved.

AR checks are there to prevent people from being carried by other people/carried into higher level fractals because the entire point of FoTM is the grind. ANet has come out and said this because it offers a means for grind-wanting players to get the grind without affecting the rest of the game.

Is the system the best one? I don’t think so, no. But is AR being easy to acquire reducing the difficulty/causing fractals to become easier than they once were? Not in the slightest.

I like the way fractals work. You start at a low level and progress, and as you are progressing you’re learning and getting better at the encounters. So by the time you’re in the 40-50 range, most people you’re playing with have a good idea of what’s going on.

The only change that would make sense to me is account bound AR. I have 2 characters with 70 AR and one with 55. I don’t like swapping gear and trinkets around, so account bound AR would be welcomed by me.

Since this announcement fractals have been hidous to pug. Sooooo many poor players that dont know what to do yet are in a lvl 30+ fractal. It isn’t even necessarily the mechanics that are the issue. Unfortunately today it was Rangers making life hard and giving the good ones a poor name (i cant even take my ranger to dungeons due to such people )

Firstly it was a lvl40 ranger that insisted on using bow4 on everything. Mai Trin boss being the worst. He refused to stack, and every time i took off all the defiance ready to pull her into the field he knocked her back for no reason even when asked constantly not too.

Secondly it was a lvl30 fractal, and someone (ranger again) that had 15 or less AR. Would not answer questions for ages and spent most the time dead. Lucky for him I was in a good mood and didnt put a kick request in even though he had no right being there. Couldnt be bothered to rezz him in bosses though as was easier just to not bother and 4man it

this is a good suggestion and the only ppl who would oppose it are elitists who want you to suffer for your junk the way they did, gw2 is not supposed to be about grind

Duke Nukem.6783:

this is a good suggestion and the only ppl who would oppose it are elitists who want you to suffer for your junk the way they did, gw2 is not supposed to be about grind

Not really. It’s about learning the content so you know what you’re doing… People should not have to and do not want to explain to another player what to do in a high level fractal. If this terrible awful “gear check” were taken away, that’s exactly what we would have. As your reward level increases, so does your knowledge. There is really no reason someone with reward level 15 should want to do a 50.

Duke Nukem.6783:

this is a good suggestion and the only ppl who would oppose it are elitists who want you to suffer for your junk the way they did, gw2 is not supposed to be about grind

Not 100% true, I like it the way it is.. And honestly I don’t want people to “suffer” like I did, because I actually enjoyed leveling up my scale and AR. If you put a little bit of effort into it, it’s not hard to get 40 AR which lets you do 1-39.

DeceiverX.8361:

Put on 60 AR on the boss. Build properly to offset the damage/heal out of it (Friend’s nomad ele with some extra support help has done scale 30’s with zero AR and survived Mai Trin’s AR checks) Take the same damage as you did once before. There is literally nothing stopping you from using less-than-maximum AR. Problem solved.

AR checks are there to prevent people from being carried by other people/carried into higher level fractals because the entire point of FoTM is the grind. ANet has come out and said this because it offers a means for grind-wanting players to get the grind without affecting the rest of the game.

Is the system the best one? I don’t think so, no. But is AR being easy to acquire reducing the difficulty/causing fractals to become easier than they once were? Not in the slightest.

Forget about it you just don’t get what I mean. I couldn’t give a flying kittent about what you propose. I don’t want to heal myself. I just loved that fractal needed us to be near perfection with our dodge or the party was wiping. If I want to artificially try to make the game more difficult I’ll just continue to solo stuff. I just miss the old fractal.

I have no problem with AR in essence, the one problem I have with it is the fact that, if you don’t use the same stats on every character you’ve got to go through the whole grind again if you want to use another character on the high level fractals. I only recently got into fractals properly and I’m basically forced to use the same character in them all the time because none of my other level 80s use the same gear and I’ve not done enough of them to have all of my characters with lots of AR. Means on a different character I still have to do low level ones, but it’s not like I don’t know what I’m doing and therefore should need to do low level ones to learn how it works.

In general though I think the concept is good and I actually rather enjoy the “yes onto the next tier!” moments when I increase my AR

Yeah, I dislike it as a concept, as well.

It’s just an artificial barrier.

runeblade.7514:

NTDK.4897:

runeblade.7514:

I agree. Sometimes, I just want to play with my other characters. But only one character has all the agony resistance because ascended is expensive. If Exotics can be used with agony resist, then I would be okay with what they are doing.

since ascended are account bound. Just move the trinkets/armors around. Lot of people do that

My Ranger can’t wear ascended heavy armor. My Charr warrior can’t wear ascended human cultural t3 armor.

Not to mention that this whole “just move all your stuff from one char to another, all the time” is a major pain.

If account-bound items were all stored in a wardrobe, accessible by all chars and (ideally) were equipable by more than one char at a time, it would be OK; but they’re, obviously, not.

Having to strip down one char and place everything (including gathering tools and stuff!) in the bank and then log out and log another char in, go to the bank and equip them all, one by one (no armour sets!), is such an extraordinarily clumsy system, I am almost lost for words…

Not to mention (once again) that the whole crafting/ascended armour grind is just horribly off-putting, to some people, anyway.

Really can’t believe that the only way to progress one’s armour is through crafting.

Crafting should be one option; not the be-all and end-all in a game.

They say the game is grind-free, but if you hate crafting, that is the biggest grindfest of all.