Guild Wars 2

From the perspective of looking for group, this is frustrating. I’ve now done fractals 1 to 6 and the next one is 7. In Lion’s Arch there are basically individual players looking for groups for each numbered fractal dungeon. Someone wants to do level 2, someone level 14, one guy is going for level 9. I don’t want to join lower number group because I can’t progress. I can’t join higher number group because game puts hard restriction on this. Why can’t we just choose our difficulty at will? From my experiences, they’re all the same at least for these early levels.

Because if you could people would go for the 20+ levels in order to get the best loot and then whine about being killed by Agony (which you can combat by getting stuff from the earlier levels).

Why can’t I do Arah Dungeon at level 1?

Well I found your problem, you seem to be expecting ArenaNet to think these things through before releasing them in patches. That’s not how it works. Think of GW2 patches as like surprise Christmas crackers. You open them, and the contents could be anything, but there’s always a hilarious joke involved.

Also, they are numbered to gate content. You can’t just jump in to the last level because that means the content won’t last as long.

Zenith.6403:

From the perspective of looking for group, this is frustrating.

Anet knows that. It’s why they made GW1 different than other online rpgs, and it’s why they set out to make GW2 even more different. But apparently the lure of cookiecutter mmorpg’s is to great to resist.

Cause Arena Net has changed their philosophy and wants us to grind now.

nachtnebel.9168:

Cause Arena Net has changed their philosophy and wants us to grind now.

Yeah, it’s not like they wanted us to grind from level 1 on August 25th or anything, is it.

Leveling is not a grind.

nachtnebel.9168:

Leveling is not a grind.

No buy dungeons are, exploration is (a checklist), farming enough gold and materials to get by is, farming gems for cosmetic items is.

That’s just an optional grind. You don’t have to do that to get BIS items. Now, you have to grind FotM to get BIS rings and backpieces.

Its artificial gear gating, which every mmo player I know hates. Its outdated and horrible and I really cant understand who thought it is a good idea.

Awren.4967:

Its artificial gear gating, which every mmo player I know hates. Its outdated and horrible and I really cant understand who thought it is a good idea.

Technically it is not gear gated, seeing as you can do everything in the Dungeons without touching Ascended gear.
The higher levels are simply harder versions of those you have already done after all.

And the boss have to actually HIT you in order to effect you with Agony

lordkrall.7241:

Awren.4967:

Its artificial gear gating, which every mmo player I know hates. Its outdated and horrible and I really cant understand who thought it is a good idea.

Technically it is not gear gated, seeing as you can do everything in the Dungeons without touching Ascended gear.
The higher levels are simply harder versions of those you have already done after all.

And the boss have to actually HIT you in order to effect you with Agony

Nope, bosses don’t have to hit you, both Jade Maw and the Legendary Dregde Suit just apply it no matter what you do.

It’s a gating and progression mechanism. They are introducing grind into dungeon access. By making you “level up” your dungeon access, you are forced to repeat the dungeon several unecessary times to get to a high skill level, despite what your personal skill level may be. They know players are playing through content quite fast so they are slowing them down by introducing mandatory grinds behind curtains for the sole purpose of forcing them to repeat content they are more than skilled enough to handle, just to get to the content they really want to play.

It’s all about progression. It seems we can’t be treated like intelligent gamers, we have to be herded onto treadmills and repetitive dungeon runs.

They had a major shift in their design intentions that they aren’t being honest about. Previously they believed it was OK for you to feel like you didn’t have to keep logging in, it was OK to go somewhere else and game. Now they seem to want to create as much stuff as possible to get you to repeat content and grind just to keep you occupied, like rats in a skinner box.

The problem is locking people of varying progression levels out and making it impossible or annoying to find groups / start groups at your level. We had normal mode and hard mode in GW1 to deal with this problem to separate completionists and casuals from the farmers / ‘uber-leet.’

The gating is stupid, and agony is a really lazy mechanic. Rather than making the mobs more difficult, faster, smarter, more skills and abilities, we’ll just put a blanket debuff on the whole group that only an expensive/tedious to acquire gear upgrade can solve! Durrr.

And for the love of god give FoTM a lobby or something, having everyone crammed in LA spamming LFG Fractals Level X is maddening. I hate even going there any more because of the lag and long loading times that massive groups of players seems to cause.

What’s wrong with people on these forums? If you don’t want to do the dungeon or play the game then be on your merry way. This topic was created for discussing dungeon group format. It could be less restrictive, for example playing 5 games on levels 1 to 5 before trying out levels 6 to 10. Same amount of practice, but players would be grouped to bigger categories for easier team finding.