Guild Wars 2

With Heart of Thorns introducing more fractals and fractal levels, I have one, simple question.

Why are fractal rewards so… unrewarding most of the time?

Compared to dungeons, (which they are “stepping away from”), fractals measure up as such:

1.) Fractals don’t offer guaranteed gold (maybe a couple silver); dungeons can get anywhere from 1-3 gold for running the dungeon.

2.) Fractals don’t have unique armor, yes they have a back item and weapon set, but there is no logical progression to obtain the weapons, it’s RNG or GTFO; Dungeons, in addition to their gold, offer tokens to unlock unique skins for both weapons and armor. It’s as simple as amassing enough tokens to purchase your armor, no RNG required.

3.) Fractal rewards are self-diminishing (meaning after a certain point, there’s little reason to continue running them. Once every character has full ascended [no small feat, though] fractal rewards don’t matter as much); Dungeon rewards you with gold and any drops you might receive. This is universally rewarding. In addition, they can be run by alts for a free, guaranteed level up.

4.) Fractals require as many as fifty (soon to increase) runs to reach the highest tier of loot gain. At fractal 50, enemies are considerably stronger and have the capability to one-hit many players, provided they don’t dodge the mechanics; Dungeons, on the other hand, don’t have any ramp time. I can join a dungeon once or a hundred times and still receive better loot (on the average) than if I had run 100 fractals. Admittedly, I am less likely to receive certain items like ascended gear, but I am guaranteed the gold, sufficient enough to craft ascended armor. Also, dungeon enemies are level 80 and are unlikely to kill a player in one hit, without significant tells (wraithlord crusher comes to mind with his slow, lumbering attack).

5.) A Fractal run requires a party of five people to dedicate perhaps an hour or more to complete 4 dungeons. The difficulty is variable and as such, many pugs have and will continue to get stuck at certain encounters. Fights such as Ice Elemental, Lava Elemental and Mai Trin come to mind; A single dungeon, depending on the group, can take 10-30 minutes. At the end of said path (of which there are 3 per dungeon), the players are rewarded EACH path with the aforementioned gold. In addition, players are not required to accomplish 4 paths to receive a chance to receive the item that they queued for (like an ascended chest or rings). Certain dungeons, like arah, have given players trouble in pug groups, but generally speaking, from my experience, arah is far less painful than ice ele or lava ele.

6.) Fractals require a certain amount of Agony Resistance, a unique stat that requires the crafting (or looting) of ascended armor which can be very costly; Dungeons require nothing. I could queue (perhaps unwisely) with green armor and do alright. Generally, it’s accepted that exotic armor is the minimum a player should be wearing to participate in pugs.

7.) Fractals are randomly chosen for you. While certain fractals are tedious or frustrating (I’m sure everyone’s aware of my personal distaste of a certain 3 fractals), the player has no choice over which fractal he will participate in. This can mean that you might be required to do long fractals such as cliffside, or fractals that require certain set-ups (like uncategorized fractal’s need for reflects), or even tedious fractals that you’d never normally pick with a pug (snowblind, volcanic fractal etc); Dungeons on the other hand are 100% your choice. You pick which path you wish to run and which path you will only do once or twice to receive the dungeon master title.

I’m sure many of you will read this and think “He sure loves dungeons and hates fractals, why doesn’t he just run dungeons instead?” To which I reply with this:
Anet wants to focus on Fractals from here on out. Any new “dungeon” content will be a fractal of the mist. I don’t hate fractals, but when compared to dungeons, a myriad poor design choices were made. Certain individual fractals, for instance, have mechanics that actually punish you for playing the right way, (IE stacking on Mai Trin to remove her invuln, during which she applies tens of thousands of damage worth of bleeds.) Furthermore, I want to run fractals, I just want to be rewarded for my efforts.

In the past 4 weeks, I have run FotM every day to get my daily reward for a fractal level 50, sometimes I will also do a level 40. I have received 6 rings and nothing else for the past 4 weeks upon the completion of a set of fractals. So 28 days, averaging perhaps an hour and a half per fractal, I have spent about 42 hours doing fractals. I did receive 1 exotic that I sold for 2g on the TP, but that was a random drop. Otherwise, for 42 hours of effort, I was rewarded with 6 rings that I didn’t need and/or had already.

I understand that RNG wasn’t with me and many people will say that they have received a large amount of gear. Good for them, my wife counts among them. In the same time she received 5 ascended armor chests 4 fractal weapon skins and a numerous amount of rings some useful, others not so much.

What frustrates me most is that there’s no baseline reward for completing the dungeon. Empyreal shards? I have an entire tab of my bank dedicated to them. I’ve started deleting them. I have too many. If I had instead spent 42 hours in dungeons (assuming the average run time is a half hour) I would have made at least 84 gold, more if those dungeons were arah. In addition, 84 runs would have been more than enough to purchase several exotics for salvaging, mystic forging, or for bolstering my collections.

Simply put, anet pls. Give us a baseline reward for completing a fractal. There simply isn’t a good reason to make the loot from fractals so volatile. They can either be amazing or absolutely nothing. That’s not rewarding, on the whole.

And yes, you can loot some really cool stuff (like ascended armor) but statistically speaking, even if the drop rate was 5% for ascended or fractal weapons, that would mean 95% of runs would end with a less than satisfactory result (provided you have all ascended rings like I do). Please address this in HoT. I really want to enjoy fractals, but I don’t want to gamble an hour of my time with a good chance of getting basically nothing.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

1. Not true. Fractals offer 1-1.4g at the end depending on the scale. They also have significantly higher rare and exotic drops, especially on higher levels.

2. When you consider that all the dungeon armor and weapons can be obtained in PvP, you can’t really say they’re unique. In fact, getting them in pvp is way quicker.

3. This isn’t really true. Dungeons have far more noticeable diminishing returns. First of all, every fractal reward tier (1-10, 11-20, etc.) has its own timegate, so you can feasibly do 5 per day with no diminishing returns. On top of that, if you do repeat a fractal reward tier, you get everything except the final chest, so you’ll still end up with a good amount of loot.

4. This sounds like a point in favor of fractals. They have a scaleable difficulty, so if you want easy, you can do easy. If you want difficult, you can do difficult. It also allows for a sense of progression as you continue to master fractals.

5. This is a valid criticism. It’s also changing in HoT. From then on, each fractal level will be a single (and non-random) level. For example, fractal 29 might always be Mai Trin, and once you kill her, you’re done.

6. Yeah, that’s a bit of a pain, I agree. Apparently Anet is changing up the AR thresholds, and hopefully the new masteries give better ways to obtain AR.

7. See 5. That will no longer be true in HoT.

Ayrilana.1396:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

Wow! I just read that. Sounds like a bunch of good changes. I would still like to see maybe a gold reward at the end of each fractal or maybe upon completing all four fractals. Something to guarantee that you didn’t just spend a rather large amount of time doing mostly nothing.

Mechalibur.9618:

1. Not true. Fractals offer 1-1.4g at the end depending on the scale. They also have significantly higher rare and exotic drops, especially on higher levels.

2. When you consider that all the dungeon armor and weapons can be obtained in PvP, you can’t really say they’re unique. In fact, getting them in pvp is way quicker.

3. This isn’t really true. Dungeons have far more noticeable diminishing returns. First of all, every fractal reward tier (1-10, 11-20, etc.) has its own timegate, so you can feasibly do 5 per day with no diminishing returns. On top of that, if you do repeat a fractal reward tier, you get everything except the final chest, so you’ll still end up with a good amount of loot.

4. This sounds like a point in favor of fractals. They have a scaleable difficulty, so if you want easy, you can do easy. If you want difficult, you can do difficult. It also allows for a sense of progression as you continue to master fractals.

5. This is a valid criticism. It’s also changing in HoT. From then on, each fractal level will be a single (and non-random) level. For example, fractal 29 might always be Mai Trin, and once you kill her, you’re done.

6. Yeah, that’s a bit of a pain, I agree. Apparently Anet is changing up the AR thresholds, and hopefully the new masteries give better ways to obtain AR.

7. See 5. That will no longer be true in HoT.

Maybe I’m not noticing the gold?

In response to your replies I’ll just number them so you can see which one I’m talking about.

2) You’re right, pvp can obtain this gear too. And yes, it is faster to do it that way, but it doesn’t remove the fact that you have a clear, direct path towards exotic gear, in addition to flat gold gain (which is faster than FotM).

3) While you can rerun FotM to your heart’s content, I rarely have the gumption to. Let’s face it, 4 dungeons and 90 minutes of Fractal is a lot to do. Even if you do two different tiers, that’s 3 hours of effort. Sure, some players may still want to do more than that, but I personally would rather do map exploration, silverwastes or pvp to break up the monotony of fractals all day every day.

4) I do like the difficulty, perhaps that didn’t come across. What I was complaining about is that the difficulty is increased but the reward feels decreased. I used to run with a guild that would do speed runs of many dungeons a day. It would take us a couple hours to blow through a dozen or more paths. We made a lot of money every day doing this. Fractals, on the other hand, are more difficult (therefore harder to farm, which isn’t bad) but they don’t pay off as much as dungeons did.

5-7, I just read that article and I’m super excited for the changes! I really just want fractals to be more in line with dungeons in terms of rewards. Now it seems they’ll even be better, now that you can reliably work towards the weapon skins, salvage rings, and so son. I’m thrilled about that!

sharkswithlazers.7632:

Ayrilana.1396:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

Wow! I just read that. Sounds like a bunch of good changes. I would still like to see maybe a gold reward at the end of each fractal or maybe upon completing all four fractals. Something to guarantee that you didn’t just spend a rather large amount of time doing mostly nothing.

It’s only 1 fractal now. They’re likely adding better gold rewards.

Ayrilana.1396:

sharkswithlazers.7632:

Ayrilana.1396:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

Wow! I just read that. Sounds like a bunch of good changes. I would still like to see maybe a gold reward at the end of each fractal or maybe upon completing all four fractals. Something to guarantee that you didn’t just spend a rather large amount of time doing mostly nothing.

It’s only 1 fractal now. They’re likely adding better gold rewards.

That’s good. I’m rereading that post now. It seems like they are fixing nearly (or completely) everything I just complained about. I’m glad to see these changes. I really want to love fractals.