Guild Wars 2

My friends just alerted me about the new fractals patch, and that is why I’ll be leaving. I play MMORPGs for challenging content, and fracs was the only challenging PvE content in the game. As such, I will stop playing.

I think that is an issue for a lot of players: lack of challenging “end-game” content. I have zero interest in exploring the entire map, or doing all the faceroll dungeons, or grinding for a legendary that’s ultimately just a “prettier” ascended, or being 100% zerker because there is no other viable spec. GW2 is a fun, aesthetically appealing game, but it lacks lasting appeal.

phys.7689:

*1 maybe true depending on your prespective

*2 supposedly drop rare hasent changed and they were always possible from 10 on, just highly unlikely (well thats what the dev said) i have gotten one in the 20s though.

*essentially the daily system is almost exactly the same, except its acount bound now.

*the old infusions are not being touched, no one will have less AR, there is no a possibility for higher AR, nothing really different here

*since all your beefs except 1 are inaccurate, i dont know if you can really make that claim, but regardless, it sucks that you lost your title, i suggest they give you another
Alpha fractal runner X
x= level of fractal over 30 you obtained

@phys, you are actually incorrect on all accounts.
1) weapons ONLY dropped 20+ at a rate of ~5% (~15% at 38, ~30% at 48)
2) you could run multiple dailies, one from each “tier” (i.e. 48, 38, 28)
3) they ARE reducing AR. “infused” rings will no longer have the +5AR built in… rather, they will already have AR in the infusion slot… what happens to people that grinded the 250 ecto infusions?? will they be given 100s of gold they spent to get them?

Moshari.8570:

Zylonite.5913:

Give these players a unique title and back piece that won’t be available after the patch and problems solved.

that’s what I said, We all did the high level fractals for almost no reward prior to this…so just give us some recognition so that when we join a group someone can look at us and say “ahh….he (or she) is one of the old-guard”. It’s giving people the respect that they earned for accomplishing something that not a lot of people did. Give us something special to show that we were the leaders prior to the leaderboard being created…and making it different depending on how high you really were would be icing on the cake….like add a tag to the backpiece for every 10 levels above 30 you used to be…or a different color…or just anything to show that I was there…even if I might not have the time or energy to go there again.

If they implement these changes, I definitely won’t be going there again.

pretty much this. Fractals were the only thing keeping me on this game. I’ve been waiting a while for some changes that would improve compensation (i.e. salvaging ascended rings, letting me do something with 20+ shards in my bank, let us infuse ammy/accessories to make lvl50+ reasonable AR-wise). Instead, they for some reason drop everyone to 30 instead of just keeping the difficulty system as-is? If they wanted to tweak the difficulty a bit, why not implement these changes at 50+ (without booting everyone to 50, of course).

Who cares if someone is already lvl80 and would be top of the leaderboard… kudos to them! I’m only lvl 50.

Also… why do we even need a leaderboard for this?

Fractal weaps at lvl 10? Great! Now everyone will have them.

Yes, I’ve been patiently waiting for an update, but this feels like the opposite of what fractal-goers want. I guess I’ll just stick to Dota2 from now on. GG and goodbye Anet

i’ve gotten one ascended weapon box from lvl48 think (which i run daily). they’re certainly out there!

Kyrus.7218:

This game was originally designed with a level playing field in mind, so why in the world did they stray from the GW1 model of giving everyone the same base HP to start with? You can still build for more or less HP depending on your role. You could introduce new upgrades that are more powerful than normal but have a penalty like reduced vitality or some other stat.

By leveling the playing field you encourage build diversity and creativity, which is what everyone seems to want anyway.

but but… what would happen to the warriors?!

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

It is definitely not 30% at 48. I don’t think that is anywhere close to accurate now, if it ever was.

people have actually started doing stats and found it was about 31%. think about it this way; when you run 48 or higher, how many people in your group get a weapon? I most commonly see two, sometimes more, sometimes less, but rarely none at all.

Korossive.7085:

Launch is fine. Remove “Invulnerable” message.
Without that – they’re a cake.

This is the problem!

this topic comes up at least once a week, without fail. You’re not alone on this one, i don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to salvage ascended gear.

LordByron.8369:

spoj.9672:

Do you actually read other peoples posts? Most of the suggestions made in this thread are exactly what you’ve asked for. Make skins purchasable with pristine relics = every skin requires the same effort for everyone.

you are the one not reading….

50 pristines?

DO math…..even removing RNG its easy skins.

I suggested to:
1) leaving RNG for lucky drops as it is.
2) adding a new token to fight rng based on current chance to get the skin you want.

that are about 166 lvl 48 runs……
This is actually halving the effort.

Or make them sellable so at least fotm players recover some gold.

Opposed to

50 lvl 10 runs……..and stuff like that,

(FYI took me 450+ runs to get the 2 i wanted…..)

where is this 1/166 value coming from? fractals skin at lvl48 are about 30% chance of dropping, and there are 19 skins…. so that’s more like ~1/57 ?

It’s really not as bad as you claim. but again, i’d be OK with a combo of pristines and shards to purchase weapons… why not, so long as it is the equivalent of about 50 lvl 48 runs?

This has been brought up several times on this thread, never really hangs around too long because everyone agrees that it should be account bound and it just falls off the board. Never hurts to bring it up again, though. Maybe one day our dreams will come to fruition.

i main a thief, and i spend my time mostly doing dungeons. I would say yes, thieves are perfectly viable in PvE. I’ve played quite a few classes, and optimized for dmg output, i’d say thieves are pretty much at the top (along with mesmers).

You are VERY squishy, tough. I run 48+ fractals regularly on my thief, and in my experience you really can’t go full berserker for this, nor should you want to. IMO you need to make some compromises for toughness, vitality and healing. Here are my stats/traits:
build: 25/30/0/15/0
armor: full zerker
runes: full divinity
weapons: zerker and/or assassin

trinkets (ascended)
rings: 1 zerker/1 knights
ammy: zerker (the one with 18 vit as well)
accessories: both zerker (18 vit each)
back: zerker

in terms of zerker stats (off the top of my head) i’ve got about 3.3K attack, 72% crit chance, 107% crit dmg bonus, but with 14k hp and some toughness for survivability.

TL;DR – thieves are great for PvE but need to make gear sacrifices to be viable (unlike warr)

Bright.9160:

Crysys.1297:

for the record, a group of people have calculated the weapon drop rates based on catalogued data from multiple runs from multiple players. They’ve found a 31% chance at 48.

I was about to say that that’s way too high, and was about to quote a guy on reddit who calculated it to be around 15%, but then I found the thread I was going to talk about and found this in the thread

The only thing that bothers me is that their sample size is so small. With only 80 runs, that chance can still fluctuate quite a bit. We should make a collective of people running Fractals and noting their chances to get to a better consensus.

80 data points for 48 probably are too few, but at the 28 and 38 are double that and they’re sitting at ~8 and ~14%, respectively. so it would stand to reason that 48 is higher than that, though not necessarily 31.25% as they report.

Seveleniumus.5973:

Well, I done over 200 fractal runs, most of them 20-50 and only got 2 skins – spear gun and short bow, so that’s pretty bad drop rate, imo, got bank full of useless rings though.

so you have 200 pristine relics sitting in your bank and only 2 weapons? id be curious to see that… also, “most” of them 20-50 is quite vague. if you really want weapon skins, then run a 48+ every day, and maybe a 38 if you have time. lower than that i don’t see much point due to the drop rate.

food buffs and potions are extremely useful in dungeons.

whether or not you should use them depends on the difficulty of the dungeon, i guess. for example (anecdotally) in faceroll dungeons (i.e. cof, AC) i rarely see people with food buffs. in dungeons like arah i tend to see little less than 50% run with buffs. lastly, contrast that with lvl 48 fractals and i rarely see anyone without a food buff. if the content calls for it, chow down!

Ethics.4519:

Bright.9160:

Forkada.8376:

Bright.9160:

Forkada.8376:

1 February 2013 – today! I do 38 and 48 fractal every day….. I know its only random loot! And its really uncomfortable for me and many other ppl. but it would be cool if anet add venodr or recipe in MF for fractal weapons, mb Like fractal capacitor.

I have a very hard time believing you’ve been doing 38 and 48 dailies since February and you have yet to get your first weapon.

im unlucky and it is most annoying

So, you’ve been doing daily fractals since February 1 2013. You say you do 38 and 48 every day too. Let’s take a look at this, shall we…

That would mean you have done 258 38’s and 258 48’s. Let’s say the chance to get a weapon is 8% in 38 and 12% in 48 (taking unlucky numbers, data has shown it’s about 10 in 38 and 15 in 48). The chance to not get a weapon 258 times in a row on a 38 is (92/100)^258 = 4.54 E-10, or about 1 in 2201610789, the chance for this to happen 258 times in a row on a 48 is (88/100)^258 = 4.74 E-15 or about 1 in 200000000000000.

Do you understand why I’m having such a hard time believing you?

math is hard. anecdotal evidence is obviously easy

He’s just lying. You can argue agaisnt a lot of things, but math ain’t one of them. For those interested – these are the observed probabilities for fractal weapon drops at different lvls. I did not generate this dataset.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1cqabz/fractal_daily_reward_probabilities_calculated/

seems to be a bit of a divide on this thread – i personally love running fractals for the challenge. i just got my personal lvl to 48 on my thief and i run at least a 48 every day. i do agree that having a ticket drop would ruin the prestige factor of these skins (which imo are the best looking in the game)… at the end of the day, that’s really all they are, an aesthetic, prestige item; and i don’t think that should change.

i think by having the fractal skins sell for something like 50 pristine relics for 2hand and 40 for 1h would be fair, though. in this case, the only people that would be able to afford the skin they want are those people who have done kittenloads of dailies for them. i think everyone wins in this case.

for the record, a group of people have calculated the weapon drop rates based on catalogued data from multiple runs from multiple players. They’ve found a 31% chance at 48.

I’m not sure what the hold-up on this is… they could be salvaged into dark matter/ectos/mithrilium/luck rare chance of bloodstone brick/dragonite ore/empyreal star.

It is silly that people are forced to sell these “high valued” ascended rings for 4silver.

I support this idea; I have stacks upon stacks of bloodstone and empyreal but i am yet to amass one stack of dragonite. I enjoy running dungeons and high level fracs, i don’t enjoy spending my GW2 playtime standing in position spamming 1 on world bosses. I’d be more than happy to spend extra mats in the mystic forge to convert my bricks and stars to ingots.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

1) For the short term: Let people transmute 1 ascended mat into another (to let people “play how they want to play”)

2) For the mid term: The OP’s suggestion to get MF, actually a really nice idea (but so much clicking….)

3) For the long term: let us just vendor them (just because “eventually” people will either max MF or want to stop gaining more)

Seems reasonable to me. I find it annoying that i have thousands of blood stone from running fracs, and barely any dragonite. kindof annoyed that you only get dragonite off the borrrring stand in place and smash 1111111111 world bosses

@Wallace i won’t quote your thorough post (as it is long), but thank you for it.

You make some great points here, but the argument ultimately comes back to the class toolkit. Every class has their own unique skillset, otherwise there’d be no point in having classes at all. I like the idea that classes can utilize each of their respective skills to fulfill certain roles in a group. That’s great.

In my opinion, your gameplay in an rpg should be about compromise.
It seems that warrs and guards going “full zerker” are really the only classes that doesn’t really have to make compromises? 14% damage reduction is quite a lot imo. When i started running Arah on my thief, I realized that unless I got lucky with Lupi’s targeting, pretty much all of his attacks would deal more damage than my pitiful 10.8k HP if i ran out of endurance. That green slime projectile thing he throws hits me for over 11k with some toughness (and mandatory vit) mixed in with my current zerker set. Thus, we squishies make compromises; speccing full zerker just isn’t viable especially if you need to melee imo.

Why doesn’t heavy zerker gear, then, have less armor than tank gear to make them equally as squishy as all other classes? In that case, they’d still have almost 2x the HP than thieves and eles and STILL wouldn’t get one-shotted by Lupi. I guess at the end of it all, i find it frustrating that squishy classes need to be more conscientious of survivability skills and traits just because they’re squishier by default (despite not doing more damage than warriors by default).

Anyway – the impression i get is that something like this would never be implemented by anet anyway… though i do enjoy reading your opinions.

Olba.5376:

Crysys.1297:

Taking warrior as an example, they are one of the best dps’ers in the game, they wear heavy armor, AND they share the highest base hp in the game. While i take no issue with them dealing heavy damage, i think a nice change that would really balance out the classes would be to give light armor wearers the fastest endurance regen rate, and slowest to heavy armor wearers (with medium armor in between). And no, I’m not talking about a trait you have to spec into, just default passive endurance regen. Thoughts?

Well, warriors also have no access to Protection/Invulnerable/Stealth.

As for your endurance regen idea, I don’t see how it could be balanced. If the current rate would be the base for Heavy armor, you would end up in a situation where an evasion specced Thief (20 Acrobatics, Withdraw, Vigorous Recovery) would be completely broken due to a massive amount of dodges and evades.

Sorry, i forgot to address your second point. I’d like to reiterate that balancing is the whole point of this thread. You say that granting a 20% increase in endurance regen would be imbalanced but the current scenario isn’t? remember using warr vs. ele:

warr: more armor, 18k base hp
ele: less armor, 10k base hp

default mobility is equal for both; run speed and endurance regeneration. If heavy armor doesn’t affect mobility (i.e. it isn’t heavy), why can’t all classes wear it?

lastly, as was mentioned above, another reason why warriors / guards are popular is because their toolkit (skills) are excellent.

so, what are the downsides to playing a warr?

Olba.5376:

Crysys.1297:

Taking warrior as an example, they are one of the best dps’ers in the game, they wear heavy armor, AND they share the highest base hp in the game. While i take no issue with them dealing heavy damage, i think a nice change that would really balance out the classes would be to give light armor wearers the fastest endurance regen rate, and slowest to heavy armor wearers (with medium armor in between). And no, I’m not talking about a trait you have to spec into, just default passive endurance regen. Thoughts?

Well, warriors also have no access to Protection/Invulnerable/Stealth.

As for your endurance regen idea, I don’t see how it could be balanced. If the current rate would be the base for Heavy armor, you would end up in a situation where an evasion specced Thief (20 Acrobatics, Withdraw, Vigorous Recovery) would be completely broken due to a massive amount of dodges and evades.

huh?
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Endure_Pain
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shield_Stance

if i’m not mistaken, shield stance is the second longest invuln in the game, on the shortest cooldown.

as for protection, you have
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dolyak_Signet

…you even have a signet that boost endurance regen 50%! my proposition is a 20% increase for light.

Thief Elite skill:
Enveloping Shadow
The thief becomes a shadow: gaining quickness for a short time and allowing the thief to perform stealth attacks but is not invisible.
Casting time 0.5 seconds
Duration 4 seconds
Cooldown 80 seconds

Mo Mo.1947:

I think if you’re having trouble with light/medium class armored characters you should look for some tips on how to play that specific class. I do quite well with my thief, and eles are pretty strong mother-kittens; you just gotta know how to use them correctly. I still need to learn a better way to play mesmers in PvE.

I’d recommend googling for builds or asking for advice on the class specific forums here.

i also main a thief, and i enjoy playing for the most part and don’t struggle with it in PvE ONLY because it’s almost mandatory to spec 15 traits deep into acrobatics for that extra endurance regen. I haven’t encountered many thieves that don’t spec it for that reason.

That said, I’m not proposing ridiculous increases in endurance regen like 2:1 for light:heavy… more like a 20% increase. small enough that it’s not OP, but large enough that over time you’d notice a difference.

Dawdler.8521:

Heavy armor is cosmetic. It does very little to your actual armor. Guardians and Warriors are great because of their skillset, not because they wear heavy armor.

Most light/medium classes already have a major boon over heavies – perma 25% run speed. Thief, Necro, Ranger and Ele has it. Mesmer is the only non-heavy class that doesnt have it. Warriors can get easy perma-swiftness with skills and traits though.

If armor classes are purely cosmetic, why have them at all? I’m not sure what the dmg reduction % is for armor, but there must be a difference.

25% run speed are from signets, and are not permanent. Also, do those passive 25% run boosts work in combat? o.O

Howdy – just thinking about the armor classes. Traditionally (i.e. in most rpgs/mmorpgs) there is some sort of penalty for wearing heavy armor, such as reduced dmg compared to light classes or reduced mobility. I’ve noticed that in GW2 there is no such detriment for wearing heavy armor. It is no surprise, then, that in GW2 the most popular classes by FAR in pve are warrior/guard.

Taking warrior as an example, they are one of the best dps’ers in the game, they wear heavy armor, AND they share the highest base hp in the game. While i take no issue with them dealing heavy damage, i think a nice change that would really balance out the classes would be to give light armor wearers the fastest endurance regen rate, and slowest to heavy armor wearers (with medium armor in between). And no, I’m not talking about a trait you have to spec into, just default passive endurance regen. Thoughts?

this is a great idea… while overall i enjoy running fracs, it is not without its issues. I love the difficulty, but it is frustrating to run lvl 30+ fracs only to receive less in way of compensation compared to something MUCH easier and faster (i.e. arah p1/2). For fracs, giving daily gold rewards that scales in difficulty (in addition to current rewards), scale up the relics a bit (as proposed above)… I really like the idea of being able to purchase more than just rings (amulets and accessories like all other ascended vendors), and being able to upgrade frac weapons with ascended with fractal upgrade components!

It would also be nice to see some new fractals introduced, maybe even another bonus fractal to alternate with jade maw.