Guild Wars 2

Oh, boy. Chain lightning elite mobs. AOE explosions everywhere. Expanding rings that knock you down! Little mobs that come from the big mobs once they’re defeated and swarm you! Sun Flare attack. Triple beams! A map-wide death blast at the end of the phases. Insta-wipe mechanic with the Anomaly and death orbs above players heads! So much, so much, so MUCH!

… And yet it all feels fair once you get the hang of it. Again, the second boss is the only boss of the three where I had zero unsatisfactory issues with. Now I do understand that it’s not for everyone, but it’s hardly a luck fight, and beyond a lack of ability to keep up and/ or a bad internet connection, fault feels entirely on the side of the player(s).

Nonetheless, it’s a vast and highly negative overreaction to quit all of Fractals just because of 100 CM—just because of one chosen level out of so many others, but people are free to do whatever they wish of course. I’d just rather you’d reconsider.

Nick.6972:

Why would you complain about the difficulty of 100CM if you’ve only done it twice?
It took me about a week of daily 2 hour 100CM to learn and master all mechanics.

Maybe I spam Fractals too much. Who knows? It literally took me only about an hour and a half to grasp the mechanics and form a deduction. For what it’s worth, we got Arkk to 10%, but eventually the group disbanded anyway. I took a look at the possible rewards for doing the Fractal and came to the conclusion that beating it wasn’t worth it for me since I Fashion War—maybe a bit more than what is healthy—and didn’t find the Celestial Infusion appearance able to complement anything.

Knowing the balance team, if they were ever to make blind work on bosses, they’d of course look into individual professions and skills that would allow permanent blind access by just one individual. As for thief being superior about it, that’s fine. I was mentioning a (very unlikely to happen) possibility of giving necro more viability in the PvE scene, but thief could use that benefit as well.

Mentioned it before, but perhaps having all conditions work the way they should when a boss’s defiance bar is orange and recharging might be interesting.

Would be nice if blind and weakness worked on bosses (the normal way, not just its pretty lacking CC degen). Maybe not world bosses sure, but considering how mechanic-spammy certain ones could get, it’d definitely open up necro as the debuff support it’s meant to be without totally being a lockdown to said boss. Possible OP territory, sure, but then another thing a necro is good at, they can slap a ton of vulnerability onto a target like no other. What if vulnerability was capped at “!” like other conditions that can stack? Their ability to maintain so much vulnerability alone would work in favor of making them supportive, and giving an argument against the “too selfish to accept” sayings against it.

But oh well. Wishful thinking.

Must concur, except that I actually want to like 100 CM just because of the fact I like 100 and everything below. So far, I’ve only attempted it twice. The first time was before the bug fixes, and the second time was after. Now, being unable to beat it, one would expect me to come with a whole list of dislikes, but I actually only have a couple.

In the first fight, sub 33%, the meteors have a tendency to hit you at speeds faster than you can react to, and it seems like if you’re not at full health, these will down you immediately. Feels luck-based. Not a fan.

Also in the first fight, a minor peeve is the phases which turn into a DPS check to kill the four mini bosses. Despite disliking DPS checks since they tend to discourage build variety—max damage or die—and in a way encourage elitism, each boss cannot be CC’d while having an unconditional, uninterruptible “evade everything” ability. (Hah! You thought I’d gripe about the knockdown spam, didn’t you?). These could screw over your burst on whatever you happen to be running. Fortunately, they tend to use this move first.

Second fight… No issues. Oddly enough.

Third fight, I’ve yet to beat Arkk as previously established. And for something like having an achievement where no one can die, perhaps some of the mechanics he has could be toned down or included in, maybe, the first fight. Not like I’d be going for that title ever, but I’m sure people have some pretty bad horror stories about what it’s like to get all the way to Arkk and the Solar Bomb just so happened to miss a tower.

And hitting those towers, man that whole thing feels clunky. It’s doable, but it feels as if it’d be better if you could somehow get more control over the Solar Bombs than you have. Sometimes they fail to follow you. Sometimes they get stuck behind broken towers. And then you’ll get the PUGs who get desperate and will keep shooting it against the edge not knowing how to press ESC and disengage their auto-attack when it’s not even fixed on them in the first place.

Besides all that sidetracking, a dislike I have for it is that it’s timer-based, but the expanding square begins expanding BEFORE the Solar Bombs even appear. And then while that’s happening, the Anomaly can appear during that with a skull over someone’s head which now puts a timed wipe mechanic on top of a timed wipe mechanic… More anti-fun.

Finally, the potency of the flak from the big Red Orbs Arkk shoots is a bit much. You can get used to it, but once he enters Enraged, it can one shot you, and unless you’re Ele or Thief with a move-right-after-you’re-downed skill, you die. Not so great to deal with, but the icing on the cake during said Enraged duration is that the symbol above Arkk’s head is so huge and overriding that it’ll often block visibility of the appearing Red Orb above his head which is meant to telegraph it. If only I could pan my camera out further.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents on it. It’s become a Fractal I just can’t beat and don’t really desire to, which is fine. But it’s also a Fractal that has to be dealt with differently than all the others. Instead of just a leisurely pass time like all the rest (yes, even 99 CM) and just with random PUGs, both awesome and carried alike, I feel this one will require the whole nine: organization, specific build comps, Discord, etc.

Also, the Vale Guardian green circle mechanic combined with Social Awkwardness … Contradictory elements that must be healed through.

Definitely the case for myself in that an entire build option of mine, thoroughly enjoyable for PvE, has been thrown out of the window, and with it, nearly the entire class for me. Additional damage done as it’s my one and only 100% world and HoT completion character. Additional damage also done as the build I made for it which I found unique and fulfilling I had minmaxed in both gear and those absurdly priced infusions. And I’m not even sure I’ll regret posting this, but as a person who hates to endlessly farm for anything—I know some don’t mind that—I justified putting in real money to acquire said infusions just because I enjoyed the unique role I had so much.

Now, with a switch that came without warning and completely out of left field, to something that appeared to be set in stone and would remain untouched for maybe even another four years, all of that’s thrown away as the build is useless, albeit somewhat tolerable if I can get someone to camp Alacrity on me. So in short, it almost gives me the feeling of being scammed, money gone right down the drain, hence my seriousness about the change.

I also agree with Vitali, and it’s something I hinted at as well. Have Relentless Pursuit be updated to return the reduced cooldown. After all, you can’t run Scourge and Reaper at the same time, so there would be no overlap. Hell, at this point, I’m practically begging.

All that being said, and with the things I’ve read, I see how it’s also messed up so many others and hardly just myself for the reasons just mentioned by EremiteAngel.9765.

The traits’ve been fine for four years. If a new mechanic isn’t going to be using what’s offered in the trait, considering it’s for necromancer core, that trait should be updated to include additional features instead of removing things from it to dampen build diversity. There are many traits even still across all professions that are very specific. I guess in their arguments, a specialization is a bigger deal than the general, bigger depiction of the profession’s main mechanic?

After taking some time to do the math, you’re right. It’s even worse than I thought! That explains why I couldn’t keep anyone alive in Fractals this evening. :(

As for the buff to revive percentage, from having used the old state of it frequently and using the new state now, that really doesn’t amount to much. Sure, it helps, but it’s much more viable to keep people from being downed in the first place. Sigh…

As someone who used the three second recharge reduction quite frequently, I’m saddened to see it go. I fancy myself as somewhat of a build experimenter, originating since the Guild Wars 1 days, and loved to create unique-yet-effective things just to keep my interests going. Admittedly, it has been a bit of a struggle to keep that trend going strong in Guild Wars 2, for reasons I’m sure you all know, but it seems that update after update, the opportunity for variety is getting smaller and smaller.

One note on the new Speed of Shadows skill is that its functionality change has, from what I’m reading, reduced the value of the trait Relentless Pursuit significantly. Movement mitigation conditions reduced versus just removing them completely, I’d go with the latter option, and then just let my blinds, fear, and freezes do the rest for me in terms of preventing said conditions coming back on me while I’m fighting. Perhaps Shroud cooldown reduction could go there instead, which in turn would have it compete with Augury of Death and Chilling Nova. Removing it from the game entirely really hurt the value of Shroud, the necromancer’s primary mechanic (and as demonstrated from certain angrier threads involving Vital Persistence, made the entire Soul Reaping trait line lackluster).

Another thing was that it worked quite well with Foot in the Grave, a grandmaster trait. I felt it was a necessary synergy there given the lack of Stability the necromancer has, and when you have hardly any Stability, you’ll want as many stun breaks as you can get! Using those two traits with each other was just another way to survive, especially in things like WvW, and on the PvE scene, the absurd amount of knockbacks Fractal 100 CM presents.

Life From Death, a skill that’s received a buff lately, benefits from flashing Shroud. To be quite frank, this was one of the traits I’ve been using for a long time and had thoroughly enjoyed. And although it received a 25% healing buff, since you can no longer use it every seven seconds, but ten, it’s actually a 30% nerf, resulting in a 5% overall nerf which will, unfortunately and very likely, still see it seldom used with builds. Unless you spec to a healing build, and quite literally minmax it, it seems this doesn’t help the survivability of the necromancer terribly well, and with nerfs to condition damage, all in all, the necromancer is beginning to feel like a sitting duck in most scenarios—PvP and WvW, anyway. PvE, what they’re best at support-wise doesn’t work on bosses (Understandable, but I could see it being fit into the system in the way that they’d work on a boss whose breakbar is orange and recharging as opposed to blue.)

Anyway, that’s my two cents. I only hope that the balance team would see this post and perhaps reconsider adding in the Shroud cooldown reduction back into the game. There’s always hope!