Showing Highly Rated Posts By Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:
Molten Boss Fractal
• After killing the Berserker, the Firestorm can jump outside of the circle and land in an unhittable spot. This wouldn’t be a problem as you can run to the other side of the circle and he will come closer and become hittable. Unfortunately he usually draws aggro on one of the two mostly useless npc and he will simply shoot at the npc from range for several minutes until it finally dies. Again, the useless NPC create an aggravation and unnecessarily extend the duration of the fight. Not game breaking, but just annoying. Solution: since the npc don’t contribute to your success, just make the bosses ignore them.
Solid Ocean Fractal
• Killing the tentacles no longer damages the Jade Maw. I understand completely that they want to make encounter about the crystal mechanic, but killing the tentacles to speed up the encounter rewarded playskill and made the fight more interesting and interactive. This is a change for the worse.
• The camera zoom has been severely limited and makes it much more difficult to see the skull symbol above your head. I don’t understand the motivation for tweaking the camera here as it was working perfectly fine previously and no one had any complaints about it. The best thing you can say about a game’s camera is that you don’t notice it influencing your gameplay; unfortunately the camera here is a tougher opponent than the Jade Maw. This is a problem.
This is long enough and there is more than enough for the devs to address. Hopefully one of them would be nice enough to address some or all of these points. I, my guild, and the pve community would greatly appreciate it.
Volcanic Fractal
• The camera at the end boss has been changed (bugged?) to keep it from zooming out as far as it used to. This has made melee’ing the boss significantly more difficult and removed that option from most groups. As a result, one of the most interesting and well-designed boss fights in the game has been taken down a few levels of fun. This is disappointing.
Uncategorized Fractal
• Some of the kitty golems at the end allow you to rally, and some do not. I’m not sure how they were designed, so this may be intentional. But for general purposes it is a bit unseemly to have 4 bosses who are all identical for all intents and purposes count differently for that kind of purpose.
Thaumanova Reactor
• In the rescue the lab workers quest, it is possible to rescue them too slowly and have the mission fail/bug out. On two times we did a split (4 people doing the shield/lasers and 1 doing the rescue) in order to make the fractal faster only to have it bug out and force us to restart the entire shard since you cannot finish the fractal or reset it. This is a gamebreaking bug. Right now the solution is to do it as a group to avoid doing it “too slowly” but in a fractal with a non-linear sandbox design, it is a bit disappointing to have the ability to split and come up with creative solutions limited in that way.
Molten Furnace Fractal
• You can bug out the shard forcing a full reset of your progress that level if you enter the furnace room before the NPC finish their dialogue. Any game breaking bug like this should be addressed immediately. Needless to say, a reliance on NPC dialogue/triggers has been demonstrated to be the biggest flaw in your dungeon/instance design and its puzzling why it has been continued here.
• There are several safe spots in the end area that trivialize the encounter somewhat.
Snowblind Fractal
• You can no longer respawn at the check points, and are forced to respawn back at the starting area. This rather annoying if one person dies on the trash run to the end boss, since they then have to run all the way from the start again. Just a huge waste of time for no reason.
• The camera has a bizarre zoom out against the Elemental Source from certain angles. While I would love it if we could zoom out to these distances always in all zones of the game, when you can only do it from limited angles in limited places to no real purpose it seems like a bug at worst, poor implementation at best.
Underground Facility
• Extra dredge added. Really? The problem and biggest complaint since day one has been that there are too many dredge. Good parties can skip many of them no matter how many you add, and bad parties get bogged down. This fractal was already the longest and most annoying to get, and the developers said they were going to address individual fractal balance and the solution is to add more dredge? Sad.
• Blink+Portal exploits still work. How about we make a deal: you remove all the unnecessary dredge (including about half the clown car waves) and you close that blink exploit and we call it even?
Urban Battlegrounds
• The NPCs appear to have had their HP significantly reduced and their agro mechanics changed. They tend to get caught on the endlessly respawning mobs outside the city and take forever to get to the gate. When they do get there, they die much faster than they used to against the veteran mobs. It’s bad enough that an entire fractal is based around the worst mechanic in Guild Wars 2 (npc ally AI) but when there are changes that make them even less reliable it is sheer frustration.
• Making the npc not roll over and die from Ashyim’s Agony attack is a nice change but it makes the fight incredibly easy mode, especially with Time Warp and Battle Standard. Perhaps a middle ground where the fight isn’t an AFK laugher would be better.
Hey all. Like most people who are into fractals/dungeons I was more than a bit disappointed with the announcement of the fractal update due to the removal of my progression equity, negating the hard work we put in to push to level 80 under the old system. As unfortunate as that was, a few of the changes they announced gave us hope that the changes would be fun and what we would gain from the patch would be worth giving up what we lost.
However, after getting to Fractal 50 I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this patch was rushed and botched. I will explain, in depth, why I argue this. But first, I want to give a general critique of the lack of communication from Arena Net in failing to answer all the many, many questions that people have posted in the forums. It’s been complete silence, and quite frankly it sends the message that we all suspected: Anet doesn’t particularly care about the end game PVE content and definitely doesn’t care about the community of players who do. Whether this is true or not I have no idea, but I think it is a bad PR move to drop a huge patch and then disappear. While we could excuse them for being gone on a holiday weekend, the fact that the devs continued to post in PVP/WVW threads is troubling.
With all that said, I want to use the remainder of this post to make a comprehensive log of every bug or problem currently in Fractals. Some of these things may be developer intended, some may be genuine bugs and some might be an issue of someone on the Living Story team responsible for this update not doing his job properly. A developer response on each item would be greatly appreciated. Without further delay…
Fractal Rewards Issues
• The loot table is currently broken as it was before the patch and was not updated. Currently, the shard end chests do not scale loot based on your level and you get the same blue/greens/rares/exotics/cores on 49 as you would on 1. The only thing that scales is the Fractal Relics and daily chest gold bonus.
• Uninfused Rings continue to drop through level 49. An infused ring at 49 is bad enough, an uninfused ring is a slap in the face. This is obviously broken and needs to be fixed.
• Fractal weapon skins continue to drop, fractal weapon boxes do not currently exist. We were promised that weapon skins would be delivered in a box that would allow us to choose the skin we wanted. This was, for players like me, the number one selling point of this update and the reason why I would run fractal dailies every day now instead of farming dungeons. The item code exists in the game but the brackets by the name indicates that the item itself does not. My theory is that this change was planned, but the LS team responsible for this update failed to get it implemented by the deadline. A simple, “we wanted to implement it but didn’t get it done in time. We will add them next patch” would suffice.
• The new recipes are account bound. I have both recipes now, each new recipe that drops is useless for me, these should be sellable. It wouldn’t hurt the market for the Runes/Sigils since they are very limited by Shards which are a relatively scarce resource.
Individual Fractal Bugs/Issues
Underwater Fractal
• Krait still get stuck in the ceiling and you have to hope you can get far enough away from them to reset them or else your progress could be lost. Granted this is the first part of the first fractal, but it is still technically a game-breaking bug and ought to be fixed out of principle.
Cliffside Fractal
• The arms seals do not properly reset to 2 chanters on each side in case of a wipe. This is mildly annoying in the 30’s for a good group. This is pretty tough in the 40’s and will only get more difficult for unorganized groups as progress into the 50’s and beyond begins to happen. This was supposed to have been fixed months ago but that promised change appears to have not happened and been forgotten.
• I applaud the devs for trying to fix the Archdiviner exploit which trivialized the encounter. However, their fix is pretty lame. Essentially, the Archdiviner gets 2-3 seconds of free attacks on the party. On several occasions a party member has been given 3 stacks of agony because he spawned the red circles under him during the stun phase. This isn’t a huge deal with max AR, but for people with imperfect gear it becomes a simple RNG gear check which is not how the encounter was intended to be.
TBC…