Guild Wars 2

pre-patch this was already the hardest boss for 50+.
I would choose lava fractal anytime if given a choice over dredge ice elemental.
What were they thinking when they decide to buff it -.-

Jzl.8715:

Some personal input here.

My team and I are currently sitting at level 56 in fractals. We quite enjoyed the process of leveling up, and the rise in challenge moving past 50 is quite engaging. Since level 50+ we have been using revive orbs. So I guess I have to talk about the Jade Maw fight, and why I didn’t have so much problem with buying a few orbs before:

Jade Maw is never considered by us as a hard fight, in fact it is incredibly easy. So we don’t see it as a challenging part of moving up the level in fractals. My team basically came into an agreement that we will just pay 1g to whoever is buying an orb. The money didn’t quite bother us, and we see it just part of the expense of progressing. The Jade maw fight before has some issue. If we consider the most effective strategies to be exploits, (99%, ranger, orb), which I think they are, there aren’t really much other reliable strategies. This is why I don’t understand the system in the first place, being:

Why using such a nonsensible method to hard cap content?

This didn’t bother us all that much before, because like I said, this is an easy fight after all, we take the previous 3 fractals as the challenging part.

Now I just put our planned level 56 run tonight on hold because I heard from multiple sources that there are currently no way of getting past the Jade Maw fight. Fixing exploits and things that are considered as bugs are fine, but then this brings me back to the original question: Why such a weird kind of hard cap? We already know that fractal goes to at least level 80, why not just let the people willing to progress do so? If not, then wouldn’t it make more sense just to cap it at say 50, and then 60 and so on with the release of new gear?

I still fail to see the reason behind absolutely halting any progress. Unless level 80 was supposed to be only reached with full ascendent and ar, but then that was also ridiculous. I was anticipating some kind of valid mechanic to get around orbing and pet rezzing, so I do anticipate the current status is not what in intended.

But at the end of the day we haven’t really ever heard any official statements with the level of fractals and the intention of Jade Maw agony mechanic. Hope this time around we get some feedback.

EDIT 1: Got a tip from a friend who just finished 42 with 99%, seems like there are some false info flying around or it has been hotfixed in the build around half an hour ago.

So is this fixed or not? I don’t want to spend 2 hours into level 50+ and get stuck at jade maw when I get home. Can anyone verify this?

So is daily limited to once per character now instead if tiers?

At level 50 i could do 5 dailies, now I can only do 1? Since rewards are based on my reward level..

Been running FOTM hardcore since the Lost Shores patch aiming for a Fractal GS,
5 dailies per day since my main hit 50+ and the only skin I got is Dagger which I can’t use on both my characters. That’s pretty much > 150 dailies.

The RNG is full of BS. Same person will keep getting good stuff while another will keep getting nothing. How the hell is that random?! There were many days where I did 5 dailies and every single daily chest had nothing in it (No ring/No Skin)

Fractal weapons were meant to be a symbol that you’re a fractal vet but how come with 2 characters 1 at 50+ and 1 at 40+ running at least 5 dailies a day, I still don’t have any on both of my characters while I met quite a few guys who are just level 20+ without any alts who has 3 skins on their character.

I used 40 pristine relics to equip 2 of my toons with 4xAscended rings and still have about 100+ left to spend. I have like 7k of the normal relics which hogs up almost 2 rows of my bank slots now after equipping 4 of my characters with full 20 slot bags.

Now I feel so burned out and I don’t even feel like doing FOTM anymore. I really do hope that they add weapons and amulets into the FOTM merchant. I don’t care if its for some crazy amount of fractal relics or pristine relics.

This fractal has a 10% passing rate on level 20-29 tier and has been the biggest time sink for me even though it was discussed before the fight to not kill all chanters. I usually use my extra time to do 20s daily and each time I rolled this fractal its bound to fail and end up sinking even more time. There will always be 1-2 guys who do not listen and went on to kill everything even though was instructed to “NOT TO KILL TARGET”. Of course after everything’s messed up, the group would always come out with a bunch of wierd strats and want to try for 5-6 times before giving up. I just gave up totally on level 20+ dailies after failling cliffside on 2 different groups last night. Sanked like 5 hours or so and not getting the daily done. It is always much easier to run 50s or 40s dailies compared to the lower level ones.

Rares yes its more (If you sell all the rares from 1 run the amount of cash is only half from a AC run, named exotics from mob drops not really. I only received 1 named exo at level 49 FOTM with main and 26 with alt. Talk about time invested vs rewards, I’ve tried to do level 26 for 4 days now with 8 failed attempts. (Issues with DC(no.1 reason) or people killing chanters on 2 seals in cliffside, no guardian in party but rolled Grawl Fractal.

The time spent on running 8 runs of AC which is much faster would had given like 24 gold with bars without any headache.

Hickeroar.9734:

Erasculio.2914:

Tankzilla.7052:

A friend of mine got hit for this. He says got aprox 90 ectos from this.

Nice, one less exploiter in the game! Thank you ArenaNet!

You’re all high and mighty now, until you get banned for doing something innocent and innocuous. What You fail to realize is that he probably spent 60 ectos getting those 90, and 30 ectos is less than 10g profit. That’s NOTHING.

or do u mean 1 ecto for 90 ectos with BLS kits?

Its really disappointing to get grouped with guys who skips everything. Its like someone was handing you a few free lottery tickets for free and you choose not take it. How stupid is that?
9/10 groups I’m with on tier 4, there will be the 1 guy who insists on skipping all mobs and will usually run far ahead leaving everyone behind. It takes awhile to reach Maw on that tier and I’m sure I’m not the only one who is hoping for a named exotic drops from the mobs. It really spoils it for everyone else in the party. If there’s anyone who is on 37 who wants to party up for Fractals without skipping mobs please add me.

Only thing that is bad is the 250 ectos to craft the infused backpiece which conflicts with what aNet said “Ascended tier is something for players to acquire in between exotics and legendary weapons.” You will get more than enough relics as you progress.

Then why use ectos which are needed to craft mystic clovers making players (in between casual and hardcores) use all their ecto savings that should be used for RNGing mystic clovers.

Do you by any chance have a screenie? Not that I don’t believe you but it will help clear a lot of confusion on the loot table. By the way, a big congratulations to you

nelopp.6140:

If fotm rewards are too good, no one will do the other contents.
Exp mode dungeons rewards are buffed because someone complain no one is doing dungeon at that time so Anet makes this decision.
I believe Anet won’t change much. Ascended gear is more than enough to keep you guys repeat fotm.

I agree with you that FOTM rewards shouldn’t be too good however it should at least scale with/or be similar to explorable rewards, for an example a player playing in explorable have a chance to get a precursor drop when a FOTM player has no chance of getting a precursor drop. Other reasons mentioned in first post.

Ascended gear? Just level 3 toons to level 10 FOTM and farm pristine relics. 3 dailiesx4days : 1 ring. A few more days and you earn enough relics for the backpiece.
Level 10 difficulty is similar with explorable dungeons.

Lodestone and cores drop on each respective explorable dungeons as well.

“1” full run of COE will drops 1-2 Charged cores and at times 1 Charged lodestone. Maw’s chest gives 1-2 random cores, very rarely a random lodestone and is 4 instances including Jade Maw. If you roll for (Volcanic, Cliffside and Dredge) and you might have to spend the whole night just for that 1 chest. While it takes a lil more than 1 hour on a PUG party to complete HOTW or COF all 3 paths.

What I’m talking about is time/effort invested on each dungeon compared against their rewards.

You mentioned:
“Sometimes you drop a non bound exo, some of wich sells for 10G or more also”
I have never gotten an exo worth more than 4g. There might be 3-4 exotics worth around 2-4g after hundreds of runs the rest are all account bound. Please also note that uneven number fractals do not have a Maw chest.

You get 2-3g NET gold for “1” explorable dungeon run excluding drops and the 180 tokens that guarantees you 6 rares per run including 26s upon completion of each path for explorable dungeon.

I have been running both dungeons actively for a whole month.
I’m just going to go by assumptions from what I observed. My explorable runs are usually COF, COE, HOTW, Arah and sometimes AC. FOTM is on level 30 more than 250 runs.

Explorable Dungeons Loot Table
- Quite similar to world drops
- Champion Bosses drop decent amount of silver
- All rares have runes in it
- Many named exotics drop. Almost 1 per run(3 paths)/party
- Precursor drops in Explorable Dungeons. A guildie got Storm from running AC.

FOTM Dungeon Loot Table
- Different from world drops
- “Legendary” Bosses do not drop silver
- Most of the rares dropped from mobs or chest do not have a rune in them.
Rarely do I receive rares with runes in them although there are some instances that I did.
- Exotics: Account Bound. Rarely get named exotic drops. 1st week running I got a Soulbound on Acquire : Berserker Amulet and about a week later an account bound: Soldier’s Amulet. Exotic armors (Armageddon) and several weapons.
Can’t sell them when they are no use to me.
- Precursors : I have never seen 1 report/screenshot of someone getting it grinding FOTM. I’m quite sure it doesn’t drop because its using a different loot table.
- Ascended Rings/Weapon Skins : A RNG Nightmare. Although recent patch helped with the rings. After more than 250 runs, 1 dagger skin which I have no use for. Also there is no way to reimb someone with pristine relics for the runs they did earlier prior to patch benefiting those who were too lazy to run fractals from the beginning and started running it now.

My question is why does explorable dungeon give more than FOTM when on every scale, FOTM is a much more challenging dungeon. Explorable dungeons can be cleared in a matter of minutes while FOTM at 20+ could take from an hour to 3 hours (depending on fractal, professions, internet connection of party members).
I cannot comment on anything above 30 but I’m sure it would require much more effort.

You guys should state what is your current FOTM level before rating them.
It differs as you are going up the tiers.

Dungeon explorable chest rewards? I’ve never seen a screenshot of someone getting it from this source. If anyone has would you mind posting a screenshot please?

Stowing my main (guardian) until someone from Anet says something bout this.
I have endured and kept changing build for each major nerf on each patch because I love playing as a guardian but this really gimps my AH/EM build to the ground. I do not see how AH on vigor is OP as we need to tank and hit mobs to get the heals. With most warriors going full DPS these days mobs will always aim for the guardian and with the healing efficiency from AH halved, its better to just roll a warrior watch high 100b numbers and have 3 shouts for 3 big heals.

I feel Bear’s POWER!!!
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I’m close to Dying……..