Guild Wars 2

Estriella Faerie:

Verticallity as it was in fractals before (AR) was really good. It was something that was not absolutely needed: a very skilled player, who knew the fights, could manage by dodging, positionning. The skill-cap component to the fights was kinda high.
The main utility of AR was to be a “safety net” for those players, to enable them to recover if they made a mistake. For less skilled players, AR was a way to compensate for numerous mistakes, and to progress through fractals anyway. Their progression was at a lower pace than skilled players, because they needed more AR (making mistakes more often call for more AR to compensate).

As I said in a previous post, the change from Fractured patch changed that, and to progress now, the “skill component” required is now less than what it was, but the “stuff component” is way higher. Before, a skilled player could compensate low AR by playing really well. That is not the case anymore. If you don’t have enough AR, you can’t do it, even if you played perfectly. That’s especially true with the levels x0 instabilities. I really hate that change, which goes from the skill-gating it was before to a gear-gating.

I agree with Estriella Faerie on this one.

I’ve seen a few players say they’d be fine if verticallity was restricted to fractals, but from what I saw, it’s not like they think it would be good for fractals, but more like they want it out of their own gamemode (be it pve or wvw).

As a fractal player, I really don’t want a required verticallity, like the new patch introduced. An optionnal verticallity, like it was before, to help the “less skilled” also progress, can be good though.

TL;DR: Please don’t bring more verticallity to fractals, there’s already too much of it there.