Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty aware they don’t give two kittens about the forums, but you do see a post once in a blue moon. I felt like the comparison had to be drawn, just because of how bad it got the last time around. At least posting this, I can feel like I’ve said my piece, and swap over to playing FF14 without feeling too bad. Just from personal experience, I’m willing to bet a good deal of the Anet team is sympathetic and there’s just one stubborn kitten in a place of power who’s blocking any actual progress or communication.

Dustin.2793:

There is potential for this to be one of the funnest metas. Unfortunately, revenants and bunker memsers are not in a imbalanced, but broken state in my opinion. Which leave close to every team being force to convert to using these compositions. It is very boring to watch and play in. My team scrimmed the double rev, double mesmer, tempest team for hours the other night and by the end of the scrims I had such a headache and everything just blended in. If a balance patch cannot happen until the end of the season a one class limit per team should be considered. If something doesn’t change this could be a big disappointment not only for the players, but to the already hard to spectate side of things as well.

Quoted for truth.

So, my post above is hardly news to anyone. The current Meta is an absolute kittenshow. This is a cautionary warning and tale to the Devs about where this is going.

Back in 2004, Magic: The Gathering released the Mirrodin card set. When this happened, a deck known as Ravager Affinity utilized a unique set of synergies, rose to the top of the scene and absolutely devoured the Meta. It was unstoppable, and smashed even decks designed specifically to counter it at about a 60:40 win rate. Player participation in tournaments cratered and an outflux of players began.

To quote:
“And so began an exodus of players and casual support for Magic because no casual, innovative or “fun” deck could survive in the world of Ravager Affinity. It was faster than the fastest aggro deck, had a continuous stream of gas and answers in response to any form of control or hate cards and had a relatively low learning curve for most beginners while guaranteeing success. Worse still, unlike today with formats like Commander to satisfy people who decide to wait out the storm, 2004 Magic did not have such a luxury.”

Guild Wars 2 does not have anything for PvP players to wait out the storm until February with. The only other PvP type (Stronghold, which I love), is limited to a single map, and even that is currently gone. This is an emergency situation. The Pro scene is dull to watch and even the competitors find it detestable. Viewership is cratering. Casual PvP is a nightmare thanks to the combination of MMR and Leagues. The worst thing that can be said about a game is now the buzzphrase that everyone is using. It’s not fun.

Take a look at this article, written by Wizards itself: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/eight-plus-one-2005-03-04
You can replace nearly every word in it with the appropriate Guild Wars analog and it will still ring true. Here is an altered version of the most telling paragraph:

One of the most kitten ing statements that can be made about a game is that it is not fun, and that’s exactly what we’ve been hearing lately about the meta. Sure, ever since elite builds first showed up after the release of HoT,… people complained about it. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence in my inbox of people quitting GW2, threatening to quit, or stepping away from PvP for some amount of time because of the dark cloud of the current meta—and believe me, each of those emails made me unhappy—but recently the evidence of the general public’s disdain for what the format looks like has gone from anecdotal to measurable. With some of the biggest PvP events of the year—Regionals, Nationals, and Worlds—on the horizon, how many more players could we continue to frustrate and alienate?

This is what’s happening to you. Fix the meta, and swifty, or you’ll suffer the same if not worse. I understand it takes time to balance things. PvE and knockoff effects must be considered. If you want to save the ESL scene, take a drastic step. Something like limiting teams to one of each class or banning certain amulets/runes may seem drastic, but at this point you desperately need a fix and don’t have the luxury of time.

I write this because I love this game, and I really enjoy the PvP. I had an absolute blast at PAX East last year watching the ESL World Championships. The Shatterer statue and Rytlock plushy I won reside on my desk and couch respectively. I want the scene to thrive and for my friend and I to share drinks and laughs/shouts as we wreck face/enjoy the tournaments. Please listen to your fans and communicate with them. We don’t make this noise because we hate you. We genuinely want this game to thrive, and your silence makes us feel more and more alienated now than ever before.

Azukas.1426:

Missed abjured game what was toker’s build?

I honestly don’t remember the specifics. Final Form was using Dual Mesmer/Dual Rev and the Abjured won via a close match in the first game (said they were experimenting with a few things that didn’t work), and then in the second game, just abso-kitten-lutely dismantled Final form. Toker himself was pretty much unstoppable. The moment a mesmer blew their cooldowns, Toker and co. would down and cleave the kitten out of them. There is plenty of good to be found outside of the reigning meta, and I’m disappointed that The Abjured seem to to be the only crew figuring it out.

Thief > Bunker Mesmer
Toker IS the meta.

Thief > Bunker Mesmer/Condi Rev
#TokerGod420

Anyone who hangs out at range in PVP and lets the attack hit them deserves what’s coming to them. Seriously, if you give half an attempt at closing with an enemy, you negate most of a Hammer Revenant’s toolbox. Learn to adapt your stale strategies and you won’t keep losing to skill spam.

Rym.1469:

As for the Hammer, the only things that needs fixing is that CoR can hit same player with two cascading impacts at once if the character model is unlucky enough to be in that “sweet spot” which leads to instakills on builds without toughness.
Aside from that behaviour which may need fixing, Hammer is totally fine, has clear counters and figures as L2P issue.
If you run from hammer revenant or try to range him and then come here to complain, I have no sympathy for you.

This is well put. Anyone who hangs out at range and lets a hammer Revenant wail on them gets pretty much exactly what they deserve.

Lothirieth.3408:

Sajuuk.5706:

Between the mithrillium I had saved up and that my friends let me use, my total gold sunk into the precursor was maybe 200 gold. I’d hoarded materials obsessively since they announced precursor crafting, and it paid off in spades.

Wrong. All those mats increased in value. You essentially still spent money because you chose to use them instead of sell them. Your cost was the same as everyone else’s.

Either way, hoarding materials was obviously and clearly the correct decision, because everything went up in value, my lower initial investment increased in value. My overall cost was significantly less because of when I began to hoard. If my initial hoard of, for example, 300g worth of mats became worth 600g, I’ve saved a ton of money, time, and effort.

If I’d sold everything I’d still not have had enough money to buy Dusk (even with all the deldrimor it’s still more expensive to buy). Using my own mithrillium lowers the cost appreciably because the cost of mats to craft ascended materials is still less than they sell for due to the daily lockout. In the end, yes, I consumed the same value of material as everyone else, but I spent vastly less gold accumulating that value.

I like how there are costumes based on the human Lore, but pleaaase no Kormir! Good god, she was the worst part of Nightfall by far. See exhibit A:

Am I the only person who crafted their precursor using piles and piles of mats that they had from before the HoT release? Seriously, I barely needed to buy anything outside of mithril. Between the mithrillium I had saved up and that my friends let me use, my total gold sunk into the precursor was maybe 200 gold. I’d hoarded materials obsessively since they announced precursor crafting, and it paid off in spades. Getting Dusk as soon as they fixed the modniir bug was very satisfying.

The fight is buggy as hell, unacceptably so. I only managed to complete it because when we all wiped at the end for some reason the boss didn’t reset phases, even though the blighted NPCs began to respawn. I’m not going anywhere near it again to help others until that embarrassment is fixed.

Seriously, ANet, I love the expansion, but I can’t believe for a minute that you play-tested that fight, because if you did you did, then either your QC team is an embarrassment or you are OK with foisting incredibly and blatantly broken content on paying customers.

Twice-Told Legend is only for having two of the SAME legend. No bug here, alas, just lunacy that would make the Mad King proud.

Modniir’s Ruin is still bugged after the latest patch.

I’m having a different issue. At about 10% health Blighted Canach bugs, and becomes invincible. Nothing, even reflecting grenades at him by hiding behind normal Canach, brings him out of this.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

Kessex Liberator looks like it should work correctly, though it does depend on other events in the map being completed before it will reset.

Brisban Liberator: it’s likely the case that the Hillstead events should also work, but the collection is currently looking at the enslavement event at Joy’s end (and the subsequent rescue if the event fails).

Overlord’s Defeat and Modniir’s ruin have issues- I’ve identified the problems and we’ll hopefully have them fixed soon.

Frizz’s energy- I can’t see any issues with this, and it’s working fine when I test it out- it works with both the low half-wall as well as the big rotating wall.

For the events breaking, we’re looking into them- they’re working fine for me on the development servers, but hopefully we’ll be able to find the issues.

Is there an ETA on the blocking bugs? I am loving the expansion but the fact that it’s still holding me back is getting to be deeply frustrating. I want to be able to know what to buy, what I can sell, ect, instead of hording like a pack rat and hoping the market favors me.

How long can this take to fix? It’s getting very frustrating, especially as we lose advantage in the market as prices change and we still don’t know what we need.

You just need to wait for the vizers chest even to respawn. The wait sucks but there’s no bug.

Game is still hard crashing when I try to open rewards chests.

Confirmed, same here.

Killing Ulgoth Modniir is also bugged, he doesn’t give you the right trophy for the collection. I was able to complete Bauxite no problem, however.

The Legendary Collection for Twilight I: Experimental Nightsword has a blocking bug. Killing Modniir Ulgoth in the Harathi Hinterlands does not grant the Modniir’s Ruin achievement. No one in the group got it. People saw Overlords defeat pop up instead. Please fix, this is really frustrating as I’ve been waiting ages to start work on this.

It’s a bug that lots of people are having. It doesn’t matter how long you hold down the fire key, the cannonball always explodes the instant it leaves the cannon. There’s a 70+ post thread below this one of people who are having map completion blocked by this. The bug seems to have appeared with the recent major patch.

Still bugged, please fix this. It’s blocking world completion and is profoundly frustrating. Even an acknowledgment of “hey, yeah, we know it’s broke”, would be better than this silence.

What surprises me is Anet’s general silence on this issue. Much like Bon Jovi, they are really awesome at what they do… on occasion. There never was any explanation for why these rings are the exception to the salvage rule and excess ones become dead weight. At the very least we can make logical guess to the account binding.

Glektor.2934:

For the same reason you can’t print your own dollar bills.

Money is controlled by the governments. I’m sure the Tyrian treasury department mint stamps the legal gold coins with their seal. Your unmarked gold is counterfeit.

The intrinsic problem with this statement is that dollars are valueless outside of the promise of being legal tender for all debts public and private. We’ve moved on from the gold standard, where the dollar was tied to and represented a given amount of gold. Gold coins in a society are valuable because they are made of gold. Gold coins minted in one section of Tyria are usable elsewhere because of this fact, or else they’d be valueless. It’s extremely unlikely that all the races mint the same currency. The economy of Tyria only functions because coins have intrinsic value, unlike the dollar. So, going into the market and plopping down a bar of solid gold should be a legitimate buying technique, you’d just need to figure out the value of the bar by the weight versus the weight of the gold coins (against how much gold is actually in them, since that’s where the value of the coins come from).

Thus, I posit that the only reason you can’t break that gold bar into coins is because fantasy world logic (or lack thereof) to stop you from destroying the economy of the game. I mean really, you can’t look at the in game economy in a logical light of value or else the whole thing falls into hilarious shambles.

I am deeply concerned about this trashing the quality of PUGs. The comforting thing about the high level fractals right now is you DON’T get terrible players because you don’t get to fractal level 30 without knowin what you’re doing. I don’t want players with no idea what they’re doing trashing the higher level fractal attempts. I know exactly what this will turn into: Link your AR gear before joining. It’s what I’ll end up doing. I don’t care if it’s elitism. Fractals is a long dungeon, and I don’t want unskilled players wasting my time because he wants to run with a higher pug.

Oranisagu.3706:

Sajuuk.5706:

This definitely is a bad case of RNG. To everyone complaining about stealth nerfs, I just got the ventari and princess on my first try, and the golem on my second try. There’s definitely just a series of people getting either lucky or unlucky, and getting likely jilted by the Gambler’s Fallacy. I’m sure I don’t need to explain it here, but after 50 failed attempts at a tonic, the 51st has the exact same chance of getting you the tonic as any other attempt. There are no nerfs involved here, just terrible, wretched luck. If we really want to prove the stats on this, someone make a google docs spreadsheet and we’ll chart this out properly. I’ll even run the stats myself, I’ve got professional statistics experience and software.

and another one doesn’t understand statistics.. YES, every single run viewed seperately in itself has the same chance as the run before or the run after. BUT the chance of having a number of runs within a certain path (say 50 fails and 1 correct) are extremely slim. in fact, it’s a lot less probable than having 20 fails and 1 correct, if the chance is below 1:20 – and the numbers do suggest its below that ratio (only very few unlucky people got more than 15 fail runs).
I know statistics and probability isn’t that simple, but still.. please try to at least think about it before you post, it’s not magic, just math..

The case is, however, we don’t know what the odds to get the endless are. We’re looking at a massive game population. Once you spread out the low possibility of getting nothing 20 times in a row over the game population, the likelihood of it occurring increases. Add on to the fact that you’re more likely to get people who have this poor luck posting on the forums to complain about it, and it shows that there’s really nothing remarkable going on here, other than a unsurprising and likely skewed section of the game population posting on the forums about the bad luck which is bound to occur when dealing with populations on this size. Think about it this way. Let’s say the odds of getting a toy are 1 in 10 (I have no clue what they actually are). The chance of getting nothing after 20 attempts is ~12%. For the people getting nothing after 30 attempts, it’s ~4%. If we’re generous and say that you have a 1/4 chance of getting the endless tonic, the odds of getting nothing after 20 tries are .3%, which, spread over a population of thousands upon thousands of players, is bound to happen.

This definitely is a bad case of RNG. To everyone complaining about stealth nerfs, I just got the ventari and princess on my first try, and the golem on my second try. There’s definitely just a series of people getting either lucky or unlucky, and getting likely jilted by the Gambler’s Fallacy. I’m sure I don’t need to explain it here, but after 50 failed attempts at a tonic, the 51st has the exact same chance of getting you the tonic as any other attempt. There are no nerfs involved here, just terrible, wretched luck. If we really want to prove the stats on this, someone make a google docs spreadsheet and we’ll chart this out properly. I’ll even run the stats myself, I’ve got professional statistics experience and software.

So, I like running fractals quite a bit. I like the sense of progression and the challenge beating higher and higher fractal levels brings. What throws me off, however, is what to do with my excessive number of ascended rings that I don’t need. The Pristine Relics are a nice touch and all, and I’ll be using them, since I can finally get the rings I want, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m sitting on 4 ascended rings on top of the two I use that I have no use for. I can’t sell them on the TP because they’re account bound, I don’t have high level alts to send them to, and I can’t even salvage them like I could lower rarity items. Does anyone have any idea what I can do with them that’s useful other than turning them into a pittance of silver at the vendor? Also, is there any reason that we can’t salvage them? This one really confuses me, I have absolutely no idea why A-net would make them unsalvagable.

What? ME!? With HIM?! Oh, no, honey, hell no, that must have been a clone.

I disagree very much with the negative sentiment in this thread. Imo, the Mesmer is one of the best rezzers in the game, and this skill is part of that. Not only do we have access to invisibility if we need to resurrect an ally, we also have Time Warp for AoE double-speed reviving, and distortion for invulnerability.
Illusion of Life is like whipped cream on top of all this. People forget that it’s an AoE skill with respectable coverage and a fast cast time. In a close PvP match, it can very quickly turn the tide of battle. If an ally (or several) is about to go completely down in a hostile spot, it gives them a chance to escape to a safer location. The only place where I’ve ever encountered issues with people not being able to rally fully is on bosses, and even then, you’ve still likely gotten your group member to safety.

So much talk about PRX. If there was a guild I had to attribute the most credit to for bringing SoS to where it is, it’d be MERC. The organization and commitment is supreme.

I’m going to echo the sentiment in here. The offensive slots are useless. All it means is that my Solaria is costing me extra time for no extra advantage. The +5 stat advantage is useless. I know you guys don’t want grind. 250 tier 6 mats for +5 stats or 250 ectos for +5 infusion seems to be the biggest grindy-time-waster in the game.

Unless I’m wrong, of course. I’d love to be educated in how the possibility +5 of one offensive stat is worth that much extra time and if obtained will allow me to dominate face in WvW.

Could you explain how the system works? Several people in my guild got a second box. Not that I should complain, because I got one originally too, but now I’m feeling left out! Mostly I’m just curious though.

And some people who were there got the chest and got it again.

I don’t know how many of you were in the Beta tests, but I remember the first time I ever went into WvW. First thing to murder me wasn’t another player’s weapon, but the hooves of some deer cracking my skull. They’ve been waiting and biding their time to take back the WvW maps ever since.

azurrei.5691:

someone trying to corner the market – not going to work so well

looks like someone bought most of all the supply about 2 hours ago

Just say no to buying it and they will lose a bunch of gold

This sounds about right. I have a friend who’s been buying it along with ectos as a form of speculation, since he’s expecting the prices to keep going up on both. Every now and then the price on something will rise, then crash, I honestly think the amount of speculation in this game is hilarious.

I’m going to have a fun time trying to figure out how to make my CoF set look festive outside of making my Sylvari look like a Yule Log

Great if you want to be a “jack of all trades”, but i belive in Min-Maxing to the MAX. Every piece of my gear is glittering with ruby orbs, which allow me to do phenomenal damage at a very reasonable price. The other orbs shouldn’t be disregarded either. If you really want to excel at something, I say find the orb that fits your build best and go to town.

Nope, you’re just unlucky. The RNG is a fickle kitten. I got nothing for at least a week straight, then I got 3 rings in a row. Keep at it!

With the underground fractal, I have fewer problems with mob HP and more with just the sheer number of mobs which spawn, particularly for the bomb placement/mining cannon. It’s very normal to see a party wipe right after getting the door open because of the number of mobs that spawn. Doesn’t make the fractal harder, just makes sure that everyone dies after achieving the goal. Frustrating design, for sure.

Fair enough, that’s a poor choice of words. It certainly can’t be helping the situation, however.

Mostly I’m thinking about the following, which can’t be helping the markets:

Question: Ascended gear widens the time gap between exotic and Legendary weapons by making Legendary ingredients more expensive. Since Ascended gear is so expensive, the time gap between Ascended and Legendary looks to be larger than the pre-Lost Shores gap between exotic and Legendary.

How does that make sense ?

Answer: Hi Bila,

I agree that the crafting materials required for Ascended Gear are too much of a grind and we are looking to balance the requirements in a manner that is fair for all involved and we had always intended for their to be multiple ways to get Ascended Gear it just didn’t make it the FotM build.

Chris

and

Question: Any plans to have high-end items feel more like adventure than grind/trading post? I like to go to zones and do cool things, battle through a DE chain I’ve never seen before, things like that. Piling up stacks of 250 high-end items and dumping them into the Mystic Forge really isn’t my thing.

Answer: Hi Otter,

Yes definitely. That is most certainly our intention, one that has been misrepresented in the itemization of the FotM.

Chris

Gold may be easier to get, but not nearly in line with how much prices have gone up.

It’s a good question. Perhaps prices finally hit the point where people have stopped buying?

John Smith.4610:

The lost shores event was not the only modification to precursors.

We’re tracking the changing economy. The changed prices come from a lack of supply relative to demand, not from a substantial increase in inflation (this is apparent when you look at the TP as a whole bundle of good rather than just a few items).

It wasn’t the only modification, but the increased chance of getting them from the forge has proved irrelevant since prices are now worse for the precursors than ever.

Also, I suspected what you just stated about the lack of supply relative to demand. But that’s a problem created by the fact that you guys added new recipes that require huge amounts of the same mats that everything else needed. The huge increase in prices was entirely precipitated by the Devs deciding that everything needs 250 ectos/tier 6 mats to be upgraded/created. It’s making the grid worse than ever, as someone stated very succinctly on the recent reddit AMA. Ascended items can’t act as an in-between for the legendaries when they use all the same items, drive up prices, and thus make getting the legendary even LONGER to take, especially if you try to work on the ascended gear.

Uncategorized Fractal

I used to love this place. I really did. It was my favorite fractal. Sure, it has no alternate paths, but it was so funny and clever and pretty that I really didn’t care. BUT NOW YOU BRING ME NOTHING BUT PAIN. Seriously. Pre-difficulty level 10, this place is enjoyable. After 10, it’s frustrating. Not hard, frustrating. There’s a huge difference, ArenaNet. Things that are difficult can be mitigated through experience and player skill. Frustrating things can not and make your players agitated and miserable. That’s what the harpies with AOE Knock-back are. Frustrating. You can’t see the red rings on the tiny platforms, and the fall inconsistently either downs or outright kills you. Even at fractal level 20+, I see players falling ALL THE TIME. It makes the kitten fractal take ages compared to the others, while adding no true difficulty to be differentiated by skill, and certainly adding no enjoyment.

The bosses, on the other hand, are fine. I like the changes to Old Tom and the Asura. I demands the player pay more attention and coordinate with the other players. That’s what good scaling should be like. Not frustrating invisible AOE knockbacks.

Solid Ocean

This is without a doubt, for me, the most gorgeous fractal. I loved the jade ocean in the previous game, and to see it again with the new graphics is glorious. I can’t get enough of the place. I can only pray that we get to see the jade ocean again in an expansion. There isn’t much to say about the first part, since it’s pretty short.

The fight with the Jade Maw is awesome. It tests both your ability to pay attention to yourself and your team. Once agony kicks in, it can be pretty brutal, but it doesn’t change the fight too much as long as people have some infusion (at fractal 20, I saw one unfortunate die every time it came out because he hadn’t gotten a ring yet). I once even 3-manned this fight after we lost two players. It’s a good sign of how well designed the fight is. It can suck when you’re downed near a tentacle and the knockback ruins every attempt to get you up from downed, but that’s fairly minor.

My only real gripe is I wish there were more boss fractals like this. The other fractals are constantly mixing it up. Why not have more world boss fractals to mix in? It’d be fun, and a chance to show off what visually spectacular ideas the dev teams can come up with. I love these huge epic boss fights, and mixing a few more in would keep the ending of the even fractals more intense, epic, and varied.

If I were to list from favorite to least favorite, it would probably be something like this:
Solid Ocean
Cliffside
Swampland
Volcanic
Snowblind
Urban Battlegrounds
Aquatic Ruins (Specifically, the boredom monster)
Underground Facility
Uncategorized (Only on difficulty 10+)

I’d love to see what other players think, and please post your favorite to least favorite fractals!

Swampland Fractal

This is a fractal I’m always happy to see. This is probably because I am a Mesmer though, and may not echo the sentiments of other players. Overall, I consider the experience to be short but sweet. I like the nature of the first area, trying to navigate a swamp full of traps while you try to relocate the wisps and the swamp changes around you. It’s pretty reasonable too, once you’ve learned the location or the tripwires (or if you have a Mesmer who can portal everyone and make the first part a joke). My only big gripe on this part of the fractal is the tripwires can be very very hard to see if you’re running the game on low graphical settings. If you’re running subsample, you better have them memorized because you won’t see them coming.

The Bosses are pretty enjoyable. Mossman is the harder of the two, but not by a significant margin. Both fights seem to emphasize movement and close attention to the behavior of the boss (both telegraph their moves). This is great, it allows an attentive single player to make a large difference in the fight (with a well placed reflection). On the higher difficulties, this is magnified, as it should be. It becomes more and more important to see what attacks are coming and pay attention to where you are standing, which is the proper way to scale difficulty.

Underground Facility Fractal

Whether or not I like this fractal is entirely dependent on the group I am with. This fractal is best described as unforgiving. It only takes one bad player to goof things up, and make the entire fractal drag out. This wouldn’t be so bad if the fractal didn’t stand out as taking SO much longer than any of the others. From standing on the buttons, to placing bombs, to the final boss, all it really takes is one goof-up player to make everyone else miserable. I can say I’ve been fortunate enough for this not to happen often, but it’s still an issue.

This is an issue that heads straight for the bosses. One lousy player can wreck the fight, and it is unforgiving, particularly the Mining Suit. Don’t get me wrong, I love a hard fight. But the healing generally just makes the fight drag out if there’s a screw up in your party. I will grudgingly admit that little needs changing in this fractal, since it’s so heavily dependent on player skill. But it would be nice if its length was brought more in line with the others.

Urban Battlegrounds Fractal

I mind this fractal a lot less than I did when first started running it. Like a few of the others, it’s entirely dependent on how familiar you are with it. Once everyone knows the paths to run and what they’re doing, it’s pretty simple. I thought I’d have more to say on this fractal, but even on higher difficulty levels it’s more or less the same. The changing paths through the streets are basically irrelevant because everyone takes the shortcut via the walls.

The Boss is pretty hard once agony kicks in. It’s pretty important to stay on the move. But really, all I take away from this fight is how TERRIBLE the voice acting for the boss is. Generally speaking, I feel like humans have the worst voice acting in the game, and this guy is a shining example. “YOU WILL NEVER CONQUER ASCALON. DURRRRRHGHGIGAJFLEAJFEHHGGGGGHGHGHGH.” It sounds like he’s choking to death on his on phlegm.

Volcanic Fractal

Another fractal I quite enjoy. It does seem to, however, get disproportionately harder than the other fractals as the difficulty level increases. Early on, it’s almost a joke. Once you get up towards 20+, it takes on a very different feel. Mob damage is pretty massive, and the boss becomes particularly vicious when the lava elementals pop out. It’s not a bad thing per-se, just rather jarring. The rolling magmatic rocks are a cool addition, but rezzing someone who dies there is a nightmare and can drive a group to wipe entirely just to move past it.

The boss is fairly easy on lower levels, though I do quite like the mechanic of constant movement. Makes you consider pretty carefully what skills and traits you take with you. On higher levels, it’s a pretty concerted team effort, since surviving the lava elementals becomes tantamount to beating the boss.

WARNING: THIS IS GOING TO BE A LOT OF TEXT

So, after having played excessive amounts of Fractals of the mists, I’ve decided I can finally compile a good deal of my thoughts on it and it’s various difficulties all in one place, by each individual fractal. This will be done in alphabetic order (save for the Solid Ocean which will be done last). I’d also like to preface that this dungeon has some of my favorite visual design in the game. Sections like the dark forest in the Snowblind Fractal are gorgeous and should be the new standard of design quality.

Aquatic Ruins Fractal

Whenever I see this fractal show up on higher difficulties, I’m typically grateful, because it is incredibly easy compared to the others. For the most part, the design is fine. The first time I saw the Dolphin section, I cracked up especially hard, and it’s still not quite lost it’s charm. It can be frustrating effectively getting 2-shot by the krait, but since one person can reach the checkpoint and get the rest there via respawn, it’s not too bad.

Generally, the Deep Water section isn’t too bad either. It’s mostly dependent on how good your team is at staying together. If a player with light gets ahead or the party becomes fractured, it’s pretty easy for the whole group to get literally devoured. I’d take the dolphin over it most days though, because it’s more forgiving on a less coordinated party, and you never know what you’ll get with a PUG.

The boss fight for this fractal sucks. It’s easy, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also incredibly boring. I remember reading from a dev post on the forums that the dungeons designer had been drinking when he came up with the dolphin section. I suspect that he was hung over when he developed the “Jellyfish Beast” (criminy, even the name is boring). It’s very hard to die on this fight, even on Fractal difficulty 20+ it’s possible to virtually afk. The overall problem is the boss has WAY too much HP and does very little that’s actually interesting. The aspect of kiting the boss into the cages doesn’t really do that much extra damage either, it’s simply a method of salving the sheer boredom this fight induces. I once, on Fractal Difficulty 16, LITERALLY fell asleep for 3 minutes on this boss, and was perfectly fine when I woke up. The boss is also visually boring, being a completely unaltered regular jellyfish of larger size. ArenaNet, you can do MUCH better than this, we both know that.

Cliffside Fractal

This is probably one of my favorite fractals. I affectionately remember the first time I ran it, in which no one had any clue on how to damage the seals with the hammer. The mechanic for the dungeon (the hammer and it’s ever increasing penalties to the wielder) is interesting, and the dungeon is visually stunning. Even conceptually, the dungeon is very cool, and makes me deeply curious about the nature and origin of the chained colossus. The fights can be difficult, but are all very manageable once you figure out the proper strategy for them, even on higher difficulty levels.

I only really have one gripe about this fractal: There’s no alternate pathing. The other fractals usually have some built in way to mix it up to keep things fresh, but the Cliffside Fractal lacks this, and it gets old decently quickly if it keeps coming up.

Snowblind Fractal

For the most part, this is a very enjoyable fractal. Visually, I consider it to be one of the most stunning, particularly with blizzard effects and the darkened forest. It’s something you see very little of in games, and I’d love to see more of it. The Frostbite mechanic keeps you on your toes, and it’s always important to make sure there’s warmth you can get back to. The first section reminds me of The Wall from game of thrones, a massive construct of sheer ice, and I’ve goofed up and called the Sons of Svanir “Wildlings” on more than one occasion.

Most of the fights in the Fractal seem pretty well done, but can be very unforgiving on higher difficulty levels. This is fine, save for what I consider to be one thing: The absolutley absurd range on the AoE knockback of the Ice Elemental (excellent visual design on that, btw, love to see things mixed up). It’s OK during the fight, but to be constantly getting knocked back and over on your kitten as you try to REACH the boss is pretty obnoxious and doesn’t contribute to the difficulty of the fight at all. Just to toss it in again, I love when it casts you into the blizzard. Fantastic way to mix up the fight.

The final boss isn’t too bad in either direction. In fact, It’s one of the easiest bosses in Fractals, but unlike the Boredom monster known as the Jellyfish Beast, the fight keeps you on your toes and forces you to pay attention. Much like the Cliffside Fractal, I just wish this had multiple paths to keep it more interesting on multiple playthroughs.

This stems from the problem, Robert, that you haven’t bothered to address yet, the incredibly fracturing nature of this dungeon for party-making.