Guild Wars 2

Let me start by saying I’m not writing this from a place of frustration. I think A-net hit a home run with fractal dungeons, but I’m wondering if the rest of the community shares the viewpoint i’m about to talk about.

Last night was a typical night for our dungeon group. We ran the next level fractal (42) so that we could challenge ourselves and reach that next tier of difficulty. We really enjoy the content and just have a great time all around.

Despite not being in it for the money one common topic of conversation is just how crappy the drops/loot are for such difficult content.

It just doesn’t seem to scale the way one would expect.

I’m speaking mostly of the rare, exotics, fractal skins and their drop rate. You get plenty more greens and blues. Once you’re level 40 Personal Frac level you likely don’t need any of the common drops you’d see:

• Shards – you don’t need anymore
• Frac relics – you’re good on bag space and likely have your back piece. Skill points are situational.
• Ascended Rings – you’ve gotten your two rings and probably rings for alts
• Fractal skins – I’ve gotten 1 skin out of hundreds of runs. Maybe that’s just kitten luck but the story is the same for many friends.

At this point you’re simply hoping to make a little gold on the side while enjoying the dungeon.

My Point

Would you like to see Arenanet increase the benefits of running high level fractals? Im not suggesting they should be so profitable as to kitten off the CoF speed runners, but I do think maybe a slight tweak is in order. Anyone who’s spent a lot of time trying to kill Shaman in volcanic 40 only to get a few blues and a green feels my pain.

Some options

• A chance at an ascended amulet or accessory after level X
• Slightly more elevated exotic/rare drop rates: I’ve gotten as many as 6-7 rares in a run, but i’ve also gone countless runs with 1 rare or less, some long and painful. I think i’ve gotten fewer than 5 exotics in total from all of my runs. I do not run magic find because the content is challenging and I like to min/max.

My favorite option

Fractal armor: Similar to other dungeons this would give us something to spend relics on other than more bags.
If I had it my way you’d have to reach a specific frac reward level to buy specific gear skins and those skins would be available to that character only. In a game where we dont have the gear treadmill this would give us some sort of “visual” bragging right saying “hey I do this tough content pretty often on this specific character”.

I can just see some guardian pimped out in all “level 40 fractal armor” getting asked advice from new guardians who want to run fracs. Hell, id ask him questions.

It would also give us zero advantage, which is the idea right?