Guild Wars 2

I can agree that the risk/reward is kind of out of wack between melee and ranged, so having the kitty golems target players further from the boss would be a decent trade-off. I like that the first two boss autos do decent damage though because it forces people to be more aware of their positioning, and also makes maintaining agro on someone who can handle it actually important.

Anecdotally it seems like the biggest factor (and likely the only) factor for agro is distance. I’ve found if i step back at all out of melee (like even just 400-500 range) he very often will turn on to the other melee dps. Once he drops agro he seems to stick on a target for 10ish seconds (with or without the prey icon) even if you get up in his face again. For a really smooth kill the tank ideally will never, ever move – the boss straddles 2 pads where he spawns so it’s easy to keep him permanently debuffed . Commanders chrono + druid or (le gasp!) minstrels chrono would be the easiest way, but guard can also work. It just takes some sustain because you will end up facetanking most of his non-daze autos.

The fight is infinitely easier with a dedicated tank – you can maintain agro 100% of the time if the tank stays in melee and no one gets farther then 1000 ish range. If everyone is positioned correctly the fixate mechanic never comes into play. I’m still not sure if toughness effects his agro but having some doesn’t hurt since you’ll be eating 2/3’s of his autos. The 360 radius on his 3rd aa does make melee kind of tedious for the dps since you have to keep backing up slightly, although in non-pugs a guardian and chrono tank can rotate group distort, aegis and stability.

The fact that the boss looses conditions when he goes invuln is probably unnecessarily punishing to condi – if they could give him an unstrippable version of resistance that would be better. Since toughness scaling is gone, though, there’s really no reason not to just bring a power team comp to this fractal. I wouldn’t mind if they made the lazer floors dodgeable, but I don’t think its an unfair mechanic since you’re given some visual warning and one or two ticks from the floor won’t down you by itself.

“if the primary cost was a token instead of gold, we wouldn’t be able to use either Pristines or Research Pages as players have had to long time to stockpile those already” – Anet_Sean on reddit. . I’m playing devil’s advocate here because obviously they consider it an issue, and I think even if you disagree that it is an issue it doesn’t need to be make or break. You’d still get to spend your pristines, and as you said if you have a mass stockpile your probably sitting on a bunch of ascendeds anyway and don’t “need” a bunch more.

Definitely an artificial gate would be tedious but I think they are worried about devaluing ascended gear in an abstract sense even if it doesn’t directly effect the gold market. I guess my thought is, if the timegate would make 100 pristine option more palpable to anet, would it really be so bad?

Artemis Thuras.8795:

rfdarko.4639:

Maybe they could make it so you can only buy one ascended item from the vendor per week – that way it would work in effect more like the raid vendor does where its just a slow small drip of ascendeds that can supplement crafting (or, replace crafting if you are very patient). Relics need a long term sink beyond the one off purchases of the infinite pots, and a daily/weekly gated vendor could provide that without fractal vets totally crashing the market.

Don’t the time gated journal pages basically already do that? Though It’s more than a week for most pieces isn’t (stupid censor) it?

The problem is there are people who have saved up the pages since they came out nearly a year ago, so it would be a time gate for people just starting but vets could just dump their savings. Having an artificial time gate solves the problem of the vendor being implemented with an already existing token system. The same goes for pristines. In terms of impeding veterans, you kind of have to if you want the currencies to have any value at all. I had nearly 3k relics saved prepatch and even I don’t want a system where i could dump all of them day one and get mass amounts of ascended gear instantly. I also don’t want the pristine cost to be so high, just to compensate for people like me, that in alienates people just starting. I’d rather have the chance to slowly over the course of months offload my relic savings in a way that doesn’t hurt the market or the value of ascendeds, rather than continue to let them pile up because anet can’t balance a token system that people have been saving from for nearly 4 years.

Maybe they could make it so you can only buy one ascended item from the vendor per week – that way it would work in effect more like the raid vendor does where its just a slow small drip of ascendeds that can supplement crafting (or, replace crafting if you are very patient). Relics need a long term sink beyond the one off purchases of the infinite pots, and a daily/weekly gated vendor could provide that without fractal vets totally crashing the market.

SlyDevil.3952:

rfdarko.4639:

The main issue i have with the poison is that the damage extends farther then the visual effect, to the point where even if you are trying to max melee enemies you can get hit by the edge of it.

Max melee is around 242, effective max melee is around 200, the radius of the circles was listed as 80.

I didn’t have as much trouble with the bosses so it could have been the way the mobs moved around in large groups that made it look like one big puddle. I’m still not a huge fan of how the visual affect reads but it’s probably something that will feel more intuitive in time.

The main issue i have with the poison is that the damage extends farther then the visual effect, to the point where even if you are trying to max melee enemies you can get hit by the edge of it. Pulling mobs tight together and spamming blinds can help since the source of the poison is the mob; the issue with that on cliffside is there are chanters constantly trickling in, sliming thing up as they come even before you have a chance to pull & burst.

The other thing that made it kind of frustrating was that combined with the merging fractal instability. Skyhammer lazer covering the entire platform while trying to no die from fire and poison on the chest seal, getting mai’s cannon shots fill the arm seal corridor as your trying to dodge away from slime puddles… My group had a lot of laughs last night at how unlucky we were sometimes but I imagining that kind of stuff will get old.

I’d like it if the radius of the poison was reduced a little bit to better match the aoe, or at least give it a circular indicator because trying to melee at all is a pixel perfect dance with death currently. I’m also not a fan of the champion rabbit as a random spawn, he’s too easily obscured by particle effect and very often has the same effect as “one party member downs randomly to nothing”. It doesn’t feel like it has the same counter-play as mossman which you can see coming and wont 100-0 you instantly.

To trivialize the bloomhunger fight, simply bring a rev, druid, and a few classes with high burst like thief, guard, ele etc. Druid can bring both electric wyvern and moa. Moa does ~600 bb damage, wyvern can do up to 700 if he’s facing correctly. At tier 4 the bar for both his shake and his pound have 1000 health, so the other 4 people only need to contribute 400ish damage – easy for a rev to take care of, not to mention any random soft cc that might get put on him.

Even in a pug its pretty easy to burst him down in 10-20s if you cc both bars. The only thing to worry about is having enough situational awareness to see when and where he leaps after the onslaught phase and making sure everyone is ready to dps when the bar breaks.

The problem I have with the new bloomy is that a single mechanic is the difference between a total clusterkitten, or so easy it’s boring. I say this is a problem only because I think when it comes to balancing the fractal it will be hard to make it challenging for organized groups without making it frustrating to the point of unfun for pugs. The end boss of chaos is better because there some nuance to tanking him correctly, rather then just breaking the bar = win. If there was some organizational check in the onslaught phase that could make the fight go faster, (rather than just waiting out a timer) that could give a challenge to coordinated groups without making it unwinnable for pugs.

As much as I want to be positive because YES FINALLY, I’m not sure going the re-used asset route is very reassuring (on a superficial level at least) after years of no new content. Also the prospect of having story closure honestly terrifies me because I don’t want fractals to become legacy content like dungeons. I think even the most positive person can admit that being a fan of fractals has been a rough ride, and it’s hard to let go of the fear and cynicism after so long. I’m excited for the guild chat, though – it will be refreshing to hear about the future of fractals from the people actually creating it, in the way we get for raids.

It’s not a huge deal necessarily, however – I think it’s worth talking about because I would never want a situation like this again. Even if I swallow my frustration, accept that its just a set of ascended armor and none of the skins are that great and and and…What is gained from it being RNG? Like really, what is good about it? What’s the value in making people wait an arbitrary number of weeks for the reward they’ve already basically earned?

I just don’t think “I didn’t let it bother me, it’s no big deal” is a very compelling argument for not just making the drop chance guaranteed, or making it purchasable with magnatite shards, or something. There’s plenty of RNG in raid rewards already. If Anet doesn’t want to take the time to change it because its a relatively minor issue then that’s one thing, but if the criticism makes them think more carefully when making future collections, then I’d still count that as a win.

Aceofsppades.6873:

rfdarko.4639:

I’m really disappointed that one of the first tier collection items for this wing is a weekly gated rng drop. I was looking forward to finishing up the collection and getting my set of armor after progression. Instead I need to wait X number of weeks till I happen to get the drop, while friends of mine in my raid group are already well on their way through the second tier. After getting nothing but exotics from the bosses, it felt pretty bad.

What drop is rng?

You need to get a drop from one of the three chests in the twisted castle – I opened all three and didn’t get one.

I’m really disappointed that one of the first tier collection items for this wing is a weekly gated rng drop. I was looking forward to finishing up the collection and getting my set of armor after progression. Instead I need to wait X number of weeks till I happen to get the drop, while friends of mine in my raid group are already well on their way through the second tier. After getting nothing but exotics from the bosses, it felt pretty bad.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Did you even read the OP?

yep. A simple “All welcome” doesn’t always register with people, especially if they are in a hurry to find a group and just wanna grab the first lfg that pops up. Specifically putting “newbies” or “first timers” or something like that in the description better deter players who kick for low AP. Adding hearts or smilelies help as well. The fluffier the description the better. I’ve recently been doing fractals with a friend who has ~1k AP and this is the best filter method we’ve found so far.

Probably what happened was once a few people joined, it became less obvious who had started the lfg and thus your friend got the boot. I recommend putting something like “newbies welcome” early in the discription – something saccharine enough to scare off people who want 5k+ ap for a friggin level 13 fractal pug.

So, was the fractal tonic lost in all the loot table swaps? I tried really hard to get one but never was so lucky and now it seems like they’ve been totally forgotten. :/

PS war, chrono, and at least one tempest are going to be base for anything remotely close to an ideal comp. There are a few things though that necro bring that ya’ll might be overlooking, which are especially useful in a pug setting -

-Condi transfer from plague sig -> minion -> mobs/boss. Particularly in the tiers where enemies apply random conditions this takes a load of pressure off your team and adds to the necro’s dps. It’s the same reason you might take a necro at mathias.
-Minions eat cleave. Classic minion masters with a mix of melee and ranged pets were a nightmare for boss aggro, but a 10+ minion wall of little melee kidney beans trivializes a huge amount of the content.

I honestly think necro competes pretty well for the guard’s spot – fotm bosses still hit like a wet noodle and for a lot of fractals I value mitigating condi pressure over prot. Guard and necro both have blind, projectile hate and good cc. Guard has the advantage in burst damage and aegis if used well. Necro has the advantage of being easier to play while still being extremely effective (not relevant for some groups but again with pugs/new players its a consideration).

I wanted to post and condense some of the info we got on how fractal development is going, since 1) not everyone goes on reddit, and 2) the info isn’t well organized since the dev is just replying to random posts. You can trawl through all the replies yourself here: /user/anet_sean

Fractal Leaderboards have evolved into something else entirely, and development is on hold.

“So yeah, development on this has been suspended. The more we worked on Fractal Leaderboards the more we realized it just wouldn’t work with Fractals as they are right now.
We did come up with something else entirely that we really do like as an alternative, but that would take a lot of development work and we just have too many problems with Fractals in their current state before we can devote those kind of resources to a project like that.” [x]

The backpiece is no longer linked to the leaderboard/whatever is replacing the leaderboard.

“I can’t promise a certain date, but we’ve de-linked the backpack from Fractal Leaderboards so we can release it sooner rather than later. […] it was originally tied into leaderboards pretty closely. We had to undo all that, which took time. Now we need to test it and make sure all the changes work correctly.” [x]

No plans to release scales above 100 for the forseable future – instead they want to replace boring/annoying instabilities and revamp old fractals.

“For the near future, replacing most likely. We don’t really want to add more levels past 100, because that opens up a whole new can of worms.” [x]

“…as we develop new, better Instabilities we do plan on phasing out the old ones. We’ll likely end up with a mix of new and old Instabilities for a period though, at least until we develop enough new ones.” [x]

“We’re borrowing a page from Raids here with things like phase transitions and different attacks, which will then become more challenging at higher scales (e.g. larger AoEs, shorter breakbar windows, more punishing attacks when you fail to dodge, etc.)
And yes, we are looking at both doing this for new Fractals and reworking old Fractals to incorporate these things as well. It will take us some time to get to all the old Fractals though.” [x]

“Swamps of the mist” will be addressed through reward structures rather than re- balancing individual fractal difficulty.

“‘Swamps of the Mists’ is definitely not ideal. I think the main driver behind this is how the Daily Achievements are structured, so we’re currently looking into reworking those to encourage players to play all of our different Fractals.” [x]

" we originally though about just making Swamp longer, but realized people would just move onto Jade if we did that… and Snow after that… etc.
We’re hoping the changes to daily achievements will resolve this issue, without actually making any of the individual Fractals longer/harder." [x]
__________________________________________________________________

In terms of a priority list/timeline of changes, from his responses I think it’s something like this:

• Immediate future: Finishing fractal backpiece, changes to reward structure to discourage swamps of the mist.

• Soon-ish future: New/reworked instabilites, new fractal islands with raid-like multiphase bosses.

• On hold/soon™: The “not-leaderboard”, whatever it ends up being.

• wishlist/far future: rework agony, reword scaling system. (“Maybe instead of having scales at all, you would just play Core Molten Duo or Casual Jade Maw or something like that, instead of Scale 40 and Scale 20.” [x])

And, finally, he did confirm that the backpiece will also function as a glider skin. [x] If I missed any big or relevant points let me know and I’ll add them above.

Edit: added links to the quotes.

Just an update from Mike O’Brien’s reddit post: “I can’t promise A certain date, but we’ve de-linked the backpack from Fractal Leaderboards so we can release it sooner rather than later.” Awesome news, though wish we could have heard about it here where we’ve been asking for a while. :P

It’s not always that people want to but can’t. Some people (a lot I think actually) aren’t interested in raiding. They are looking for some middle ground between open world and raiding. For myself, I don’t enjoy raiding very often simply because being in a large group is overwhelming to me, and is something I avoid irl and in game. Fractal selling was ideal for my daily routine because I could do it with one or two friends and just chill and feel comfortable – but there was skill and teamwork involved unlike openworld zerging or press-f-on-tree farming.

To suggest that people who are frustrated with the state of fractals should just “get gud” and raid instead I think is a little misguided. That said, we know new fractals are being developed, and it seems that the devs working on it are choosing not to engage with the community like the raid team is – so there’s really nothing we can say that will change anything or make new fractals come faster.

Dinosaurs.8674:

rfdarko.4639:

Ye, I’m p sure sabetha’s backpiece only gives sinister, not vipers. Disappointing to hear RD but it is what it is at this point I guess.

I am 100% sure that it does in fact give Viper’s because I have it in Viper’s and use it on all my condi characters.

oh neat, both good and bad news since now i’ll have to decide if i wanna get the backpiece or save up for the vipers trinkets when they add them. x_x

Ye, I’m p sure sabetha’s backpiece only gives sinister, not vipers. Disappointing to hear RD but it is what it is at this point I guess.

I hope they add it in before the next raid wing at least. I just hate the idea that the only way to get vipers/zealots/etc back-piece is to pvp (where gear stats don’t matter), even though I know that practically speaking those few points make very little difference. They really just need to prioritize fractals sooner rather than later. They gave up the dungeon model stating specifically that fractals would fill that semi-casual instanced content niche but then have not touched fractals in months – by april it will more then half a year. The most optimistic spin I can put on all this is that they saw how frustrated/disappointed veteran fractal-runners were with the update and went back to the drawing board to implement the feedback. It’s just hard to have that optimism given the 3-year history of fractal updates.

I’d like to second the motion for the vipers/keepers stat accessories to be in the vendor – the fact that I’m using exotic trinkets because the only way to get ascended vipers is rare rng drop off a boss with a week lockout is kind of backwards from gw2’s normal design. (I don’t think BiS has ever been locked behind rng so I’m assuming this is an oversight.)

1) what, if any, other games did you look to when designing the new jungle enemies? Either in terms of combat mechanics or art design

2) what specific ai improvements came in HoT? was there anything you wished you could make the mobs/bosses do at the launch of the game that you are now able to?

I think many people where looking for an excuse to give dungeons a break, given that the content is well over three years old now. There would have been a move away from dungeons even without the reward nerf, realistically interest in dungeons had been waning before HoT even came out. I think people where hoping there would be new fractals released and with one shard per roll that fractal records could take the place of dungeon records. That obviously didn’t pan out, so now a lot of those people interested in low man content simply play the game less or not at all.

You have to understand that people were approving records in their own free time, out of a love of the game and the scene. Expecting them to carry on after their own interest is gone and the scene is pretty much dead, for the benefit of one or two people, isn’t really fair. If this is something you believe there is genuine demand for, I recommend finding some interested approvers and contacting wethospu to see if/how he cares to maintain the site.

Raids are suppose to be about exclusive skins, where as fractals are what they want the instanced-content crowd to “farm” daily for income. The problem is, fractals is not doing its job because of how poorly it was implemented. If fractals had got new content, was actually challenging, and gave decent daily rewards, I think people would not expect raids to provide a farmable source of gold. Also though, given how far the community has been able to push the bosses in less then a month, raid selling could easily become a thing. It probably will if fractals continue to disappoint after the mid-december patch.

All that said i agree that something like 30g would be more reasonable for the liquid gold reward.

This reminds me of when low elo players in a dota style game obsess over the current meta in professional tournaments. Unless you are going for an actual record kill, what’s most important is how comfortable each individual is on the class they are playing. Every boss was beaten with over a minute left on the enrage timer within the first week, so this idea that you need the perfect team comp and the perfect dps rotations is just baloney. I’m almost certain you could beat the raid with 10 necromancers if you set your mind to it. Prioritize team communication, and play a class you are very comfortable with so you can focus on the mechanics of the boss while you are learning.

Thank you for addressing the toughness scaling, but as some others have mentioned it’s important the power scaling is restored. Half the issue making high level fractals boring is the bosses pose no threat. It will be nice to be able to get through fights quicker, but it would be nicer have some challenge back in fractals.

I hope there can be at least a little back and forth like there was with the profession specialization iteration, or other aspects of the HoT release, because it really seems like there’s a significant lack of understanding in terms of what people doing high level fractals want out of their experience.

At this point, its just not fair to assume that our advice is being interpreted correctly, based on years of disappointment. yes, we know they know there is a “problem”. But are they going to fix that problem in the same way they did with fractured? with HoT? what is going to be different about this iteration? That’s where some dev feedback could help give us some confidence that they know more than “people are mad about fractals” — that they instead understand why its so frustrating for longtime players and what needs to change on that high end of the spectrum.

Since the mastery vendor has come back, and is charging exponentially more for AR infusions, it got me thinking about how much money I dumped into my rush to 100 – and what I’ve really gotten out of it in the week since.

Even setting aside the fact that the achievement boxes are tradeable (which I’m almost certain is an oversight) nothing you get from completing level 100 is unique. There’s no title, and golden skins can drop from low level dailies. As far as dailies go, there seems to be no incentive to go above level 70. All you appear to get is a few more locked boxes, and with how meaty the enemies are you be better off just doing a random low level fractal for the chest on the ground.

Now for some people, they want to experience the full progression for the sake of the challenge/achievement of doing so. I was definetly one of those people. But what I didn’t know at the time and what we couldn’t really know until we had a better understanding of the new system, is that you are basically paying a very large premium (in terms of ar cost) to push to 100, with virtually 0 long term benifit that we know of. Based on what is in the game right now, you pay hundreds of gold for the privilege of fighting Mai train with a little surprise at the end.

The one unknown factor in this is the backpiece collection. It could be you need level 100 to get the final tier. However, it’s a pretty big if and a large price to pay for that speculation. There’s tons of other stuff in the game right now that is a concrete investment : legendary crafting, guild halls, gearing alts for raids, etc. And lastly, there will always be the opportunity to level up later, should it prove to be necessary.

All of this is not to say you shouldn’t go for 100 if it would be fun for you. But I wish I could have known/considered what a gold sink it would be and how irrelevant level 70+ would be to my daily fractal experience before I rushed through it. So for those non-fractal nuts out there, I can only advise that you do your dailies, get the time gated backpiece mats, but don’t feel any pressure to rush the higher levels if you are saving gold for other projects.

The way the rewards are structured currently, I can’t see any reason to do level 70+ fractals for the 51-100 daily, which makes those tiers kind of a waste after you get the chievo. At least in the old system you wanted to get your pr level up and do 41+ to get a better chance at boxes and the tonic.

There doesn’t seem to be special rewards for each tier outside of completing the chieve, you just get more boxes. Anything rare or special (like golden pristines or aether skins) are in the boxes, which you can get at any level or even buy off the TP. In fact I think you could get a golden fractal skin never having set foot in fractals just from buying the boxes, getting 4 of them and forging them. (maybe the keys are mastery locked? not sure)

The rebalenced scaling (reduced power, high toughness) was also a real disappointment. It’s masked somewhat by the instabilites, especially the random condi one, but on lvl 90s I was zoning out halfway through the fights. Dredge final boss is a nightmare since condis were NOT fixed on him. The suprise at mai trin was cool but finishing her felt really anti-climactic because she was just a giant hp bag at the end. Even at lvl 100 she was hitting for less then she did at lvl 50 before (possibly because of the stupidly op fractal potions).

I also haven’t seen any weapon/armor boxes drop, just recipes, so I’m not even sure fractals are a direct source of ascended gear anymore.

They want to incentive people to do fractals instead of dungeons? Great, fine, that in itself is good. But that’s a false equivalence because while there are 20 something explorable dungeon paths, there will be three fractal SHARD dailies. So your daily instanced content experience post-HoT will consist of what is currently less than a single fractal run. After that, what? Raids? That’s gated to once a week.

Unless you’re selling high-level fractals or raids (assuming its possible) the only thing left to do that’s profitable is open world zerg. And realistically, that’s where they want and expect dungeon runners to go. They keep saying “fractal/raids” because that’s what we like to hear but three fractal shards a day and one raid a week is not going to keep people occupied.

The problem with de-incentivicing dungeons and expecting people to spend that time in fractals is this – From what we understand, there will be three daily reward tiers for fractals and now each fractal only consists of one shard. unless higher level instabilities does something gimmicky to increase the time of completion by a huge amount, doing your daily fractals will take no time at all. Raids are gated to weekly rewards, so it will function more as an extremely challenging guild mission.

So after a dungeon runner does his 3 daily fractal shards, what should he do? Map rewards? Open world pve should not be a dungeon substitute. Even as old and overdone as they are, old dungeons are still much more engaging then open world zerg farming.

Maybe if Arah and Aetherpath could still have a sizable gold reward, that would be a decent compromise.

Cameron Rich.3905:

Fractals is getting a revamp and additional rewards (like the new weapon skins we announced) with the expansion. You can read more about this here:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

The fact that fractals is getting revamped YET AGAIN is kind of the point. Back in the fractured patch the whole selling point was “this new system will allow for more frequent updates! Yes we are resetting your progress but it will enable us to give more content to you more often!” and then…here we are one year later. The fractal system is getting yet another face lift after a year of no new content.

That doesn’t mean the new content wont be good in and of itself, but it undermines the trust that future systems will be supported long term. I think the fear is — after this first raid, is anet going to abandon raids and then a year later develop yet another system? Dungeons were abandoned after one attempt at a revamp (AC) and one new dungeon path (aether), fractals updates have been in the form of total reworks spread a year+ apart.

So a new system is exciting, but in the context of that history there’s understandable concern.

I’d agree with ecori that the number one consideration is group stealth. When you need it, you’re options are limited to theif, engi, and mesmer.

Mesmer’s group stealth is somewhat limited and on long CDs. It requires some coordination to pull off effectively, but there have been some recent records (one was hotw1 I believe?) where the mesmer took the place of the thief. The mesmer does the skips with personal stealth and portals rather than steathing the whole group. For high levels of optimization this is great because you get the utility and stealth roles in a single package.

Engi is definenitely becoming more popular, and it’s an excellent class to take in pugs or low mans because it has access to might, vuln, and good personal damage. However, in a 5 man semi-organized group, things like might and vuln are provided by other classes.

So where does that leave the thief? As far as I know, a thief still has better burst, and does more damage with an icebow, than engi. Because of how much faster things die after the specialization patch, thief is probably still optimal for 5 man dungeon and fractal tours. From a record perspective, thieves are one of (if not the) fastest skipping classes in the game since the mobility nerf. Arah 1, 2 and 3 all have long skips which the thief can navigate incredibly quickly with the ability to teleport to targets through walls and blink forward to far – off mobs. There are also a few niche uses for shadow refuge, like when low manning the CoE p1 console.

The problem with this and other “safe spots” for this boss is that, it isn’t actually a safe spot as the game understands it. Frost can still target you and hit you with his iceblock freeze. The aoe cone attack misses because he can only fire it horizontally, but the game probably can’t tell the difference between it missing when you are above it, and it missing when you walk around him. Because the game’s in-built anti-exploit systems can’t really handle this case, the only options would be to redesign the boss (giving him more attacks that will hit above him) or try and find every little ledge that could possibly be jumped up on and put invisible walls around.

I’m not defending the use of the tactic, I just see a lot of people saying the usually “incompetent anet can’t fix a simple little bug that’s been around forever” and I’ve definitely felt that way sometimes, but in this case I can understand why they haven’t gotten around to it. There’s not a 5 minute fix that would fix the problem long term.

I think in reality it’s the simple fact that more people play thieves. It’s a toss up for me which is actually better, I think it comes down to the shard. I agree with painbow that in a 5 man speed run the ease of steath skips and the greater burst damage of the thief gives it a slight advantage. In trios I’m starting to prefer the engi because you can take on both the buffing and the utility roll, and the awkwardness of a few stealth skips is made up for in kill times.

Wolfeng.3784:

On that note, how come in GW2 we allow both record and tournament runs to make use of those exploits, making them popular, creating this enviroment where people just assume that hitting through a wall with a dagger is normal, where holding a cutscene for the rest of the team is normal, where its normal to stay on a corner away from the mobs because they suddenly can’t reach or attack you anymore.

You seem to be a bit confused about the acceptance of exploits. Both DnT tournaments used the restricted ruleset, as do 99% of records. Those rules ban things like safe-spotting, terrain glitching, etc. Gw2 is actually pretty strict when it comes to community policing of exploits. What pugs do in their daily runs doesn’t necessarily reflect the speed run community – pugs will take the path of least resistance and that includes safespotting mossman, one-shotting lupi with wall-on-wall, etc.

We have been asking anet to patch these exploits for ages. However, they don’t have a dedicated dungeon team so anything that isn’t a progress preventing bug gets put on the back burner. We can keep sending in reports but the fixes will take months.

Telling people they shouldn’t exploit rarely works, people are going to do what they are going to do. But the restricted ruleset gives people an idea of what the community considers “fair play”, and any serious record attempt will abide by those rules. In terms of setting a good example, I think that’s the best we can do.

If you want 3 year old + content to tide us over, be the stuff we occupy our time with, then it should be treated as such. This is not some little quirk in a level 30 personal story mission, this is (one of) the most iconic boss encounters in the game, and something many dungeon players encounter as part of their daily routine. Having a significant balance change like this come in undocumented, it warrants some explanation. Even if its just “This was an unintended side-effect of some tweaking we did to projectile tracking on larger enemies in HoT, but in the case of Lupicus we feel the change was for the better.”

As above this is not targeted Gaile or Lauren, but the people who are preventing them from talking on this issue. So they can understand how little we are asking communication wise, and why its an important issue to us.

I agree with what your saying about boss readability. If there’s anything I want from other games it’s non-human sized bosses and aoe indicators. As much as mai trin and mossman and archdiviner are interesting bosses, their animations get really lost in particle effects and their cleave range is still kind of a guessing game.

That picture no-trigger linked actually reminds me of the aetherblade lazer room boss as it was when it was first released – the walls would basically oneshot you, you could NOT face tank them. When touching a lazer wall = down, the fight becomes a lot different. Not saying it is equivalent in terms of complexity or challenge, but I think it was an attempt by the devs to challenge players to think about positioning and coordinate on the move. The essence was just sort of lost in the translation to fractals.

I see the start of good things, like the above, in the 3 post launch dungeons (molten, aether retreat, and aether path), and if they had kept developing 5 man content like that we could have had some really neat stuff by now. That’s why I still have some hope for the expansion. I actually believe the developers have a much better idea of how to make content that is challenging for the combat system of the game, and could produce some genuinely difficult instanced content, its just a question of whether they had any time allocated to do it.

I know a few people who have done ranger who just haven’t recorded (or uploaded yet). You can even do it double 1h sword but GS just make life a lot easier especially if you get bad swarm RNG. (GS-SA) I’m not anything close to a ranger expert so i didn’t want to upload my horrendous times :P

I don’t think so, I’ve noticed there are spots where circles tend to render slower then the impact occurs, because of terrain or angle or whatever. Like lupi’s big aoe in phase 2. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz_VTgdzoh0) This seems to be less of a problem with the orange circles – I find bloomy’s aoe a lot more reliable now – so upgrading the aoe indicator could help a lot.

Aaah I’ve tried telling people he looks like Karl but its always met with confused silence. Not enough people know him ;<

Ah, it looks like the golems in the boss fight of the aether fractal are inquest, something I always wondered. Good to know! Thanks for this Iris (and atoi)

“We can’t tell people viewing the records on the website to “start at X:XX and end at Y:YY”, and therefore we will not approve from them.” – Your youtube video still suffers from this problem, you probably should have read RD’s post more carefully. You can say “hey, that’s not in the rules!” all you want, but it’s not going to get your run approved. Literally every other recorded record is in its own video.

At the same time, Jerus, we need to have some starting point in interpreting what fair play is beyond “I think this is cool”. If you want to be reductive and say “everything is subjective anyway so eehh just do what feels good.”, it becomes hard to have a constructive discussion about what the rules should be.

" If the competitors feel something is better done a certain way, that’s the route that should be taken." – if everyone was in agreement all the time, then it wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is when competitors disagree. That’s what we see here, everyone is drawing a different line in the sand at what they think is exploity and what is just “creative”. The rules are meant to be a compromise that is easiest to work with for everyone, even if it isn’t perfect for each individual.

People who want the flashy tactics need to embrace the unrestricted set more. It’s there for people to use if they want to push the game to its limit. To get creative. If it’s too open to be workable still, change it – its not being used in it’s current form anyway. If the unrestricted ruleset got used there wouldn’t be so much pressure on the restricted set to be everything to everyone. The easiest way for that to happen would be to enforce the restricted ruleset as written.

You can’t make everyone happy and have a consistent ruleset. Right now we are trying to make everyone happy, at the expense of consistency, but the ambiguity is becoming a problem. The alternative is sacrifice some happiness for consistency, and hope that people realize the unrestricted set is there to be used.

Isn’t this why we have an unrestricted rule set in the first place? So that people who don’t care about dev intention can have at it?

But also – just for use-ability, how is a record team going to determine if something is “fun” enough to be allowed? I realize that dev intention is not the best metric but it’s a hell of a lot easier to intuit then “will the dungeon community find this fun?” If this is how rules are made going forward, I don’t think it will solve the consistency issue at all because it’s entirely subjective.

I don’t think the system we have now is bad, I think that sometimes people haven’t looked past a specific exception they want to see how it effects the rules as a whole. Consistency in the ruleset is going to mean compromise, and I don’t think people have taken that to heart. It means you don’t always get what you want all of the time. Sometimes you won’t like a decision, but it makes the ruleset more workable for everyone. When we don’t compromise, we have the current situation where all the little exceptions make the ruleset hard to interpret.

With that in mind I think your #2 option would be best for resolving disputes. Someone whos main priority is keeping rulings consistent and keeping the ruleset useable should have the first and most weighted say in what is or isn’t allowed. Those “in the action” have a hard time seeing the bigger picture. On the other hand, the rules are for the community to use, and I think people would like to feel they have some say in contentious decisions. Maybe make it 2/3 majority to over-rule.

Even if there are ambiguous cases, I think keeping the spirit of “running the path as intended” gives people at least a starting point when trying to determine what is allowed. If similar types of questions keep being brought up, the rules can be adjusted, like in this case. It sounds like the consensus is jumping or bypassing barriers is fine so long as you don’t cross into out-of-bounds terrain and don’t do events out of sequence.

Just consider -“paths should be as interesting as possible for a fun competition”, those exact words could come out of the mouth of an anti-stack anti-zerk phiw to justify fighting every single trash mob. Using “interesting” or “fun” as the only rulemaking metrics just seems like a recipie for more arguing.

Tacking a new shiny on the end of outdated content won’t make it less boring. Maybe it if it was a reward for a special gambit or challenge (kill all optional bosses, no defeated players, etc.), but honestly that would just be a bandaid for the fact that we haven’t had any new instanced 5-man content for nearly a year and a half. The fact that launch dungeons are boring is only an issue because they are still a mainstay of endgame pve in the absence of new content.

The answer is – surprise- new content, in the form of more frequent fractal updates and hopefully instanced raid-like challenges. I’d much prefer that then them spending development time propping up old content.