The changes to the snowblind fractal reminded me that the developers are not actually testing their changes. It hasn’t stopped people from skipping at all.
They try hard to make the content more annoying (not harder, annoying. The dredge fractal is not challenging.) but haven’t fixed any of the real issues with fotm, fixed the party bugs that’s plaguing quite a few players these days, introduced decent content or anything.
I have yet to find a ‘skip’ fix they made where it took me a substantial amount of time to find a way around it. The only ‘skip’ fixes that got fixed were due to instancing, not due to their worthless invisible walls.
Hey Anet, just to give you an idea:
Hire people that have some imagination and aren’t too lazy to actually test their ‘fixes’, because as you have proven by now, they have never done it. Although, I have to give it to you. It took me a bit of creativity to get out of Arah. But that wasn’t because your fix was well implemented, it was still sloppy as kitten, it just requires some complicated jumps.
I’m willing to wager that they are working as intended and if testing anything…..they are testing how far they can get with minimal investment. Yes I know, that’s very skeptical of me, but I have already been fooled once by them and I’ll try my best to not let that happen again.
Hopefully if enough players speak up they will change it, but I highly doubt they will by their own volition.
Rangers are the worst class for most dungeons and definitely the worst for fractals. Your group should be grouping up mobs and cleaving them. Rangers have single target dps which adds little value in that scenario which consists of half or more of a dungeon. Their utility value is out shined by other classes as well. They are a burden at high level fractals and lead to longer runs and more wipes because of these 2 things.
Thieves are middle ground as far as classes go but if your group has no problem skipping or doing the content then mesmers and guardians have better utilities and warriors have better dps so it’s better to bring them instead. I don’t mind having a good thief in the group though.
The problem also is the players’ mentality. Rangers are a very laid back class to go wander around with. When it comes to dungeons it seems like most don’t know the content, don’t know their class, don’t know how to dodge, don’t know how to manage pets, and don’t want to have any responsibilities like picking up the hammer. I’ve seen so many thieves just run in and die over and over again or just range the whole time and very few that really know how to play their class. That is another reason why people avoid/hate these classes.
(edited by obal.3218)
Oh look, a thinly veiled anti-skipping thread.
Skipping is not an exploit, your argument is invalid.
Give us MWF quality trash and we won’t skip.
@Voy Hollow
It’s not only CoF 1 but FotM 30+ too. Here you have the “2 Guard minimum rule” if you want to get past it as fast as possible, and of course you take as few glass cannons with you as possible.
But you are right, you can do every dungeon that is not about either max dps or max survivability with every combination of professions.Parties that require 2 guards at frac 38 are probably terrible; expect around 2 terrible players in the party.
Yeah we are so terrible to want a faster run where we can melee everything (much higher dps than range) and get it done faster than your average group of “anything goes” carebears who think class does not matter.
With 2 guardians you can safely melee bloomhunger, mossman, all 4 mobs in the sad harpy fractal champ room […] things that take like 3 times as long in the average pug. I’ve never seen a pug go full melee in the ettin room until after the first three died. We start and end with full melee with a decent group that has two guard.
Of course 2 guard doesn’t mean 2 tanks, you want at least one of the two to go full berserker. You mostly want the guard for the hammer, reflection and aegis. Blind in some frac like cliffside.It’s parties that do not require 2 guard that are terrible because they don’t really get this game.
I agree. At first I was denial to this fact, but the fact is you can do runs faster, more efficient with less deaths, whatever with guards/zerker warriors/ other zerker setups. All this bullkitten saying you can finish the run with any profession… well of course you can. After the “play for fun” is pass, you run for the rewards per time ratio.
I think Anet failed short on the no more trinity philosophy. There’s still is, especially on higher fotm, just hidden.
I’m still waiting for that 2 necro/2 engi/1 ranger setup that can supposedly match the guards/warrior/mes at harder dungeons.
(edited by Yenn.9185)
Albert Einstein:
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
People need to get this idea out of their head that “DPS is always best”.
Especially for a run like fotm where having all the dps in the world won’t save you if that’s most/all you can bring to the table. Fotm is all about working well as a team and getting the objective done without having a million deaths in between.
I run my guardian on 48 and can honestly say that although I have low to moderate dps compared to a warrior, my teams would be in trouble many times If I was not there to support them (try shaman on 48 with multiple wars and no guard or other class with support skills.)
Of course I value warriors just as much as any class in fotm, but it’s not because im thinking “YES now our dps will be so high!” It’s because most of the warriors Ive run with (luckily) have been exp and not noobish, and that’s 99% of what I look for in fotm teammates.
When you have experienced parties and the right defensive utilities selected, dps IS best. Really, efficiency in runs is much better done by having a lot of damage to kill enemies quickly, so they deal less damage to you, than to soak damage.
Now, the defensive utilities are very important, really in terms of actually completing the fractal, they are far more important than dps, but once you have the necessary amount, and your party is experienced and capable, increasing party dps is the best way to make for faster and smoother runs.
(edited by ShadowLordX.5148)
After thinking about it for a while a simple solution would be to change the system as following:
Instead of the current recipe
4 x item → 1 x item
with a probability of p for the resulting item being a precursor, make it as
4 x item → precursor_shard (probability q) OR 1 x (non-precursor) item (probability 1 – q)
and make precursors available through the recipe
m x precursor_shard + fancy_stuff → precursor (guaranteed)
By setting q / m = p the expectation value of a precursor stays the same as before. However, instead of an exponential distribution, the system now follows a binomial distribution, with a significantly smaller variance.
In simpler terms, it would be just like the system used for crafting mystic clovers. Can you imagine what it would be like if the only mystic clover recipe had a 1/250 chance of producing 77 clovers in one go, and 249/250 chance of producing random junk?
The suggested solution gives the system a coarse memory through the accumulation of shards, and cuts out worst excesses in both directions. In that system it’s still in average just as hard to get a precursor as before, but now that hardness is reasonably fair.
“I tried out for my high school basketball team and I didn’t make it… ABOLISH SCHOOL SPORTS!” Please people, try to understand that not everyone wants to play casually and some people like highly coordinated, highly efficient teams with maximized potential. There are plenty of things for you to do in this game aside from joining our speed run groups so please stop acting like you’re being excluded from the entire game.
Um…I rather they buff every other dungeon’s Time:Reward ratio than nerfing CoF’s…
Simply killing CoFP1 will result in:
-some people will just ragequit because other forms of farming gold in this game is simply too boring or too inefficient. (“why not just play and enjoy the game?” cuz most players have already done 1000+ hrs of ‘playing and enjoyin’ the game, they are now more interested in finally having a legendary, and legendary requires money, and this is the most fun and efficient way of making that money)
-some people will go 4W1M the next easiest/efficient things that’s there. I’m guessing COE is a good option due to the drop rate of Charged lodestones. Then Charged lodestone market will crash, so it wont even be efficient anymore. More players ragequit.
People will always find the best setup for making money. And there will always be certain preferences and exclusions…that’s how MMOs are. COF farming is at least more fun than farming vials of karka blood or armored scale or corrupted cores or whatever…at least for me. I feel like a bot when i farm those items in open world, when i do CoE i feel like im actually playing the game.
“The difficulty, lack of decent rewards and boredom whilst dead is driving them all away.”
If your team were finding a lack of difficulty, a lack of rewards, and boredom whilst alive, then you might have run out of things to do. As it stands you have some improvements to make in your team play so you could set that as your goal if you wanted.
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