Guild Wars 2

Currently, +1 agony Infusions are 3.64s buy and 4.24s sell and Fractal Encryptions are 15.01s buy and 22.5s sell. Both are steadily falling. Source: 1 Agony Infusions. Fractal Encryptions

The problem with all the rewards depending on the Trade post is that it leaves them subject to supply/demand cycles. In this case, it has created a huge oversupply of +1 agony infusions, which kills the value of the boxes. Also, every other tradeable item in the boxes has plummeted in value since the encryption’s inception. Point is you are getting less than 1g per fractal after Tp taxes even if you sell all of your boxes on the trading post which is a nerf from the previous and much maligned gold given per completing a fractal.

We are not equating “cash” with “reward.” This is only one aspect of the reward problem and so far the one we have the most evidence to show is problematic. In addition, the rough, preliminary evidence leads, but does not conclude that ascended weapon and armor drop rates have been heavily nerfed per box. Source: King Fractal Research It should be noted that even if the chances were the same as before HoT it would still be a nerf due to the reduction of the number of boxes which give ascended items. Finally, there is the epidemic problem with fractals that it is more worth your time to do the lowest levels of a tier than the higher level ones. One of the key promises of the Blog Post introducing Fractals was greater rewards and that promise has not been fulfilled.

On further thought, there should probably be a limit of getting the Completion Chests at once per week. This would be to maintain relative rarity of the chests for tp reasons for those who choose to vendor the chests.

Colin if you are reading this you will not be able to come up with a simpler and more elegant solution to fix the problem of replayability of hard Fractals levels while also helping improving the poor rewards at the same time.

You clearly have not run higher than 39 Windsagio. First, the boon on crit causes at least 5 different boons per second. There is no internal cool down on individual boons causing the bosses to gain up to 25 boons a second during bursts such as during a defiance strip. The fastest a mesmer can remove is 1 boon per 2.5 seconds. There is no realistic way for a mesmer to counter the boon production. The very first thing my guild did after testing mesmer is conclude it was a waste of space due to the lack or dps and inability to actually counter anything and swapped back to a guard. There is no way for a party of mesmers to realistically counter the boon production. The only way to work around it is to either roll a completely new stats on your armor (which destroys your runes btw) or muscle through it. Stop spamming your false information on these forums.

I am a big fan of making the once per account achievements for completing all fractals of a tier like 76-100 infinitely repeatable. That would always give motivation to complete every fractal level as well as a guaranteed way of obtaining fractal skins. In addition if someone does not need the skins, they can still sell the boxes at the trading post for a small profit.

What Account Bound items are you referring to? The ascended Recipes that you have maybe a 1 in a 100 shot at getting? Or possibly the Mini Cat Golem that you have about a 1 in 500 shot at getting? Everything else in those boxes is Able to be sold on the trading post. There is No Reason you should not be able to break even Buying everything you need to open a box, opening it, and then selling mats.

Poorly rewarding per difficulty has been true since Fractals inception. I have mostly started taking as a constant of the universe like Death and Tp Taxes.

One thing to keep in mind is that many of the TP items have crashed since this research was posted. For example, +1 agony infusion cost half as much as they did at time of research.

Source: +1 Agony Infusion

Colin Interview mentions Fractals

Well at least Our voices were heard. Copying from reddit.
I am encouraged that he says they are looking into the scaling at the higher tiers.
I am encouraged that he mentions rewards are being looked into.
I am not encouraged that he does not mention the replayability of higher level Fractals specifically levels 80,90+.
I am not encouraged that he did not say anything about looking into specific Kittened Instabilities.
I am encouraged that there are more plans for fractals.
I am not encouraged that they will be 2016 at least before we see them. Fractals need help now.

I have the same bug. I have attached a screenshot showing the Hero challenge completed, but it does not show as completed on my minimap.
Edit: resubmitted Screenshot with the Player Asuran’s name blocked out.

@Windsagio: All of these points are false:
1) Adapt and learn: Fractals 51-100 were done day 1 in meta zerks without specializations. There is no need to adapt as most high fractal players have already learned all the tells of the bosses. In relation to the specific instabilities complaints, again there is no adept and learn as these instabilities are actively punishing both skillful play and Team play. So we should adapt by not dodging? By not buffing our allies? By not standing close to supply heals or focus melee a stunned boss?

4) Rewards are fine. People are too $$$ focused: The reward problem is not just gold focused. Its a complete nerf on Ascended Weapon and Armor Drops, which might I add anet said they were balancing the raid around. Its the fact that the new shiny reward is a recoloring of the already in the game Fractal skins with LESS Effects! Its the fact that Players are now PAYING gold in the form of higher + agony infusion, paying for items that only costed fractal relics prepatch, or the extreme costs for a single ascended salvage use. All that gold to play boring Fractals instead of Gaining Gold, Ascended Items, or new Shinies in any way. Basically the only reward worth going for is the Legendary Back piece and it is behind some heavy time gates. Rewards are not fine.

Just confirmed. So does this mean they are rerolling to only lvl 1-50? Will Fractals be fun again? Stay tuned. Same battime, same batchannel.

style.6173:

DrEckers.2039:

I am getting real close to feeling that they should revert back to pre-HoT Fractals of the Mists. Even if they never touch Fractals again pre-Hot fractals were more fun than the mess we have now.

I do like the individual fractals vs having to do 4 in a row. I just think that as part of the daily, a reward should be the exact same bonus chest we used to receive.

I know I am in the minority, but let me explain why I think the old system of 4 islands per level (which I will call 4in1) was better than the current 1 island (1in1).

1) Reaching Max Fractal level previously was a harder and longer task. This one is pretty straightforward as it took 200 islands to reach max level previously as opposed to the only 100 islands it now takes. I get that people did not like dedicating 1 hour+ to completeing all 4 levels if they pugged it, but I would rather have the 4in1 Longer but funner system since we had to go to multiple locations and do multiple things than the shorter snoozefest of chipping through a single boss’s hp we have now. In my opinion this makes reaching fractal 50 in the 4in1 more prestigious than reaching 100 in the 1in1.

2) While in the 4in1 everyone rolled swamp to start, there were still 3 random fractals which the player had no control over choosing. This kept the content fresh as you could have swamp, ascalon, thaumanova, and molten due one day and swamp, snowblind, cliffside, and Mai another. Even having different random paths in the same fractal like how swamp could give either bloomhunger or mossman helped keep the content fresh. Now, one of the biggest complaints about 4in1 was that people would spam swamp instead of other fractals in its tier like Krait. But, we are now in a much worse situation as people will only pick the easy, quick, and the lowest reasonable level fractals to complete their dailies such as swamp and maw once they complete their collections. Whole fractals that were challenging but fun including but not limited to Snowblind, Mai, and Cliffside will be straight up dead content.

3) 4in1 required more general party compositions as you had to be prepared for a wide range of challenges. Now you just tailor your party to the specific fractal.

Honestly while I did not present as such, I made my comment about rolling back to the previous 4in1 in the hopes that anet would look at the feedback for the 1in1, make appropriates changes like what the Op lists to increase the fun and reward of the new system, and then rerelease the new Fractals with Raids. In the mean time, the fractal playerbase would still have the old fractals which they enjoyed a lot more than the 1in1 system.

I am getting real close to feeling that they should revert back to pre-HoT Fractals of the Mists. Even if they never touch Fractals again pre-Hot fractals were more fun than the mess we have now.

I have gotten 2 balls of dark energy in that many tries. But I salvaged one ascended weapon and one ascended shoulder piece.

The big problem with the encryption boxes is that it requires an amount of 20 silver (or 20s) to buy a key creating a small gold sink on rewards. In essence, the momentary value of opening a box should be at least twice the cost it took to buy a key so that the box and key are both equal value. While the +1 agony Infusions were 10s to 14s and you had the appropriate mastery level, the boxes maintained value as you could easily make money by opening a box and selling the +1 infusions and vendor trash. However, this created an oversupply in +1s since the fractal merchant who converts the +1s into higher infusions being disabled, and its market crashed to the current price of 3s-4s or 26s per box as the current research posted on the 1000 Fractal Encryption Research thread shows. Now the oversupply is so great, I do not see the +1 infusions rising in price even when the fractal merchant returns from his vacation.

So, we either need a way to bypass the silver requirement for a key or we need guaranteed gold for completing a fractal to cause fractals to be worth running for money. The advantage of bypassing the silver requirement is that it could eat up some other oversupply such as Shards of the Mist (If you have run fractals constantly you should have stacks of these). The advantage of giving guaranteed gold is that you can weight it based off of Fractal level encouraging people to actually run lvls 90+ instead of spamming low 50s to get the best fractal daily.

Ultimately, the rewards in Fractals relative to the rest of the game is in a worst place than before the update unless another rework happens.

I agree fully and am semi hopeful that they are going to make additional changes to fractals considering they still have to add the legendary backpiece.

Honestly, the best way to guarantee fractals remain viable content at all levels is to have the complete x-y achievements infinitely repeatable. We can already sell the rewards boxes for that achievement upon the Trading Post, so there is no reason they shouldnt be infinitely repeatable.

Right now daily fractal rewards are heavily biased for doing lower levels over higher levels. Since launch there have been 4 daily fractal rewards for levels 1-50, but only 1 daily for levels 51-100. I fear that once people hit level 100 for notoriety higher level fractals will be impossible to pug as people will only do the easy ones like Swamp and Maw in the 60s. Here are my suggestions for alleviating this in the future.

1) Break the daily complete 3 fractals between 51-100 to two different dailies, one for 3 fractals between 51-75 and another daily for 3 completed fractals between 76-100. This seems to be a natural decision as LFG lists fractal levels 51-75 and 76-100 and there are separate Achievements for completing all fractals between 51-75 and 76-100.

2) Add two extra daily fractals for specific Fractal levels between 51-75 and 76-100. Same reasoning as above, but additionally this will encourage people to play less desirable fractals such as Snowblind or Volcanic. Otherwise in one month, LFG will be full of Groups only doing Swamp and Maw to complete dailies.

3) Make the Complete all fractals between 1-20, 21-50, 51-75 and 76-100 Achievements infinitely repeatable, but the rewards for repeating are only an extra daily chest. First time rewards will stay the same. Again this is to encourage completing Difficult Fractals instead of Just spamming Swamp and Maw.

Clearly the rewards should be better for the 76-100 than the 51-75. Ideally, the 51-75 reward chest should be slightly worse than the current 51-100 daily and the 76-100 slightly better. But overall, this would be a welcome change to actually encourage completion of higher level fractals and

Bonus Suggestions: The achievements and Dailies should 1-25 and 26-50, not as they are now 1-20 and 21-50. Just bugs my perfectionism that they are this way.

Ya, but 1g per ring salvage for some stabilizing matrices is pretty atrocious.

That is a pretty bad ratio. So 40g per dark energy, I hope the back piece doesn’t take something ridiculous like 10 pieces ofDark Energy.

Has anyone gotten anything valuable from salvaging Ascended Rings? Like Dark Energy?

So far I have only gotten random amounts of Flux Matrices, which have netted me less money on average than 1g per ring. Seems like Ascended Ring salvaging is a massive Gold Sink.

So basically we have to give up the majority of the gold for completing a fractal to free up an inventory space from the Kitten item they rewarded us with? That’s beyond Kitten Kitten Kitten Golems.

Plus now everything in the Fractals costs gold, even Obi Shards. This smacks of kitteny Mordrem Event rewards all over again. Absolute Kitten.

What happens for any conditions transferred to the ranger’s Pet by Signet of Renewal or Empathetic Bond? Are they full duration or also reduced by 95% since they are not directly targeting the pet?

I am in the camp of having utility shouts (US from here on) grant greater interaction with pets. Currently, US suffer from two core issues : (1) very niche uses and (2) primarily affect the pet. I like the idea of Rangers calling out commands for their pet which current US do but I would like theirs uses to have greater internal synergy. In addition, I believe the US should give the Ranger greater control of their pet.

Here are my suggestions in italics without any numbers since I assume numbers can be balanced:

Guard Current
Your Pet leaps to the target area gaining Retaliation and Resistance. Enemies in the target area take Damage and are Weakened and Crippled.
Reasoning: Guard is considered one of the most useless skills in the game. This change gives Rangers something they have never had: A way to quickly move their pet around the battlefield. This can be extremely useful especially after a pet swap. I imagine the speed the Pet will leap at should be the same as Warrior Gs5 rush. In addition, the leap damage and applies impairing conditions to enemies to make the skill useful in a wide range of situations.

Protect Me Current
Your Pet gains Protection and returns to its master at super speed absorbing damage the master takes. Protection is twice as effective on the pet while it protects its master. This skill breaks stun on both the pet and the master.
Protect Me is not far from being useful as long as it can be used without killing the pet. Applying a boosted Protection should allow the pet to survive the redirected damage. Returning to the master is very important to guarantee the skill activates due to the known bug as well as allows the pet to get back into action faster compared to currently the pet being inactive while Protect Me is active. It would be cool if Pet’s Retaliation triggered off the transferred damage to the original source, so this skill could be combined with my suggestion for Guard.

Search and Rescue Current
I like Shadelang’s suggestion alot “On the topic of Search and Rescue. What if it was reworked to be a ground targted ability that hte pet would run into an area and pulse out aoe healing. That healing would have a similar affect to a weaker version of transfusion on the downed. But it would also affect those still standing.”
I would add in that it gives the Pet and allies in the area Regeneration, put that is for a change in Resounding Timber that is further down.

Sic’Em Current
Grants the Pet multiple stacks of Might and Swiftness and causes the pet to leap at its target Damaging, Revealing, and Knocking the target down. This skill counts as a Leap Finisher for the pet.
Sic’em currently has very occasional uses to counter Stealthers in SPvp. I like that niche use, but it needs a greater variety of uses. First, my suggestion will function like a leap so that pet can quickly start reposition itself to the target. I imagine the pet will move at a similar speed to Warrior Sword 2. Second, the Knockdown and Damage makes the skill be useful against any target and the Reveal continues its former niche use. Finally, the leap finisher adds extra interaction between the pet and combo fields.

Resounding Timber Current
Shouts apply boons also to the Ranger. Reduce the Duration of Shouts by 20%.
The idea is that each retooled US granted different specific boons to the pet. When Resounding Timber is slotted, those boons will be applied to both the Ranger and the Pet. This gives the Ranger a much wider selection and better control over which boons it wants.

I hope you all enjoyed my suggestions. I put a premium on having the shouts execute specific movement commands at a rapid pace: Guard will act to reposition the pet to a target location, Protect Me repositions the pet to its master, Search and rescue repositions the pet to a location, and Sic’em repositions the pet to a target enemy. I tried to keep my suggestions in line with a martial class. Teleports and Boon Rips feel out of place on either the ranger or any current pet. Critiques and Praise are welcome.

Greatsword is widely used over hammer. It gives higher dps, aoe Blind, and a 5 enemy vacuum pull. Hammer on the other hand has better utility with perma prot, immobilize, and walls. Use what you enjoy more do not feel like you have to conform to the Metabattle builds.

This is a good idea. I madesure to suggest in on one of Colin’s comments on reddit on the day of the blog post. Hopefully, more exposure will help make this into a reality.

One additional detail, I suggested was that the reward for this achievement should be akin to the currently monthly ones. I.e. A perma qccount bonus such as agony resistqnce or magic find while in fractals tied with a selectable big reward such as ascended weapons/armor/backpieces, golden fractal weapons, etc. etc.

Here is a suggestion to break up the static fractal schedule.

An infinitely repeatable achievement called Fractal Cartographer that required you to complete every single fractal level: 1-100.

If on average you completed 3-4 different fractal scales a day, it would take you about a month to complete all 100 fractal levels. So the Fractal Cartographer would be the “monthly” version of the fractal rewards. I would model the reward off of the current monthly achievements such as giving your account a permanent +1% magic find inside fractals and a choice of one of four different Big Rewards such as Asc Fractal skin (what I assume the upgraded fractal skins mentioned in the article will be), an ascended Weapon, Armor, or Ascended Aquabreather, etc. etc.

The main reason for this is of course to give everyone motivation to compete every different fractal instead of just farming swamp. Another reason would be to give a genuine pay off for long term fractal commitment.

Thats a good point. I am gonna add that quote from Roy into my suggestion.

Some people have suggested removing the energy cost from Weapon Skills, but that does not lead to Dynamic Gameplay. Instead I would suggest these two changes to energy:
1) If energy is below 50, it increases at a rate of 5 per second. If energy is above 50, it decreases at a rate of 5 per second. If energy is at 50, it neither increases or decreases passively.
2) All Weapon Skills besides auto-attacks Increase Energy (instead of decreasing it). However, they cannot be activated if Energy would be increased to a value greater than 100. For example, if a Revenant tried to use Staff 5 at 90 energy, the skill would not activate since it would increases energy by 15 to 105 energy.
3) All other Energy mechanics remain the same.

These Suggestions truly create the Push and Pull play style Roy described the Revenant as having. The Revanant will push his energy up using his weapon skills and then he will pull it down using Legend Skills. Clearly, this suggestion would lead to a rebalancing of many of the cooldowns of the Legend skills to prevent them from being overpowered, but it should be worth as these suggestions create a highly dynamic play style as the revenant will juggle his energy to Increase it to cast Legend Skills and Decrease it to cast Weapon Skills around the fulcrum of 50 energy. This greatly increases the flexibility of the revenant as it has a choice in when to swap legends to when it best fits the situation, not exclusively to regain energy. Also, Revenant’s will be a lot more unpredictible as to what they will do once they Legend Swap. Will they use Weapons kills, Legend skills, or wait for a good moment to burst something ALS? In addition, a lore link can be created explaining Revenants as “Gathering Mist” with their weapons to feed the Strength of their channeled Legends. What are y’alls thoughts?

To begin, I would like to summarize how Energy currently works. Energy is a resource used by Revenants. Currently, all Revenant Skills besides Auto-attacks require energy to be activated. Weapon skills all cost between 5 and 15 energy to activate, while Healing, Utility, and Elite skills require between 25 and 50 energy to activate or require a maintenance fee of 5 energy per second. Energy regens at a rate of 5 per second. Energy has a max of 100 and resets to 50 whenever the Revenant swap legends. Roy Cronacher described Energy as having a push and pull feel on a GW blog post.

This system directly leads to many problems of the problems identified with Revenant over this Test weekend such as lack of customizability, lack of flexibility and extreme predictability. These problems are identified and discussed in these threads on the forums and Reddit: Discussion How could we fix the Revenants Missing Revenant Significant Flexibility Sacrifice and My big Revenant Rework. In addition, I would like to point out how exactly the energy mechanic leads to the flexibility and predictability Problems.

Flexibility: As it stands, each legend is highly specific to a certain role. Ventauri is very good at healing and general support, Mallyx is great at Condition Manipulation, and Jalis is proficient at surviving and Tanking. All signs point to Shiro being similar in concept as a heavy damage dealer. However, Energy heavily constrains the output of each Legend. You can only use 1 Healing, utility, or elite skill upon swapping to a Legend (remember 20-50 energy cost per skill) and then you have to wait several seconds before you can activate a second. In addition, every time you use a weapon skill this increases the time between other skill activations. This is a Hard constraint and does not allow the flexibility of activating multiple utility skills if required or multiple Weapon Skills to set up a burst unless you spend a large amount of time doing nothing or just auto-attacking after a Legend Swap.
The other thing to note is that Legend Swapping every time off cool down is not a healthy practice. As already stated, each legend is highly specialized. So, you may be forced to legend swap in order to regain energy but into a horrible situation for a highly specialized legends. However, the only way for Revenants to actively regain energy is to Legend Swap, so they are often forced to do so every 10 seconds.

Predictibality: In sPvP and WvW, Revenants will be the most predictable class. Due to the hard cap energy imposes on them, their enemies will be able to predict what the Revenant does after each Legend Swap (ALS for the following scenarios). If the Revenant activates a non-weapon skill ALS, this opens a sizable window for the enemy to Burst the revenant as the revenant’s active defense will be down until his energy recovers. If the Revenant spams autos ALS, the enemy knows he is saving for a Burst of high cost skills and will be able to interrupt the Revenant’s burst, Dodge it, counter it etc. etc. If the Revenant spams Weapon skills, the Enemy can outlast it using their own active defense while waiting for the moment when the revenant’s Energy is on empty.
In addition, this predictibility leads to a very face-roll style of play for the Revenant. Upon Legend Swap, the Revenant has only a few choices (3-5 depending on if you use 5 or 10 energy cost abilities) into how to use his abilities unless he waits a long time as opposed to all other profession who have up to 10 skills that can be chained in a row. Even face-roll warriors, have more choice in how they use their abilities. Energy was intended to create a balancing act for the revenant between bursting their skills and saving their skills, but in the end, it only accomplishes limiting the available choices to the Revenant.

Ultimately, the problem with Energy is the fact that there is no active way other than legend swapping for the Player to regain energy! There is no balancing act. And as already stated, Legend swapping for the sake of regaining Energy is not always a good thing, and quite often a bad thing.

Before the change from Spirit Shards to Skill points, completing a dungeon would give almost a full level of experience (80%) which for an 80 was an additional skill point. The skill point was a valuable part of running a dungeon as it could be converted into gold for anywhere from 40s, if you did material kitten t2 flipping, to 1-2g+, if you crafted an expensive mystic forge recipe and then sold it. Needless to say easy skill points were a sizable portion of the profit of running a dungeon.

After spirit shards were introduced, we still gain experience for completing the dungeon, but we do not get a spirit shard for completing it. I do not know if this is a bug or oversight. If this is a bug, I hope it is patched soon. If it is an oversight, I hope Anet would reconsider and add Spirit Shards as a bonus for completing a dungeon instead of experience.

I like your idea, but shouldn’t the Rework for Tornado make it a Glyph, not an arcane skill? The key characteristic for arcane skills is that they always Crit. The key characteristic for Glyph’s is that they change based on the attunement. Your proposal is much more in line with Glyph skills than Arcane Skills.

I got in!

And then I saw the hours. I am at work during both stress tests. Major Bummer.

Will not attending this stress test disqualify me from being invited to future ones?

I guess a lot of people are forgetting you will be able to use Pistol 4 to instantly clear 1 stack of stability. I can forsee pistol 4 being a counter to many of these pulsing Stability skills as it can set up stronger CC. Stability will be a big change across all classes, panicking prematurely and saying this will ruin thief without considering all the angles is being a poor sport.

Torn on the z-axis stealth change though. When playing against a theif, I hate it. When Playing as a thief, I find it a necessity.

I am interested in joining.

I have a lvl 80 Thief, lvl 80 Mesmer, lvl 80 Ranger, and an ele and nec that I am leveling up to 80.

I am most interested in WvW(primary Mes) and fractals (primary Thief), and am very active.

Thank You,

DrPeckers