Guild Wars 2

DeathPanel.8362:

Balekai.6083:

DeathPanel.8362:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

If the difficulty on enemies went up, some people would switch away from Zerker. Statistically speaking, they may be an insignificant portion, but it would still be a drop. I never said that some who can’t run zerker now would run zerker later. I said some who can run zerker now could not run zerker later.

And not all mobs in dungeons are skippable, so it’s quite possible adding Retaliation would make a difference. The impact of any change depends greatly on where the change is made as well as what the change is.

Not meaning to offend but are you new to MMOs or something?

Making content harder is not going to make people switch over to zerker. It’s going to make zerker even more important. It will make elitism go through the roof and gear checks the norm. Unless you specifically change content to nerf zerker somehow, which just means the next best thing become the new meta and few months later you end up back here complaining about that meta build. It’s an needless and endless cycle.

Any kind of elevation of difficulty naturally leads to these types of results. I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ original and this is the one trend that is consistent in all MMOS that raise difficulty in that way and it’s corrosive to the player community and discourages pugs.

You either have not thought out the consequences of your ideas or your analysis is flawed as many people in this post as well as myself have demonstrated.

What games like UO or EQ did to raise difficulty was simply increase mob health and damage by 1000%, which led to content 1 hit killing and players taking too long to kill stuff before dieing without optimal DPS/ganking. Those Devs at the time didn’t have much choice due to the technical limitations in 95-2000. So the meta was kill it asap before it killed you (at least in UO which is what I played). That’s when just going pure DPS thrives and that isn’t what anyone is really arguing for who want to open up the meta.

Actually in EQ it was all about the trinity system taken to the extreme. You needed a tank, puller, slower/mezzer/debuffer, healer, dpser(main assist), secondary tank/secondary assist or else it’s a no go. It would take 30-60 minutes+ sometimes just to get a team together and sometimes not at all. This is obviously not the right way to go but that is the ultimate result once you start pushing content requiring different builds in a party for the sake of diversity since the only way to incentivize/force people to have different builds is to make them absolutely crucial to success of a party and that’s guaranteed to turn off a majority of the people.

Or you brought a Shaman, a bard, and only if content was difficult enough a tank and maybe grab a cleric/ench if it stressed the shaman/bard too much (I played way too much EQ Bards were OP!)

Bubi.7942:

Jerus.4350:

Bubi.7942:

And that brings us back to page 2 of this thread (or somewhere around there), that gear doesn’t matter, cause PvE is supereasy.

As opposed to sPVP where you’re rewarded for failing…

I’d love some elaboration on this.

Jerus.4350:

or WvW where you’re rewarded for gathering in a giant blob or not at all.

Blobbing up is a way to play, yes, but there are different types of gameplay styles in WvW. Some require more skill than others, and are way more effective than blobbing. Generally the unskilled or people not really wanting to put in effort blob up. I recommend trying roaming.

Jerus.4350:

Sure, PVE is pretty easy if you’re just trying to complete it, but at least you have to be successful and in dungeons/fractals your contribution matters has a pretty large impact. In general i think it would be fair to say that GW2 is supereasy.

Uhm… aren’t dungeons stack in the corner mash 1? With like little to no chance of dying, ever? Or glitching through stuff, or skipping half the dungeon with invis, or always going for the cheap-o semi-exploits (eg.: lupicus half health gone with 1 reflect)? I do not want to offend dungeon running people or anything, but “knowledge” mostly boils down to 1 guy saying “stack here”.

As for Fractals, I guess some may find those difficult, I don’t really. And I’m a guy who has been resetted from lv 58 to 30 and went back up to 50 again.

I did a poor job of explaining my point, if success has a correlation to rewards, PVP and WvW hardly should be considered more difficult. If you’re ignoring rewards, then absolutely going against a good sPVP team is surely more difficult than routinely going through a more static encounter that you’ll find in PVE at a casual pace. And it still disgusts me that WvW is so reliant on zergs to even see a reward, just as much as I’m disgusted by the state of zergs in open world PVE handing out rewards for raising your hand when roll is taken.

However, PVP you get a pat on the back whether you win or lose though. If your goal is to be the best and never lose, well, an attitude that believes that dungeons are about “stack in and corner and bash 1” is not much different than believing that taking your reward for a loss is a success. If you judge PVP based on winning and being a top ranked player, then you shouldn’t view dungeons as simply getting through it and taking your reward but instead be looking at it as attempting to match or beat record times, and even the best teams have quite a bit of trouble replicating it consistently, which would warrant some respect of difficulty would it not?

If you want difficulty in this game you have to make it for yourself, every avenue has it’s ways of becoming easy if you focus simply on completing it and getting rewards.

phys.7689:

Jerus.4350:

spoj.9672:

Think of the wheel of fortune as a compromise. Its not a perfect system for those of us who hate RNG. But its better than what we have currently.

And it prevents people always farming the path of least resistance. Without forcing the devs to scale rewards per fractal shard. Which even if they try to do it will never be perfect.

^^

I still want the whole 4 fractals in a row thing abolished, I want to be able to run every fractal on 50 nightly for funsies if nothing else, though they should be rewarding however they decide to do it (i put my suggestion in more depth earlier in the thread).

The option to at least weight the RNG would be a very welcomed thing as opposed to just the current bend over and take it approach.

are you against dusks suggestion?
you can pick fractals seperately, but no daily reward.

i suppose it wouldnt be bad to let the daily be gotten either via one random, or clearing all without random

Not really, it’d be something nice, though I’d really prefer being able to get a chance at fractal skins. If we could get individual fractals with just the chest and normal loot + the PVP map selection thing described above it’d be my “ok I’ll stop complaining” answer.

As i stated before though.

What I’d love to see is something like this:

Change rewards from the “complete 4 for your level run” to instead use a sort of PVP reward system, doing a fractal gives progress towards a chosen reward with smaller rewards throughout including pristines and other stuffs.

Toss a 3-4 hour DR on a map where you get 10% of the normal reward till the DR resets, this means you would be still rewarded for farming a certain fractal if you wanted to train at it, but so hindered that you’d be greatly encouraged to do other fractals.

THis would mean you get your non RNG based fractal rewards of skins/chests, something like say you get progress equal to the level you are doing, so you’d get 50 for every lvl 50, then make it like 20k+ to get a reward (roughly equal to doing 100 fractal 50s or more).

I’d also add in instability “gambits” as additional challenges for daily gold rewards for those who feel like creating an additional challenge and want to get a gold reward. Scale this reward based on the previous days completion metrics such that rarely done ones are more rewarding, stack a few of these and the right ones and you could make bank, but it surely wouldn’t be easy. The lvl 40/50 agony check would be the standard on those level ranges so you’d always have that there but with that it’d be potentially even more negligable of a cash reward compared to what it currently is.

You could even add in a random system to this for bonus progress though repeated runs of it could overlap and leave you not getting the rewards /shrug.

I really like choice and an incentive to do all the fractals on the most difficult setting you feel like doing.

I’m really a fan of the changes they made in PVP regarding map selection and rewards, I think both systems are pretty elegant and well made.

Xytl.8659:

oxtred.7658:

And if you buff it to something actually useful, it would make warriors even more close to banner kittenes.

Until they give a Warrior any more utility than might and banners, you might as well buff the banners a little and give us some variety in which ones we can use. Right now it’s as simple as Green>Red>Purple>Orange, in fractals it could definitely be of use to have condition duration.

So you want to use 3 banner builds?

spoj.9672:

Think of the wheel of fortune as a compromise. Its not a perfect system for those of us who hate RNG. But its better than what we have currently.

And it prevents people always farming the path of least resistance. Without forcing the devs to scale rewards per fractal shard. Which even if they try to do it will never be perfect.

^^

I still want the whole 4 fractals in a row thing abolished, I want to be able to run every fractal on 50 nightly for funsies if nothing else, though they should be rewarding however they decide to do it (i put my suggestion in more depth earlier in the thread).

The option to at least weight the RNG would be a very welcomed thing as opposed to just the current bend over and take it approach.

Becka Williams.4978:

Rising Dusk.2408:

What if instabilities were still a thing, but they stacked based on what level you were on. So for instance, L31’s instability was active when you do L31, and L31 and L32’s instability were active when you do L32. So you couldn’t avoid instabilities by doing higher level fractals within a tier. Once you hit the next tier, the list of instabilities reset and you had the next tier’s instabilities. This would at least prevent people from skipping instabilities, and would also avoid the situation where L40 is easier than L39.

As for Eco’s question, I think the only way to make rolling swamp not a thing would be to intentionally slow it down. The problem with just making the other ones more rewarding is that people will naturally gravitate towards rolling for the first fractal that is most rewarding for its average time investment. To actually solve the problem of rolling altogether, the average time spent on each first-tier fractal has to be virtually the same.

This is a great discussion so far! Thanks for all the insight into your thoughts everyone!

I don’t see how level 40, with 1 instability, is harder than 39 with 9 instabilities. To be honest, stacking instabilities is a terrible idea. I still think my idea, random instabilities as gambits is the best way to prevent people from avoiding them. I also don’t know why people care about how others play their fractals. What’s the difference if people roll swamp?

It’s not really that other people roll swamp it’s that if I’m looking to complete a quick fractal it’s pretty silly not to roll swamp and that’s kinda wrong isn’kitten Same thing as cliffside but in reverse. Cliffside is too long, swamp is too short when comparing to the other options. Likewise Mai is too hard and Maw is too easy. It just makes luck such a big factor in time and effort.

@Spoj, I like your thought there on tiered fractals. Being able to do more high level fractals and various instabillities but at least get your rare chance at skins would be cool.

@dlonie, if they went that route they could just import the PVP voting system yeah? Choose a map you want it gets added to the possible queues, to keep it random you could have a 1 vote for everything initially and your team can only strengthen the odds at certain maps. That’s what I figured Spoj meant when he suggested it a while back.

Iris Ng.9845:

Wrong topic eh? Jerus?

Scroll up a bit, it was in response to some Ele questions… that or I’m still groggy

It’s only heals that you lack in zerker, every other form of defense is reliant on utility skills and trait selection.

Personally I like to view things in regards to their opportunity costs.

For example, using mace on guard has 2 notable negatives. First being the light field, it can potentially block more powerful fields. The second is it’s small personal dps loss. It has pros though, most notably for the group is the healing, it’ll help maintain scholar bonuses through passive damage which can actually lead to a dps gain, while it also leads to more general sustainability through the passive defense of the heal in general. Overall the pros/cons make it quite a powerful weapon.

Going full on healing and sacrificing base stats for healing power will lower your damage by an amount that makes it harder to offset that loss. The opportunity cost is high. The most notable benefit is the increase in ease of play and allowing potential mistakes to be made.

The viability is surely there, especially when you consider ease of play to be a factor (which meta ignores) it’s simply the idea of optimization that it conflicts with (which is what meta focuses on).

In the end though I hope you guys keep doing what your doing and continue to work on strategies to really fully explore the opportunity cost of your decisions, it’d be enlightening to see it more fully fleshed out.

Bubi.7942:

And that brings us back to page 2 of this thread (or somewhere around there), that gear doesn’t matter, cause PvE is supereasy.

As opposed to sPVP where you’re rewarded for failing, or WvW where you’re rewarded for gathering in a giant blob or not at all. Sure, PVE is pretty easy if you’re just trying to complete it, but at least you have to be successful and in dungeons/fractals your contribution matters has a pretty large impact. In general i think it would be fair to say that GW2 is supereasy.

Zoltreez.6435:

rotten.9753:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

-snip-

Mate, pve meta in this game applies only to dungeons/fractals. Since this is the old content and everyone and their mothers will play HoT where there will be mostly (or only) an open world content, it doesn’t matter what the meta is/will be. People run dungeons not for fun but for gold. It doesn’t matter how you farm gold because it’s mundane. All you want is gold.

WoW i didn’t know im the only person in this game that does the dungeons for fun……

Nope, but that’s also typically why I don’t run any dungeon other than Arah and stick to mainly pugging and teaching runs of that or Fractals. The only time I do other dungeons is when asked to teach or with my speed run guild because they make it fun by pushing ourselves to go faster than we feel comfortable doing so.

Just a few comments on people’s responses.

Litany of Wrath isn’t all that bad on it’s own, the only reason it’s bad is that by comparison to the other options it simply isn’t enough to use over them. Shelter is just so good, and Signet heal has some niche uses as well. A fully traited Litany could be awesome if it weren’t for Shelter doing such a good job.

Sanctuary is a long reuse but it’s also very powerful. There are a few bosses in dungeons for example that can be dealt with quite wonderfully with the use of this ability.

Devourer Venom is great for immob on something like Tar in Arah, niche use yes, but I just can’t call something that even has 1 niche use objectively bad when there are skills that simply should never be used.

Scorpion Wire again has a lot of niche uses for positioning, likely going to fall into the bad category with the defiance changes though

Mass Invis is another that has a lot of uses when a thief isn’t around. I can think of quite a few dungeon/fractal situations where it’s nice to have a mesmer slot it when a thief isn’t around.

If I had to choose a worst skill it’d be something like Mortar, which simply doesn’t really help in any situaiton that I’ve found more than alternatives. My only thought on where it might be useful to me is soloing Arah p2, though I haven’t even tried because I can use a consumable to drop one where I’m thinking and then I get to use my Supply Crate. Then maybe Asura’s Power Suit which is incredibly clunky and performs terribly even if you do use it well.

There are many underwhelming and largly unused skills, but then there are skills that are just terrible and have no use, those are the skills I’d label as Worst.

Bottom slot (or two) on each char is an invisible bag, nice to not have the stuff I want to keep showing up in selling windows. Also has the whole compress thing disabled

Next on my mains I have an equipment bag, this also prevents the “compress” tool from moving the items locking them in place for the overflow of some items from my invisible bags, on my main I use the fractal Rare bag, this makes it easy to organize when salvaging a bunch of stuff, the rares drop to there and the rest go into the normal slots to be salvaged with my copper salvageomatic and I can come through with the master salvage kit and eat up the rares. So I really only have to keep an eye out for exotics in my main area.

Never botherd with the crafting ones as I just deposit it anyways unless I want to keep track of how many I’ve gotten for a while and then I drop the stack down into my invisible bag(s).

That’s how I set my stuff up.

Welcome to the issue of open world content. This is why many people who want to play at a higher level in the game are so dead set on instanced content, it allows you to avoid players who don’t share your same play style. Private instances of open world would be nice too. However that’s not ANets goal, they WANT you to carry those AFKers, they want the most braindead of players to still be successful even if it means they have to force more competant players to carry them on their coat tails. If they didn’t do this those players who simply suck wouldn’t be able to be successful, and ANet is against that idea. This is why I’m so skeptical about their claims of “hard content” in HoT, sure it might be well made content but when they allow zerging, well, each individuals contribution is not as important and it simply allows mediocre play to still prove successful. If they prove me wrong no one will be happier than I but I have serious doubts they can pull it off or even truly want to.

Falados.7165:

Yet i suck at PvP even tried SO many builds

You don’t need to be good, in fact it can be better! you get matched against worse opponants making it easier, and a few good players on your team can carry you to victory, if that fails, well, you still get progress to your rewards. It’s literally a no lose situation, you always get something.

That said, for PVE, just do wahtever you have fun doing, once you get 80 is when you want to fine tune your build as you have more powerful choices in traits and gear you won’t replace quickly.

WTB an ascended aquabreather! Though personally not an issue for me as I went all try hard (mainly so I can swap stuff to alts) and got 15 AR in back/rings

Theugotzd.9843:

Thaddeus.4891:

They both have average DPS (5th-6th) and Warrior is higher.

Do you have a source/proof for this?
To my knowledge the dps rankings were:
1. Ele 2. Guardian 3. Thief 4 or 5: Ranger and Warrior 6: Engi 7. Necro 8. Mesmer

As I understand it a perfect Engi rotation has the capability to easily come in at a solid 3, though I doubt anyone can reliably run that rotation. They should be able to easily come in around number 3 though. Guardian would have to trait full DPS sacrificing most of their team support to come in very high and then will still be well behind Ele/Thief. I’m quite sure Ranger has overtaken Warrior with ranger buffs a while ago and the constant warrior GS nerfs. Also, Mesmer has the potential to do quite well, it’s only that the practicality of pulling it off isn’t there that they usually score so low.

As for the viability of double professions. I sure love my 2 engi casual fractal runs. Not saying it’s optimal in any sense, just that it’s a nice combo because of the way Engi’s are built. We can do a lot but it’s typically not able to do the job fully, as a team you can cover it easily. Vuln being the main exception to that though being able to drop precise sights and pick up some alternatives can be nice. Basically you just don’t see as much overlap with 2 engis as you see with other professions, again, not optimal, but at least you’re both contributing a lot if you work cohesively as a team instead of being blocked by the other because they’ve already taken care of it.

Though personally I prefer more trait focused support builds than gear focused builds (more damage while still giving support) I do see plenty of value in contributing to the passive defense of your team. I know a buddy I used to run with ran a modified fractal hammer guard build with IIRC Water sigil and the heal symbol trait, he lost like 15-20% modifiers and 100 precision doing that but it was very noticeable on fights that had passive damage from burning/poison/retal (as iris pointed out).

My old group ran 1 PS war, 1 Hammer guard, 1 Staff Ele and filled in the last two with various professions based on whatever we felt like. We used to joke and call it the “braindead meta” because of how much easier it made things, however we were still able to do say SEp1 in under 4 minutes and our times overall were more hindered by lack of portals and general mobility compared to record runs than kill times. The only reason we moved away from such builds was because braindead play became a bit boring to us, I still see it as a great composition, especially drunken dungeon tour nights.

insanemaniac.2456:

Rising Dusk.2408:

This is a very good point that we haven’t talked about yet. Assuming they stay random for purposes of discussion, do we actually like that some fractals can be had at both the first and second level? What about the ones that you can get at the second and third level?

i really like it personally, but i think the biggest issue with it is tangentially related — that cliffside feels too long

^^ Though, I LOVE cliffside, I think it’s a fun fractal, I enjoy it, but it takes a lot longer assuming no failure rates are all equal across fractals. As for the spread, I enjoy a lot of the fractals and with Swamp being the obvious choice to start I like that I have a chance to see the other fractals that can be first fractals like uncatagorized and Ascalon, of course I’m not a fan of the water one

Fay.9457:

I think that silly teams / records should be on there – Its amusing and its kinda cool to see what kinda things people can come up with on 5 of the same non meta class. These weren’t posted for seriousness jsyk and im not rushing or pushing the issue. Maybe we should have gone with 5 necros

I’d love to see a consolidated “funsies” videos page. Things like DnT’s Cleric build Lupi speed kill and stuff like in this post. They make me smile and laugh. If Wethospu is up to it simply having a “funny videos” tab would be… fun

IMO on Ele is a profession you should play with your weapon swap tab open. By that i mean either inventory or hero tab. Before run try to be in earth, swap staff do the swiftness rotation, then swap back to scepter/dagger and you can RtL through. Alternatively if you don’t want to utilize earth for the extra blast with staff you can just do air thing, and swap the focus in and have earth ready to swap for invuln. Not a huge fan of scepter myself, I usually go D/F for PUGs… though I’ll swap S/D→F→D/F might rotation if I have time to before fights. Ele is no easy profession in PUGs because of the frantic and unorganized movements random people make. Lots of people have this expectation that things will simply happen, not realizing that giving you a couple seconds would make your life far easier, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten stuck in the wrong weapon because I’m trying to be beneificial to my group by stacking might/swiftness before a fight/run… that said I’m no great Ele obviously, but I try, I just rarely get people who are willing to give me the few seconds to make it happen.

loseridoit.2756:

dear anet,

can we choose which fractal we do not want to play?

I would really like to do fractal 39 for my regular daily but the cliffside fractal has killed most of my interest.

This is an interesting idea. I think I’d be much less opposed to random if we could vote say 2 out. For me lately It’d probably be Snowblind and Maw, though some nights I’m up late but want to bang out another fractal knocking out cliffside and grawl might be prefered or something like that.

… I still would like to be able to pick and have the option to do them all on 50 nightly but if they’re dead set on random this would be pretty awesome at least.

Rising, wouldn’t that make certain fractals a little rediculous?

40’s would be harder than 50’s also with mossy and exploding enemies I’d think.

Again, I’m a big proponent of choice, but I just see it better as letting us choose our instabilities and reward them properly.

As for Swamp, i like Sarah’s idea of simply having to defeat both bosses, I think that’d be sufficient to make it a longer task. Maybe if they could force the return of more orbs? But, biggest th ing when discussing swamp IMO is they really need to fix the mossman glitch, half the LFGs I join already have mossman in the water when I get in… the other half are mostly on bloomhunger

Personally speaking, I hate the randomness of my fractal selection far more than the randomness of my rewards. I want to do the fractals I want when I want to do them.

Becka Williams.4978:

Jerus.4350:

Becka Williams.4978:

If we make instabilities into gambits, they need to be randomized, and cost relics. Random because if they aren’t, some will simply never be used (and adding new ones would be pointless), and cost relics, because it prevents people from doing too many rerolls to get the instabilities they want.

Random is a cheap way of forcing people to do things. If they properly scaled rewards people would do what is rewarding to mix it up. A scaling reward system would do just that. The more something is done the less rewarding it is, the less done the more rewarding. Simply use their metrics in a function to adjust the rewards on a daily basis, if one instability were done 100 times the day before and another 0 times then the 100times one would drop down to the minimum reward while the other raises to the max.

How would people know what gives the best reward? There are, of course, easy and hard instabilities. Presumably, the easy ones will be done more than the kittenes, but eventually, people will choose the instabilities that give them the best reward versus effort. If one instability gives you, let’s say, 5 gold, but makes running the fractal take twice as long as one that gives 2.5 gold, isn’t the one that gives you 2.5 gold the exact same risk vs reward? Now, let’s say it gives 5 gold, but the one that takes half as long gives 1 gold. Some people will do the one that gives 5 gold, but I think it depends on how long the fractal takes to run in the first place. If it’s a difference of, say, 30 minutes versus and hour, I think people will take the 5 gold. If it’s 90 minutes versus 3 hours, well….I think most would take the 1 gold. Plus, fractals are already randomized. Why not the instabilities?

You explained the problem with random quite well.

Having things take variable times of that magnitude is quite troublesome. If it were a possibility to have say exploding enemies or mossy chasing you on a lvl 50 grawl fractal, but also just agony check and aetherblade both as possibilities… sure I could hae a 30 min fractal run still but I’d have to prepare for what might be a 3 hour run. That’s not really a reasonable spread to schedule your time with. Might as well just give up if you roll the wrong instability and don’t have plenty of time to beat your head on something.

I want the option to beat my head on things, and I want it to reward me for doing so, but I don’t want that to be a luck of the draw and basically choose for me whether I do fractals that day or not.

spoj.9672:

See i used to get 1 or 2 every 49/50. Ive actually only had 1 or 2 drop for over 2 months. And ive done a load of 50’s, 40’s and 10’s. Im guessing its just RNG. But its odd to go from seeing them drop almost every run to pretty much never getting them. And this happened around the time we started always doing 50’s instead of 49’s.

Well the extra chance on fractal weapons had to come from somewhere you know…

Becka Williams.4978:

If we make instabilities into gambits, they need to be randomized, and cost relics. Random because if they aren’t, some will simply never be used (and adding new ones would be pointless), and cost relics, because it prevents people from doing too many rerolls to get the instabilities they want.

Random is a cheap way of forcing people to do things. If they properly scaled rewards people would do what is rewarding to mix it up. A scaling reward system would do just that. The more something is done the less rewarding it is, the less done the more rewarding. Simply use their metrics in a function to adjust the rewards on a daily basis, if one instability were done 100 times the day before and another 0 times then the 100times one would drop down to the minimum reward while the other raises to the max.

I average between 1 and 2 of some form of them every 50 I do. I think I got like half a dozen shards last night doing a 49 and 2X 50.

Drop rate surely isn’t very good, but they do come, just nice and slow.

Ryn.6459:

“CoE p3 warriors and eles DD are welcomed”
I joined and asked what dd means.
A guard answered that DD stands for damage dealer.
I said that we all are DD. And surprise surprise the guard claimed that he was support. I pointed that support can be done with berserkrr gear… Silence.
A necro joined and keept the speed signet. I wished them good luck.

I dont recall.exactly but the guard was well beyond 10K AP so was the necro.

But Vitality and Toughness make my Wall of Reflection last longer right? no? Well it lowers the cooldown on Purging flames! No? not that either? umm… well healing power makes my shared Virtue of Resolve heal for 20 more every 3s! got you there! I’m support!

Radio Isotope.3045:

That BS time availability. Some of us have to budget our money and didn’t have enough to get them immediately. The 24 hour availability on them was Bullcrup. Bring them back for longer Anet. This Flash sale crup is stupid as hell.

… it was a sneak peak, prepare yourself next time and you’ll be ready. Sorry the world doesn’t cater to your needs. They will be back though, we just don’t know when.

phys.7689:

Jerus.4350:

I really think instabilities should become the gambits of fractals. Everything gets the agony check instability, then add on others for bonus rewards. Of course there would be popular ones, but again… if they could create a function based on scaling rewards for common/uncommon choices it could be used there as well. Maybe people could get their BIG cash rewards based on using like “random mossy, attack in the back = death, and whatever” combinations.

only problem i see with removing instabilities, and making them more like gambits is

Then level 30-50 is pretty pointless, i think they said 30-40 is, other than the instabilities, virtually the same difficulty level.

isn’t it already considering most people just do the easy options? if they became a gambit system people might actually do them for bonus rewards?

I really think instabilities should become the gambits of fractals. Everything gets the agony check instability, then add on others for bonus rewards. Of course there would be popular ones, but again… if they could create a function based on scaling rewards for common/uncommon choices it could be used there as well. Maybe people could get their BIG cash rewards based on using like “random mossy, attack in the back = death, and whatever” combinations.

Zoltreez.6435:

in PvP ? Enginers and Eles EVERYWHERE

in PvE ? Warriors and Eles EVERYWHERE

I’ve been seeing far more thieves in PVP than ele and engi combined the last few runs through it for me. Maybe it shifts at higher ratings? (i’m far from good at it)

PVE it’s a lot of guards/war/ranger, dungeons lots of guard/war/ele.

All that said I don’t think there is a very large imbalance at all, at least not compared to other games where you end up wtih situations where people play like 70% of the healers are a certain class, 70% of the DPS are a certain class, and same with tank, here things seem much more diverse. Except when you get into speed running dungeons, then it’s like 2 Ele, 1 War, 1 Thief and either another ele or a mesmer.

Tarasicodissa.7084:

The SSD x HDD problem in my opinion makes as much sense as necros complaining about eles being stronger. “Not fair, that class is much stronger than mine! Nerf plz.” Just like no one is forcing you to play necro and you are allowed to play any class you want as much as other players do, you are not forced to be playing on HDD and can get SSD any time you really want, it won’t get you a ban. So how can this possibly be an issue? No one has any kind of advantage, everyone is ALLOWED to have all the hardware they need.
I won’t be commenting on restricted, that one is supposed to be restrictive. But why have this nonsense on unrestricted? I would actually really like to see the rule about rerolling different classes being scrapped as well, because that would make some runs really interesting. There might be some passages where using other than standard party composition would be better, so you basically force players not to play optimally when going for a record time. GG.

That’s the entire point of unrestricted though isn’kitten to showcase the real tricky tricky ways of doing things. Where restricted is an attempt to create a competitive playing field that is more open and fun. At least that was my understanding. I mean people can vote however they want, just seems to me that the spirit of restricted would go against this option as it promotes exclusion based on yoru computer quality. I mean, sure, it’s just what you could get one that could do for like $60. But Exe Axe in the Gemstore was a hell of a lot cheaper than that, should that be allowed?

Kodan Hammer has been my favorite in general. Aetherized is cool but I just can’t see myself using it, it’s a bit rediculous. Mjolinar might be what I make for my Engi when they get hammers though.

Windsagio.1340:

Jerus.4350:

Ahh yeah… well that’s the old “pillar guard” type build. The whole Valor tree doesn’t benefit anyone but you much for defense (extra toughness from strength in numbers is all). Personally I dropped that as an option for me when I got frustrated with the inconsistency of toughness agro mechanics. Hammer with the honor tree traits are a variation that can make for a nice smooth ride for the group though, theory crafting of course you can do other stuff, but like I said I was just curious what build you were talking about, thanks for posting.

The weird thing is that the aggro is actually shockingly consistent. You’re right though, the honor tree is mostly balls. The only real reason to go into it at all is that AH makes tanking possible because of the massive passive heal.

I am wondering why the aggro has been so consistent tho’, I figured the build doesn’t get used for DPS reasons but if people have threat issues that makes more sense, I just wonder why that hasn’t been a problem when I’ve seen it, do fracs have modified aggro tables?

Sorry for late response. First you mean “valor” tree is mostly balls Honor is awesome with hammer.

As for aggro, I used to run this, it was great on say TA at that first Wurm Room, I could stand on the hill ranging the wurms and doing periodic passes through to clear blossoms a wurm or two ahead of the group. This kept all the spit off them and on me, It was awesome, made for simple clean runs. However… it only worked like 3/4 times. The other time I’d be standing there with my thumb in my bum for a wurm or two hoping to get agro and failing before I jumped in and did some poor damage.

Then you have bosses like the Robot in COE, he is almost always going to stick to the ele like glue. HP, Toughness, Damage, doesn’t matter he’ll seek out the ele, by that I mean we tried putting on Toughness gear for the guard, no go, tried putting hp gear on Ele thinking maybe he was targetting lowest health, no go, tried having the ele simply not attack after tagging it once just to be on the list, nope still got agro. That robot hates Ele’s.

It just really seems like there is a lot of different rules for agro. For my Engi I get a lot of agro from the Ettin in the uncatagorized fractal, I run full assassin, no toughness of any kind addition. I’m told toughness is quite helpful for his agro though.

If I could have reliably held agro with a pillar guard even on just certain bosses, it’d be worth it to me, but the fact that at best i was getting like 3/4 success rates back when i was doing it (I wasn’t doing all content at the time) just had me give it up.

Lendruil.9061:

Jerus.4350:

EcoRI.9273:

Anyone has a clever idea/solution to get people to stop rolling swamp as first map every single time?

Well, as I’ve said dozens of times, I don’t like the randomness. Hell I think the fact that we roll for it proves that most people would like choices as well.

However, what I’ve seen in old games is a lockout on re-queuing. So once you pop into a fractal you’re locked out for 5 mins. It’s not necessarily the best option, it could cause problems, and there would be a workaround in that you could potentially split up into 5 “groups” all roll, and you all join whoever had the best luck, basically still allowing it but having it be more annoying to do.

Removing the RNG as well as giving every fractal a reward that is appropriate to the length and difficulty would be the best solution imo

Yup, though I would add I think the best way to do the reward would be to create a scaling function, the more it’s done before reset the less rewards it’ll give the next day, all relative to eachother, so the most run are the least rewarded, least run the most rewarded.

and, if ANet created that function I’m sure they could find plenty of applicable uses in other areas of the game to promote more diversity instead of sticking to the easy options only.

I bought 800 for 107g this morning on a whim, suddenly the wings go in about 10 mins later, I check, 159g for 800… my random purchase saved me 52g… and well i’m sitting on them because I don’t want the wings anyways just felt like it was pretty cheap.

EcoRI.9273:

Anyone has a clever idea/solution to get people to stop rolling swamp as first map every single time?

Well, as I’ve said dozens of times, I don’t like the randomness. Hell I think the fact that we roll for it proves that most people would like choices as well.

However, what I’ve seen in old games is a lockout on re-queuing. So once you pop into a fractal you’re locked out for 5 mins. It’s not necessarily the best option, it could cause problems, and there would be a workaround in that you could potentially split up into 5 “groups” all roll, and you all join whoever had the best luck, basically still allowing it but having it be more annoying to do.

hybrid.5027:

You should definitely be allowed to leave the dungeon. You just shouldn’t be allowed to re-enter.

This I can agree with. If say for instance you just need the NPC to jump to the endboss and then you intend to 4 man it for the finish, by all means sounds legit.

… I’m just very sympathetic to the potato users out there

EcoRI.9273:

I don’t think one should ever take the real world into account to speed runs because one can argue so many things about mice with extra buttons giving advantage, good graphics cards giving advantage, higher display resolution giving advantage, good internet giving advantage and etc.

We have the restricted ruleset to create a fun and competative environment right?

How does having your load times play a large part foster that ideal?

As someone who played on a potato up until recently I can tell you things have gotten a bit easier now that I can more clearly see NPCs, but I surely don’t save a good 30s on it. My load times however are now that much faster if not more.

I think the restricted rule set should try and keep people focused on gameplay and not let gaps be created due to out of game elements like this would be.

I would love to see the strat you’re thinking of for an unrestricted run though, that’s what that set is for isn’kitten

Cliffside- duration of the hammer thing increased such that you are forced to have more people rotate or sit around waiting of course. Perhaps require an extra swing at each seal?

Swamp – 4th/5th Orb needing to be put in ( not sure how that could be done with 3 receptacles but maybe they could just have them all accept any amount and have a global counter on it? /shrug)

Harpy – Could they make the Yellow jump pads blink in and out? I know they do it with some for a couple puzzles in the game, but maybe too much work here? If it was a lot of work but they were willing to do it, maybe make pressure pads throughout the jump such that it’d make stealthing through a bit more challenging?

Alternately maybe give the harpies a new attack with an orange circle (screw that red circle you can’t see on the pads) that is a “reveal shot” dodgable/blockable of course, but reveals if hit and they randomly fire it at pads. Again, making stealthing through a little more challenging.

Ascalon – Patrolling guards, much like we got with those caithe living story instances, or dredge, they’ll reveal if you’re stealthed and run into them making you have to be a little more careful.

yes I’m focusing on stealth for these as what’s the point of other changes if you can simply run right by it and never engage?

Only issue I can really see with this is the advantage of faster load times? If player X takes a minute to get back in but player Y takes 30s… well that’s kind of unfair. Waypoints have a little lag like this but not nearly what 2 zone times would (loading the outside zone then the dungeon again).

hybrid.5027:

The level of sour people full of cynicism (generally deserved, true) is so high here that they are quite right to ignore all of us.

So, chicken or the egg?

I feel the same way about the spinal backpiece, I’d love if we could just turn backpieces off… hell put that in and make it work on hobosacks too!

Because, one dimensional gameplay is something that will quickly become boring. I don’t know many people who only play one way and don’t take breaks for months at a time. Most poeple I know will dabble in various areas of the game. For those that are typically open world farmers and hate PVP, well, what do they have? the same old stale dungeons we’re complaining about. So adding some challenge, some switch from the standard grind to something a bit more is good. Now, that doesn’t have to be instanced, not at all. However, it’s generally easier to create this more challenging content when you prevent zerging from ruining it.

So basically it’s good because it creates diversity within the PVE realm, and it’s easier than creating content that will simply be zerged and become the same thing as everything else in open world PVE.

Wethospu.6437:

So any bets what fractal masteries will be like? Making easy content even more easier?

Fractal Attunement Mastery
1 Mastery Point: Follows Advice – Details are obscured by the Mists
2 Mastery Points: Agony Channeler – Details are obscured by the Mists
3 Mastery Points: Mistlock Singularities – Details are obscured by the Mists
5 Mastery Points: Recursive Resourcing – Details are obscured by the Mists
8 Mastery Points: Essential Singularities – Details are obscured by the Mists
10 Mastery Points: Hyperactive Singularities – Details are obscured by the Mists

My interpretation, “haah kitten you people who like dungeons/fractals, you’re all a bunch of kittenes and WE’LL TELL YOU NOTHING!!!”

We all know they would have said something if there was. There’s no good reason not to say something about it when there is going to be stuff. There are a lot of good reasons to keep quiet if there isn’t.

The question is, will the open world content and revanent be enough to get you to purchase it?

Ehh, I think CP did a great job of really pushing for individuals to put effort in. Sure a lot of people leached the hell out of a few bosses, but if you didn’t have people doing well on each boss you’d quickly drop to silver rewards. The problem there was the megaservers and how you simply couldn’t get a map where people didn’t leach. Make a map with say 5 bosses, only 25 allowed in the map, kill each faster than a pretty strict timer with a heavy scaling factor and suddenly you have content where you need 5 groups of 5 people or there abouts all really trying.

It’s certainly doable, but witht he megaservers and large amounts of people, well that’s when it deteriorates into “kitten this” content instead of the fun content it could be.

At least they finally had the heart to say something on the subject. Hope killed.

I don’t disagree with either of you. I just really don’t want to see it become what most dungeons have, a race to that pot of gold where each hiccup is a cause of frustration because you just want to get out of there.

There are dozens of good options to make fractals more rewarding, I just don’t think increasing the cash reward is the right way is all.