Guild Wars 2

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Paradox.5498:

My problem with this puzzle is the PvP format. First try I apparently join a “game in progress” and don’t notice, because at around 80% of the puzzle I get this score board popping up in (and blocking most of) my screen. I click it away, hoping I can still finish. But nope, seconds away from the reward I get booted back to the start. WHY!!! When I enter a puzzle with a timer, I want a fresh timer, I don’t want to join a map where apparently someone just left. From that point I kept failing at the stairs of exploding pressies and because I already lost my motivation at the very first try, no puzzle for me this year I guess. Nice that the waiting time between tries is gone. But stupid timer should die in agony.

Too much effort to look up and see how much time there is left?

No, this got nothing to do with effort. I just didn’t think of time running out, started to jump, almost finished and got screwed by that stupid timer that has no use in a JP at all. I’m sure such things don’t happen to you cause you obviously think of / notice everything but I’m not you. But thanks for the constructive post.

My problem with this puzzle is the PvP format. First try I apparently join a “game in progress” and don’t notice, because at around 80% of the puzzle I get this score board popping up in (and blocking most of) my screen. I click it away, hoping I can still finish. But nope, seconds away from the reward I get booted back to the start. WHY!!! When I enter a puzzle with a timer, I want a fresh timer, I don’t want to join a map where apparently someone just left. From that point I kept failing at the stairs of exploding pressies and because I already lost my motivation at the very first try, no puzzle for me this year I guess. Nice that the waiting time between tries is gone. But stupid timer should die in agony.

Oh, I too can confirm that ascended weapon boxes do drop from fractals (got 2 so far). But with not one dev reacting on the many valid complaints in the “fractured” forum or the many bugs in the “bugs” forum, the hyping of features that didn’t make it and plain lying about fractal balancing, I’ve lost all hope that dev quotes like these are even close to what goes live during today’s patch.

Tomzzy.9564:

Paradox.5498:

Flash.6912:

I remembered short time ago that 1 of the dev said if ascended armors drop, it would be in fractals. Is this true?

I’m not even counting on it. Fractals would also drop fractal weapon boxes at higher levels (which they don’t and it’s not considered a bug) and fractal weapons would be skins instead of weapons without stats (which is sometimes true and sometimes false).

@OP they said they’ll add armor to the fractals.

About the fractal weapon skin boxes, they start dropping at 51+ LvL. (A dev confirmed that, too lazy to search for it)

Wrong, they just confirmed they drop at levels not implemented. Which could be 100+.

Flash.6912:

I remembered short time ago that 1 of the dev said if ascended armors drop, it would be in fractals. Is this true?

I’m not even counting on it. Fractals would also drop fractal weapon boxes at higher levels (which they don’t and it’s not considered a bug) and fractal weapons would be skins instead of weapons without stats (which is sometimes true and sometimes false).

So at what level WILL they start to drop? 50+? 60+? 190+? Will we ever see this feature live in the, say, coming year? 10 years? Why even EVER mention it as a new, exciting thing and hype about it and then just not make it available during the big fractal update? Who thought it was a great idea to stick to the random skins anyway, even for low level fractal? So many ppl got 5 fractal focuses or 7 tridents or whatever and they still can’t be sure they ever get the single skin they’ve been hoping for for over a year now. “This is not considered a bug” but it stinks. Even more so than “we’re gonna balance fractals, they should typically take 20-30 mins to complete” and then make Dredge twice as annoying and even longer than it ever was.

TPMN.1483:

“This is not considered a bug.
The Fractal Skin Box is not dropping for the Fractal levels currently available (up to level 50).
It’s not accessible to anyone at this time.”

— This does not mean that they are lvl 50+ only. It just means that:
“It’s not accessible to anyone at this time.”

It has been stated before that we know it is not yet dropping.
When it does start dropping I’m sure we will all relax and enjoy FoTM again.

Patience – fellow Tyrians we have to hang on in there.

No, it means: it is not dropping for the Fractal levels currently available and it is not considered a bug. So it does mean it’ll only drop in levels that are currently not available, which is 50+. For sub-50, there’s nothing to fix cause obviously, it was never meant to drop there.

I can’t believe the frigging misleading hyping about stuff like this. If we’re not supposed to get these boxes yet, Arenanet, don’t present them as a major improvement in fractals yet and don’t be vague about it. Just don’t put stuff like that in “coming soon” and patch notes. It gives false hope, is all it ever does. Bring the good news when people actually get access to stuff like this.

Aden Celeste.3650:

Would a DEV PLEASE take a look at this post?

And guys, what did you expect from a 2 week work schedule? buggy events, game breaking issues and less time to actually play the content they themselves create.

You don’t seriously believe that the fractal team only had 2 weeks time to prepare this patch right? Fractals and living world and stuff are different teams. Still, yeah, devs SHOULD look at this post.

And then there’s several bugs popping up since patch that aren’t related to any 1 specific fractal but to the whole system:

Players with (normally) 55 agony resistance died in a couple of seconds while doing frac40 (agony everywhere). It shouldn’t tick for more than a few hit points and it didn’t for 3 of us, but 2 players saw their AR mysteriously lowered to insufficient amounts even when all their AR gear was equipped and undamaged. So far this happened more than once and both in Uncategorized and Volcanic fractals. The players with this problem could fix their AR by relogging or, sometimes, simply dying and respawning.

Before the patch, as long as the instance owner wouldn’t leave the party everybody could go to LA for repairs and vendoring. Since patch, if the instance owner leaves the fractal, gets disconnected, wants to switch character or whatever, everybody gets kicked losing all progress.

It seems, although I don’t have hard numbers to back this, that loot from daily reward is actually better at lower levels of fractals now. It surely looks like only few people get fractal weapon skins now at levels higher than 30, and more people get them sub 30. My theory is that the dice roll tells the game you get a fractal weapon chest but as these chests aren’t implemented for some obscure reason, you end up with nothing instead.

Last night, me and the party I was in came up with the same idea, only we thought it should definately both ways: enemies should be able to hurt eachother as well. We did fractal level 39, where mobs explode after they die, and we were doing the Mossman fight. It would be awesome if you could detonate his wolfs right next to him to kill him. On the downside you’d have to take care not to walk into your teammate’s traps and damaging fields and cleave attacks or stand behind the boss when someone’s shooting piercing projectiles :-D It’d be fun!

It seems the boss of underwater fractal HAS been adjusted, or is it just me? Done this fractal twice since patch and both times the jelly boss went down faster than I’m used to.

I’m also one of those ppl who like underwater combat (underwater fractal is awesome) and I dig the urban battlegrounds fractal as well. So TS, I don’t support your idea at all. And with the changes to the Mossman fight (vet wolfs!) more people will fail on this fractal than before so it might’ve become a tad less popular than it was.

Last night we had the weapon testing room bug out on our team, blocking progress to next fractal / higher fractal level / loot / more fun.

Apparently when we entered the room, Braham and Rox were nowhere close to the room yet and that’s probably what caused the bug. The weapon testing champ started his speech and then… nothing. About a minute later Braham and Rox finally decided to enter the room as well but the event still didn’t start and no matter what we tried (die in the lava, everybody but the fractal owner zoning out and back in, trying to get the NPCs to die) we couldn’t get it to work.

So, we had to abandon our progress and restarted a fresh fractal run a bit later. We got the molten facility fractal again and paid much attention to enter the room together with the NPCs this time and it worked as it should. It’s bugs like these that can completely ruin fractals for people, it’s no fun at all to lose your progress and completely restart.

I fully support the call for a dev lifestream of dredge at higher levels. It’ll be endless fun to watch, especially if they roll a dice for random professions first and end up without warriors and/or guardians. Good luck surviving on the buttons.

There MUST be a way to pass the message to ANet that the majority of fractal players hate the dredge fractal with a passion after all these so-called “fixes” that only make the thing harder, longer more tedious and, generally, even more annoying than it always was.

The ONLY positive thing I sometimes read about this fractal is, “the heavy mining bags are great loot”. Well, that doesn’t compensate for the annoyance of getting this fractal in your rotation.

Same happened for me and 1 party member last night, fractals 31. Another party member did get an infused ring.

Talindra.4958:

Done it yesterday with 2 guards 2 warriors 1 ele. But only at lvl 31 or something. Its a good fix. but the respawn of dredge should be make slightly longer say 5 more secs

Oh the irony… 2 guards + 2 warriors survived it so it’s a good fix. Whatever happened to “bring the profession you want”?

Fluffball.8307:

Everyone calm down, in a week or two the established methods for completing all the new fractals will be known to everyone and you won’t have to think anymore.

Also, in a week or two is next patch, which (if we extrapolate a bit from what we’ve seen over the past year) will make it impossible to be on a pressure plate while invulnerable, stealthed or wearing less than heavy armor.

I can’t believe this is anyone’s idea of “balancing” Dredge fractal. It has been the least popular fractal of all since fractals were implemented in the first place. The only attention it ever got was making it harder and more frustrating and even less popular.

Now it won’t be doable by most pugs and it’ll always be the third fractal in a series, so it’ll be harder to avoid. Well, I can see why it ain’t meant to be skippable easily. But the reasons people want to avoid it never got addressed, quite the contrary:

Underground Facility haters have gotten shafted every single patch that paid attention to fractals.

Yeah, kinda disappointed here too… I just bought T2 medium a couple of days ago and liked it a lot. Now, if I want (for instance) some tiny blue, almost invisible splotches of glow on chest and legs, I got to dye almost the entire parts blue, which doesn’t look all that good. I hope T3 is better, haven’t had time to preview that yet, but it ain’t promising.

Paken Kai.5970:

Astralporing.1957:

Have you ever heard of anyone that got a fractal skin at level 10? No? I thought so. If there really was a chance, it was so low to make precursor drops seem like an everyday occurence.

So, because you haven’t heard anybody in game or on the forums exclaiming that they got their skin at level 10, it never happens?

A low chance is still a chance.

Right… Back in the days before the champion loot patch, devs claimed Final Rest was actually available in game, added to a loot table of some very large chest and just had a very low drop rate. It didn’t need fixing. Only noone EVER got it before that patch. Obviously, something WAS fixed after all and now it’s a rare drop from the Behemoth chest. Don’t believe everything you hear devs say about loot tables. Fractals are a pyramid, with a majority of players only doing low levels (wide base) and a small minority making it to level 50+ (narrow top). If fractal weapons ever dropped in lvl10 fractals, even with a very low drop chance, it would be known.

If Dredge and Cliffside fractals aren’t modified to take less time and frustration, things even get worse than they are now, due to longer fractals always popping as third fractal after the patch. This is very worrying so I really hope some dev cares to shed some light on this.

I recall reading that there would at some point be some balancing as some fractals unintentionally take much more time to finish than others. Now all I read about fractal length is, “Fractals are now weighted according to their length and difficulty. Easier fractals will always show up earlier in the run, with more difficult ones coming later.”
And: “On average, a single fractal should take 20-30 minutes to complete, depending on your group and difficulty scale.” Dredge needs some serious attention before it gets completed by normal groups in 20-30 mins.

Needs to be fixed ofc but in case you’re eager to get this skill challenge done, consider guesting to another server. I did this skillpoint last night on my home server Piken Square (EU), wasn’t bugged there.

Hate to burst the bubble but if you expect completely different personal stories on every character, you’re gonna be severely disappointed. Choices within the same race like legion, descendance etc. only influence your story at low levels, like you noticed now. But even then, at some point every character’s personal story gets pretty much identical, with the same choices.

Transformation tonics are fun while waiting for Tequatl to spawn. But I too am disappointed that there’s no set of costume brawl skills on such an expensive item. :-(

Zanshin.5379:

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

What a waste of instant bank access.

Yeah you’re right ofcourse. I’d better let them rot in my bank again, all 35 of them. Like I’ve done over the pass year. Please enlighten me when using them would NOT be a waste.
Alternative is the WvW trick, which demands that I’m in a WvW queue for about an hour and a half while waiting near the chest. That surely is NOT a waste.
Anyway, I’m not saying I’m burning loads of bank access items this way, I was just explaining how you COULD use a character parked at the chest to open the chest once per day. You could save up a bunch of keys before using 1 bank access ofcourse.

Charak.9761:

Paradox.5498:

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

You can access bank in WvW, logout and back in and be at the chest

That didn’t even occur to me, thanks for the idea. I’m not sure whether this is a practical solution for me (generally long queue times for WvW) but it might help people on low pop servers.

Lothirieth.3408:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not surprising considering there’s no benefit to run it once you’ve gotten your achievements and can just park an alt at the top to run the instance or to open the chest with your daily key.

I must be missing something.. what daily key do you get at the top of the tower?

You don’t get a daily key at the top. You CAN however park a character with a couple of those instant bank access consumables at the chest. Use another character to buy one complete key per day and bank it (account bound). Then switch to the character at the chest, use bank access to get the key and open the chest.

Gasmask also completely removes Asura ears. Looks horrible so my Asura flamethrower engineer still has to do without a gasmask and gasmask stays in the bank.

Same here, got a dragon’s jade shield skin in my bank and can;t sell it. Made an in-game bug report over a month ago and nothing happened.

9/10 if you pick Vessanya :P

My Sylvari thief is named “R T Choke”. I like witty names but I realize they’re not everybody’s fav. At least it gave some guildies a chuckle.

I rather expect it to be completely random to be honest. It’s kinda natural for humans to try find a pattern but I doubt there is one. My Norn ranger ending up fighting Zoija and Mr Sparks doesn’t correlate with anything in her personal story or race.

So far I’ve had to kill Eir+Garm and Zoija+Mr Sparkles, apart from the nameless mob types (I’ve seen one of those Scarlet invasion type of champ or aetherblade dudes).

An Siorai Tharian.4516:

ATMAvatar.5749:

An Siorai Tharian.4516:

Then can you honestly expect that player to know the first thing about how to actually play their chosen class when they get their first character or for that matter ANY character to level 80, and proceed to leave the confines of the crafting district in whatever their starting city was and attempt to join a Fractals Run or whatever the End Game Content of choice that they choose to undertake happens to be?

Why not? The professions aren’t that hard to get a basic handle on, and story dungeons/the early levels of fractals are cake. You can’t go 15 minutes in LA without a guild invite, so they can even cut their teeth with guildmates.

Okay…

A.) A Profession (aka Proficiency) is a Crafting Skill, like Artifice.

B.) A Class, is what your character actually does in Combat, i.e. a Guardian.

C.) A Race is the species of the Character which can augment the characters abilities in combat to some extent.

Get those terms right. They were defined this way long before Guild Wars was even conceived of. Heck, they were defined this way long before Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Games were even dreamt about.

Get your facts right. Confusing as may be, in GW2 classes are called professions and got nothing to do with crafting. Stop making this discussion more confusing than necessary. Few people care about definitions made up for pencil and paper games from 1974 these days.

That being said, being one of those players who collected a vast amount of lower tier materials while leveling 5 characters to 80 the regular way I think OP has a mostly valid complaint here. Leveling even more characters has become boringly repetitive while all some people want is another level 80 character to gear up for fractals, dungeons, wvw or just for fun. GW2 had the benefit that there was the alternative way of leveling characters quickly by just crafting your way to 80 and skipping going through the same zones for the 6th time. The ascended weapons patch has made that more difficult and I too wonder if that was entirely intended. And yes, ofcourse, if you use a scroll to get to level 20 and then craft all your crafting skills to 400, you get close to 80 still, and getting the last 4 levels ain’t much trouble at all. That argument doesn’t change much to the OP’s saying that leveling through crafting has become much more expensive than it used to be.

Morfedel.4165:

This skill WOULD be good in condition heavy areas where not everyone has healing spring. Take, for example, Twilight Arbor.

It only removes (and heals for) 4 types of conditions, which I rarely see combined during 1 fight. Even in TA, it’s usually not worth it.

I can see how this skill could have some use in some very rare cases but overall it ain’t worth using. I tried it on my ranger last night, both in open world and in level 40 fractals, but it’s inferior in every way to good old healing spring (both for me and for allies). The idea anyone would pay 250 pristine spore samples and 5 gold on top of that for this skill is utterly absurd. Spending 25 skill points on it is a bit better but still kinda expensive for a skill that doesn’t even heal my pet. New skill? Thanks but no thanks, I’ll stay far from it on my other characters.

Well, yes, it only advances when you succesfully harvest pristine spore samples… 5% advancement at a time, no matter how many samples you harvest in a single go. So in order to get the achievement to 100%, you’ll successfully harvest 20 times and thus end up with way more than 20 samples. You don’t collect 20 samples, you collect 20 times.

In other words… please fix either the mechanism or the description.

Where have you even seen this skin? Can’t find a picture of it and I’m curious…

Pifil.5193:

I like it. I got to enjoy my SAB finisher.

Agreed! 8-bit nuke ftw!
I hope the possibility to use finishers will be extended to all vets, elites and champs tbh but most def NOT to every single mob in game pls or it’ll get annoying quickly.

You should’ve seen the fire elemental at game release… He’s still very easy if you don’t forget your character can actually be controlled by pressing keys on your keyboard. Killing him while AFK is a bit harder now, and should be.

Korossive.7085:

Launch is fine. Remove “Invulnerable” message.
Without that – they’re a cake.

Exactly! Shooting invulnerable harpies half of the time is what gets ppl raging a lot in this fractal.

What, you say that in a living world, only 1 thing happens at a time? I don’t get it, why are you complaining exactly?

Don’t get your hopes up, as long as it doesn’t concern a greatsword skin it does not seem to have ANY priority at all. I gave up hoping for a fix a long time ago.

ANet: “Here, some extra loot to celebrate Halloween”
Cribbage: “NOOOOO! Aggravating in the extreme!”

Seriously…

I read somewhere that there was a link between the achievement (not) progressing and the way you enter Lunatic Inquisition. If you enter by talking to the Halloween dude in Lion’s Arch (marked with a pumpkin on your minimap) the achievement progresses, if you enter through one of the doors in the open world (labyrinth → NPC → Lunatic Inquisition) it doesn’t. Haven’t checked whether all of this is true, I just know that I entered for a round of LI through Lion’s Arch last night and now I got 1/8.

Same issue, completed clocktower this morning and all I got was 20 emp frags. Second time I completed it, nothing at all. Last year my PC didnt like the clock tower, this year I hoped to get the achievement and be able to do some rewarding clock tower jumping. Well, I finished it alright but no achievement, gloves ONCE, now just the fragments once a day? Thanks but no thanks, not worth the time anymore. I had fun completing it for the first time, not replay friendly, moving on.

Reading stories on the internet is not one of my hobbies. If I want to read, I grab my e-book reader or an old-fashioned book made of tree corpses. I wholeheartedly agree with OP that stories should be told in-game.

You sure it ain’t 1 chest per account per day?

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

Has it really been a year with no fix?

Almost a year and 2 months now.

Spiky Muffin.9180:

Still don’t get why sellers are the bad guys… they’re doing those who buy(the “actual bad” guys) a favor

By the same logic, there ain’t anything wrong with selling harddrugs to kids.

A cat, of course. One that’s both alive and dead at the same moment.