Biggest reason i avoid taking necro into fractals is because of the lack of projectile defence and active defence. It just frustrates me being forced into absorbing damage like some roleplay tank.
Or something that has multiple uses would certainly help. For example blast finishers to be on par with other classes. But we also need something else.
Vuln is really easy for necro now. Even dagger necro gets a decent amount with Rending Shroud just by flashing DS.
However just about every other class has far more vuln than they previously had as well. Vuln is incredibly easy to come by these days. It used to be something groups struggled with and that would have been the best time to give necro some. But now that its such an abundant condition its too late. And it wont make a difference.
I dont really think theres any merit to certain more established guilds have more vote power. Thats starting to get into some shady territory. The big guilds have more influence and that will influence the smaller guilds opinions to a certain degree. Theres no need to add extra vote power on top of that.
That said i might have to change my stance on that if we find ourselves in a situation where there is a huge amount of smaller guilds with vote privileges from only submitting one or two records and they completely outnumber the larger guilds that the votes would have more effect on.
Im not to worried about rewards. I think if the daily achieves are rewarding enough then the incentive to do other fractals will be enough.
However I am very concerned about progression. Please do not allow players to progress by getting carried on an easy high fractal. Players should be required to do each scale to progress to the next. Skipping out scales should halt your progress.
Please don’t tell others to play how you want them to play. If you like to waste time for BS long runs because you think it’s “fun” – feel free, but make you own group for people like you.
Im sorry but i dont believe you deserve to progress to the next level unless you complete the level you are on. Thats basic classic game design.
This only effects you when you are trying to reach 100. For your reward runs you can do whatever short fractals you want.
Im not to worried about rewards. I think if the daily achieves are rewarding enough then the incentive to do other fractals will be enough.
However I am very concerned about progression. Please do not allow players to progress by getting carried on an easy high fractal. Players should be required to do each scale to progress to the next. Skipping out scales should halt your progress.
The bare minimum I would give necro is reliable finishers and active defence. Also make WoD actually decent compared to other similar skills on other classes.
Current fractal mobs already crit fairly often. And they also hit hard already on higher scales without critting. Ascalon mobs are a good example. So yes im curious how they are going to do this.
If approvers comment on validity we also get abuse. And we also get underhanded anonymous requests for us to be removed from approving records as a nice bonus.
Ill hopefully be testing it in an organised PvE environment. Probably high level fractals. Might even record some footage. No guarantee on that though. And yes I will be analysing the damage and PvE implications extensively.
The only prestige of worth is items tied to challenging achievements. RNG loot can be good as prestige. But it has to be done right. Which means it cant be accessible easily but it also cant be completely unrealistic to obtain.
So in fractal terms that would be fractal skin drops come in the form of a box where you choose the skin. The chance of obtaining this box is moderate. But its only available in the loot tables if you are fractal 50 and have completed fractal frequenter or some other challenging achieve that unlocks the drop. The point is that its not impossibly rare to get as a drop. But there is some significant requirement before you are even eligible for the drop.
Some basic feedback for this news though. I think progression should only be obtained by completing the relevant scale. This means you cannot skip scales if you want to reach fractal 100. No matter how well you balance the high level instability fractal combos there will definitely be one that gets put on farm by the community to carry bad players up to scale 90+ easily. So lets just avoid the issue entirely this time round and prevent this from happening. Right?
We could probably do with more approvers to be honest. I have much less free time now and dont want to spend much of it doing this. And it never hurts to have more approvers than we actually need.
Each fractal scale is a pre-determined island and gambit pairing. Fractal 20 will always be the same island and the same gambit. You won’t be able to just do swamp for any scale you want.
The rewards you get from an island will scale based on the island type. So an island that is typically longer (cliffside) will give more rewards then one that is typically shorter (swamp). This will discourage you from just farming swamp forever.
The new daily achievements will require you complete different fractal scales. You won’t be able to just do swamp X times to complete the achievements.
This might mean a group picks their favorite set of scales (3 to 9 or so islands) to clear each day, but repeatedly farming the same scale or same island will not be as beneficial.
Boss fights will be spread throughout the ‘static schedule’ like the other fractal islands. A ‘run’ will be one island; either boss or regular. They use the same reward scaling I mentioned above.
This is cool. Only problem is having only 3 scales is too little. Make it 5 different scales.
Yeah it will be equal. But like from a record point of view. The highest scale with dredge might be 96 and have some really awkward instability. Whereas another shard will have its highest on 94 with a different instability. Which just means we have some extra variables in records. Not really a problem. Just might make some shards really unfun to do on the highest scale.
So this allows you to balance and tailor mistlock instabilities to scales without worrying about how they effect certain shards more than others? Interesting. I believe Weth mentioned this back in the fractal CDI. Good to see the concern was addressed.
Only problem this creates is a lack of uniform scale for fractal records. Usually we choose the scale with agony and no other mistlock to create a controlled environment. Now it seems like certain records are going to be forced into weird mistlocks.
That only sounds depressing if you are doing it to get to the end. I find fractals fun and that second run you listed sounded pretty fun. Cliffside on the other hand i pretty much despise.
Doing the same exact runs back to back is not fun. I dont mind cliffside so much anymore. I just dont want to see it twice in the same day. And i certainly dont want to run 2 fractal scales and get both molten and mai trin twice. The purpose of the random shards was to create variety. But ever since they tiered shards most of that variety disappeared.
Therodin. Let me put it into perspective. We sometimes do multiple scales in a single night. When we do this “RNG” often results in the same “random” choices each time. My group gets cliffside pretty much every time we run fractals. The other day we got swamp > molten > dredge > mai on both 40 and 50 back to back. With static shards and different static shards on each scale we can avoid depressing stuff like this.
“The new static schedule will allow you to practice a given fractal and learn its challenges with your friends, removing the necessity of rerolling fractals in order to find the fractal of your choice.”
I dont think its going to be locked into specifics. I think you can choose whatever you want. Maybe the bonus daily is tied to a certain one. But there will probably still be worthwhile rewards to completing other fractals on the same scale.
At least I hope so.
Static shards is really great for a lot of reasons. Records included.
Theres probably a reward per fractal per scale. So i would expect you can get multiple fractal 50 rewards by selecting different shards. But repeating the same skitten the same scale will not keep rewarding you. Obviously a lot of casual players will just go for the quick ones. But thats no different to how people go for the quick dungeons like SE p1 when they have little time or desire to do the content.
What confuses me is that they nerfed it at the same time as when they capped chill stacking. It was a double nerf. The chill stacking fix was enough to resolve the “too strong” issue. And if not then then reverting it back to 1 second chill would have been a better solution.
So I guess the common strat is to drop the static field at the top of shadow refuge and blast them to get both stealth and swiftness, right?
The reason this works is because shadow refuge is not a smoke field so it does not give stealth on blast. It pulses stealth just from standing inside the field. If you placed SR first and blasted you would give AoE blind and not recieve any swiftness from the static field.
Fine changes.
Chilling Darkness isn’t as good as before but if you used plague and maximized your chill duration with no icd… you could cap the chill duration on someone 100x over.
This was fixed when they made chill duration stacking capped at 5. But in the same patch they nerfed chilling darkness. They only needed to fix chill to prevent the plague thing. So yes its a stupid nerf. And the devs lacked the foresight to implement them seperately to see if chilling darkness really warranted a nerf after chill was fixed. Still dont believe it does.
The evolved husk does not have any pull. The other stuff you said makes literally no sense. You can dodge every one of those things Jerus mentions. Or use blinds. A necro team should have more than enough blinds with plague and WoD rotations.
Getting knocked into lava is the sign of a bad player or someone messing around like an idiot. And getting knocked by the destroyer of worlds just means you need to learn to dodge super slow tells.
Finally got my fractal rifle the other day. Now i can roleplay as a sniper with fractal style. Almost 2 years and im still missing the greatsword, mace and spear.
I went in with no expectations as well, still dissapointed.
This was me yesterday. I literally said to myself “I want an excuse to pre-purchase HoT. I know! Ill buy it if they revert chilling darkness or theres a decent gemstore update!”. Kind of funny how im literally looking for an excuse to support anet. But they arent helping. Last week Tempest let me down. Wondering how long this dry spell of no decent news is going to last.
The statement “you need stability to go as fast as possible in a speedrun” falls flat when the majority of current records do not use a guardian or any stability in any part.
And yes Khristo I am aware eles can blast to 25. I usually solo stack 25 before each fight out of habit (I play ele the majority of the time). But in case you werent aware. Eles should be running staff while in combat. And in fractals the fights will often last too long to fully burst a boss down before might drops. There are a few exceptions of course.
So there are times when the party will be on about 9 stacks of might mid/late fight. This is where the phalanx really kicks in. It also helps because you dont even need to pre-stack other than a few quick blasts for fury. So you can engage slightly faster. And warriors should be running empower allies and banners anyway, So phalanx is basically a free bonus. That said you dont need warriors. My group sometimes does frac 50 without one (we play whatever we want). But most of the time the extra QoL the phalanx brings is essential to maximum efficiency.
They said they were going to continue these balance patches up until HoT release. If we cant expect stuff during one of these patches then well its hopeless.
Oh and to add, my fastest frac 50 ever was 1 warrior 1 ranger 3 necros. Nothing survived between wells and healing spring we meleed archdiviner into instant death
And my fastest was a fractal 50 with 2 warriors, 1 thief and 2 eles, we melee’d everything to death within 10-20 seconds.
Try getting that fire field blast off with a necromancer in your team.
Replace the warriors. The 1 thief + 2 eles can generate 25 might from blasting, no need for warriors.
1 Phalanx with banners makes a big difference in fractals. Not so much in dungeons though.
Bhawbs not wrong. Unfortunately no matter how good the elite spec is if the base class is still in a god awful state it doesnt really help the class overall.
No no you are still misunderstanding. The page was edited to remove the leaderboard and replaced to display an insulting conspiracy theory and a link to an offensive video. It wasnt up for long though.
Very curious how the whole of DnT seems to not know what happened on their own site.
