CC has no condition removal limit. It will wipe every single condition, and you get a bonus heal for them all. However conditions are pretty lax in PvE, you’ll be fine in general without much removal.
Not strictly true. CC and well of power will not work on special conditions. Good example of this is Malrona’s poison. This is because this is not normal poison. It has additional effects such as increasing your damage and lowering your movement speed. Basically CC and WoP only work on conditions which are in the condition table that they can convert or cleanse/gain bonus healing from. These skills also didnt work on the burn caused by that champ in the southsun Living story release.
I’d say this: rolling isn’t a problem, it’s the symptom of a problem. That:
1) Despite a tiered system, there are still Fractals which are clearly “better” (read: quicker)
2) With the existing reward system, Faster = More Rewarding most/all of the time
I agree. It’s not a problem. It exists because of imbalances (time wise) between fractals. If those were leveled in a way, we would see rolling happen less and less over time.
At this moment, Swamp is the quickest way to start a fractal. Kind of like jump-starting a fractal. If all tier 1 levels were balanced to be based on average time length to complete, it would make rolling obsolete. Time is money, so the less time it takes, the more population it would attract.
Please do not read it as “make everything longer”, so they’re the same length, but shorter so they’re on par with Swamps. At least Tier 1 Levels.
Also I miss those times when we had a chance to get (now known as) Tier 1 level as our third fractal. Those moments felt like winning a lottery. Now it’s more of a “here it comes” kind of a feeling. Where we hope to get the lesser of 4 evils…
Agree. My group always plays the disheartening guessing game on each loadscreen. And with our luck it usually cliffside and then dredge and then mai trin. We dont mind cliffside if we get it as the 3rd (were just grateful we didnt get dredge at that point). But I dont really like the tier system. It wasnt needed. Before it was less likely to get dredge + cliffside. Now its much more common to get both simply because of how they are weighted and how few fractals their are in the 2nd and 3rd tier (This makes the final roll rather predictable and frustrating).
Anyway as Conski mentioned I believe cliffside should be removed from tier 2 and put solely into tier 3 if you are keeping tiers. If you need an extra fractal for tier 2 then I suggest putting underwater in tier 2. That way it can actually pop up even when a group rolls for swamp.
SE explorable mode. Mainly effects path 3. Floor is missing which breaks patrol route of one group of dredge. Also forces the group to go a longer route to reach the first boss.
All dungeons. Spiders and other mobs which start off as green and/or drop down from the roof when approached are all visible and sometimes hostile from instance start now. Examples are TA spiders and malrona in malronas cave. The 6 archers in TA forward path. All spiders in arah.
Arah. The amount of broken waypoints in arah should also be mentioned. Including the ones which activate when completing the path instead of at the relevant boss kill.
Volcanic fractal. Still has a broken camera on the final boss fight.
Its difficult to explain lupi pushing. But once you’ve worked it out for yourself you should be able to keep him where ever you want. You can stand right inside his circle when hes in the wall and he wont move unless you do.
Every request for revised/improved rewards is a statement “you’re no longer paying me enough to do something repetitive.” I’d like to see the evolution of fractals be more akin to rising from tic-tac-toe towards chess rather than upping the hourly wage…
Not really. My group still does fractals because we somewhat enjoy them. However if we want to make money aswell we kind of have to avoid them. Its very frustrating spending 50 mins in fractals only to recieve a few blues and greens. Its also very hard to find extra group members when one of us cant play because noone wants to do fractals with such poor rewards. Making rewards worth the time will bring more players back to fractals and improve the enjoyment and activity.
The thing about re-rolling is, that you might as well always make the Swamp the first fractal if you allow it. If people are just going to keep re-rolling till they get the Swamp, might as well make the swamp the start-fractal by default… OR allow players to select their initial fractal.
All re-rolling is, is bypassing the other fractals to get the quickest one.
That maybe true but its hardly the most pressing issue which is driving players away from fractals. It should be a low priority problem. Lack of rewards and dredge is whats killing fractals for the majority of players, not rolling.
I think the op is saying he wants more movement unrestricting legs. Im inclined to agree. Most light female legs have huge dress bits or hanging parts. Id like some more trouser like legs or just skimpy legs without the huge flappy bits.
Id say rewards is higher priority than dredge rework. But they both need to be looked at to encourage players to start doing fractals again.
Dredge is pretty well designed, its just too long. There really doesnt need to be anything complicated to rework it. Just remove Rabsovich and the clown car.
Rewards on the other hand are completely terrible for the time it takes to complete a full run. And the difference in rewards between 10 and 49 is so small it doesnt make any sense. Id say gold should increase by 1g per tier. So doing 41-50 should reward 5g for the daily. Adding dragonite into fractals would be nice. Atm dungeon runners are forced to do wvw or open world to get their dragonite. And they have no shortage of emp fragments and bloodstone dust.
Fractal weapons need to be made noticeably more common in higher tiers and much rarer in lower tiers. So far ive heard of so many people getting them in 10-20 when previously it was impossible to get them below 20 and doing 48 definately had the best drop rates for fractal weapons. Id like to see weapon drop rate increased back to its former drop rate and the addition of the selectable weapon box asap. Also please remove uninfused rings from higher tiers and make all rings salvageable or give us the option to vendor them for 25-50silver instead of their current 5silver.
Rolling should be a very low priority problem. Its certainly not driving players away from fractals like dredge and rewards are.
How To:
-Create dat childish “legendary” staff
-Get The Crossing staff
-Transmog The Crossing skin over legendary’s skin
-Enjoy Necro true legendary staff with customizable stats
Ascended armour is designed for fractals. So you should get full zerker ascended for pve and then other exotic sets for wvw etc. There is no need for ascended in wvw.
Haha well I sort of know that feeling. I finished kraitkin the other day. Thats a leggie that I will pretty much never use or even see. I guess I can get aquatic slayer on the daily with style atleast.
Flame seeker prophecies so nice. Shame shield is like the least used weapon in the game. Used on engi but you would never see it. Nice on warrior maybe but offhand sword is better. :<
You will definately need the energy sigils in phase 3 (if you miss some dodges and lose too much lifeforce you wont get enough time to regen it). Its actually pretty tight on endurance in both phase 1 and phase 3 with just energy sigils. So if not going for a record attempt endurance food + energy sigils is the safer way to go.
The bubble is only triggered by being too far away from lupi (around max melee distance) which can easily be avoided by dark pathing back to him. If you do trigger it by accident you can always use plague as your emergency stability. But one of the most important things about learning lupi is learning not to cause bubbles. So i would suggest scrapping the stability and forcing yourself to learn the hard way.
Yeah im not sure what exactly does it. But ive had a few times where ive almost died at the end of the run. It may have been ooze auto attacks or it may have been the fire. Endure pain worked. Defiant stance also works. But the last time i did it was before the introduction of the healing skills i think.
Good discussion. I am enjoying it. The discussion about re rolling is very insightful.
I would appreciate it if you could put some ideas forward for Leader-board mechanics.
Specifically in regard to the fact that I was unhappy with us putting out Leader-boards in their previous functionality (having lots of folks sitting at lvl 50 was not ideal) and therefore the feature was held back.
Obviously we have given Level 50 Leader diversification a lot of thought but it would be awesome to hear your proposals. Note there are a lot of logic problems in the solutions in this area so please do think about associated risks.
Cheers
Chris
Keep leaderboards by clear time. Individual fractals, and then for all possible combinations. Like http://gwscr.com/ , but official and for fractals.
Time to clear is the only reliable metric on how “good” a run is, and is the best way to display mastery and leadership in the area.
If you wanted room for more challenge, you could make categories for duos, triples, etc. as well.
I agree with this. I would also suggest allowing players to select a specific fractal for less reward. Much like the practise mode previous posters have suggested. This way a team can try and top the leaderboard on a specific fractal shard and instability combo. It allows competition and limits the rng nature.
As someone in the speedclear community, we have a category for fractals but its not viable to compete for tier 2 or tier 3 fractals because we cant just restart if we mess up. At the moment only one record is posted in that category and that was done in a casual fractal run. Giving us a proper leaderboard and the ability to select fractals purely for minor reward and leaderboard status attempts is something the speedclear community would be overjoyed to see. It will also encourage other players to improve their skill by aspiring to those who have cleared certain fractals in record times.
They already confirmed it will be hit hardest and they want to introduce a ferocity mainstat gear eventually so that means celestial cant have it as main. It never made sense for celestial to have so much crit damage anyway.
People overrate critical damage a lot. Plus investing in celestial now is a very bad idea. Ferocity change will completely kill the crit damage portion of celestial gear.
Boon removal is unreliable due to the rate at which they re-apply the boons. And the fact that so many spawn and remain invuln that its impossible to properly interrupt all of them.
But yes CC helps a lot at surviving that encounter. Doesnt make it any less tedious and boring though.
Dear master haviz and master Zelyhn, even though I’m still clueless at what that skill did to the fight. It somehow worked! Flawlessly! And it only took me two wipes to get the hang of it. Awesome, thank you very much!
\o/
It works well because it chills the shaman meaning you can take your time to destroy the bubble. This makes the shaman take longer to reach a human snack. Also its unblockable so it will always work, same goes for frozen ground on the staff.
Yeah i checked the numbers and full beserker with 30/15 was still better even though you lack crit chance. And thats including prec food and perception stacks. Its annoying because even though you put all that effort in to min/mix for lupi you still miss so many crits. :<
I assume you arent using DS to dps even though you are running 30/0/10/0/30. If thats the case I would suggest changing to 30/15/0/0/25. This is the superior trait setup for lupi solo on necro when using a power build. Gives good fury uptime and slightly higher base crit chance. Problem is you will still lack crit which is why its so difficult to get a good time with power necro on lupi.
You dont even need to swap utilities. Just use gs, sword warhorn. But obviously if you do get caught by an imob then you need to be prepared to cleanse and maybe pop endure pain.
He may have just been lucky and not recieved any glancing blows when attacking. Although it does seem strange that he hit you that hard while you were in plague form. My full ascended beserker necro only hits 5k on the final hit on trash mobs when unbuffed. So i guess its possible if he was a fully buffed up necro but thats rare in wvw.
Its far from min/max but theres no way to min/max a hybrid build seeing as they are always going to be underwhelming in either condi dmg or direct damage. If rampager had power or condi damage as main stat or we had another similar stat combo then maybe we could make some genuinely good hybrid builds. But atm we have to overstack crit chance or focus more on condi damage. Either way the build lacks a lot of power. So hybrid builds always have low direct damage.
I wouldnt say that. Id just say on eu we are all gathered into fewer guilds. Alot of us run with several people who arent in a top guild because they choose not to be. Anyway on eu there is rT, SC, LuPi, ONE and a few more. The only other ones i can think of off the top of my head are french though.
Because celestial isnt good. The crit damage doesnt make up for the loss of power and in some cases precision/condi damage. You get more damage just going rampager trinkets or even beserker trinkets. Heck even rabid trinkets would be better.
How about Story Mode fractals, where you could pick a fractal you want to experience. Then upon arriving to said fractal we could experience the story behind thus level hence learning more about the history and idea behind the design of each and every fractal. To make it actually rewarding we could have a achievement system in place for each level, so everyone would play it at least once. And maybe a reward at the end (30s should be sufficient as it would be much shorter than a regular dungeon story mode) and some experience. It would also help new players get a hang of fractals a bit more understanding the layout and mechanics behind every level.
We could do something like this, but when ends up happening is the work involved ends up being a lot of additional work to basically build something people play one or two times and then are done with it. In that time, we could have probably half built another real fractal, which I think probably would be better for the game over-all. Maybe the real question would be -> How do we try and get across better lore and stories with the current fractal system?
Make the dialogue run in the background in such a way that it doesnt halt progress while waiting for a conversation to complete. Make fractal objectives clues to the lore. Basically just avoid timegating the content for cutscenes and lore, but you can still add it in. Whenever I play the living story stuff for the first time I turn off my music and turn on npc chat so I can see and hear the dialogue. If it is simply background stuff then I can turn off ingame sound, play music and it doesnt interrupt my enjoyment of the content when replaying.
Proposal Overview
Fractals should be used to tell as more about the lore/history of Tyria.
Goal of Proposal
Increase the amount of lore used for the fractals and creating new fractals which story and background informations. This is such a good oppertunity to tell us about things that happende before GW2, things that could happen in the future, things of an alternate version of Tyria.
So an interesting challenge we always face when trying to make any type of dungeon content more lore heavy, is they are by their very nature highly repeatable content. Historically our design philosophy around group content that falls into that category is to try and provide enough context for the experience to make sense, but not heavily attempt to tell deep story in these instances.
While the core concept of using fractals to continue to show great moments in the history of Tyria is indeed totally in line with our own thinking as well, the struggle we always face is how much of that story we can really put there. Once you play it once or twice, you really just want to actually play the content and not wait around for all the story moments, scenes, cinematics, etc. This can lead to a problem we used to run into in Gw1 where some people in the party really wanted to see the story, and others had played it before and wanted them to hurry the heck up.
Our work around for this for Thaumanova for example was to provide a story version of it that was around during the living world release with far deeper exposition, and the current fractal version today that tries to focus on the game play. Similarly, story dungeons are really intended to be played a handful of times to get the story, and explorable mode dungeons are very story light since they are intended to be re-playable based on the core content.
What kind of fun ideas can you come up with to help allow us to get more story into the fractal experiences, without the cost of slowing down the core re-playability of the game play that is at the heart of the fractal content?
Thaumanova was well done in this regard. Its an enjoyable fractal for replayability and even so you still experience some of the lore without interrupting the content.
But on to the point of explorable modes not being heavily story driven. Why does the new aetherpath in Twilight Arbor still have unskippable cutscenes and needlessly long dialogues? This is a major reason a lot of players avoid the path. Not to mention the previous path that you replaced it with was far better designed and much more fun. I like that fractals dont interrupt content with cutscenes and dialogue (The npc dependency is an issue in the molten fractal though, this is also a major issue in many regular dungeons which results in bugs and frustration).
Its not a big enough issue to be worth discussing. As romo said we should focus on more important things such as shard balance, rewards and bugs.
I would however like underwater to appear in tier 2 though. Before this happens they need to add craftable ascended water breathers though. Or make head pieces carry over AR to underwater.
I do. It doesnt take a genius to realise people are going to misunderstand that. Especially when they dont even understand the word selling most of the time.
Ive always found the most basic requirements, like “experienced pls”. Lead to decent pugs. Sometimes you get odd builds and leechers. But often they arent bad enough to warrant a kick. It is a pug after all.
If I join a pug i usually join the no requirement groups because its more interesting carrying a group through a dungeon than pugging for efficiency (I can do that with my guild or my friends so pugging is something I do for entertainment).
Its rng based. I have about 3-4 locusts spawn at once almost every attempt on my necro. Best way to deal with them is save well of suffering for when you get a group. Rest of the time just maintain locust swarm on warhorn and flash DS for weakening shroud as much as possible. It actually works quite nicely as a semi cleave when there arent too many. You can still fight him on the wall with lots of locusts but it requires a bit more experience with locust walking.
Phase 1 is a real pain on necro. But once you get used to it the other phases are pretty easy in comparison.
