4821

That dredge mining suit is an utter bastard. One hour of running it around in circles and we still couldn’t get it below 50%.

4822

And it’s really weird, because the Ice Elemental is the same fight, but with a much lower damage output. The mining suit has brutal melee damage, the huge number of mines, and that gigantic AOE that hits like a truck and can even hit the lever folks up top. He puts out enough pressure with the damage to really be a pain in the ass for the group when positioning him as he can force people to move either to avoid damage or rez downed folks, making it harder to consistently position him.

The ice elemental has a much slower, weaker, easily avoided GTAOE, and summons minions that hit like a gentle breeze. I don’t think I was ever under 75% health when positioning him, and had my heal just sitting unused most of the fight.

The mining suit also seemed to have less interest in sticking on one person, going so far as to break off the group at the bottom and go apeshit on the lever puller several times, but that could have been bad luck.

4823

I do wonder if our ice elemental run didn’t have this problem because we were organized enough that the lever puller never attacked the elemental at all, whereas in the mining suit run, we were trying to figure it out as we went, so everybody had wailed on the boss a bit. Kind of frustrating if true.

4824

The group from the QT3 guild I was in beat him in something like an hour and a half. His squat and self-heal move was just insulting.

4825

That is because if they want to do fractal rank 5, and your only rank 1, the highest your group can do it rank 1. People want to progress i guess.

4826

That one was horrible. I don’t rage quit often. But after doing that one I rage quit.

4827

How do you determine what fractal level you are?

4828

One method would be to hop into the instance to see what you can select. I’m not sure if there’s a better way. I tried to poke around in the achievements to see if there might be anything related, but I failed to find one.

4829

Anyone with half a brain could have predicted that happening.

4830

This was my biggest issue. I missed out on what was apparently all the really fun stuff because I was either working at the time, or had to wait for a patch to fix the broken quest guy. Also, the whole thing was not very well explained so I never really knew where I should be or what I should be doing to get to the fun stuff. My computer died Sunday morning which didn’t really help either.

Maybe next time they do an event that is going to shunt the entire server into a single zone, ANET should have servers capable of handling that.

4831

Same thing for me. I originally thought I missed the event (had to go out and watch some football earlier!), but came back around 8pm CST seeing i might be able to do it thru overflow!

So for the next 4-5 hours…wow, it was then 1am with nothing to show for it after nearly completing twice! I should have just done my dailies and logged off…

I usually don’t get pissed from mmo’s (last time was a MC 40 raid in WoW pre-BC), but I really got pissed and annoyed. More at the idea that the risk/reward in this game doesn’t feel right. As well, the Lost Shores is kind of a dissapointment as a zone… was REALLY hoping for a full new zone… instead it feels like it wasn’t even finished and half as big as a usual zone.

Oh well, I’m not going to be spending any more money on this game until it gets some real update (I’ve already spent close to 100 dollars on gems since release and have gotten nothing substantial from it except bank slots, char slots and one witch outfit). What I’d really like is a major update to RvR… something big… because I really think this is where GW2 shines above any other mmo.

4832

I understand why gamers are doing it. It’s only natural to want to progress but it adds conflict in a game that seems otherwise pretty much designed from the ground up to encourage cooperation. I like playing, so I don’t really care if I am rolling up an alt or downgrading my 80 to play with a new friend, or rerunning challenging dungeons or fractals, but that’s not typical I don’t think. There has to be a better way to reward people who are ahead but still encouraging to play with those who already went through.

I actually loved the swamp map, mostly because it was 5 people, 1 who said they had yet to successfully complete it and we did. Granted after failing like half a dozen times, we stopped, evaluated what we were doing and how we could try something else, and then completely it a few times after that. Most pickup groups seem to dissolve after the first few failures if not the first.

There has to be a better way to do the one time events or just really big events. I mean, aside from those who are just not there for whatever reason missing out, you had a few overflow servers begging for help because they couldn’t do the event with low numbers, and another server complaining that people were redoing the event trying to another chest.

4833

Remember, if you give people a reward for being dicks in an MMO, such as a better chance of completing a dungeon if they get to pick the players they add to their group, you can count on people being dicks most of the time.

4834

True, although in this case I don’t really know that the people are even being dicks. Arenanet basically made a dungeon that has already about ~20 different, mutually exclusive versions of itself, and will only become more extreme. The folks looking for fractal 7 really AREN’T looking to run the same thing as the fractal 2 or 5 or whatever folks in terms of progress.

This isn’t the “exp only” or “link your achievement” or “minimum gearscore 5k” idiocy driven by shitty players. These aren’t the clowns that will only take uber geared and experienced players to run an introductory dungeon like you see all the time in WoW and LotRO and, well, everywhere. People running these aren’t misinformed twits like most of the bottom feeders that engage in said dungeon dickery; they’re doing exactly what Arenanet told them to do.

The fractal tier system is just a case of a design so wrong it should have been shot down by anyone who reviewed it, or even glanced in its general direction.

4835

It would be fine if they’d implement a proper LFG/LFD system.

4836

Lol, sorry but what a ridiculous statement. :)

EVERYTHING in a game is fracturing the playerbase. Character levels, zones, sPvP, WvW, all the different dungeons with various explorable modes, etc. Oh I know, let’s delete all that content, make everyone the same level as MrPerson and make everyone do only what MrPerson wants to do!

Fractals change as you level them up. It’s a brilliant mechanic, you know why? Because it’s not fun to do the same shit over and over again! Having the instance change like that ensures that you never really know what you are going to see next time you go in. People at “fractal lvl 10” still see new stuff in there after they’ve done 30+ fractals and it’s great!

Yes, some people are LFG for “fractal level 10” when you are still at 3. So what? How is that different from when people were looking to do Arah exp1 when you were still doing CM story?

Like everything else in the game, people can always “go down” in fractal levels and do lvl 2 with their friends if they want to. Does it hurt you to see someone at fractal lvl 10 while you are at lvl 3? Did it hurt you when people where at lvl 80 when you were still at 40? What’s the difference?

People want to do new challenging stuff. Let them. Find the people who is at your level and do YOUR new and challenging stuff.

And that’s where Hanacker is so right. The only thing that is bad (well, not even bad, rather inconvenient) about dungeons in GW2 (including Fractals) is lack of the LFG tool. To this day I had zero problems finding PUGs for any dungeon I wanted to do but LFG spamming is so 1999.

This new ever changing dungeon is the best thing that happened to the game since August. We need MORE stuff like that, we need MORE diverse content that people can do at their pace or ignore if it’s not their cup of tea and do something else. Don’t try and convince us that less is better.

They only need to give us the tools to make the “preparation” phase, the LFG phase, easier.

4837

Introducing the Quaggan Swimming Song. :)

4838

If Fractals is required for progression, what happens a couple weeks from now and everyone’s moved on to the upper tiers? It’ll be very difficult to find a group to run the lower levels.

My second concern is, dungeon set aesthetics aside, people are only running Fractals since all other top tier gear has been made irrelevant. This really goes against the design philosophy thus far.

4839

Anet goes back on “no grind” promise and goes full retard on grind.

The new infusion system, which will be released in tiers, means if you want to obtain a fully infusion equipped armor, which as stated in the blog post is necessary to experience later released content:

6 armor slots:

1 Precise Infusion as example (blue: +5 Precision, +5 Agony Resi):

250 Passion Fruit
100 Vicious Claw
1 Eldritch Scroll
20 Mystic Coin

1500 Passion Fruits
600 Vicious Claws
6 Eldritch Scrolls = 300 skill points
120 Mystic Coins = 120 daily achievements

If you want these for trinkets, rings, back too:

1500 Passion Fruits
600 Vicious Claws
6 Eldritch Scrolls = 300 skill points
120 Mystic Coins = 120 daily achievements

fully equipped that means:

3000 Passion Fruits
1200 Vicious Claws
12 Eldritch Scrolls = 600 skill points
240 Mystic Coins = 240 daily achievements

This is how much grinding it would take to outfit one BiS character or about 300$ in the cash shop.

I want to take back what I said about unobtrusive cash shop. If there is cash shop in the game, even if it starts reasonable, the temptation to monetize the f**k out of it will break the game.

4840

All the other top tier gear has always been mostly irrelevant when it comes to stats (aesthetics is another thing). It’s decidedly not difficult at 80 to outfit yourself in gear that is or is barely shy of max stats (as exotics go).

I’m on the fence with this Ascended stuff. However, once it become clear just what a jump in effort getting a Legendary was compared to Exotics (and how relatively easy exotics are to get), it does kinda make sense that there would be people who would want something to acquire that seemed in the realm of possibility. I’m more concerned with this whole infusion/agony thing, because I don’t like seeing content gated like that, but it helps to know that the fractals provide a variety of challenges so it’s not literally just a “run the exact same thing over and over” grind.

Perhaps being in a guild with guildies that would run lower level fractals with you would help? But yeah, an LFG is really the only missing piece. I honestly have faith they’ll add it, because it wouldn’t work any differently than how the sPvP tournament browser works, so they’ve pretty much already got it in the game in a slightly different form.