Lately, Fractals have become very repetitive and constantly having to deal with the Social Awkward instability (receive agony and damage from nearby allies when you attack enemies), overall has had negative feedback from the community. In order to fix this, I think there should be new instabilities added to fractals, along with adjusting the current ones for a more enjoyable experience. Here are some ideas using World of Warcraft's Mythic Plus Dungeons design:

Doom (Dhuum/ Grenth)

Bosses inflict this debuff to a random party member, cursing them with a shadow of Grenth/ Dhumm behind the target afflicted and a countdown timer over their heads. To remove this debuff, allies have to break the interrupt bar of the shadow attached to the target affected. If the countdown reaches 0, the player will be instantly defeated and banished from the rest of the fight. This will bring a sense of urgency to fractals and I think it would be a really interesting addition. The countdown timer should very intimidating and should have a 10 - 15 second timer to match.

Bursting

When slain, non-boss enemies explode, causing all players to suffer 10% of their max health in damage over 4 sec. This effect stacks.This Instability would make your group coordinate to not kill enemies too fast to avoid the stacking debuff, which would lead to a wipe if stacked too high.

Explosive

While in combat, enemies periodically summon Explosive Orbs that will detonate if not destroyed.These orbs should be a huge threat, leading to a wipe if not dealt with.

Sanguine

When slain, non-boss enemies leave behind a lingering pool that heals their allies and damages players.

Volcanic

While in combat, enemies periodically cause gouts of flame to erupt beneath the feet of players.If the player is hit by this Instability, they will lose health, be thrown in the air and knocked down similarly to the sand shark dive attack in the Crystal Desert areas.

Bolstering

When any non-boss enemy dies, its death cry empowers nearby allies, increasing their size, maximum health, and damage by 20%.This effect can stack up to 4 times on an enemy.

Social Awkwardness (Nerf)

Remove agony damage, and replace with a percentage (.5%) of health lost from the friendly fire effect on this instability.

These instabilities, along with the current ones should have some kind of daily rotation to change things up and bring more replay value from a nice challenge instead of an unfair and annoying one that we have with the current Social Awkward instability.

Another change that could make fractals more engaging; force players to kill adds. Let there be an event that persists throughout the fractal that wont allow the fractal to be completed unless the event is completed (requires a certain amount of adds to be killed). Some players might be annoyed by this addition so in order to balance this, there should be more rewards for killing enemies/ adds throughout fractals. Maybe similar things could be added to dungeons to bring more life to the dungeon community. Combining this with these instability changes would make for a more interesting and lively fractal experience. What do you guys think? Share your ideas and offer some criticism to mine.

I think they should change some of the instabilities based on the seasons as well, like toxic trail. That could be Frozen Domain for wintersday that chills people standing on it for Halloween it could be Bloody/Sanguine which stacks bleed etc...

@TexZero.7910 said:I think they should change some of the instabilities based on the seasons as well, like toxic trail. That could be Frozen Domain for wintersday that chills people standing on it for Halloween it could be Bloody/Sanguine which stacks bleed etc...

While that would be interesting, those events only occur for a small time throughout the year.

@Incarne.4927 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I think they should change some of the instabilities based on the seasons as well, like toxic trail. That could be Frozen Domain for wintersday that chills people standing on it for Halloween it could be Bloody/Sanguine which stacks bleed etc...

It's enough of a window that it would be interesting. Generally would last ~1 month which isnt horrible.

1st thing to do is make instabilities randomly assigned upon entry rather than set in stone, though I do like these options

@UnbentMars.9126 said:1st thing to do is make instabilities randomly assigned upon entry rather than set in stone, though I do like these options

That's an idea I thought about too but then people would just keep leaving and re-entering until they got the easiest option.

@UnbentMars.9126 said:1st thing to do is make instabilities randomly assigned upon entry rather than set in stone, though I do like these optionsIf they ever do this then the process for rolling for your t4's will become more tedious than it ever was back when people rolled for Swamp. Players will just roll for the easiest instabilities and it'll be a nightmare. Let's keep it fixed, please!

@Rising Dusk.2408 said:

@UnbentMars.9126 said:1st thing to do is make instabilities randomly assigned upon entry rather than set in stone, though I do like these optionsIf they ever do this then the process for rolling for your t4's will become more tedious than it ever was back when people rolled for Swamp. Players will just roll for the easiest instabilities and it'll be a nightmare. Let's keep it fixed, please!

Yeah which sucks, not sure how they could implement it other than a daily Instability change or something.

i think OP suggestions are mostly cancerous ideas especially ones that make soloing impossible. I wouldn't enjoy playing through them.What I would enjoy the most are more creative things like more variety in Mists Convergence.Other ideas for instabilities would be -

• healing doesn't work (and make it baseline on all fractals so the magi druids leechers stop playing already)
• you can't receive healing from other players (just to be sure)
• when something dies, an undead/awakened foe spawns from their corpse
• spider eggs spawn while in combat, you have to destroy them before spiders hatch
• ok i just realised most of my ideas fall under "Mists Convergence" category, so imo just remove the boring static instabilities and just make mists convergence very rich in content and go with that.

Bursting sounds awful. It literally punishes players for being efficient at clearing trash mobs

@Sublimatio.6981 said:i think OP suggestions are mostly cancerous ideas especially ones that make soloing impossible. I wouldn't enjoy playing through them.What I would enjoy the most are more creative things like more variety in Mists Convergence.Other ideas for instabilities would be -

• healing doesn't work (and make it baseline on all fractals so the magi druids leechers stop playing already)
• you can't receive healing from other players (just to be sure)
• when something dies, an undead/awakened foe spawns from their corpse
• spider eggs spawn while in combat, you have to destroy them before spiders hatch
• ok i just realised most of my ideas fall under "Mists Convergence" category, so imo just remove the boring static instabilities and just make mists convergence very rich in content and go with that.

Why remove healing? That's like saying make enemies completely immune to power damage. O_o

Speed Run: You have permanent super-speed and quickness. If you stop moving you die.