Make fractals fun again?

[rune.9572]

I quit fractals 3 years ago when you added random instabilities on top of butchering a bunch of "fast" fractals to disincentivize poeple from playing them for high gph. (I guess it worked. heh)

Since that time fractals changed very little, with new fractals being overly long slogs designed to slow you down so you don't dare to make more than 10g off your daily. I recently had a "pleasure" of running molten boss for LWS1 achievements (probably my first fractal in a year or so) and it instantly reminded me of how you massacred my boy.

Any plans on making fractals fun again, or is it dead content now?

Edited April 25, 2022 by rune.9572
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[Fueki.4753]

If they have any future plans for fractals, they haven't told us yet.

I wouldn't waste time and energy hoping for any changes for the better though, as their new favourite instanced content seems to be Strike Missions.

[Valisha.8650]

Fractals are indeed sluggish and boring.

[anbujackson.9564]

11 hours ago, rune.9572 said:

I quit fractals 3 years ago when you added random instabilities on top of butchering a bunch of "fast" fractals to disincentivize poeple from playing them for high gph. (I guess it worked. heh)

Since that time fractals changed very little, with new fractals being overly long slogs designed to slow you down so you don't dare to make more than 10g off your daily. I recently had a "pleasure" of running molten boss for LWS1 achievements (probably my first fractal in a year or so) and it instantly reminded me of how you massacred my boy.

Any plans on making fractals fun again, or is it dead content now?

I know instabilities are very controversial. Though I have to say, its what makes them fun to keep doing. You receive more conditions? Better take some additional condi cleanses. We bleed fire? Reflect/condi cleanse/dodging. Boon overload? Play more aggresively. Flux bomb? Throw them on trash mobs for the lols. And so on..

Especially the CMs would IMO suffer from having no instabilities. Every boss would always feels the same. Thats not really fun, well to me anyways. If you cut out the fun after the rewards, you might as well delete it completely. The only part of the community who really hates instabilities are speedrunners for obvious reasons. Not like I personally care though if they need 10 seconds more if the instabilities are inconvinient. 

You mentioned molten boss as a bad example. I say molten furnace as a good example, which is part of the very same LWS1 mission. Waiting for that drill was kitten annoying and I am glad that its gone, just like the slow test chamber.

[Fueki.4753]

8 hours ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

Though I have to say, its what makes them fun to keep doing. You receive more conditions?

It makes them fun for you and a number of other people, but not for everyone.

For other people they remove a large portion of potential fun from the Fractals.

Edited April 26, 2022 by Fueki.4753

[Hotride.2187]

8 hours ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

You receive more conditions? Better take some additional condi cleanses. We bleed fire? Reflect/condi cleanse/dodging. Boon overload? Play more aggresively. Flux bomb?

Bring a hfb. Bring a hfb. You brought a hfb but who cares, it will outheal. Bring a hfb.

Man, I didnt realize instabilities brought so much variety. Wait...

Edited April 26, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[Nephalem.8921]

14 hours ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

I know instabilities are very controversial. Though I have to say, its what makes them fun to keep doing. You receive more conditions? Better take some additional condi cleanses. We bleed fire? Reflect/condi cleanse/dodging. Boon overload? Play more aggresively. Flux bomb? Throw them on trash mobs for the lols. And so on..

Especially the CMs would IMO suffer from having no instabilities. Every boss would always feels the same. Thats not really fun, well to me anyways. If you cut out the fun after the rewards, you might as well delete it completely. The only part of the community who really hates instabilities are speedrunners for obvious reasons. Not like I personally care though if they need 10 seconds more if the instabilities are inconvinient. 

You mentioned molten boss as a bad example. I say molten furnace as a good example, which is part of the very same LWS1 mission. Waiting for that drill was kitten annoying and I am glad that its gone, just like the slow test chamber.

What if cfb solves all these issues?

Certain instabilities are just punishing power while condi doesnt care. Its guardian wars 2 anyways.

• Adrenaline rush: Nobody cares. you get oneshotted once in a while.
• Afflicted. Nobody cares. Just Take more firebrands with purging flames.
• Boon overload: only alac ren cares a little. Can run different gear if the ren wants to destroy a template and has legy gear.
• Flux bomb: Self root classes (bladesworn, pslb etc) cry, rest doesnt care. Cfb doesnt care at all.
• Fractal Vindicators: Nobody cares.
• Frailty: Necros and ele cry, nobody else cares.
• Hamstrung: Bugged in 100. forgettable everywhere else.
• Last laugh: Just a bit annoying. fine i guess.
• Mists Convergence: Nobody cares except for the tentacle which can spawn in jumping puzzles.
• No gain, just pain: Seriously dont play power. Play condi and ignore.
• Outflanked: Nobody cares, random oneshots sometimes.
• Social Awkwardness: Tries to persuade me to uninstall and its very convincing. Completely antifun if your class requires positioning. cfb doesnt btw. Just delete this.
• Stick together: Nobody cares.
• Sugar rush: Atk speed increase. Boring but fine i guess.
• Toxic sickness: Annoying
• Toxic trail: Nobody cares. 
• Vengeance: Bugged for years and applies weakness when aegis gets stripped. cry on bladesworn or play condi and dont care.
• We bleed fire: Scholar mods be gone! Just play condi or ignore with hfb.

So many fun interactions. or just play condi and dont care. Hfb condi groups dont care at all.

 

 

Edited April 26, 2022 by Nephalem.8921

[anbujackson.9564]

6 hours ago, Hotride.2187 said:

Bring a hfb. Bring a hfb. You brought a hfb but who cares, it will outheal. Bring a hfb.

Man, I didnt realize instabilities brought so much variety. Wait...

Well I get your point but I hardly do them in 5men groups anymore, just duo with another friend because t4 is just boring otherwise. So I cant really tell how others feel.

I just dont see how they can be fun if you remove everything from them. Agony (resistance) is hated, instabilities are bad, singularities might as well not exist either since its only abused for boon spam (probably the only thing everyone wants still). You just have regular dungeons then.

But yeah, just my unpopular opinion apparently.

[anbujackson.9564]

28 minutes ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

What if cfb solves all these issues?

Certain instabilities are just punishing power while condi doesnt care. Its guardian wars 2 anyways.

• Adrenaline rush: Nobody cares. you get oneshotted once in a while.
• Afflicted. Nobody cares. Just Take more firebrands with purging flames.
• Boon overload: only alac ren cares a little. Can run different gear if the ren wants to destroy a template and has legy gear.
• Flux bomb: Self root classes (bladesworn, pslb etc) cry, rest doesnt care. Cfb doesnt care at all.
• Fractal Vindicators: Nobody cares.
• Frailty: Necros and ele cry, nobody else cares.
• Hamstrung: Bugged in 100. forgettable everywhere else.
• Last laugh: Just a bit annoying. fine i guess.
• Mists Convergence: Nobody cares except for the tentacle which can spawn in jumping puzzles.
• No gain, just pain: Seriously dont play power. Play condi and ignore.
• Outflanked: Nobody cares, random oneshots sometimes.
• Social Awkwardness: Tries to persuade me to uninstall and its very convincing. Completely antifun if your class requires positioning. cfb doesnt btw. Just delete this.
• Stick together: Nobody cares.
• Sugar rush: Atk speed increase. Boring but fine i guess.
• Toxic sickness: Annoying
• Toxic trail: Nobody cares. 
• Vengeance: Bugged for years and applies weakness when aegis gets stripped. cry on bladesworn or play condi and dont care.
• We bleed fire: Scholar mods be gone! Just play condi or ignore with hfb.

So many fun interactions. or just play condi and dont care. Hfb condi groups dont care at all.

 

 

Pretty much yes. The punish to power is just unfortunate. 

But like I said, I stopped playing in full groups but thats not really the norm, I get it. I just got sick of it. People cant play the game if there is no carry support.

[Hotride.2187]

1 hour ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

I just dont see how they can be fun if you remove everything from them.

Not advocating for changes, just pointing out how instabilities are ignored by 90% of the groups due to the healer they brought.

I do t4+recs every day for the gold, its not unfun to me. Fun might be stretching it, since its bound to be repetitive when you do it every day. It could use some livening up, but its fine for me as is - its varied enough to not be too repetitive. I wouldnt do more than dailies though, 40 min a day is enough.

[Wolfb.7025]

Instabilities are annoying. having toxic sickness 8 times in a row in CM100 is annoying. npng is annoying, vengeance is bugged and screws over power builds, wbf deals so much damage if you happen to get hit. The gold for doings CMs was just an incentive for me, I used to run them daily for fun, but instabilities really started to take a toll on me.

Edited April 26, 2022 by Wolfb.7025

[Bakeneko.5826]

17 hours ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

Pretty much yes. The punish to power is just unfortunate. 

But like I said, I stopped playing in full groups but thats not really the norm, I get it. I just got sick of it. People cant play the game if there is no carry support.

Power was dominant, when instabilities were introduced, so it is normal, that power is being targeted. Would be cool to see instability, where condies on bosses gets cleansed at certain intervals

[Baby Goth.4983]

I think that true , but I use Fractals as a training ground and preparation for Strike Missions ,  still new to the game but every time I join in fractal they don't care about the loot or the group classes ,  some times they don't even need support/heal class with them , they just want to finish their dailies ...

 

 

[Vidit.7108]

As someone who does a lot of fractals I don't think they particularly fun. Sometimes I make my own fun with the people I am with but I'm doing fractals first and foremost to make about 20 gold in under 45 minutes. If they made even a little less money I would stop doing them and head to drizzlewood or maybe only do T2.

To compensate for players getting better at fractals they've made them harder and a few new ones longer. Pug groups without healing are rare outside of CMs now as a result but clear times aren't too much worse.
If you have someone that can do the teleport skip Molten Boss is over in under three minutes with a good group. Otherwise just run past the mobs at the beginning and the average time compared to before is maybe 2 or 3 minutes longer for PuGs than when it was just the boss.

As for a lot of longer sloggy fractals. I've stopped doing Siren's Reef T4 daily.  I know I'm not the only experienced player that does as I've asked people before. It's also really apparent looking at LFG and playing with groups that do T4 sirens that a lot of inexperienced players dominate those dailies making them take longer. Aquatic ruins is a disaster now since they took the break bar away so that's also on my skip list.

Unless you're desperate for gold there is not a reason to do some of the worst fractals.

[Brandon Uzumaki.1524]

Yeah, i remember before the insta reworks, you could even pug T4 Fractals without a healer, i played them as a f2p for 1 year and a half, even got the Omnipotion, but now i don't know, they feel different, just too much random damage being thrown around, it's probably because of these OP pots that make Fractals way to easy, i would just nerf then to more reasonable levels, like 10/15%, and then rework all those "one-shot" instabilities.

I also believe this is one of the reasons HB was pushed to the meta so much, healing is still very good, but with all the one-shots, it doesn't work to prevent these, like a Block or a Barrier does, if you're an Elementalist for example, with Frailty and Ouflanked, it doesn't matter how much healing you receive, the healer could be doing 1 million healing per second, if you have 8k HP and receive a 20k hit, you are insta downed.
Almost all other healers are like 100% better than Firebrand in the healing department, Ventari Hev, holy kitten, can heal a lot and provide 100% uptime on Alacrity, Ele just gives insane ammounts of regen, but like i said, all useless when you are goint to be one-shot by a single auto-atack, hell, not even "tanks" are safe from this, i remember taking a 16k auto from a Dredge in UF, on my Minstrel Firebrand with 3.700 Toughness and Protection, it was insane lol (we did have Outflanked and either Frailty or Sugar Rush).

Of course, all this is based on my experience pugging, i know that very good groups don't even need a dedicated healer since they don't get hit, and you have the dodge button to avoid most of the one-shots, but pugging is random, and there's a crap ton of people that don't know how/when to dodge, and all these random one-shots are "pug killers" a lot of the time.

[Ashantara.8731]

My #1 wish for making Fractals fun again would be that they completely cut Dessa from them. 😣 That annoying, barely intelligible babbling on top of everything is totally killing the mood of experiencing supposedly meaningful moments of the past.

Edited May 4, 2022 by Ashantara.8731
typo

[Firebeard.1746]

On 4/25/2022 at 2:07 PM, Valisha.8650 said:

Fractals are indeed sluggish and boring.

For me, it's mostly the new ones. You can just tell they're drawn out because reasons. 

[ASP.8093]

On 4/27/2022 at 1:46 AM, Bakeneko.5826 said:

Power was dominant, when instabilities were introduced, so it is normal, that power is being targeted. Would be cool to see instability, where condies on bosses gets cleansed at certain intervals

It's not Instabilities, it's the Exposed changes.

It used to be that Power was generally faster if you were on point with your CC and burst, while Condi was a bit more forgiving and excelled at certain specific fights for various reasons (including Epidemic being busted-tier good back then).

First they turned Exposed into a huge Condi Damage boost, under the reasoning that condi is damage-over-time so you can't do concentrated bursts like you can with Power. (Nevermind that both Condi Firebrand and Condi Specter/Deadeye are great at "bursts" of conditions.)

Then recently they nerfed Exposed heavily to try to force players to interact with mechanics more, while still giving a slight edge to Condi builds. (I think most of the new Exposed debuff changes are good — particularly decoupling it from the boss' stand-there-doing-nothing "stun" timer — but the overall thinking is still flawed.)

 

And in the background is this problem:

There tend to be more special little modifiers for strike damage floating around in the game than for condi damage, and Anet seems to balance around you having most of those. Which means Power builds/comps are often more demanding. If you look at Discretize they basically say the CM speed-clear Power comp isn't worth running without 2x Soulbeasts providing One Wolf Pack nowadays, and also they want you to swap to the condi comp when doing 100 CM anyway.

[Hume.2876]

I think fractals are pretty fun when you consider that most people have played them a ton - so they are naturally boring after you have done them all 100x.  I'd suggest they make some new fractals - maybe even a tier 5 of all new ones.  That would be great.  

[AliamRationem.5172]

It's kinda hard to make fractals fun when you don't release any new content for them.

[Bakeneko.5826]

On 5/4/2022 at 4:10 AM, AliamRationem.5172 said:

It's kinda hard to make fractals fun when you don't release any new content for them.

This. Fractals themselves are fun, but oh boy it gets old after running them daily for years

[Mell.4873]

20 hours ago, Bakeneko.5826 said:

This. Fractals themselves are fun, but oh boy it gets old after running them daily for years

I would be happy if they turned the new strikes into fractals as well but that is probably to much to ask. 

[Bakeneko.5826]

On 5/7/2022 at 4:29 AM, Mell.4873 said:

I would be happy if they turned the new strikes into fractals as well but that is probably to much to ask. 

Some instabilities would make them stupid hard. I'd opt for some story fights/instances as fractals. Like Canach fight from S1, Shadow of Dragon fight from S2 (either one), Bloodstone fen as fractal, where we "try to stop awakening" just before explosion that triggered LWS3, last stand of Rata Novus against chak before the fall of the city, part of Glints lair from LWS2 with same endfight as in story, siege of camp resolve changed to be harder, ending with big dragon dude fight, etc. There are so many story moments and/or maps that can be reused with some tweaking.

[Dadnir.5038]

Well it's difficult to make something that you've already done a thousand time "fun". Especially when you just go there for the reward and under the incensitive and within the constraints of a daily.

Unfortunately people tend to just want the gratification to the point that they forget to just have fun. Few people enter fractals with an unorthodox team comp to just have "fun" and explore new possibilities. It's more like: "Duh! We took 30s longer than the last time I did it! It's ruining my farming schedule! Who's the guy that drag us down? Let's look at arkdps numbers".

 

[Nephalem.8921]

1 hour ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

Well it's difficult to make something that you've already done a thousand time "fun". Especially when you just go there for the reward and under the incensitive and within the constraints of a daily.

Unfortunately people tend to just want the gratification to the point that they forget to just have fun. Few people enter fractals with an unorthodox team comp to just have "fun" and explore new possibilities. It's more like: "Duh! We took 30s longer than the last time I did it! It's ruining my farming schedule! Who's the guy that drag us down? Let's look at arkdps numbers".

 

Thats the hyper casual point of view. Beating own dps records is fun for me. Whats the point of playing bad builds or tank builds? There is a difference between fun and annoying. social awkwardness is antifun. Protection spam and only protection spam is antifun. Resolution doesnt exist.

Being able to reflect we bleed fire dmg would be fun but it doesnt work. Some instabilities buffing certain skills or weapons would be very fun but instabilities dont work like this.

Instabilities just nerf and punish power and dont really alter the gameplay in a fun way. having boonspam on a 20sec hidden timer which requires boonsteal alters gameplay but isnt fun at all.