Deepstone, not much meat on these bones.

[zealex.9410]

@"Valandor.9506" said:Mostly agreeing there with you. From my reddit post:

[...]It is too easy, definitely no new challenge for kinda experienced and geared players, who just grab a few pugs or guildies and wreck their way through it. Mechanics like the “Tetris” corridor can be completely ignored by druid, chronos, warrior, … by just running over, even on T4 – There is also always blink, if needed. Bosses die fast and their mechanics mostly do close to nothing to harm the players as long they have some kind of support. Even the three minute achievement “Of Spiders and Sentinels“ is a joke as long you start with the spiders. In my opinion this new fractal is even though we are missing experience on it one of the easiest fractals overall.

No new rewards: No new skins, no infusion, no title; all in all: no special drops (as far as we know) - that point is basically related to the next one.

Basically, my main point: No Challenge Mo(d/t)e. Just a new fractal without CM or alike gives no new challenge, no extra replayable content per day. You only will see every few days this fractal instead of any other: “Deepstone today… meh, doesn’t matter anyway. Let’s go wreck it.” You could argue, it gives more diversity, but to be honest: I think with daily changing instabilities and 20 fractals, we reached the point of enough diversity for T1-T4 fractals. It frustrates me even more, when I think about all the (easy to implement) possibilities this fractal gives for a Challenge Mo(d/t)e:

• give the last boss more knockback/push abilities
• make the platforms of the last boss disappear faster
• special action key is only available for a limited number of players at the same time (1?) and rotates either on cooldown or timer
• set a timer for the crossing of the Eastern windy bridge to the spider chamber
• give the Brood Queen (spider boss) abilities like healing through poison, so you have to condi cleanse
• fields at the western “tetris” corridor downstate instantly, or at least do by far more damage
• increase the speed of tornadoes of Deepstone Sentinel (elemental boss)
• give the Abyss Chamber a timer, or let the plates despawn faster; increase strength of mobs there
• increase number and strength of spawning mobs in the elevator; maybe make it stop multiple times with different waves of enemies…

[...] Therefore, I wish, A-Net would care more about replayability and rewards of new content in form of fractals. We already had similar issues with the Chaos and Twilight Oasis Fractal, because even after long development time all we got was a some extra points for diversity, but these were also a lot more challenging.

About its replayability i think the issue lies within the way fractals work. You dont get any value from repeating them and value after the dailies goes down drasticaly.

I liked more the traditional style of just doing a fractal or a dungeons as many times as you want per day instead of having 3 fractals per day.

Cms go halfway with this and the replayability you get from them compaired to normal fractals and their rotating setup is on a whole other lvl.

Each time i see a new non cm i just think "hey 7 months went into a weekly gj anet"

[Randulf.7614]

I like the fact it goes back to what fractals were meant to be - short, bursts of gameplay. I can't comment on higher difficulties, but I like straightforward difficultly for t1/2 where my skills level lies and this is closer to what i want, whereas Twilight Oasis was all out of whack.

If I was to improve it:

• Possibly trim some of the trap mechanics a little. The 3rd floor dragged on a bit. Could just be our group though
• exclusive rewards
• a better pay off at the end. As a Lovecraft/Hodgson/Mythos etc fan, the theme was cool and I see where you were trying to go with the ending, but to be honest it needed a "big bad" or something in the mechanics that fitted the theme a bit more beyond a partial re-use of the Anomaly boss. Part of me wanted to fight a massive chained up Balrog-esque boss at the end, but I that's just my wistful Lotro side coming through. It just needed something more to it, even if a shadow form broke away briefly from the NPC between phases so we could glimpse the "thing".

Overall it was nice to return to what fractals were meant to be after TO and SO which I avoid entirely

[mazut.4296]

@CptAurellian.9537 said:The meta simply seems to be the most unfinished part of the map. It's as if they took a few events from one lane and left the other lanes and the culmination of the siege out. No surprise that people are unhappy then. The last episodes have been much, much better.

Very unsatisfying chain of events. They have whole stronghold, but only use a small part of it and the events are boring as hell... Shame...