Slog fractals that take faaar to fucking long:
- Siren’s Reef (everything)
- Molten Furnace (boss especially is a time waster)
- Deepstone (that stupid riddle room serves 0 purpose whatsoever but to waste time)
- Twilight Oasis (everything)
- Shattered Observatiry (everything)
- Sunqua Peak (fuck this shit)
- Silent Surf (hey this fractal is super short but the boss takes 20 minutes because fuck you gargle our arse)
Fractals that are fine to good:
- Aquatic Ruins (two “pre-rooms”, easy and quick boss, my favourite)
- Swampland (boss is a drag, but not half as bad as others)
- Uncategorized (two JPs and two pre-rooms, quick and easy)
- Solid Ocean (boss is a drag but at least you can have a wank on the side)
- Underground Facility (quick enough if people don’t suck so borderline bad)
- Urban Battleground (kill a boss, rush through everything)
- Snowblind (start is a drag but then you can just rush it, boss doesn’t drag it out too much)
- Chaos (I love zero waiting rooms to bore you to death)
- Molten Boss (so rushable I love it)
- Volcanic (start is slow but the rest is quick, so it’s enjoyable)
- Cliffside (so rushable, Mesmer Masterrace Portal Bitch)
- Captain Mai Trin (what Silent Turf tried to be)
- Aetherblade (so rushable, teleport through everything, do the puzzle and you’re already next to the boss)
- Nightmare (good balance between waiting rooms and bosses)
2/3 shit Fractals and the ratio becomes worse with every new one. AMA.
Players: we want content
Anet: OK here, finally made some
Players: ew I need to invest time for rewards
Imo silent surf is good. The boss lives for a considerable amount of time with enough repetition of mechanics that you can’t just brute force through. Bit on the longer side, sure, wouldn’t hurt if it was a little less tanky. If your number one quality of a fractal is how ‘rushable’ it is… Idk lmao. I guess I don’t farm them past dailies, I never had an issue. Twilight really isn’t long pre boss if you run correctly. Shattered’s sequence between Skorvald and Aartsariv takes maybe 2 minutes out of your day and the rest is just good bosses.
Person: I’m hungry.
Cook: Here, eat shit.
Reducing things to a black-and-white level of complexity makes it easy to bash them, right? Idk lmao.
On a more serious note, too much of fractals and content in general is bloated with filler. Molten Furnace was fun until Anet decied that the endboss had to hide every 10 seconds and be invulnerable during the 50.000 animations. Why? What value does that add? Deepstone boss teleports as well, but he stays vulnerable and you have addtional light mechanics like floor restoration or CC/floor destruction. Molten Furnace is “walk 50 units that direction, attack 7 seconds, wait another 15 seconds”. That’s a time waster.
Same with the Deepstone “maze” room. A tenth of it would also have explained the mechanic. It does nothing but waste time.
Sunqua is a Walking Simulator with 20 hours of talk. What the actual fuck were they thinking? Cut out 90% of the distance and 100% of the talk and we’re starting to get somewhere.
Rushability (totally a word) is where it boils down if you do the same thing 25.000 times. No, it’s not fun standing there staring at the NPC waiting to be let through. No, it’s not fun standing there staring at the wall, or have a boss transist through 17 phases, all with a 25 second invuln animation. Fraenir has up to 30 seconds and it bores me out of my fucking mind. Someone should take away invulnerability from ArenaNet and see if they can create an encounter without that crutch. For fuck’s sake.
Here is the pattern: every Fractal has to take 20 minutes, being fast isn’t allowed. No, it’s not every Fractal, but next to all updates have lengthened the updated Fractal and made it more tedioues. That’s what makes Silent Surf so hilarious to me. Fucking hell, the Fractal was amazing at first glance. Fly around like bloody Spider-Man! And then: WHAM! 20 min boss wall to the face, because we can’t have shit that’s quick and enjoyable.
Let people have their popcorn content for God’s sake, why does everything has to be artificial pumped up to 20 minutes. And in the laziest way possible!
Because the gold / hour cannot be too high compared to other content. The problem is that the time is wasted on fillers instead of actual content, like another boss or some difficult trash packs maybe.
Sunqua normal mode is a tutorial for the CM, which does cut out all the walking and talking.