In this week's Scrying Pool, we talk more about the PAX Panel and Challenging Group Content.

At the start of this I said that I don’t think that raids will be the entirety of the challenging group content. With games you get new raids, but they come alongside a set of new dungeons, but I don’t think that HoT will have new dungeons.

Up until the change of Arah story to be a solo instance, many players in the community felt that the Arah story shouldn’t have been included in the vanilla storyline as it was labeled as the personal story. I however, felt the opposite and that the story mode for each of the dungeons should have been required steps in the personal story. I like that there is the story that is told through the dungeon content, but the story told there is too integral to the overall story being told in the vanilla storyline. I have commented previously that I thought the vanilla story was too splintered, with story bits occurring outside of the personal story progression and even in different personal story instances outside of a single player’s progression.

In addition to this I don’t like the path system that the vanilla dungeons include. In the Scrying Pool I had already linked to above, I mention how GW2 is labeled as only having eight dungeons even though the actual number is 25 once each of the paths are included. Then we get into the rewards for dungeons and how some paths are almost never completed as there are easier paths to get the same dungeon-wide specific rewards from. So I don’t think we will see dungeons like we had at launch.

In the recent blog post detailing the changes coming to Fractals of the Mist (FotM) in HoT, it was mentioned that fractals are what ArenaNet views as the end-game 5-man content. I think that instead of dungeons and alongside the new raids we will be getting a second Fractal dungeon.

This Fractals of the Jungle (FotJ) content would exist as a way to expand the war in the jungle beyond the personal story and open world content. FotJ would consist of side stories in the jungle that are not integral to understand the expansion’s story. Some of the ideas I am thinking of for this dungeon include a battle that occurred before out characters reached the location in the personal story—potentially including the defeat of the Pact Fleet between the end of Living World Season 2 and the start of the expansion story.

These fractals could also expand some of the story hinted during the personal story progression. During the betas we get to play one of the first personal story instances of the expansion. Toward the end of the instance we hear Laranthir talking about how only the weak-willed Sylvari are the ones that answer the call of Mordremoth before stating that the Pale Reavers will take any steps necessary should one of their own show signs of being too weak. A fractal could be us revisiting the Pale Reavers after we have left them to find one of them succumbing to the will of Mordremoth and us having to take the necessary steps to stop them.

In the fractal blog post we got a tease of how rewards are changing for the Fractals of the Mists dungeon. Part of that is the inclusion of a new daily system that will send players out to do specific fractal levels or kill certain bosses. This change in the reward system would allow for a new Fractal dungeon to be slotted in as a daily to complete a level 40 fractal could be completed in either dungeon while the desired boss to be killed for that daily could be selected from either of the dungeons.

As for the Fractal level, I think this would be separate for each of the Fractal dungeons so that a player with Fractal level 50 at HoT’s launch would still be level 50 in FotM but would be starting over at level 1 for FotJ. As for agony, I think it really depends on how agony is going to scale past 50 and what the new infusions they have hinted. If FotM was staying at 50 I would say there should be a new type of agony, but with FotM being 100 and if FotJ started off with 100 levels then I think having agony be the same across both would still end up with a good progression through gaining resistance into these higher fractal levels. Plus having just one agony definitely makes things simpler for a system that currently is not the most straightforward.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams really enjoyed getting to give the exclusive Berserker reveal this week!

We got to give the exclusive Berserker reveal this week. This was awesome to get to do! As for the Berserker itself, I think like it will be a lot of fun and is probably sitting at the top alongside Reaper for the elite specs that I am most excited for.

If you have a question for me or a topic you would like to see talked about here, leave a comment below. You can also tweet your question and topics to me on twitter @MattstaNinja. Also, check out my site Mattsta.Ninja that focuses on guides and more for Guild Wars 2.