Guild Wars 2

It’s been posted in many places that hearts are not the actual meat and potatoes of the leveling experience. They’re there to give you a little boost, available karma gear, and more importantly, lead you to the Dynamic Events happening on the map – which is where the bulk of the xp is.

The problem is put in stark terms when the Dynamic Events begin to break. This weekend, my partner and I played 2 of our pairs who were at/near 30. They finished their personal story quest to 40, while questing in one of two zones – Lornar’s Pass for one pair, and Gendarran Fields for the other. Both of them were pulling teeth to level, the whole time. My mesmer only made it from 27 to 33, and my Guardian from 30 to 36. We saw very few DEs that were actually running in these two zones, and actually had trouble in a few cases getting our daily 5 events before bed.

Post-patch/reset, we played a different pair of level 30 characters, in Fields of Ruin. The difference was night and day. We were 40 by the end of the night. There were DEs running EVERYWHERE. Heck, we participated in 2 or 3 of them before we even got out of Ebonhawke!

This serves to highlight the very big deal that bugged DEs are to the playerbase. When you built a game where people receive the bulk of their leveling xp from these events, you CANNOT allow them to be bugged out and remain bugged out for days and weeks! People have varient playtimes, and one of the selling points of the game is that you can log on whenever you want, play a few hours, and get stuff done. This isn’t really the case when the Dynamic Events are broken. Completely exploring Lornar’s Pass, which means doing every heart, all our personal story quests (x2 because we joined 2 different Orders) and fighting all the mobs we came across gave us half the xp we would have gotten if the DEs in that zone had been running properly.