Guild Wars 2

Djinn.9245:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Again, I’m gonna add to this by reminding y’all that other games cough WoW cough BDO cough StarWars MMO cough just discard XP at max level, more or less, and they didn’t die of it.

They discard it for everyone. They don’t only give it to some players.

Either XP / Spirit shards is a reward or it isn’t. If it is useless, remove it for everyone like other MMOs do at cap. If it is not useless, don’t gate it behind Masteries. Masteries should be their own reward.

Because it costs money to add/remove/fix and meantime, if people really care about it, there in-game ways to do something about it.

It’s clear that ANet never intended to do anything with post-80 XP, aside from masteries; granting spirit shards was a response to popular demand. Unfortunately, they forgot that the Maguuma masteries included raid masteries.

While that’s a shame, it hardly seems worth ANet pulling apart the code solely to grant some people a few spirit shards. When they work on other things related to XP and masteries, then, sure, they should also work on this.

I agree with the principle; I just don’t think it’s critical enough for ANet to change priorities to address it.

Djinn.9245:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Again, I’m gonna add to this by reminding y’all that other games cough WoW cough BDO cough StarWars MMO cough just discard XP at max level, more or less, and they didn’t die of it.

They discard it for everyone. They don’t only give it to some players.

Either XP / Spirit shards is a reward or it isn’t. If it is useless, remove it for everyone like other MMOs do at cap. If it is not useless, don’t gate it behind Masteries. Masteries should be their own reward.

Not to be objectionable, but I don’t see why they should be?

I mean, I understand and accept that you don’t think they should be something you need to complete before getting the reward. I just have no idea why these are special.

It’s not like other things (elite spec, and masteries) are not gated behind other things (level 80, hero points) already, so it’s hardly new that the second levelling chain needs to be finished before you get more rewards…

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Ashantara.8731:

Everyone gets XP, not just the people who are doing raids. Of course, and that is probably what you meant, you need to max all available masteries for the XP bar to function as such again. However, I think that, if you haven’t unlocked the Raids mastery track yet, you can get the same benefit by simply maximizing the other masteries, no?

If you mean by ‘get the same benefit’, Spirit Shards, then no, one can only obtain Spirit Shards at each post-80 level-up by completing all Mastery Tracks for a given zone/area; those being either Core Tyria or Heart of Maguuma (so far).

Including the Raid ones? Oh well, that stinks. Also, it makes no sense to me.

Ashantara.8731:

Also, it makes no sense to me.

If you have read some of the other posts, you’d see why it happened.

(Short version: ANet designed the system do that no one got spirit shards …or anything for xp after L80. When people asked for “something / anything” for xp, ANet delivered “something”, but it was too late to separate raid masteries from the rest of heart-of-maguuma ones. So it’s a series of unfortunate accidents that led to the situation; it’s not easily fixed.)

If they didn’t want to make raiding a requirement, all they would have to do is remove the lock on the masteries. They likely want that incentive however, because behind the scenes, participation is very important.

If they wanted to go back to the core idea of leveling however you wanted, they could add a repeatable mastery track to award points for leveling. In other games I’ve played with a similar system, leveling is generally the primary method of gaining points, while finding them is to simply to speed up the process, just like hero challenges before 80.

I was frustrated about XP being wasted. Then, I finished my Tyria Masteries and realized leveling happens fairly often. The shards are very useful to feed Mystic Forge recipes, especially promotion.

Unlock Raid mastery for all player.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ashantara.8731:

Also, it makes no sense to me.

If you have read some of the other posts, you’d see why it happened.

Because Anet overlooked the existence of players that weren’t raiding. They simply did not care enough about them to think of a solution when they went and implemented that change.

By the way, there’s no real reason why raid mastery has to be gated behind a boss kill, instead of just being unlocked on entry. And that is an easy fix.

Astralporing.1957:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ashantara.8731:

Also, it makes no sense to me.

If you have read some of the other posts, you’d see why it happened.

Because Anet overlooked the existence of players that weren’t raiding. They simply did not care enough about them to think of a solution when they went and implemented that change.

By the way, there’s no real reason why raid mastery has to be gated behind a boss kill, instead of just being unlocked on entry. And that is an easy fix.

No, that’s not why it happened. And no, if it was an easy fix, they would have already done it, just to stop us from griping about it.

They never intended post-mastery XP to do anything at all. If there was a misguided or ignorant decision, that was it — given all the threads people made about running out of uses for luck (among other things), I have no idea how they could have thought that making XP useless was going to go over well.

As a sop to the community, they gave us Spirit Shards, which, for nearly everyone, is literally the least reward possible. (A few, mostly newer, players have too few shards; nearly anyone playing for very long has more than they can spend.)

Because it was never intended, they did the simplest thing they could do to implement the change: make it available when the specific mastery tree (not branch) was maxed. For core Tyria (i.e. Central Tyria), that was easy for everyone. For HoT, (i.e. Heart of Maguuma), it was not, because ANet had grouped raid masteries in a branch in the same tree.

At the time of grouping raid & HoT masteries together, it was a completely irrelevant choice, because it had no consequences. It was only because they added spirit shards as a reward that anyone even cares.

Splitting that branch from the tree (and creating a new one for it to rest in) has all sorts of consequences that we can’t even imagine.

I’m sure it will eventually get adjusted, mostly like when the new expac comes out (or shortly before, with a pre-expac mechanics update). That’s the point at which it makes sense to overhaul the system, not before.

tl;dr ANet didn’t forget about those who don’t raid; the problem is that they made a mistake in not offering rewards for post-mastery XP and had no quick way to fix it.

For example Fractal Attunement, the mastery for the Fractal of The Mist don’t require, to play Fractal for unlock.

Sarah.8354:

For example Fractal Attunement, the mastery for the Fractal of The Mist don’t require, to play Fractal for unlock.

That’s a good point.

I suppose they could allow people to unlock the raid mastery track without raiding. I’m not sure how easy that is to enable/disable or whether it has other consequences, outside of generating a lot of salt from frequent raiders. Since people can already work around the requirement by buying a raid, I don’t think it would make a substantial difference for the community.

For no-raider player this mastery is useless but blocks the completion of the mastery but because of him XP becomes useless. Is Absurd.

guys, does any number of spirit shards really change your game experience? you can get spirits shards from tome of knowledge, from dailies, from so many surces that the original OP just sound like an angry rant for something very stupid (xp numbers distract me cause i don’t raid and raid is evil).
if anything i find stupid to not even take a look at raid content to try to unlock the mastery track which honestly is not gating anything that you can get more or easily elsewhere

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

No, that’s not why it happened. And no, if it was an easy fix, they would have already done it, just to stop us from griping about it.

It would be an easy fix, but the point of locking it is to incentivize raiding. It’s really not a major issue anyways, since most people are simply going to unlock what’s required and move on.

They’ll likely fix it next expansion. Masteries for specific content should have been separated, requiring you to play that content, since they’re not needed anywhere else. The current mastery implementation should simply be scrapped however. It wasn’t a smart idea to force content and allow players to get into situations where they can screw themselves, turning it into a huge grind and possibly unrecoverable (solo).

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Sarah.8354:

For example Fractal Attunement, the mastery for the Fractal of The Mist don’t require, to play Fractal for unlock.

That’s a good point.

I suppose they could allow people to unlock the raid mastery track without raiding. I’m not sure how easy that is to enable/disable or whether it has other consequences, outside of generating a lot of salt from frequent raiders. Since people can already work around the requirement by buying a raid, I don’t think it would make a substantial difference for the community.

All the raiders are already claiming that this lock is inconsequential, as “you can simply do the escort”. Which, according to at least some of the people posting on these forums, is so trivial it shouldn’t be even counted as raid. And, as already mentioned, you don’t need to do fractals to unlock fractal mastery.
Simply put, there’s no reason why the raid mastery needs to require a boss kill to unlock.

It was probably a trivial fix, but anet most likely never even thought about it, because they forgot about non-raiders.

This issue is popping up every time a new chapter is released, it would seem. I always have enough or 1-2 more, but then there’s a new LS mastery and I again have to go fish for mastery points.

Granted, there’s a lot of points in the new zones though I feel a bit dragged to them at this rate as this effectively freezes my XP bar until I find some.

ArchonWing.9480:

This issue is popping up every time a new chapter is released, it would seem. I always have enough or 1-2 more, but then there’s a new LS mastery and I again have to go fish for mastery points.

Each living story zone has contained enough mastery points for me to complete the associated mastery?

Astralporing.1957:

It was probably a trivial fix, but anet most likely never even thought about it, because they forgot about non-raiders.

I’m sure it’s easier than separating raid mastery from the HoT tree; I can’t imagine that it’s trivial or that they “forgot” about non-raiders. There’s plenty of evidence that they think about those who don’t raid more than raiders.

It might just be one of those situations in which we (as a community) see an issue that they (as the content creators) simply can’t fathom, and so they don’t see the value in diverting resources from other (to them) more important changes.

Speaking for myself, I really can think of all sorts of other minor changes I’d rather see in the game besides making it easier to unlock raid masteries. But I’m biased, in no small part because I’ve spent over 1000 spirit shards just on unlocking all the antiques and I still have more than when I started that project — I simply can’t spend them as fast as I earn them from Core Tyria xp and other sources outside of HoT zones.

Rauderi.8706:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Sounds a lot of ‘non-raiders’ are actively fighting against going to the raid in any way. Bullheaded behaviour… just do the kitten escort. It’s really not harder than any dungeon. If you are not even willing to do that then live with it.

A sterling endorsement from the ‘raid community’. Come one, come all to experience the lack of joy and poor attitudes!

…Seriously, this doesn’t even affect raiders, so why kew about it?

The offensive thing here isn’t about raiders vs. non-raiders. It’s about people that do things to accomplish something vs. people that complain about doing something they don’t want to, then trying to negotiate their way into accomplishing something.

when you reach the point, where exp plays for you and your played charactdr no role anymore, because you are max level, you mastered everythign ect., then should become the gained xp you get from kills, events ect. partwise an additional bonus für Karma and Gold.

Example.

You get 10000 Exp from an Event,, you have no use for those Exp anymore, then should 70% of the Exp be turned into Karma and 30% of the Exp be turned into Gold based on Copper Coins.

So a useless 10k Exp gets turned for you then into a Bonus of 7k Karma and 3000 Copper Coins (3 Gold)

This way would become farming events that give alot of exp alot more lucrative for people, that have no use anymore for exp.
Either such a system, or the exp gets split up into 3 equal bonuses, +30% Karma, + 30% Gold and +40% Bonus on Magic Find or increased Map Currency.

When theres simply no need anymore by game design of Exp for you, then the game should change always automatically to increased base system rewards, that will be always useful for you – which is Karma, Gold and MF/Map Currencies

We all have done things we rather avoid a few times in this game, weather its for a title, a leg, gold, karma, asc trinkets, achievement points…. you name it.These things take way more time than escort so stop being a special snowflake and go do them….geeez

Amadan.9451:

guys, does any number of spirit shards really change your game experience? you can get spirits shards from tome of knowledge, from dailies, from so many surces that the original OP just sound like an angry rant for something very stupid (xp numbers distract me cause i don’t raid and raid is evil).
if anything i find stupid to not even take a look at raid content to try to unlock the mastery track which honestly is not gating anything that you can get more or easily elsewhere

It’s not about the shards. It doesn’t have to be shards, it could be anything. It’s about the wasted XP that the game throws at players in job lots. XP is an everyman currency, but only completionists get anything out of it. The system is borked.

Obtena.7952:

Rauderi.8706:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Sounds a lot of ‘non-raiders’ are actively fighting against going to the raid in any way. Bullheaded behaviour… just do the kitten escort. It’s really not harder than any dungeon. If you are not even willing to do that then live with it.

A sterling endorsement from the ‘raid community’. Come one, come all to experience the lack of joy and poor attitudes!

…Seriously, this doesn’t even affect raiders, so why kew about it?

The offensive thing here isn’t about raiders vs. non-raiders. It’s about people that do things to accomplish something vs. people that complain about doing something they don’t want to, then trying to negotiate their way into accomplishing something.

Wow, that’s being late to the party. :\

And “accomplishment”? Really? With the rhetoric as it stands being “go do escort nub,” it doesn’t exactly reek of achievement. So it doesn’t even matter if the devs tweak it to open without a boss kill. The tracks themselves have no prestige, and it actually benefits the player pool as a whole to have them, so they have another desirable trait for raiding.

Orpheal.8263:

when you reach the point, where exp plays for you and your played charactdr no role anymore, because you are max level, you mastered everythign ect., then should become the gained xp you get from kills, events ect. partwise an additional bonus für Karma and Gold.

Example.

You get 10000 Exp from an Event,, you have no use for those Exp anymore, then should 70% of the Exp be turned into Karma and 30% of the Exp be turned into Gold based on Copper Coins.

So a useless 10k Exp gets turned for you then into a Bonus of 7k Karma and 3000 Copper Coins (3 Gold)

This way would become farming events that give alot of exp alot more lucrative for people, that have no use anymore for exp.
Either such a system, or the exp gets split up into 3 equal bonuses, +30% Karma, + 30% Gold and +40% Bonus on Magic Find or increased Map Currency.

When theres simply no need anymore by game design of Exp for you, then the game should change always automatically to increased base system rewards, that will be always useful for you – which is Karma, Gold and MF/Map Currencies

Your numbers seem a bit off, but I like the general idea. The problem is that spirit shards are a fairly meaningless reward currently, and when your masteries aren’t complete you get nothing.

This suggestion got me thinking. What if everyone could get what they want out of this? Offer a base reward for experience, perhaps something a bit more useful than spirit shards? You gain this reward when you’re level 80 regardless of mastery status. Then offer bonus rewards for experience upon completion of mastery tiers as it is now.

So you have to work for the additional rewards, but nobody goes empty-handed with their experience.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Amadan.9451:

guys, does any number of spirit shards really change your game experience? you can get spirits shards from tome of knowledge, from dailies, from so many surces that the original OP just sound like an angry rant for something very stupid (xp numbers distract me cause i don’t raid and raid is evil).
if anything i find stupid to not even take a look at raid content to try to unlock the mastery track which honestly is not gating anything that you can get more or easily elsewhere

It’s not about the shards. It doesn’t have to be shards, it could be anything. It’s about the wasted XP that the game throws at players in job lots. XP is an everyman currency, but only completionists get anything out of it. The system is borked.

O_o I have to say, you would hate playing pretty much any other MMO out there in the world.

In every single one of those, at max level, all that XP … vanishes. Like, literally nothing. No spirit shard equivalent, just … gone. Kill a mob, that XP was wasted.

If GW2 only hid the “you earned 12 XP” notifications, it would be identical to everywhere else in your situation. Which … wouldn’t have been the worst decision they could have mode.

Just sayin’

um no, GW2 is not the same as those other games – deliberately so. This means continuing rewards for playing world content – and that includes XP.

Player 1 : has a high level of achievements and completion in all areas of the game, spvp, wvw, open world play, dungeons, fractals, but doesn’t enjoy or want to do Raids. He has maxed mysteries and has a pool of unspent mastery points. He is blocked from getting rewarded with spirit shards (worth gold) for playing HOT. The UI awards him xp but it ‘disappears’

Player 2 Raids as well – he gets awarded xp and therefore spirit shards for playing in the exact same HOT areas doing the exact same content as player 1.

That’s an oversight in design clearly.

Put it this way, imagine all players were blocked from gaining XP inTyria because they hadn’t achieved Legendary in sPVP. Equally preposterous position.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Amadan.9451:

guys, does any number of spirit shards really change your game experience? you can get spirits shards from tome of knowledge, from dailies, from so many surces that the original OP just sound like an angry rant for something very stupid (xp numbers distract me cause i don’t raid and raid is evil).
if anything i find stupid to not even take a look at raid content to try to unlock the mastery track which honestly is not gating anything that you can get more or easily elsewhere

It’s not about the shards. It doesn’t have to be shards, it could be anything. It’s about the wasted XP that the game throws at players in job lots. XP is an everyman currency, but only completionists get anything out of it. The system is borked.

O_o I have to say, you would hate playing pretty much any other MMO out there in the world.

In every single one of those, at max level, all that XP … vanishes. Like, literally nothing. No spirit shard equivalent, just … gone. Kill a mob, that XP was wasted.

If GW2 only hid the “you earned 12 XP” notifications, it would be identical to everywhere else in your situation. Which … wouldn’t have been the worst decision they could have mode.

Just sayin’

Had GW2 started like those other MMO’s, that would be one thing. I’d have been OK with that. It did not, Players continued to accumulate skill points on each level ding post cap, just as was the case in GW. There were fewer uses for them than in GW, but they did have uses. Also, since ANet added uses for the post cap level currency in GW, it seemed possible they’d do so in GW2.

Then, they took away the post-80 ding currency for everyone. I was OK with that, too. Ah, but then they restored post-cap XP granting currency, but only for completionists. That, I’m not OK with.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

ArchonWing.9480:

This issue is popping up every time a new chapter is released, it would seem. I always have enough or 1-2 more, but then there’s a new LS mastery and I again have to go fish for mastery points.

Each living story zone has contained enough mastery points for me to complete the associated mastery?

It does. That wasn’t my point. The point is that if I do anything else but get the mastery points I have useless xp

It would be nice if the Raid masteries were just unlocked, allowing players to obtain the mastery points elsewhere if they prefer to and still make it to the maximum mastery rank.

Many players actually like to join a raid group but are disallowed to join because they don’t have or want to play the ‘meta’ builds.

TheQuickFox.3826:

It would be nice if the Raid masteries were just unlocked, allowing players to obtain the mastery points elsewhere if they prefer to and still make it to the maximum mastery rank.

Many players actually like to join a raid group but are disallowed to join because they don’t have or want to play the ‘meta’ builds.

You should consider something other than a random pick-up group in LFG for raiding. For example, many of the “training” raid groups are more generous.

You can also, of course, simply start your own group with whatever requirements you want.

It’s true that you might have trouble getting into some of the existing groups, but that in no way prevents you from participating in raiding on your own terms.

I really think this is just one more example of how poorly raids were thought out before and during their implementation into this game.

This issue is particularly puzzling. They try to pass raids off as niche and then block XP/shard acquisition. If shards end up being important in any way with the next expansion, it will put non-raiders at a significant disadvantage.

I wish I could turn off the XP number flashing on the screen simply to declutter the game’s interface.

Solution: nearly every major MMO offers difficulty levels. It’s totally normal. As typical as for Anet of course they don’t offer them and that’s why we all have all those little annoying things. There are easy tasks in the raid you can do, but I still understand all the people who don’t want to do it and even can’t fill their mastery level. It’s not really customer friendly.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Solution: nearly every major MMO offers difficulty levels. It’s totally normal. As typical as for Anet of course they don’t offer them and that’s why we all have all those little annoying things. There are easy tasks in the raid you can do, but I still understand all the people who don’t want to do it and even can’t fill their mastery level. It’s not really customer friendly.

Difficulty levels would solve so many raid-related problems – it is baffling that the devs have been so resistant to implementing them.

Blaeys.3102:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Solution: nearly every major MMO offers difficulty levels. It’s totally normal. As typical as for Anet of course they don’t offer them and that’s why we all have all those little annoying things. There are easy tasks in the raid you can do, but I still understand all the people who don’t want to do it and even can’t fill their mastery level. It’s not really customer friendly.

Difficulty levels would solve so many raid-related problems – it is baffling that the devs have been so resistant to implementing them.

The problems are, as always, people problems — not a technical ones. You can’t solve that with technology, no matter how hard you wish you could. (and, I assure you, the anet developers will feel that as much as you do.)

Setting aside the fact that this is, in fact, a thing which exists, in the form of the challenge mote for now, we can focus on the idea of multiple difficulty levels in raids:

Do they reward the same amount of loot? If so, players will — being human — naturally gravitate to the easier difficulty, and the harder will be disregarded and, essentially, wasted. Only a tiny minority of players will ever bother with challenge for the sake of challenge, compared to those who will take what they see as the most efficient route to completion.

(Want proof? Look no further than the threads talking about the raid “meta” and the difficulties of raiding without following it. Those are, exclusively, players gravitating to, vs resisting, what is seen as the “path of least resistance.”)

Do they reward loot proportional to some approximation of the challenge required to complete them? If so, does completing “easy” lock out loot for “difficult”? If your answer to the second is “no”, then players will complaint about feeling “compelled” to complete both, in order to keep up. Even without the gear based power gain of other MMOs, you still gate the speed of acquisition of legendary armor on this.

(Also note: do achievements complete in both modes, or are they separate? In the former case, easy mode is the desirable path for legendary armor, if not, you have provided a nice mechanism for “link <think> or kick” in pugs…)

Also, in terms of loot, if you mismanage the conversion — estimate “easy” as 1, and “hard” as 2, but actually turn out to be 1:3, or 2:3, in whatever metric the players latch on to in terms of assessing this, and you suddenly have a “good” mode and a “not enough rewards” mode. Ouch.

Also of note: the wide variety of loot and fame options tied to different levels of raiding in WoW, as they experimented, did not in any way dent elitism. “Looking For Raid” difficulty was scorned as the domain of casuals, and generated enormous amounts of complaint about having to carry them when it had rewards seen as necessary for more serious raiding.

Similarly, people were treated as poorly in PUGs for LFR-only experience, etc, and players still demanded appropriately “you must worship me, peon” perks, titles, achievements, etc, to properly gratify them that they were recognised by the community is definitely better than people who didn’t play through the same difficulty level as them.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t actually solve the problems, it just moves them around a bit to different areas.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Blaeys.3102:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Solution: nearly every major MMO offers difficulty levels. It’s totally normal. As typical as for Anet of course they don’t offer them and that’s why we all have all those little annoying things. There are easy tasks in the raid you can do, but I still understand all the people who don’t want to do it and even can’t fill their mastery level. It’s not really customer friendly.

Difficulty levels would solve so many raid-related problems – it is baffling that the devs have been so resistant to implementing them.

The problems are, as always, people problems — not a technical ones. You can’t solve that with technology, no matter how hard you wish you could. (and, I assure you, the anet developers will feel that as much as you do.)

Setting aside the fact that this is, in fact, a thing which exists, in the form of the challenge mote for now, we can focus on the idea of multiple difficulty levels in raids:

Do they reward the same amount of loot? If so, players will — being human — naturally gravitate to the easier difficulty, and the harder will be disregarded and, essentially, wasted. Only a tiny minority of players will ever bother with challenge for the sake of challenge, compared to those who will take what they see as the most efficient route to completion.

(Want proof? Look no further than the threads talking about the raid “meta” and the difficulties of raiding without following it. Those are, exclusively, players gravitating to, vs resisting, what is seen as the “path of least resistance.”)

Do they reward loot proportional to some approximation of the challenge required to complete them? If so, does completing “easy” lock out loot for “difficult”? If your answer to the second is “no”, then players will complaint about feeling “compelled” to complete both, in order to keep up. Even without the gear based power gain of other MMOs, you still gate the speed of acquisition of legendary armor on this.

(Also note: do achievements complete in both modes, or are they separate? In the former case, easy mode is the desirable path for legendary armor, if not, you have provided a nice mechanism for “link <think> or kick” in pugs…)

Also, in terms of loot, if you mismanage the conversion — estimate “easy” as 1, and “hard” as 2, but actually turn out to be 1:3, or 2:3, in whatever metric the players latch on to in terms of assessing this, and you suddenly have a “good” mode and a “not enough rewards” mode. Ouch.

Also of note: the wide variety of loot and fame options tied to different levels of raiding in WoW, as they experimented, did not in any way dent elitism. “Looking For Raid” difficulty was scorned as the domain of casuals, and generated enormous amounts of complaint about having to carry them when it had rewards seen as necessary for more serious raiding.

Similarly, people were treated as poorly in PUGs for LFR-only experience, etc, and players still demanded appropriately “you must worship me, peon” perks, titles, achievements, etc, to properly gratify them that they were recognised by the community is definitely better than people who didn’t play through the same difficulty level as them.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t actually solve the problems, it just moves them around a bit to different areas.

So serious raiders would be unhappy to complete thier normal run and a easier run a week for another subset of loot? This aint the 12 ap aday dailies that they have to keep up with mate.

About the achievement what if it took 10 kills instead of 1, anet shown before they can tier the achievments so shouldent be much of a problem.

Oh I dident realise all the raiders wanted was a title… Slap on the legendary hot raider and release all the loot from raids elsewere then.

Well I done lfr resently in wow, no scorn there they dont even bother to kick afk people just burn through the bosses and share loot with who ever needs it.

There has been various discussions about how experience becomes wasted if you are not able to unlock all the masteries and there is nothing for them to go into. There is also discussions about the Central Tyria Mastery points and the pain it can be for those. So my thought for a solution:

Add a repeatable mastery track that does not take any mastery points, takes 254,000 experience to complete, and gives you a spirit shard.

Thus, players can get back to the pre HoT behavior if they want. If a character does not have any masteries they can advance, experience would funnel here. Or if a player just decides there are some masteries they just don’t care about, they could choose this mastery instead.

My second part of this would be to add a repeatable mastery track like the above, with some high (5 million?) total that gives you a Central Tyria Mastery point. Thus, players could grind out those points over time instead of doing content they don’t really want to do.

With a high total, it would almost certainly be faster to do the achievements. But this just provides an avenue for those players to get the CtM points.

Thus same thing could be done for HoM points also – at least so far, to me, those seem easier, but at some point, experience will get locked behind completing a raid (there have been different discussions on that).

This would require some development work, but would seem to be using logic that is already mostly in the game, so maybe no so hard.

I would endorse the first part if…it was almost anything but a Spirit Shard. Or, if there were other uses for Spirit Shards.

For me, considering the pay-off, I don’t miss the level ‘ding’, at all.

Good luck.

Personally I would settle for a mastery track that provided a mastery point at the end of it. At least that way I would eventually get there with my masteries rather than pretty much writing the whole thing off as I’m not likely to get the points from things I don’t like doing.

The main problem for the central tyria points is that more then half off them are behind collections or the season 2 story. The collection ones can be very annoying to get for newer players. But I have been playing for over 4 years. I have around 30 central points lying around with everything unlocked because of all collections and whatnot I have done. This obviously took time and a ton of gold and I rather not have some guy be able to afk at a farm stop for hours to get the same thing.

I don’t mind them becoming easier to get, especially if other central tyria masteries get released, but not through just grinding 5 million XP. People can do that in less then a day. I rather have them do something that requires skill or something like that.

You had the queen’s gauntlet for example. Which was fighting mini-bosses 1v1. You could easily put 5 mastery points there for the people that beat them all. There is a lot of content that people want back, and some of the achievements they had would be great for giving mastery points.

And HoT points are pretty easy to get. Some of the adventures are very easy and there are alot of points just lying around. Not to mention every new map gives more points then the new mastery requires.

I do agree with the first part, but like Inculpatus said, being able to choose something other then a spirit point would be good. I rather get a glob of ecto, or some asc mats which I can dump into those eaters.

I’d love this first suggestion, too, and I was thinking about a separate Mastery Track with different repeatable masteries, each with another reward, so players could choose, which mastery they would invest their experience into.
Players could choose their reward (hrmmmm …. even laurels, maybe? ) and ArenaNet would have easy access to which rewards are offered to the players by activating or deactivating these respective masteries. Plus, ArenaNet could easily control the amount of experience points needed for each reward (considering the “in-game worth” of the respective reward).

Short, repeatable reward tracks similar to PVP and WVW would be awesome. Laurels could be one, spirit shards, obsidian, maybe even t6 materials.

Masteries are not repeatable and I don’t want them wasting resources to create a system that allows that just so the holdouts that don’t feel like maxing their masteries don’t waste their XP.

Yeah, I hate the current Mastery system and its waste-of-experience gating. If you’re stuck on getting your next set of points for a while, it’s such a kitten feelbad. Given that GW2 early on successfully avoided this very same problem when characters reached level 80, I’m surprised to see they introduced it with HoT.

I doubt it would have been difficult to automatically funnel XP into a different, available mastery line if you reach the gate and don’t notice. Or to implement something akin to the above suggestions of a repeatable mastery.

GuybrushMarley.6728:

I’d love this first suggestion, too, and I was thinking about a separate Mastery Track with different repeatable masteries, each with another reward, so players could choose, which mastery they would invest their experience into.
Players could choose their reward (hrmmmm …. even laurels, maybe? ) and ArenaNet would have easy access to which rewards are offered to the players by activating or deactivating these respective masteries. Plus, ArenaNet could easily control the amount of experience points needed for each reward (considering the “in-game worth” of the respective reward).

I like this idea.

I think that they should have make the Soul Shard it’s own Mastery line, that way you could select it at any time if you wanted to spend XP on it, rather than wait until you have everything unlocked first.

I’d also be OK with a few other lines such as a Karma consumable, bag of coins, random bag of dungeon tokens, random bag of HoT currency, etc. The amounts of XP needed for these tracks should probably be somewhat steep, but I think it would add a level of enjoyment and reward without being excessive.

Linken.6345:

So serious raiders would be unhappy to complete thier normal run and a easier run a week for another subset of loot? This aint the 12 ap aday dailies that they have to keep up with mate.

Experience from WoW says, yes, they will absolutely complain about that. Sufficiently so, in fact, that Blizzard changed their approach and made the various difficulties lock each other out, which also provoked a storm of complaint.

GW2 isn’t WoW, but we can probably learn from the experience they had trying the various permutations of how you handle difficulty levels, and how you make raiding more accessible.

Linken.6345:

Oh I dident realise all the raiders wanted was a title… Slap on the legendary hot raider and release all the loot from raids elsewere then.

haha, yeah. no, but what a large enough proportion of raiders want is “recognition”. You can see the same thing come up when anything sufficiently rare is talked about, or made more accessible.

For example, once legendary items in WoW required raiding, but they became more accessible over time. People complained bitterly this destroyed the value of them, because now “unworthy” people could have them. Same deal, basically, with raid titles and other exclusive raid things.

(Heck, look at the complaints when people noticed you could sell the raid minis on the market in GW2 — “only raiders should have access to them!!!” cries abound.)

Linken.6345:

Well I done lfr resently in wow, no scorn there they dont even bother to kick afk people just burn through the bosses and share loot with who ever needs it.

Yeah, LFR itself isn’t that bad, though sometimes you get people raging. What you experience, though, is after multiple generations. Do you remember what it was like when you could get tier pieces that worked with the normal/heroic mode tier set from LFR? Oh, gosh, much saltier.

The change to LFR-specific tier-ish gear, without much concrete mechanical advantage, was a big part of how Blizzard reduced the pain and agony, by making it much less rewarding for a normal or better tier raider to enter LFR at all.

Ayrilana.1396:

Masteries are not repeatable and I don’t want them wasting resources to create a system that allows that just so the holdouts that don’t feel like maxing their masteries don’t waste their XP.

They don’t need to “create” anything, just unlock the raid mastery track without having to deal with entitled salts who want to dictate others’ play experiences.
Flip one switch, and boom, this entire argument dissipates (instead of coming up every week).

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Masteries are not repeatable and I don’t want them wasting resources to create a system that allows that just so the holdouts that don’t feel like maxing their masteries don’t waste their XP.

They don’t need to “create” anything, just unlock the raid mastery track without having to deal with entitled salts who want to dictate others’ play experiences.
Flip one switch, and boom, this entire argument dissipates (instead of coming up every week).

Did it ever occur that they actually want players to complete at least one raid which is why the mastery line is locked behind it?

Ayrilana.1396:

Rauderi.8706:

Ayrilana.1396:

Masteries are not repeatable and I don’t want them wasting resources to create a system that allows that just so the holdouts that don’t feel like maxing their masteries don’t waste their XP.

They don’t need to “create” anything, just unlock the raid mastery track without having to deal with entitled salts who want to dictate others’ play experiences.
Flip one switch, and boom, this entire argument dissipates (instead of coming up every week).

Did it ever occur that they actually want players to complete at least one raid which is why the mastery line is locked behind it?

Requiring casual players to complete a raid in order to obtain non-raid related rewards for playing non-raid content is bad design. Raids, in most games, are participated in by less than 5% of the population. Nothing non-raid related should ever be locked behind content that such a small minority of players enjoy.