As you’re all aware, the Spring Quarterly update brought the rewards up for the Heart of Thorns map, but I feel this zone is now a very sad level 80 zone that is completely unrewarding for the time you’d spend in it compared to any of the others. Let’s explore why I think this way. This map was made as the first new permanent map other than Southsun Cove, which honestly also needs a bit of a revamp in my opinion as the only thing people do there is Karka Queen, and it was designed to have a cycle of timed phases and events. As it stands, this zone’s main attraction is the Ambrite Weapon collection which is a nightmare to make now. I’ve been looking around for a good way to grind geodes for the massive amount of rewards you can buy from it, and people told me “I just get mine through PvP”, and it’s abhorrent that the map’s rewards are better in one game style than others, especially to such a degree that people generally don’t even bother with the map and only do the reward track instead.
In light of the fact geodes are terrible to earn, let’s look at the cycle phases. Let’s say you get in during the clear phase which lasts 40 minutes. You do events, earn geodes from them, but how many? You get 1 geode + as many geodes as the Zephyr level, so if it’s at rank 4, then you get 5 geodes. Normally, for a good 20 minutes, the ranks won’t rise higher than 3, and then you have the slow trudge towards the rest, which never really go higher than 4. Which means for 40 minutes, each event rewards 2-5 geodes and they take a few minutes to complete. On average, it sounds like you’d get about 60 geodes for 40 minutes, which is pretty bad to begin with.
Then the sandstorm phase kicks in and you start the event train to maximize your rewards. Usually, you get 10 geodes per event, because the maps always, or mostly, get to level 4 and never higher, and during the sandstorm phase, you get twice as many geodes per event. There’s a usual rotation that the zerg does to grind for geodes: Dust mites, Haze, champion devourer queen, maybe rare creature at this point, and then nothing for a solid 3 minutes or so. Then we’re 10 minutes in, so a bunch of things spawn: Dust mites, Haze / Dust mite twister, Skritt queen. In total, you get about 90 geodes, 100 if you get the skritt thief to spawn. You may get 120 as maximum if you’re lucky enough to catch some other events as they finish elsewhere from the zerg real quick. But, wait. You didn’t get 10 of those geodes.
People pulled the Skritt Queen when she spawned because they were too impatient to wait 5 minutes to mine the rich node near her, which means the entire zerg loses out on 10 geodes, as she spawns on the 10 minutes time. Meaning your effective gain on a bad map is about 80 geodes during that time. In total, you’ve gotten about 135 geodes for a whole hour’s worth of work. You need 425 (as the tiers never get to 5 anymore) to buy one ambrite weapon schematic. 3 hours to get a single schematic, and then you also need other stuff from the zone. Notice how I didn’t mention looting chests, it’s because you get no Zephyrite keys, except from the sand from dust mite events, maybe and the chests are rather rare, spawning in only a few locations whereas they are abundant in Silverwastes and HoT zones.
You’ve revamped areas of the game to be more worth our while, so please, ArenaNet. Dry Top is just that, it’s a dry top zone. It feels bad to play in it, but there’s so many rewards you can get from it. Every time I head into it, I want to enjoy it, but it becomes a frustrating experience to organize people for the zerg group so they don’t end up blocking other people’s gains in geodes, and most people are just there for the rich node which ends up making everyone else lose out, meaning the grind gets progressively worse and worse.