Guild Wars 2

OK, I started back in GW2 a few weeks ago, I love the game and I am enjoying it but for a few bumps in the road which can often seem so jarring in an otherwise smooth and immersive game.

The biggies for me concern the new character leveling experience and skill gating.

It really seems to be a disjointed mess.

• I made the mistake of rolling a new Revenant…

The class seems to be lacking the basic low level stuff like underwater skills like healing and other abilities.

I later found out this issue is a long standing deficiency in the class. OK…

• What the heck happened to Traits?

Where once we had freedom and some early on specialization…now it’s just a series of barriers to overcome in a very slow and plodding manner. No, tool-tips anymore for Trait lines and what had once been an easy to use interface is a clunky mess of lists and lockouts.

• Level 80 boost implementation…

(Yes, I succumbed and used it on my baby Necromancer because I had previously leveled two to level cap on my long dead account)

OK, so I boost a Necromancer to 80…intending to play him through the entire Personal Story and content releases in chronological order…EXCEPT I have to jump ahead to HoT to enable Mastery Level unlock otherwise all my progress for that character is on hold until I get to HoT.

I mean, all that XP is going down the bit bucket if I don’t have Mastery unlocked, right?

But, why make the experience so disjointed and thus encourage players to NOT want to do the content in chronological order?

• New character, regular leveling experience

It’s mostly fun but the skill gating and unlocks are irritating as hell:

I miss being able to unlock weapon skills by using the weapon.

Look, I understand, you need gating, but GW2 has gone way overboard on this -almost to the point where GW2 could dispense with vertical leveling entirely and just make the game completely horizontal progression based.

HoT has been successful in dividing the gw2 community. Some people love it and some people hate it. Gating content has garnered its fair share of complaints. I agree with many of your observations.

There are a lot of things that could use improvements…

Off the top of my head a few issues I see that I think could be improved and how they could improve them.

Weapon skill level gates…
The current system has it’s advantages, but it severely hampers play in the first few levels of a new character… it’s also a terrible first impression for new players to jump in and only be able to spam 1 all the way through the introduction…
Solution: Return the old system of unlocking skills through weapon usage, BUT add in the benefit of having all weapon skills unlocked across every weapon, whether you used it or not, at level 5.

Utility skill progression
The system is quite frankly more of an annoyance than anything… If you want a specific utility skill from a certain skill type and only care for that skill in that skill type you have to progress all the way through that skill type up to the skill you wanted. If you were after an Elite then this would be understandable and fine… but if you’re just after an ordinary utility skill this is a problem. The old system let you unlock the skills in whatever order you wanted which was great.
Solution: Change the utility progression system to allow you to start from any utility skill you want, but still require all skills in the type to be unlocked to unlock the Elite.

Specialization progression
The new spec system is a major improvement over the old one when you look at it from the point investment perspective… since every point now has value. However… at each tier when you have to pick 1 of 3 traits, the new system has a major fault in it’s unlock progression. If you want the bottom row trait you have to first unlock the top and middle row… At max level this isn’t an issue, but when leveling this can be a serious issue. The top and middle for a given tier might not benefit your build in any way shape or form and yet you’re forced to go a couple levels with a trait that doesn’t do you any good.
Solution: Each time you reach one of these tiers on the spec progression, you may select to unlock the 3 in any order you wish. Progressing to the next tier should still require all 3 to be unlocked however.

I think the ‘jumping ahead’ to HoT to unlock Masteries is only an issue for those wishing to Raid, or at least dabble in Raiding. Many don’t care to. Otherwise, once all other Masteries are filled, XP doesn’t matter, anyway.