Guild Wars 2

Sylent.3165:

What happened to this???

I am very far behind in this game because the mastery system. I really have a hard time getting mastery points to level anything and my exp bar is always full.

You have to do these silly mini games which is ok…but you HAVE to complete in x amount of time.

You need to do story missions which is fine as I enjoy them, but you HAVE to do it by anets rules and do all the achievements to get the mastery points. This makes the story quests extremely annoying and not fun at all.

I want to unlock mastery points by playing and advancing in the game not by you have to play this part of the game this way only

You can play the way you want. Not all of the masteries are strictly necessary. It just depends upon what your goals are, which is no different from the core game. For instance, you don’t need to craft a legendary weapon. But if you decide to do so, there are plenty of things you will need to do and it’s likely that some of it consists of gameplay you wouldn’t participate in if you weren’t crafting a legendary weapon.

I hate “adventures” and didn’t bother with them for about a year. It didn’t affect me at all. I simply grabbed the masteries I wanted and left the rest. Eventually I made it a personal goal to max my mastery level. So, despite not strictly needing those masteries, I buckled down and knocked out the adventures that I had successfully avoided for a year. My choice. I played the way I wanted to.

Raine.1394:

Let me give you another perspective on play it your way, perhaps different than the OP or Dashingsteel who has made excellent points. I had no problems in terms of play it your way in GW2 so let’s go back to the beginning of HoT. …lots to address, but don’t want a tl;dr…

OK, I understand the frustration with HoT and the level design (as I too had/have issues with those), but that is more a gripe about not wanting to run around on poorly designed maps, with a broken minimap while also trying not to die to anything that is just outside the one or two safe way points on the map.

All that being said, you can very easily play HoT story almost straight through, with a few side runs for a handful of mastery points to help round out the ones you get during story mode stuff to complete the main story. After that, yes, getting full map complete will require taking the time to do some extra MP giving meta events (especially in Dragonstand where they are handed out like candy) so you can get the masteries fully unlocked. And here’s the kicker: you don’t have to even get them all unlocked. You can if you’re a completionist, but in reality you don’t need them all. As of right now I’m just casually getting MPs to chip away at a few last ones that are nice to have but are completely not necessary.

Now, did i like them sticking aspects of the story behind needing to unlock a mastery to even do the next step? No. I thought that was poor game design. And I too griped that I wasn’t being allowed to just play the game. So I skulked off to grind experience and find random MPs I hadn’t gotten and in doing so I visited parts of the map the story and metas hadn’t taken me before. I started just exploring the map. As a vet I had lost the explorer mindset by HoT and just wanted to push through it and this forced me to sit back and essentially enjoy the view.

In hindsight I’m glad I did.

Tangled Depths still eats a bag of Richards, but I don’t think anything can fix that map.

Fractured.3928:

Raine.1394:

Major snip

So for me, I’m glad they went the route of having a vertical HoT. It is indeed frustrating at times, but it is super unique! I haven’t seen a map like it in any MMO, ever. It is grand, beautiful, and exploring is more fun than any area of any MMO.

It really sucks that you don’t like having to explore to get to your places, but I understand thats part of “Play your way”, but in this instance, there isn’t a way to get a unique feeling like this without it being kinda slightly niche.

My complaint though, which we both agree on I believe, is the part where you mentioned you need 2 abilities which you don’t have yet to get to an event. That right now, is what sucks about HoT. Not only that, but having to chase down masteries makes it even worse.

Thanks for the thoughtful even-handed response. The only thing that I would like to emphasize is that I actually love exploration. True fact: my first title in WoW was the Explorer. And I don’t have a problem with the vertical element per se. It’s really the platforming aspect that I have a problem with. And, the nature of the puzzle, at least in the initial examples, was that there were no clues about where to navigate to you just had to kind of brute force it. I get that the puzzle aspect implicit in platforming is fun for a lot of people. I think part of it has to do with my age. I actually was old enough to enter bars when Pong was just making its way into bars as a novelty game. By the time I was playing arcade games (other than pin ball) I was old enough to just be able to marvel at the dexterity of 13 year olds playing Defender. I could never play it competitively. Respect!

That’s my story. I loved that GW2 had platforming and I loved that I could avoid it. I was disappointed that is was so center stage in HoT. Between the platforming and the annoying mobs I decided within a couple hours that I wouldn’t be playing HoT beyond getting gliding (worth the cost of the expansion) and the ranger pets. Cheers!

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Raine.1394:

Let me give you another perspective on play it your way, perhaps different than the OP or Dashingsteel who has made excellent points. I had no problems in terms of play it your way in GW2 so let’s go back to the beginning of HoT. …lots to address, but don’t want a tl;dr…

OK, I understand the frustration with HoT and the level design (as I too had/have issues with those), but that is more a gripe about not wanting to run around on poorly designed maps, with a broken minimap while also trying not to die to anything that is just outside the one or two safe way points on the map.

All that being said, you can very easily play HoT story almost straight through, with a few side runs for a handful of mastery points to help round out the ones you get during story mode stuff to complete the main story. After that, yes, getting full map complete will require taking the time to do some extra MP giving meta events (especially in Dragonstand where they are handed out like candy) so you can get the masteries fully unlocked. And here’s the kicker: you don’t have to even get them all unlocked. You can if you’re a completionist, but in reality you don’t need them all. As of right now I’m just casually getting MPs to chip away at a few last ones that are nice to have but are completely not necessary.

Now, did i like them sticking aspects of the story behind needing to unlock a mastery to even do the next step? No. I thought that was poor game design. And I too griped that I wasn’t being allowed to just play the game. So I skulked off to grind experience and find random MPs I hadn’t gotten and in doing so I visited parts of the map the story and metas hadn’t taken me before. I started just exploring the map. As a vet I had lost the explorer mindset by HoT and just wanted to push through it and this forced me to sit back and essentially enjoy the view.

In hindsight I’m glad I did.

Tangled Depths still eats a bag of Richards, but I don’t think anything can fix that map.

I believe we have a lot we can agree on. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and perspective.