Guild Wars 2

Again, I thought I heard Anet say that they didn’t want players to grind in GW2. (Watch the GW2 Manifesto )

This isn’t going to give the new players a “fun” experience, tbh.. grinding for mastery points inside CoF reminds me of one of the korean mmo’s I played before.. lol

GG

Someone has even reported that as exploit :S

I actually like this more than running around on maps trying to find boring events.

TFW when you destroy dungeons to encourage participation in expansion content but it just drives people back to dungeons so they can bypass it.

Magical…

Looks more like self inflicted grind to me

People want the new stuff now to play with, tinker around with until they get bored. Then demand new content immediately in that short period of time.

If ArenaNet’s intent with the mastery system was to give players a fun and interesting way to progress their characters, I’d call Heart of Thorns a rousing success.

Serophous.9085:

Looks more like self inflicted grind to me

People want the new stuff now to play with, tinker around with until they get bored. Then demand new content immediately in that short period of time.

Arguably yes, but Anet did this to themselves when they locked Fractal and Legendary Mastery behind xp grind.

This honestly isn’t even that good of a way to gain mastery points. Events end up giving you way more experience, and end up being a lot more fun and engaging in my opinion. The only way this method works, is if you have boosters, and those run out soon, and are limited. So if people end up doing this, they’ll eventually be gated by lack of boosters, since without boosters it takes pretty long and isn’t worth it.

This is like the loot cave…

I used to level alts like this before I had tons of level up scrolls. Not surprising that people are using it for mastery’s.

Substance E.4852:

Serophous.9085:

Looks more like self inflicted grind to me

People want the new stuff now to play with, tinker around with until they get bored. Then demand new content immediately in that short period of time.

Arguably yes, but Anet did this to themselves when they locked Fractal and Legendary Mastery behind xp grind.

First I will say that I didn’t like the nerfing of dungeons. If anything, after the first run, rewards should be reduced according of each repeated run of a path. And then added a Dungeon mastery path.

if anything, I will assume the thought process to the tyria masteries was “well, the people who like running fractals will continue to do so and get the XP that way, and this way people wont abandon the old world to level up these masteries.”

But, players being players realized, “hey wait, I can get this a lot faster by just grinding the dungeons of infinite spawning mobs!”

So one of three things is going to happen:
1. Players will grind this out, get their masteries, then complain about “nothing to do”.
2. Players will grind this out, get their masteries, and not complain (i laughed as I wrote this).
3. Anet is going to nerf this, thus providing another kick at dungeons, in which the players will complain once more and play the victim.

Only a fool would believe Anet intended or desired people to use a broken dungeon to level the mastery lines. I understand some people feel they have no choice. I’m only at level 42 I earned this without abusing the game. I did not go in one dungeon or abuse any endless spawn. What annoys me greatly is people are pm’ing me accusing me of using an exploit when that is 100% completely false. I wish there was a way Anet would distinguish those who earned their mastery lines legitimately by playing the game as intended and those who abused a broken dungeon. And those who want to whine about this request, what in the world are you doing on the forums shouldn’t you be exploiting an endless spawn somewhere aren’t you afraid someone may get ahead of you?

CindyKa.6137:

What annoys me greatly is people are pm’ing me accusing me of using an exploit when that is 100% completely false.

I either find this incredibly hard to believe or don;t care because it’s obvious that you just went and exploited some other fast source of xp.

No one gets that high in 4 days without dedicated farming.

Even doing the CoF farm takes at least ~12 hours of active farming.

Serophous.9085:

So one of three things is going to happen:
1. Players will grind this out, get their masteries, then complain about “nothing to do”.
2. Players will grind this out, get their masteries, and not complain (i laughed as I wrote this).
3. Anet is going to nerf this, thus providing another kick at dungeons, in which the players will complain once more and play the victim.

To be fair, making people do old content again to unlock features doesn’t make old content new.

AVM.5746:

This is like the loot cave…

A million deaths are not enough for Master Rahool.

I’m not really surprise nor care about it. I haven’t bought HoT yet but I would have done the same.

Most players played those old content for years and maybe they want to get the Tyrian mastery faster so they can focus on the real new content ahead.

Since someone says it’s not an exploit, why don’t you guys leave them be and just do what you want with your mastery.

My friend said " tyria mastery complete! "
Is this not EXPLOIT ? i cant beleive.
HOT Mastery System comlete way designed " 3days "?

anet should annouce this issue.

Tyria masteries deserve this treatment, as it stands the only viable options fro reliably completing them is either ya grind Cursed Shore or ya Grind CoF, finished my Legend track and am halfway through fractals from CS alone.

Id cry if I had to run solely events when they give a measly 5-18k exp per completion (T4 legend crafting is 5 million exp alone…)

They also said play how you want. You don’t have to grind, you CHOOSE to grind. I’m leveling my masteries without grinding. What’s the issue?

FYI

https://twitter.com/Shazbawt/status/658092329962573824

A lot of my guildies have been doing this. I don’t mind if they grind their way through the tyrian masteries in a couple of days, it’s not like they’re making a profit out of it. It would be quite different if they could farm HoT masteries in CoF but as it is, they can’t.

To me farming anything aside from a couple of ToT bags in the labyrinth sounds mindnumbingly boring but hey, each to their own as long as it’s not an exploit or preventing other players from progressing events etc.

Since they aren’t getting any excess gold or anything like that, but only cheating themselves of any sense of reward by getting the Masteries done by playing slower, then it’s probably not an exploit even though undoubtably unintended. However, they shouldn’t complain later that there’s nothing for them to do in the new expansion.

I know this hasn’t come up yet, but this also removed the fastest production of gold and experience in the game. I’m not sure whether ArenaNet knows what this will do to its nice economy it has going. My bet is that is everything commonly used takes a big drop in worth and all the old stuff still in the trading post becomes too expensive to buy. Also, those hero points you need to complete the new specializations are much harder to acquire since the experience was nerfed.

Also, I liked doing both dungeons and fractals but being forced to do fractals for gold is kinda rough. (If the “same-day-return” penalty is still in effect, then the cap on “first-run gold/day” is much lower now 1gold/day from fractal and about 40silver/dungeon run as opposed to 33 gold/day possible from just doing dungeons)

Finally, if I got tired of dungeons I would switch to fractals and vice versa. Now I feel forced to do fractals, and that “Dungeoneer” title I was working on is officially a pain/not worth the title. Unless that nerf changes, I’m never going into a dungeon again except to get specific dungeon skins or to “abuse” the infinite spawns. (really if you want to/can fail at a dungeon and fight forever then go for it sounds super boring though)

Paolo.6198:

Again, I thought I heard Anet say that they didn’t want players to grind in GW2. (Watch the GW2 Manifesto )

You ought to re-watch this. They didn’t say they didn’t want players to grind (MMO players would go rabid if you didn’t allow them to grind, it’s all they do all day, see dungeon runners, fractals, WvW, sPvP, PvE, everything actually).
They said you’re never required to grind. That’s a huge difference.

Duregar.3659:

I know this hasn’t come up yet, /snip unrelated rant

That hasn’t come up in this thread because it’s off-topic. There are several threads on that topic elsewhere.

Substance E.4852:

TFW when you destroy dungeons to encourage participation in expansion content but it just drives people back to dungeons so they can bypass it.

Magical…

Pretty much that.

Serophous.9085:

Looks more like self inflicted grind to me

People want the new stuff now to play with, tinker around with until they get bored. Then demand new content immediately in that short period of time.

Ok let’s get one thing straight – masteries are not content – they are at best features.

Content means: new maps, new enemies, new encounters, new items, etc. Things that are new- are made and put into the game.

Masteries are a way of gating features that could for example be brought into the game with a “feature pack” like they did before.

I understand why they did this – but let’s not kid ourselves – people claimed they wanted new content – I don’t remember anyone complaining about a lack of features.

I mean look at FOTM – did we get new content ? no we did not – we got the same things we had before but in a somewhat different form with a bit of changed functionality – Sure there are some new skins ( reskins of old skins with a different color) but the maps, the encounters, it’s all the same. It’s the old content with a bit of a new layer of paint.

So let’s not go ahead and call this content. Grinding masteries is not new content – it’s just an arbitrary gate to access features.

Substance E.4852:

CindyKa.6137:

What annoys me greatly is people are pm’ing me accusing me of using an exploit when that is 100% completely false.

I either find this incredibly hard to believe or don;t care because it’s obvious that you just went and exploited some other fast source of xp.

No one gets that high in 4 days without dedicated farming.

Even doing the CoF farm takes at least ~12 hours of active farming.

It is possible if you can play 8-10-12 hours a day. I get what he’s saying because a few years ago that would have been me.
If you have the time you don’t need to hurry up – the problem is most of us don’t have that time anymore.

I seriously can’t hear “gate” anymore… when I first bought the game, I wanted to roam the vanilla PvE world with a Lv.80 toon, but it was gated behind XP… ugh, that surely sucks…
Or does it?
EVERY progress could be called “gate” with this mindset.

Thanathos.2063:

I seriously can’t hear “gate” anymore… when I first bought the game, I wanted to roam the vanilla PvE world with a Lv.80 toon, but it was gated behind XP… ugh, that surely sucks…
Or does it?
EVERY progress could be called “gate” with this mindset.

Not really. Sure, everyone would love to be max level on day 1 but it is an accepted part of gaming that you do something or other to get there. What this is is effectively adding new levels without saying they added new levels.

If they just broke down and added levels that were account bound for your 80, fine, there would not be as much complaining. It is that they also said you had to do mastery points. There are 19 just for pact commander. I have only 13. Hover over your personal stories sometime, they did not give you a story point (I tested this too since my norn had not even started the PS yet). Aside from it seemingly being random and not rewarding their featured content (the PS) it has not awarded me the KQ one yet … despite however many times I have done it. Sure, if you did the LW story you have lots of points, but like I say it is random not ‘play your own way’.

Harper.4173:

Substance E.4852:

CindyKa.6137:

What annoys me greatly is people are pm’ing me accusing me of using an exploit when that is 100% completely false.

I either find this incredibly hard to believe or don;t care because it’s obvious that you just went and exploited some other fast source of xp.

No one gets that high in 4 days without dedicated farming.

Even doing the CoF farm takes at least ~12 hours of active farming.

It is possible if you can play 8-10-12 hours a day. I get what he’s saying because a few years ago that would have been me.
If you have the time you don’t need to hurry up – the problem is most of us don’t have that time anymore.

In other words, yes, that would be dedicated farming, lol.

“Normal” players only play maybe 2-3h a day. Personally I dont even see the rush. I am only rank 9 but already did like 90% of the first two zones with the next story mission in the third zone. Thats just one lousy weekend. Sure it will take some time to go through on other characters and max out elite specs, but again, whats the rush? We running late for something?

This is why ANet delayed release of the HoT raids dungeons in my opinion. Also why Tryia dungeon rewards were nerfed.

ANet have been around long enough to know players will always find the path of least resistance to achieve their goal. If that path offers minimal resistance then knowledge of it will spread and lots of people will do it. ANet had to know people would seek out the highest xp return for time and effort then farm it relentlessly. The proof of that is the dungeon rewards nerf.

Also, if Raids were available now and gave a similar xp return as dungeons, how many people would simply farm them and ignore PvE content? It wouldn’t matter if they weren’t able to be completed either, just run through to a certain point, rinse and repeat. The proof ANet know this would happen is the delayed Raids release.

A couple of large assumptions there but I feel those assumptions are correct. My point? Please stop complaining about it, this isn’t an exploit. It may not be playing in the intended spirit but this has already been anticipated and prepared for by ANet.

Substance E.4852:

CindyKa.6137:

What annoys me greatly is people are pm’ing me accusing me of using an exploit when that is 100% completely false.

I either find this incredibly hard to believe or don;t care because it’s obvious that you just went and exploited some other fast source of xp.

No one gets that high in 4 days without dedicated farming.

Even doing the CoF farm takes at least ~12 hours of active farming.

cof takes less than 12h to get all 3 masteries 100%

maybe 7 hours

Substance E.4852:

TFW when you destroy dungeons to encourage participation in expansion content but it just drives people back to dungeons so they can bypass it.

Magical…

Made my life. I wonder where people would go if you could get HoT mastery in CoF. Countless long escort events with minimal exp reward or mindless grind of CoF?

I love how people finding a faster way to get masteries through farming a dungeon is now being defined as grind.

The players chose to do that to themselves. Anet didn’t force it on them. The idea was to unlock masteries over the course of time, but good ole GW2 players OMGMUSTHAVEITNAO, so they decided instead of spreading it out over a long period, they would concentrate their efforts into a farm to get it done quickly (right on! more power to you folks!).

Then of course the good ole GW2 players hop on the forums to complain about it….

smh is all I can say…

As long as the players “Grinding” don’t post in the forums in about 1 month time that “there’s nothing to do” while those who choose not to take this “shortcut” still have plenty to explore.

Lock the dungeon until the issue can be addressed. And yes these same players will be back saying, what now?

This HAS to stop.

This is not grind. This is Farm.

There is a distinct difference in that this is entirely optional. They could go out and run around Silverwastes, or Orr. I have personally not changed up my routine at all and have almost Second Tier of legendary masteries, plus about 6-7 from the jungle.

These folks simply found the optimal means of gaining what they want quickly. Congrats to them. It is not the most fun, but optimal paths are not always fun. As long as they don’t come back complaining about endless grind I have no issue.

Well, to argue that.
In 2012 The Steel Tide Story instance was nerfed.
Big groups of mobs would spawn and people would farm it.
For items that time, they removed xp and loot from the mobs.

I don’t get why these mobs are giving xp in CoF. They respawn endlessly!
And does it matter if its a FARM or a GRIND? It’s ridiculous that its part of the game.

The current issue is an overlap of a design flaws (in both, masteries and the dungeon) with normal human behavior. If you gate loot/features by exp, there will always be the fastest way to get that exp, which a portion of population will use. If not CoF, it’ll be something else.

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

This is why ANet delayed release of the HoT raids dungeons in my opinion. Also why Tryia dungeon rewards were nerfed.

ANet have been around long enough to know players will always find the path of least resistance to achieve their goal. If that path offers minimal resistance then knowledge of it will spread and lots of people will do it. ANet had to know people would seek out the highest xp return for time and effort then farm it relentlessly. The proof of that is the dungeon rewards nerf.

Also, if Raids were available now and gave a similar xp return as dungeons, how many people would simply farm them and ignore PvE content? It wouldn’t matter if they weren’t able to be completed either, just run through to a certain point, rinse and repeat. The proof ANet know this would happen is the delayed Raids release.

A couple of large assumptions there but I feel those assumptions are correct. My point? Please stop complaining about it, this isn’t an exploit. It may not be playing in the intended spirit but this has already been anticipated and prepared for by ANet.

Not really – the dungeon rewards nerf were aimed at gold farming not xp farming. Even if dungeon XP rewards remained the way they were the current CoF p1 farm would still be better.

Anet is trying to force people to play content – which is understandable but not admirable.
The way I see it is this – they started working on this expansion too late, and had very little time – as a result we have very little content so they’re forcing us to take it very slowly in order to “stretch it out” and make it seem like it’s actually a lot – which is isn’t.

They’re trying to present this as a “design choice” to make you feel like you’re progressing and whatnot – but the blunt truth is that it’s just a way to ration out content and try to “hide” the fact that HoT cost 60 dollars and it didn’t deliver 60 dollar’s worth of content( in quantity) compared to the initial release.

You can compare anything – from number of enemies, to number of sets of weapons and armor, to size of areas or number of events.
The original game gave more content per dollar than HoT does. So what they did with HoT is they made sure you’ll be doing the content more times over and over in order for it to seem like you’re spending more time on it. And you are – it’s just that instead of going to new places and doing new things and new events you’re doing the other ones over and over in order to farm your next arbitrary gate and progress the story or exploration or whatnot.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Substance E.4852:

TFW when you destroy dungeons to encourage participation in expansion content but it just drives people back to dungeons so they can bypass it.

Magical…

Made my life. I wonder where people would go if you could get HoT mastery in CoF. Countless long escort events with minimal exp reward or mindless grind of CoF?

Gotta love escorting NPCs for 10 minutes fighting mobs that give NO xp only to get a nice 18.000 xp at the end.

And the best part? You wouldn’t even be doing it if you didn’t need that xp to be able to get to where you wanted to go initially.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Since they aren’t getting any excess gold or anything like that, but only cheating themselves of any sense of reward by getting the Masteries done by playing slower, then it’s probably not an exploit even though undoubtably unintended. However, they shouldn’t complain later that there’s nothing for them to do in the new expansion.

But….you know they will complain nonetheless

What a waste of perfectly good expansion content.

This is a reflection of ppl these days its the NOW generation i rather play naturally and enjoy my time but to each their own.

“I don’t like how grindy this mastery leveling! I will go and stand in one place hitting 1 for hours in CoF instead!”

For anyone asking, yes this is actually a good use of the word ‘Grind’. Only thing is it is not needed at all, you are not forced to do this. You could easily just go and play the game normally and you will still gain the exp.

Did I grind a little to finish auto loot. Yes I did. Although Hulu + mindlessly hitting things is something I actually enjoy.

It is someone’s own problem how they chose to lvl their stuff.

Yes this way is super fast compared to anything else, yes we may laugh at them, but since there is no official response from Anet, you can’t report them for exploiting.

If that would count as exploiting, then dungeon skipping should too. Both situations are content played not the way it is designed to be played…