Guild Wars 2

Hi ANet,

I’ve been playing HoT without any exp boosters, just wandering around exploring and doing events. I’ve put maybe 7-8 hours into the expansion at this point in time.

After getting some rest and having some time to think, I’d like to share my thoughts on HoT PvE.

Overall, my first impression is something to the effect of “GATES, GATES EVERYWHERE”.

I started playing the expansion on a necromancer, because I was excited about the reaper elite specialization. I quickly realized that I would not be enjoying reaper in the ways I had envisioned. I also realized the expansion was incredibly grindy due to multiple reasons:

• Base necro is the most painfully horrible map traversing experience I’ve had from any profession.
• I am choosing to not play with boosters, to see just how painful gaining mastery experience actually is
• Gaining mastery experience is actually quite painful if you just try unlocking map progress and doing events. In 7 hours I’ve only been able to unlock 2 mastery levels point on my account, even though I have 5 additional points stashed away.
• The personal story is gated behind masteries unlocks, which are themselves are gated behind mastery unlocks, and unlocking mastery points is also gated behind experience point grind.

The content itself is of the highest quality I’ve seen in the game. However, the content is gated artifically behind pacing mechanics of experience gain. It’s also legitimately gated behind mechanics availablity. However, in my opinion artifically drawing out the amount of time it takes for players to access content is the lowest of the low in a game, it’s time gating through repetition and that’s when you get grind.

I definitely have yet to experience everything in Verdant Brink, but what I’m getting at is this:
* The most common things I ever see in front of me are map completion points, which do very little for mastery progress gain (which seems to be the most important thing when accessing the expansion’s content).

• One other thing I see are random enemies, not worth the time to fight as the mechanics of these fights are simple and uninteresting in the scope of the game as a whole.
• Events are repetitive. At some point in my 7+ hours of play, I did arrive at some of the same events 3 times. I’m sure I can’t have done all the events yet in Verdant Brink though.

The most important thing I want to bring up though, is that I lose so much time running around maps seeing the same things I’ve seen before, because traveling to places you’ve been through is so time consuming.

If you replace “around” in “Waiting around to have fun” with “to arrive” in order to get “Waiting to arrive to have fun” I can’t descern the difference between these two statements, because they both feel like the same thing with the expansion. Maybe it’s just that I’m spoiled by the waypoint system, but I can honestly say if it weren’t for the waypoint system in Guild Wars 2 I’d never touch PvE.

I would challenge ANet to collect data on players that measures the time that players are actively participating in content they are doing for the first time, content they are repeating, time players are idle, and time players are just running around.

tl;dr
In summary, the expansion doesn’t feel good, because it’s content is behind gates behind gates behind gates, the worst gate being the artificial pacing of experience gain for masteries, which results in grinding for experience.

Time wasted due to “Waiting to arrive to have fun” is extremely painful. Finding new content to do, only to not be able to participate in the new content due to a gate, then having to way point way back somewhere then run a lot of the same areas you’ve just experienced in order to hopefully find some other new content that you can do hurts as a player.

*Added to tl;dr
Going in cold to PvE, 7ish hours resulting in 2 mastery points. That I know of, you need over 6 points to progress the personal story. That means it will take over 20 hours to unlock doing story for what I’ve identified up to this point.