Guild Wars 2

So, I just started adventuring into HoT areas. For now I just got Gliding and I’m training Mushroom jumping, as the story suggests.

I have two questions:

1) In which order should I unlock the masteries to have a nice flow through the zones? For example, unlock gliding at first was obvious, so that I can reach the places without having to backtrack too much. But and after that? And for other zones?

2) Just following the story and exploring the zones will get me enough mastery points to unlock what I need? Or am I expected to, say, raid or farm achievements?

Raiding will give you some mastery points but they are not required if you don’t want to raid. Unlocking the different stores is useful (keys/other for chests) and leyline is great but not neccessary for anything in the zone (except the up and coming final raid boss but again if you don’t want to raid don’t worry). Personally I unlocked everything up to lvl 3 then chose which to unlock to the end.
Mastery points are spread throughout the jungle and story, look in the achievement log to see what unlocks what. A couple of hidden ones that can be found on the net specifically Dulfy.org.
good luck

1. Updafts is must for story and is helpfull. Advanced gliding is quite usefull too. In itzel jumping mushroom is a must for story, and helps traversing jungle a lot. Nuhoch wallows can be usefull for exploring and saving on waypoints.
Rest depends on what you need – for example if you want specialization weapons – you need vendors and exalted gathering.
2. For basic masteries i think that some exploration is sufficient, like insights and strongboxes which are pretty easy to get with all those guides that are out there. To max out masteries you would have to do some farming.

If your main interest is the story, it’s been nerfed so many times that really gliding, updrafts and nuhoch hunting is all you need.

If you just want to play through the game, all the needed masteries are basically the first half, which are easier to get. If you essentially just play the game, you’ll have more than enough mastery points to unlock them. Specifically, doing some adventures, playing through the story, playing through the event chains/meta and exploring the map (see the zone achievements, like finding strongboxes) should get you enough. It’s only when you’re almost done with masteries that you’ll find yourself really out of points, which will require you to do stuff like gold adventures or the more challenging achievements.

The masteries you’ll want to start with are gliding and bouncing mushrooms, then updrafts, wallows and exalted markings. After that, advanced gliding will make it much easier to glide around. From there you can go for either ley line gliding or itzel poison lore to reach a few inaccessible areas, or stealth detection to make the stealthing enemies easier to deal with. That’s really all you need to just play through the game.

Ultimately, you’ll unlock everything without all that much extra effort, so it doesn’t matter that much.

However, if I had to do it over again, here’s how I’d proceed:

• One level of each mastery (HoT and Core); this is cheap and useful.
• Max Pact Commander (for autolooting — this is game changing imo)
• Max Gliding (to unlock endurance-free gliding — this is also game changing).
• For HoT, progress the rest together, one level at a time (this ensures you get the most out of your earned XP)
• For Core, choose Fractal Mastery if you expect to do high level fracts; choose Legendary otherwise.

(Originally, I progressed everything one level at a time, which turned out fine, too. I just would have been happier with early insta-loot and early never-tired-gliding.)

Hope I am not hijacking this thread too much, but how, exactly, does one go about unlocking the Masteries? Just keep doing events, killing things, etkittenil the bar fills? Which would suggest spending a lot of time in the HoT zones.

Moyayuki.3619:

Hope I am not hijacking this thread too much, but how, exactly, does one go about unlocking the Masteries? Just keep doing events, killing things, etkittenil the bar fills? Which would suggest spending a lot of time in the HoT zones.

You do have to spend time, but I never felt the need to spend “a lot of time.” Turn on as many XP boosting tools as you can (guild buff, ascended infusion, boosters, a food + utility, etc), plus fireworks. Run a couple of meta events and boost up the specializations for all your L80s. I ran out of mastery points long before I ran out of XP.

Moyayuki.3619:

Which would suggest spending a lot of time in the HoT zones.

You should be able to obtain most masteries on your journey through HoT, assuming you actually try to explore the maps, participate in the events and try everything else there is to offer, like adventures. The later masteries are mostly useless, so you can simply skip then to make it a very casual experience, but if you want everything however, then not only are you going to have to put in the time, you’re going to have to put in the effort to complete achievements.

If you want to spend minimal time in HoT, adventures are the fastest source of experience. Pick the ones you can manage gold on and do them daily. They take roughly 2 minutes each and are worth 100k experience. To make it even faster, park alts and use the % exp boosters.