Guild Wars 2

I put almost the whole weekend into trying to unlock as many masteries as possible, and I wanted to share my feedback.

My overall summary (balance issues aside): Masteries are cool, but the unlock system is confusing, and completely blocks your progress at times.

Detailed feedback:

The system is hard to understand.
I don’t know why these unlocks require both XP and Mastery Points. Maybe there’s a good reason for it but the complexity of this design makes the system hard to understand for a large % of folks.

I led a group of guildies in a Verdant Brink exploration on Saturday night, and it took us almost 20 minutes of explaining to get everyone to understand the unlock system well enough to start earning their first gliding mastery. An hour later, we were explaining it all over again.

We heard the question asked many times in /map. too. Not at all intuitive!

It requires too much Right Now! interaction.
When a mastery “primes” for unlock I have to stop everything and buy it Right Now!, or figure out how to stop the nag messages. Otherwise I get a popup each and every time I gain XP prompting me to complete the unlock.

What’s worse, the nag messages are a requirement of the current design! If you fail to act your mastery progress from XP is simply lost.

Difficult (for some folks) to get enough Mastery Points
A friend of mine who has superb reflexes was able to get some MP from the adventures. I spent many hours this weekend trying (and failing) to earn mastery points from adventures. First advancing buggy maps to unlock the adventures, and then grinding them over and over trying to get silver or gold. Bottom line, I just don’t have the reflexes to win the competition.

I was tempted to give my account credentials to my friend with the good reflexes so he could go to get them for me. I didn’t — because sharing account credentials is something I never, ever do (nor do I recommend it).

But this experience highlights a gotcha with the two-currency design. My mastery progress was blocked because the lines were “primed,” but I didn’t have enough mastery points finish the “unlock” step. So my XP (and progress) was just falling on the ground.

Compare this to LS Season 2 achievement “progress”. I’ve finished them all, and some took practice and several attempts to beat. But I was never blocked. Not having enough mastery points is like having your entire LS Season 2 disabled because you can’t beat Wicked Rodeo. (Or worse, since you can get friends to help with Wicked Rodeo.)

Perhaps this is “by design” but it doesn’t feel right. If the goal is the throttle progress, please consider a daily element instead.

SUGGESTION
I think it would be a big improvement to make mastery progress work more like WvW rank points. Not the UI but the underlying one-currency mechanics. It would both more understandable, and give players more freedom to earn progress the slow & grindy way if they can’t master a quick & skilled way.

Here’s the system I’d like to see:

1. The only currency needed for mastery unlocks is Mastery Points.
2. Earn points, spend them later at a time of your choice.
3. Progress is never completely blocked. Even if there’s a time-gated element, some component of progress through normal play is always available.
4. XP is one way to earn mastery points, Challenges are another way. These are just two examples; several other ways to earn mastery points are possible.
5. Ways to earn mastery points can differ by category. Perhaps in Fractals XP isn’t used at all, and the non-challenge way to grind mastery points counts boss kills instead. (10 kills/point, for example)
6. In the Masteries dialog, each masteries category (Heart of Maguuma, Tyria, etc.) has it’s own “progress to next mastery point” bar. Fill the bar, get a category-specific mastery point.
7. The dialog also shows the number of unspent Mastery Points by category.
8. In the main UI, what used to be the XP bar before level 80 (at the bottom of the screen) now shows your progress toward the next mastery point that can be earned in the current map / area. (If I’m in Verdant Brink, I see the progress bar for the next MP I can spend on Heart of Maguuma masteries.)

After that it’s just balancing the numbers. How much XP (or whatever) equals one mastery point, how many Mastery Points each challenge awards, how many mastery points per unlock.

Bottom line: It’s simple and more consistent with the progression system we’ve already used in WvW.

And it gives you the flexibility to choose how you earn your progress. If you are good at the category-specific competitive challenges, less grinding for you! Better still, you get to earn progress doing something you enjoy more than grinding. I don’t mind if a really skilled guy gets to his goal faster than I do, as long as I still have the means to get there with sufficient effort.

I agree I also feel masteries progression is a little broken. I aslo feel masteries shoudn’t be account wide.

Progression should be character by chacacter. Give me some incentive to replay though the game with my other characters. Try different paths, maybe have one character go down the glider route, another bouncing mushrooms etc. At the moment your forcing me to have glider for all of them as soon as I have it for one this just make the game samey.

The Account bound setup does seem to railroad you, but it was designed due to the fact that not every player is going to invest time in the adventures, or due to the fact that finishing a mastery track requires a massive time investment and can be sped up by running an alt through some story missions. Thus, you can switch mastery tracks while playing if you want to, while just going over to an alt to grind the mastery xp for it.

Also, mastery points can be gained outside of adventures from simple exploration, there are two mastery challenges, a la skill points, in sight of the entrance of VB. Well, at the top of the ridge you enter on, but you know what I mean.

Lakshmi.5941:

Difficult (for some folks) to get enough Mastery Points
A friend of mine who has superb reflexes was able to get some MP from the adventures. I spent many hours this weekend trying (and failing) to earn mastery points from adventures. First advancing buggy maps to unlock the adventures, and then grinding them over and over trying to get silver or gold. Bottom line, I just don’t have the reflexes to win the competition.

I was tempted to give my account credentials to my friend with the good reflexes so he could go to get them for me. I didn’t — because sharing account credentials is something I never, ever do (nor do I recommend it).

But this experience highlights a gotcha with the two-currency design. My mastery progress was blocked because the lines were “primed,” but I didn’t have enough mastery points finish the “unlock” step. So my XP (and progress) was just falling on the ground.

That is maybe because there where only 5 mastery points (without the adventures) on the beta-map. I hope there will be enough mastery points one can aquire without the adventures in the final expansion. Because I too was not good at the adventures.

Gaining experience (training) takes time. My strategy would be to always have enough mastery points in advance to unlock trained masteries.

Overall I like it that you have to collect mastery points and XP to unlock masteries. Because that means that you can not just farm the same events for XP but you have to “go out” in the world.

tocsoft.3641:

I aslo feel masteries shoudn’t be account wide.

I like it that they are account bound. I do not want to train the same thing (i.e. gliding and mushrooms) again and again on all my alts/characters. That would felt like a lot of grinding for me and would not be fun.