Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I was thinking about what is grind, why stuff gated behind tools in Metroid or Zelda is fine and all that stuff reminded me the NPE.

Remember, in the NPE, abilities were gated behind some achievements, like hero challenges. Here, there was a little problem because random abilities, crucial for the game were gated behind some random stuff. You want to build a warrior only for doing some dungeon? You need to go in Orr and in many places just for having your build, it’s not nice.

But i think a such system could be nice with the Mastery system and provides some feeling of achievement with Mastery.

I explain myself. In Zelda, gating stuff behind tools is fine because it’s part of the story or a reward for finding a treasure.

Right now, in order to make the frog happy, you need to grind some XP. This xp can be earned anywhere in the jungle but it’s considered like a grind. Why? Because if right now my goal is to make the frog happy, then I need to do random stuff to earn this XP. And that is not nice, i want to make the frog happy not to do hours of event to grind XP. I an other hand, if i could make the frog happy by doing some actual content related to the happiness of frog, i should be ok.

So my proposition:
- The number of Mastery you can unlock is limited by the number of Mastery point you have (like now).
- The ability to spend points in a Mastery track is unlocked by doing some actual challenges related to the ability.

A non exhaustive list with some examples:
Frog stuff:
- Mushroom thing: Progress to the frog village in the personal story.
- Frog happiness: Do some hero challenge and kill red frogs.
- Nuhoch Wallows: Go to some places hidden behind Wallow but without it. After that, the frog allow you to learn how to use wallows.

Glinding stuff:
- Do some adventure with gliding involved.
- Go to a place really hard to go without some gliding mastery and in reward gain the ability to unlock this particular mastery.

Factal stuff:
- Unlock the ability to unlock the mastery after completing a full range of fractal.

Pact stuff:
- Complete the main story

Legendary crafting:
- Complete a lore collection (something similar to precursor collection but for unlocking the track).

A last word. Yes, it’s very similar to the ability thing in the NPE. But in the NPE ability were gated behind content not related to the ability. You needed to to random stuff with no actual relation with what you want to unlock the ability. But with mastery it’s different, to have better reward in fractals, you must do some stuff in fractal. To make the frog happy, you must do stuff related to frog.

With that, unlocking Mastery is a reward for doing actual content related to the Mastery you want to unlock, it’s not a grind.