Guild Wars 2

I was disappointed with what we are allowed to experience using the new ability “Gliding”.
I wanted to test how to take advantage of it to go to hard to reach plces , looked for the updraft and could find nothing.
Basically my experience is the one of a stone: Jump, fly a bit and drop like one.
It’s pretty silly to limit one of the most interesting features in Heart of Thorn that way
It’s also very limited on mushroom bouncing, which makes last week-end a blahhh experience, really.
Very hard to justify investing any time into it.

You have to level up gliding. You don’t get all the abilities at the start. Besides the training is their to learn.

It’s a long term character progression. If they made it easy people would go through the new content like a dog eating its dinner, then look at the devs and say “Is that all? (Burp)” Expect it to take months of steady playing to reach max on all Masteries.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

It’s a long term character progression. If they made it easy people would go through the new content like a dog eating its dinner, then look at the devs and say “Is that all? (Burp)” Expect it to take months of steady playing to reach max on all Masteries.

People are already doing that, Fleshy! ;-)

They are gobbling down their HoTdog as fast as they are able only to feel hungry again….

Actually, I can agree a bit here… I finally got my updraft trained but can find NONE in this new section of map they gave us.

There are two updrafts in the north eastern portion of the map (under the blighted tree area) but I couldn’t find any real use for them at the moment, they just shot me about 20-30 feet higher up in the air, but didn’t allow me to reach anything new.

Yea, the lack of updrafts here is a little disappointing. There should at least be a few to help you recover from falls or take shortcuts. Apart from that it’s pretty solid though.

Updrafts are strategically places to get you to content you couldn’t before access. They’re not just for flying around willy nilly. This is a small portion of the map and it has two updrafts in it. Over the four(?) zones in the expansion there’ll be a lot more. In fact, we don’t even know how much they’ll be in this section, since certain areas are off limits in the beta.

The updrafts under the blighted tree allow you to reach a Mastery point that is likely impossible to reach otherwise. There might be other ways to do it, but the way I used was to drop down, hit one updraft, and instead of heading for the second, I flew to the left a bit, and landed on a nearby vine. Then I climbed up that vine a bit, putting my higher and closer than I landed, and took off for the second updraft, which got me to the MP.

But there are a LOT of uses for just ordinary glide in this map. There are plenty of events that are a huge hassle if you can’t safely jump down from above, and there are a total of eight mastery points in the map (that I’m aware of), all of which require either gliding or bouncing mushrooms, often at least two things. I haven’t yet found anything that absolutely requires “lean training,” but it does make things a lot easier since it offers more precise landings and a little more distance.

There’s definitely other ways of reaching that MP, I didn’t find the updrafts until after I acquired all of the Mastery Points and all of the Points of Interest (aside from the 2 that are outside of the maps vertical boundary). Gliding is very useful in this map and it’s easy to see that this will be a crucial mastery to quickly acquire the basic levels of even if for no reason other than cutting down the distance you have to travel from area to area.

I agree that there need to be more updrafts. Gliding should provide a means to transport the map while ignoring the paths. Now it is just one direction (down) and almost never up. So there need to be more updrafts.

For those that crave challenge in the game, try to save the Gliding mastery line for last.

Ohoni.6057:

The updrafts under the blighted tree allow you to reach a Mastery point that is likely impossible to reach otherwise. There might be other ways to do it, but the way I used was to drop down, hit one updraft, and instead of heading for the second, I flew to the left a bit, and landed on a nearby vine. Then I climbed up that vine a bit, putting my higher and closer than I landed, and took off for the second updraft, which got me to the MP.

Or you could just jump into the hole from above und directly land on the vine with the mastery point and the blue asura without needing a updraft.