I’ve been around on and off since the beginning of Guild Wars 2, but I haven’t felt like getting Heart of Thorns yet. The recent sales have made me consider it, but then something occurred to me.
For the longest time, I had only played my Sylvari Mesmer. She’s the only character I’ve done anything significant with the story on (caught up to what I can do without the expansion) and she has World Completion (with no other character coming close).
I was originally planning on continuing that trend, especially since there are such heavy Sylvari themes in the story (none of my other characters are Sylvari). However, after finally getting my Guardian to 80, I’ve started to have some serious doubts.
My Guardian showed me that I made the wrong choice with my first character. All these years of Guild Wars 2, and I’ve been having way less fun that I could have due to how absolutely tedious and powerless that Mesmer feels to me (relative to other professions with my skill at least).
This is a problem for me for two reasons:
1) I still like the overall theme for my Sylvari character the best out of all of my characters. That matters a lot to me. There are other MMOs I could never even get past character creation because of how bland and uninteresting the race or other customization choices were for me.
While I have made my other characters within the realm of interest for me for alts, they don’t capture the imagination enough to focus on.
2) I don’t want to redo all of that stuff again. World Completion was one of the most tedious things I’ve ever done. I appreciate the world and exploration in this game, it was one of the things that I was looking forward to before it came out. However, I don’t quite naturally explore. I don’t know exactly how to put it, just that I was missing whole zones I didn’t even realize existed when I first set out to do World Completion.
I feel it’s important, though, to at least getting all of the waypoints. I did what I could for Bloodstone Harvest recently, and I almost missed one of the targets on my Thief, because he didn’t have half of the zone that it popped in and barely made it in time. I ended up switching to my Mesmer to finish off what I could do since she has all of the waypoints, and it was miserable.
In other words, despite how much of this game unlocks cross-account (and I very much appreciate that), what still isn’t cross-account makes me feel like I’m starting over on an alt, even one that’s max level.
Even though this new character might be able to explore all of the Heart of Thorns zones as they go along without repeating anything, I would have to redo everything in the old Tyria on that character.
Also, while I wouldn’t have to replay any of the story, having different parts of the story completed on different characters would just be plain confusing for me, especially if there was ever anything I wanted to redo for achievements or whatever.
This might feel like a small issue, and it is, but it’s enough to hold me back from the expansion. Right now I feel done enough on each character that I’m more or less content. While I’d like to have more content, I don’t know how I’d tackle that new content. Tackling that content is going to take a lot of playtime, and I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted it, like I feel like I might have already wasted years invested in my Mesmer.
Right now I’m just wondering if anyone has any advice about how I should tackle this problem. Continue with my Mesmer who already has everything invested in them, but I can’t seem to find a fun build on, or my Guardian who seemed a lot more fun to play, but doesn’t really capture my imagination and barely has anything unlocked? Is there something else I’m missing that would make it easier to catch alts up on the content that my main has spent years finishing?