Guild Wars 2

Hey,

So i’ve spent the past 15 mins or so poking around the limited wiki article on masteries

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery

And I have to say… I have no idea why I should be excited about this. It doesn’t sound like character customization at all… In fact, it sounds like a ton of the new content is just going to be gated behind millions of XP. For example, take gliding:

Ley Line Gliding: Learn to enter ley-line energy flows while gliding to be moved along with the flow, gaining access to otherwise inaccessible places.

Ok, so I won’t be able to fully explore the jungle until I have sunk… 381k, 635k, 1.1m, 2.4m, 4.2m, 8.1m = ~17 million experience into gliding. But it’s not like my character becomes more powerful, or a customization aspect. It’s simple binary. Do you want to go to x location gated by 17 million xp? Then fill out the gliding mastery. I’d be ok if gliding was the only mastery like this, but it’s not even close. In fact, every jungle track that we know of has something like this.

Itzel Lore

Itzel Poison Lore: learn about Itzel poisons, and gain the ability to pass through poisonous Mordrem vines and withstand poison hazes that exist in Maguuma.

4.5 million xp gate.

Exalted Lore

Exalted Honing: Learn how to efficiently pierce through tough Impenetrable Bark, which makes some of the powerful Mordrem unbreakable

17 million xp gate – ok sure, this isn’t a location, it’s a creature but my point stands. There are creatures you can’t take down without passing this 17 million xp gate.

Nuhoch Lore

Nuhoch Wallows: Master the use of Nuhoch Wallows, learning to traverse these hidden passages to gain access to locations both far and hidden

2.3 million xp gate – plus the 17 million gate says something about chak acid – I have no idea what that is right now, but my guess is that there’s some other powerful monster out that that uses chak acid and you have zero chance of defeating it until you’ve passed this 17 mil xp gate.

So in the end you aren’t going to be the “glider specialist” while your friend is the “exalted specialist”. You’re just going to need to master all of the aspects of the jungle in order to experience the jungle. How is that a good and exciting gameplay experience?

Basically parts of the Maguuma jungle are permanently locked behind a 69 million xp gate. How is that exciting?

The tyrian masteries on the other hand, are a bit more exciting. Yay you finally get to craft precursors. Cool. Auto loot, permanent swiftness in cities and repairing someone’s armor & downstate when rezzing? Awesome.

I was hoping the jungle masteries would be a bit more than just another gating mechanism, but it appears that is not the case.

…and this gating applies per account or per character? If it is per character, I’m quitting, because I’m NOT doing it 19 times over.

Daddar.5971:

…and this gating applies per account or per character? If it is per character, I’m quitting, because I’m NOT doing it 19 times over.

Pretty sure they said per character.

and actually i am excited, or at least relieved. It’s difficult to play a game, sometimes, despite whatever enjoyment you get out of it, if you don’t have the sense that you’re progressing towards something.
This gives me something. A lot of something, admittedly, and that might need reexamining/readjustment, but it at least means that when i want to just log in and make progress i have some way of doing that.

plus there are all sorts of ways to up your exp gain, and in the beta weekends at least the initial tiers to at least give access to the mastery thingy were doable within a half hour.

Daddar.5971:

…and this gating applies per account or per character? If it is per character, I’m quitting, because I’m NOT doing it 19 times over.

Mastery progress is account bound.

While gating is sometimes pointless (charged quartz anyone?), i do believe this is justified.
Since there isnt any gear treadmill, some form of progression is needed and was highly sought after by many, along with more challenging content.
The solution is character evolution, and it’s far better to have that gated behind EXP since its easy to grind, especially with consumables that most players have ton of anyway. (Not to mention you’ll gain it passively just playing the events etc)
The alternative would be something along the lines of skillpoints that you interact with for points, and while that isnt “gated”, it does require alot of running around and honestly, who likes running around channeling at certain points to evolve?
Also, since your progress is account bound, you wont have to do it on several toons, and thats a big plus.

If progression occurs instantly, it isn’t progression. MMO’s sell time sinks and progression. Expecting something different is foolhardy.

Its grind without the feeling of grinding. Having walls is to slow down progression, if everything was easily attainable then players would go through content almost instantly.

I get what you are saying but take gliding for instance… if you could see all there is to see day one (presumably you won’t be able to because you can’t glide or play Super Mario right off the bat) would you be happy?

Mastery gated content is necessary if you don’t increase the level cap. You don’t seem to be the type that would hold your ability to rush through content against the developers but this is how MMOs work (and most MMO players do hold it against the devs). I think what they have chosen to do is a better solution than adding Veteran Levels ala ESO or raising the base level cap.

Would you rather they added 10 levels instead and gated the content so that it takes you a month to get 10 levels and to get to all 4 maps? Or would you rather have no gates and hordes of people race through all the maps on day one hour one, and then ask where the expansion is?

How is raiding for hours exciting? How is stumbling around in a three layer maze with either relatively powerful or mob wusses exciting? How exciting is turning a close combat class into a bowman, or an archer into a staff wielder? How exciting is it to have a PvE map camouflaged as a WvW map?

Quick answer: it isn´t. If it were not for fractals, precursor aquiring methods and new pets, HoT would be pretty skippable in my opinion. Getting mastery xp for actually playing the game is the least of my worries for HoT to be honest.

rhapsody.3615:

Daddar.5971:

…and this gating applies per account or per character? If it is per character, I’m quitting, because I’m NOT doing it 19 times over.

Mastery progress is account bound.

Account bound, as stated

You don’t have to complete a mastery to enjoy the benefits. I got one point of gliding and I could explore the entire area of the beta (albeit with some difficulty, because I didn’t get the hang of it — pardon the pun — right away). I think I’ll aim to get a point in as many things as possible before trying to max any.

^

The way the Masteries are set up, there is increasing amount of exp needed for each tier. You do benefit from getting the first tier so imo it’s a good idea to unlock tier one of each. It’s the most benefit for the least amount of exp. After that you can think about unlocking one completely or unlock tier 2 on each.

I think the purpose of it is to give a sense of progression and to keep the sheer amount of content from being too overwhelming at the start.

It’s sort of a metroidvania approach.

Daddar.5971:

…and this gating applies per account or per character? If it is per character, I’m quitting, because I’m NOT doing it 19 times over.

It’s per account, not per character people are spreading false info lol.

I do not mind the mastery system. It sorta like, give me to many options and I’ll choose none. This way, with Gliding first anyways, i can ease into it, and still have fun exploring with my partner.

TJgalon.5012:

I do not mind the mastery system. It sorta like, give me to many options and I’ll choose none. This way, with Gliding first anyways, i can ease into it, and still have fun exploring with my partner.

Oh wow.

I thought it was okay so long as it was account bound, but you just worded it to make it sound like the New Player Experience/ the 2nd iteration of traits.

I can accept the fact that it’s an attempt to slow down the rate at which people go through their content, but please don’t try to claim that it’s a great thing because it makes it easier to get into.

Having everything available right away is by far the better option as it allows you to see and experiment with it holistically, and see how things synergise without spending hours with each individual aspect in a vacuum.

Having played WoW in the past, I found an issue in that while leveling, /so/ many people in my guild actually formed terrible rotations that they had to break their habit of using once they finally got the rest of their skills, because they had them handed out piecemeal, and so they just took their basic rotation and stuck with it all the way to 100.

If anything, the mastery point gating is the type that’s likely to cause people to choose no option. Look at what happened with traits and gear.

With ascended costing so much to make, no one experiments with it, they either don’t make it at all, or they ask what the best set to make is, and then make that.

Under trait system 2, people would again, not buy traits until someone told them exactly what build to use, and then very rarely change from it.

Investment kills variety.

To max out one mastery we will need to grind out 17mil xp.
What happened to no grind? I have been looking forward to this expansion for months now a week before launch i find out this.

I know what I’ll be doing. I’ll be using every exp buff I can get my hands on from the moment the expansion starts till from then on. Banners and boosters as long as they last (which won’t be too long with the way guilds will be restricted). Lunar fireworks or exploding draketails (10% extra exp from everything you do that gives exp). Halloween food such as Spicy Pumpkin Cookies (15% extra exp on kills) and any nourishment (10% extra exp on kills). With all the exp that will be required, every little bit of a boost to exp gain will help.

Foods/nourishments will probably be selling like hot cakes once people realize what how much exp is needed for full mastery line completions. I bought a ton of really cheap crystals as well as the cookies and fireworks already just for every day exp boost. I figure I’ll be using stacks of them in the coming months.

Anyone knows if tomes will affect the masteries progress?

gaborkaldy.3210:

Anyone knows if tomes will affect the masteries progress?

They won’t.

Stage 1: “Give me everything NOW!”

Stage 2: “I’m bored. There is nothing to do.”

So glad that I’ve been hoarding all those Cat-Shop rng-fail xp-boosters for 3 years :P
Now I can finally clear my bank tab !

Eponet.4829:

TJgalon.5012:

I do not mind the mastery system. It sorta like, give me to many options and I’ll choose none. This way, with Gliding first anyways, i can ease into it, and still have fun exploring with my partner.

Oh wow.

I thought it was okay so long as it was account bound, but you just worded it to make it sound like the New Player Experience/ the 2nd iteration of traits.

I can accept the fact that it’s an attempt to slow down the rate at which people go through their content, but please don’t try to claim that it’s a great thing because it makes it easier to get into.

Having everything available right away is by far the better option as it allows you to see and experiment with it holistically, and see how things synergise without spending hours with each individual aspect in a vacuum.

Having played WoW in the past, I found an issue in that while leveling, /so/ many people in my guild actually formed terrible rotations that they had to break their habit of using once they finally got the rest of their skills, because they had them handed out piecemeal, and so they just took their basic rotation and stuck with it all the way to 100.

If anything, the mastery point gating is the type that’s likely to cause people to choose no option. Look at what happened with traits and gear.

With ascended costing so much to make, no one experiments with it, they either don’t make it at all, or they ask what the best set to make is, and then make that.

Under trait system 2, people would again, not buy traits until someone told them exactly what build to use, and then very rarely change from it.

Investment kills variety.

While they are at it they should just allow everyone to start every character at level 80, after all we don’t want the leveling experience to be unreasonably gated either.

If all content is handed over immediately, people complain there is nothing to do after one week.

Me and some friends really like the XP aspect of masteries, because it will reward you no matter what you do as a level 80. For example if i want to stay at maps that arent SW on my lvl 80 i’m punished because i get little reward from my time spend, but after masteries at least i will progress there because every thing in this game gives XP, everything…

So masteries will make things far more enjoyable for everyone who wants to play in their own way and still get a “good reward”

Torolan.5816:

How is raiding for hours exciting? How is stumbling around in a three layer maze with either relatively powerful or mob wusses exciting? How exciting is turning a close combat class into a bowman, or an archer into a staff wielder? How exciting is it to have a PvE map camouflaged as a WvW map?

Quick answer: it isn´t. If it were not for fractals, precursor aquiring methods and new pets, HoT would be pretty skippable in my opinion. Getting mastery xp for actually playing the game is the least of my worries for HoT to be honest.

that all sounds pretty exciting to me. i guess i won’t be running into you.

The bottom line of most MMO’s is “Do you find the moment-to-moment gameplay enjoyable?” Because if not, you really shouldn’t be shackling yourself to what ever time-stretching delayed gratification system this or that particular publisher has dreamed up.

If you like the gameplay, then the periodic delivery of shiny is just a bonus.

The fact of the matter is most games when they come out with expansions come out with level increases as well. Which created that great treadmill, have to get the next highest equipment, the levels, etcetera. The goal of arena net was to have horizontal progression rather than vertical progression. You know the way we were progressing levels 1 through 80, was supposed to be part of the experience. Now they want to do the same thing with horizontal progression where you’re not getting actual levels, but you are increase your characters capability in the other ways

Of course, after you have played the game awhile and obtain the experience Scrolls and tomes of knowledge to auto level new characters, such as what I am going to do with my revenant. Horizontal progression gives us a way to continue to experience the growth of our characters without having to deal with the level and equipment treadmill that plagued World of Warcraft with their expansion

It really isn’t exciting and is truly an unimaginative way of handling progression for many of these tracks. While this method does open up many avenues for completing them, it does make me feel like it is a grind as opposed to something exciting to learn. My preferred method of unlocking/progressing these things would by doing relevant activities instead of any old activity:

• Hang gliding – After building your hang glider (unlocks track), you progress it by practicing with your glider (small amount of track progress every few seconds while gliding) and completing hang glider race courses and events (large amount of track progress).

• Lore tracks – After meeting the species (unlocks track). Interacting with them through dialogue (small progress) and completing events for them (large progress) unlock access to their stores and techniques. Using their techniques (e.g., mushrooms) also progresses you along the track a little bit each time.

• Fractals – Not enough information yet, but I’d say completing fractals should move you along.

• Pact commander – Killing the dragon minions around Tyria will progress this track a little. Events with dragon minions move the track along further. Specific goals could be created for large progress (e.g., specific events).

• Legendary – No good ideas. This doesn’t really seem like a good choice for the mastery system to me, and more of a collection activity. If it must remain a mastery, some combination of learning lore for the relevant legend, and crafting.

Of course, by making these more specific activities they should be easier to progress.

Gating is a necessary evil for MMO. For single player games not so much. Once you buy a single player game, you could skip to the end and developer isn’t going to care.

The problem with MMO is that players think of it as long term. They want a game that can go on for as long as possible. THis is nice unfortunately, creating that type of content is very expensive.

Believe or not, when guild wars 2 was release it had very few gates. The only major gate were reaching level 80 and getting legendary weapons and both of those took a month at release.

I remember being in Orr within a week of release. I watch people ran Arah and do Orr events for hours and after hours. Within a few days after release got their exotic gear then proceeded to kitten and moan how guild wars 2 has no endgame content.

I remember within a week, players were already asking for Cantha and elona. The point being gates are necessary because mmo players have proven to be unable to handle not having gates. If a developer cares about the long term population health of their game, they have to drag out the progress as long as possible while not making it seem painful.

tl;dr
Gate exist because there is no reward to having no gates other than an unhealthy population. The cost of making a game with constant content is too expensive. A lot of MMO players substitute an life for an MMO.

Did people really expect a post-80 progression system to not be time-consuming? This is a bloody MMO. MMO’s are, as a genre, massive time sinks. The business models used involve ongoing revenue whether via sub or store. Thus, the developers’ goal is always going to be to design systems to keep players playing. Not to mention that a lot of players like having longer-term goals.

Testudo.4620:

Torolan.5816:

How is raiding for hours exciting? How is stumbling around in a three layer maze with either relatively powerful or mob wusses exciting? How exciting is turning a close combat class into a bowman, or an archer into a staff wielder? How exciting is it to have a PvE map camouflaged as a WvW map?

Quick answer: it isn´t. If it were not for fractals, precursor aquiring methods and new pets, HoT would be pretty skippable in my opinion. Getting mastery xp for actually playing the game is the least of my worries for HoT to be honest.

that all sounds pretty exciting to me. i guess i won’t be running into you.

You could run into me. Like the idiot I obviously am, will stay loyal to GW2 and grind my way through all the things I don´t like to do until I get the shinies I want. If there is an interesting hunting ground in HoT, I may even spend some time there after I have the mastery xp, but that remains to be seen.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Did people really expect a post-80 progression system to not be time-consuming? This is a bloody MMO. MMO’s are, as a genre, massive time sinks. The business models used involve ongoing revenue whether via sub or store. Thus, the developers’ goal is always going to be to design systems to keep players playing. Not to mention that a lot of players like having longer-term goals.

You take your logic and put it somewhere dark. And sticky. Yeah! dark and sticky.

We don’t want no logic running loose ’round these parts!

So boys and girls… How about that Gift of Maguuma huh?! Lolololololol only need to level past 80 while doing Maguuma events 272 times!

I personally think the Mastery system is a good answer to the question, “How do you keep max level chars from overrunning a new expansion within an hour or less if you don’t put in extra levels to slow them down?” ANet knew the players didn’t want more levels (judging by forum post responses to people who suggested it) but they needed something that acted like levels to stop “content locusts” from eating up their expansion in a day and then quitting the game. Masteries, which is leveling without increased levels, is a great idea. They can use it to put in any sort of character progression they want without unbalancing the rest of the game or requiring a whole new set of gear with each expansion. At any rate, anyone who thought that an expansion would be released without grind, is maybe a trifle naive. The grind is required for replayability and to keep us doing content while they work on the next expansion.

They did this because the mini-maps are so tiny and didn’t want players to realise it too soon after they enter it. The dlc is a scam, they try to gate their so little work.

It’s horizontal character progression. shrug

Anet is a solid group of devs, but it isn’t a solid group of geniuses. They aren’t going to magically solve the problem of keeping people busy. One way to do that, while keeping in the spirit of their anti-vertical-progression mantra, is to do horizontal progression instead.

None of this is required, as far as I can tell. It’s just icing. And I’m not saying the fact that it isn’t required means you shouldn’t speak up if it bores you (you absolutely should). But don’t expect Anet to revolutionize everything. They are human and working within the same design philosophy constraints as most of the MMO industry.

That said, is buying coffee exciting? Not really. But Starbucks made it interesting by turning the whole thing into an experience of prestige. Half of this stuff is marketing and perspective.

It’s best not to sit there and calculate out how much XP you need because much like staring at a clock, all it does is slow down the time in your mind. To me, the spirit of masteries is that you naturally get XP to unlock them while you are enjoying other aspects of the game.

Currently, once you hit level 80, getting XP is all but meaningless (there was the skill point reward each level at one point, now I’m not sure — a spirit shard maybe?). With masteries, there will now be a point to XP after 80. But rather than being pressured to hit a new level cap like some expansions do, it is horizontal progression that you can do on auto-pilot. Bing, pick a mastery thing to go for. Do other stuff and eventually you’ve got enough XP for it.

If you think of masteries as the goal itself, then yes, the grind will undoubtedly bore you.

17M exp it is a just 944 events. If you did 10 events per day(what is not so much) it will take you 3 month to get full mastery. And don’t forget about exp from killing mobs/exploring the world/story.

This grind will be boring. If you are interested in playing challenging games for fun, then HOT will not be the right game for you. You need to play an online RTS or FPS games for fun and truly challenging encounters, or wait to see what the next generation of MMORPGs will be like. Too bad that Anet gave up their manifesto of GW2, which had the potential to be a fun game without being grindy. These days I normally play GW2 for its pvp aspects only.

Simzani.4318:

They did this because the mini-maps are so tiny and didn’t want players to realise it too soon after they enter it. The dlc is a scam, they try to gate their so little work.

Don’t like it, don’t buy it, problem solved.
I had to look at your posts, and this is amazing. For the past 8 months, anything hot related you keep writing “this dlc is a scam”

SirMoogie.9263:

It really isn’t exciting and is truly an unimaginative way of handling progression for many of these tracks. While this method does open up many avenues for completing them, it does make me feel like it is a grind as opposed to something exciting to learn. My preferred method of unlocking/progressing these things would by doing relevant activities instead of any old activity:

• Hang gliding – After building your hang glider (unlocks track), you progress it by practicing with your glider (small amount of track progress every few seconds while gliding) and completing hang glider race courses and events (large amount of track progress).

• Lore tracks – After meeting the species (unlocks track). Interacting with them through dialogue (small progress) and completing events for them (large progress) unlock access to their stores and techniques. Using their techniques (e.g., mushrooms) also progresses you along the track a little bit each time.

• Fractals – Not enough information yet, but I’d say completing fractals should move you along.

• Pact commander – Killing the dragon minions around Tyria will progress this track a little. Events with dragon minions move the track along further. Specific goals could be created for large progress (e.g., specific events).

• Legendary – No good ideas. This doesn’t really seem like a good choice for the mastery system to me, and more of a collection activity. If it must remain a mastery, some combination of learning lore for the relevant legend, and crafting.

Of course, by making these more specific activities they should be easier to progress.

Most of your suggestions would lead to people macro’ing the dialogue button or pressing space bar over and over again at a lip to pop glider in and out.

I take it you never played an MMO where you leveled up individual skills like swimming, lore, etc. by doing that task over and over. In EVERY SINGLE CASE players just find a safe spot and afk macro to build xp. That’s not even gameplay anymore, that is just silly nonsense. I remember building swimming in EQ1 by continuously swimming into a dock for like 12 hours overnight. Trust me when I say the gameplay was “thrilling”.

This information has been available for months. There are innumerable videos, by ANet, explaining how this will work, as well as blogs and third party videos. I don’t know why it’s not thoroughly explained in the wiki, but that’s still no excuse. If you actually want to know about something, how about you actually go out and find the information and learn about it, rather than gleaning a tiny idea of it then coming to rant about it here because you don’t understand it in the first place?

The point of masteries are to give us goals and something important to work toward without imbalancing competitive aspects of the game.

Personally, I vastly prefer the mastery system to a simple “gain 10 more levels” or gear grind approach. It gives them a way to continually add new goals for players to reach in the game that centers more around content than gear stats or levels.

Should be interesting and fun to see the cadence they set and overall diversity of future mastery lines.

Also while I am unsure of the Tyeria mysteries, it work out well since my partner and I, still going for the explorer achievements, and as a result, double rewards then. It might not be something we can earn all at once, but that does not make it bad. Also it gives a use to the boosters we been holding onto. Extra xp, and such.

MyriadStars.5679:

This grind will be boring. If you are interested in playing challenging games for fun, then HOT will not be the right game for you. You need to play an online RTS or FPS games for fun and truly challenging encounters, or wait to see what the next generation of MMORPGs will be like. Too bad that Anet gave up their manifesto of GW2, which had the potential to be a fun game without being grindy. These days I normally play GW2 for its pvp aspects only.

L00000L did you just say FPS games were challenging?

Do tomes of knowledge provide “XP” to lvl 80 characters, or is it just skill points? I’ve actually never tried one on a lvl 80.

Good Tofu.9376:

Do tomes of knowledge provide “XP” to lvl 80 characters, or is it just skill points? I’ve actually never tried one on a lvl 80.

They now give spirit shards after 80, that about it.

displacedTitan.6897:

Most of your suggestions would lead to people macro’ing the dialogue button or pressing space bar over and over again at a lip to pop glider in and out.

That’s a fair point on dialogue. How about unique dialogue and events for the rest? Or if that is too cumbersome to track remove the dialogue part (or have it be specific important NPCs). There could also be things like playing games with the species NPCs (e.g., belcher’s bluff, or species specific games).

I take it you never played an MMO where you leveled up individual skills like swimming, lore, etc. by doing that task over and over. In EVERY SINGLE CASE players just find a safe spot and afk macro to build xp.

First, macros are against the terms of use, so we shouldn’t have to forgo more interesting systems because people are abusing the system. Second, this problem exists in the current system. There are plenty of places for easy XP gain, and macros can exploit those. Have you seen some of the Orr events back when they were popular with players just afking with a button on repeat?

I remember building swimming in EQ1 by continuously swimming into a dock for like 12 hours overnight. Trust me when I say the gameplay was “thrilling”.

That you are an exploiter of that game’s systems suggests you didn’t find that particular track fun. That is fair. Perhaps swimming races, or other water adventures that gave big boosts to the track would have made this more interesting. As would lowering the amount required for progressing. The behavior you’re describing suggests to me that for you a careful balance wasn’t struck between the amount of time required to progress and the variety of interesting activities available to get you there.

For all we know, those areas hated by the high tiers in the mastery tracks are optional. Maybe they lead to a JP or an Adventure. I doubt progression will be hindered.