Guild Wars 2

HoT is not that difficult, but certainly harder than faceroll braindead Central Tyria, which is good.

dubstax.9102:

I’m saying that the small group of hardcore players burn through content faster than everyone else. Hardcore players are concerned about the present and not so much the future. Casual players tend to be more long term driven and will fund the game that way. Hardcore players also earn a majority of what they receive through the game itself rather than spending real world cash. Would you rather cater to a hardcore player that sinks little to no money over a small period of time before they get bored and leave the game, or a casual player who spends $30-$40 a month over several years to buy cosmetics, toys, etc.?

My experience is the complete and polar opposite.

For the first three years of Guild Wars 2, the “hardcore players” played the same handful of Fractals and Dungeons. For the past two of those three years, in order to achieve challenge and replayability, these players did everything from speed runs, undermanned Dungeons/Fractals to even more bizarre self imposed restrictions on gear/skills/classes/etc (forcing ever more unoptimized builds).

At the same time, the “casuals” blaze through content, and demand more.

Additionally due to how the Real Money Trading system works in GW2, those purchasing gems for gold increase the value of those gems (for the purposes of gems to gold), thus bringing in more gem purchases for real world money.

In short, it appears that a lot of your arguments and opinions are based on nothing at all.

Ragion.2831:

I want to switch my main character but to make one that I would be satisfied with, i want to level it to 80 without tomes which means lots of PvE.

I have a hard time stepping back into PvE after the brain dead feeling of going through the PvE in the vanilla area that insists on hand holding(still dont have map completion yet after playing for over 3 years).

So, has the difficulty improved in HoT? and are there any plans of making changes to the difficulty of the base game.

HoT is substantially more difficult than other GW2 level 80 zones. Speaking from my perspective, mostly a solo player, the difficulty is about right. It is not a push over and you are always at risk of dying if you make mistakes. Its not like Orr where you can go on cruise control and take your hand off the wheel.

Having said that, the content highly favors classes with larger HP pools. I would not go into hot as a thief with full zerker gear. You can easily get two shotted. Also, harder HoT stuff (or not meant to be soloed stuff) only few classes can tackle that. Trying to solo a champion and so forth, you need large enough HP pool and strong (usually multiple) sources of healing. It is not a questions of skill here cuz you will get hit, it is a question of can you afford to take hits and how fast can you recover.

My issue with HoT over other GW2 content is accessibility of maps. VB is highly accessible. AB not so much but manageable. TD and DS are just terrible. Getting a populated map with events is near very difficult, and meta events in HoT are unsoloable.

IMO I wish Anet would upgrade level 80 content difficulty to Magma Jungle level while maintaining the accessibility, but it seems Anet is going the other route and just nerfing HoT difficulty in the recent future. Remains to be seen.

Overall difficulty of trash and events is quite a bit harder than Orr, but not impossible. However, mob density in some places is a bit absurd and the fact that the mastery system makes it more difficult to get around than necessary until you grind out the xp and masteries for stuff like basic gliding (this should be a chapter 2 HoT reward), bouncing mushrooms, exalted markings and leyline gliding creates an artificially more frustrating experience.

Imo, all the masteries for getting around the map should be grouped up and require less experience. Some would be nice if they gave them to you after certain HoT chapters (Basic gliding chapter 2, Exalted Markings chapter 7, etc).

Too hard, too causal crying are not new story. Every other MMO has experience the same problem. Some of them released one expansion hard and other casual alternative. And other just released as hard as possible, as they know hardcore player will kill all new content within month or 2. Then they push the raid or alike hard content and nerf the rest of the expansion contents. As I my seeing, GW2 problem is caught back by the old MMO theme park model as they want to be difference.

It is not hard,if you want to enjoy game.HoT is hard if yo want actual progress.

1)In order to craft legendary item,you need max mastery level.

a)Max Legendary crafting mastery line

b)Max HoT masteries

c)You need to spend good chunk of time in HoT maps,doing events for ascended materials.

d)You need to farm all masteries there is.Higher level you are,less options you have.Me myself,i am on level 140 and i got left only story achivs and golden medals from those mini games(ley line,shooting gallery…etc)

e)If you want legendary item,you are forced to rush trough the content,in order to max everything out.There’s no enjoying in that,you are forced to do mini games and all story achivs

f)If you want legendary items,you better get ready to face sad facts about bugs,which will make you repeat tons of stuf

Now,me personally i do not mind farming,i do not like story or mini games,so there’s no “enjoy mode” for me,this game has come down for me to SW farming,daily fractals and raids,because once you complete all masteries and all challenges,you will be sick of doing HoT things,you will never want to enter new maps again.

What happened to choice to do or not to do things in this game…I made mistake,when i started Nevermoore,i never looked on the internet what do i need,i wanted surprises,but what i got is sad and far away from positive surprise,but now after 1800 gold spent,its too late to stop.

So,point of this story is : I would never recommend,not to even my worst enemy,to start legendary “journey”

Ubik.8315:

Overall difficulty of trash and events is quite a bit harder than Orr, but not impossible. However, mob density in some places is a bit absurd and the fact that the mastery system makes it more difficult to get around than necessary until you grind out the xp and masteries for stuff like basic gliding (this should be a chapter 2 HoT reward), bouncing mushrooms, exalted markings and leyline gliding creates an artificially more frustrating experience.

Imo, all the masteries for getting around the map should be grouped up and require less experience. Some would be nice if they gave them to you after certain HoT chapters (Basic gliding chapter 2, Exalted Markings chapter 7, etc).

Bouncing mushrooms are certainly useful and so are adrenal mushrooms but exalted markings and ley line gliding? Barely worth having. At least they are more useful than Nuhoch Alchemy.

Judging difficulty is hard because there are so many variables like playstyle that affect it. For me, as a casual player, I found HoT content to be easiest on my Necro and Engineer. I struggled with aspects of it especially on my Elementalist and Thief. I personally found it more challenging that I ever found Orr. I also dislike things about it such as non-soloable HCs and event timers.