Guild Wars 2

I give this a 4/10.

The maps are beautiful and well done, even though a bit frustrating at times cause you can’t do much without having to grind to get masteries. So far, all i feel is the grind. The Elite specs not so much but if i ever want to craft pres or get anywhere in the new maps, it’s grind grind grind. It’s not fun at all. I’m glad I have some great people to play with or I would have never gone into HoT. It’s not a friendly place for solo players.

What I hate the most is the fact that we are not allowed to go into WvW to gain xp. I lived in WvW before this xpac and now, I have yet to get in there cause there is no reward for it. I have to grind my life out in pve before I can go back to doing what I love. I’m sad that anet has taken away the one thing that kept me coming back. I hope there is some sort of fix for this.

Pros:
New content: +5

Exploring the nooks and crannies of the beautiful new maps +1

Gliding +2

Mushroom bouncing +.5

Tarir Meta Event +2 (being tiny bouncy mushroom jumping over invuln smokescale is hilarious)

Story +1 (I’m only 2 steps in, so it might be worth more than this)

Guild Hall +5 (claiming it, sitting on stools in the tavern, building pumpkin jump puzzle, playing around with my friends)

Challenging encounters through the maps +1

Cons:
Having to gain both exp and mastery points to use masteries -1

Material costs of the guild hall upgrades with no more over-arching bonuses for the guild -1

1G cost to salvage unwanted fractal “rewards” -1

Inability to immediately play with a properly traited elite spec on characters that should have definitely earned the right: -5

Tyrian Mastery grind with encounters that give exp to characters under level 80, but provide nothing to the mastery track (Mad King’s Labyrinth, etc.) -2

Total score: 7.5/10

The truth of the matter is that the game play itself is really fun. Challenging, inventive, beautiful with an engaging story. Go and play and it’s FUN! The mechanics of the game are not fun.

Ranael.6423:

Ascii Red.4029:

Personaly I think HoT is a move away from GW core values.

Which ones? When Factions was released we had to grind/farm/gain Luxon points. When Nightfall went out, I need to gather Lightbringer and Sunspear, to advance the story and get the related skills stronger. Things were event stronger in Eye of the North.
When expansion were released, if I wanted to get the new skills of my profession and all secondary profession (like Espec in HoT) I was put in front of a huge paywall : every single skill for 1k gold, plus the elite. For those last I had to actually run the same map several time to collect them all.
I don’t think GW cores have changed so much, but rather the players’ expectations.

“Most games you go out and you have really fun tasks occasionally and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff. I swung a sword, I swung a sword again hey! I swung it again, that’s just great. We just don’t want players to grind in GW2, no one enjoys that, no one finds it fun…” – Colin Johanson

Those ones I guess.

Overall 7/10

Story 7/10: Good until the last one, it was just too fast and feels rushed. I mean, what about taimi’s research ?

Music 10/10: Just perfect, every new piece is great.

Content(Quantity) 5/10 It’s ok if they keep on updating stuff like usual. For the current amount, this is 5/10.

Content(Quality) 6/10: Events are too simple.
A good one would be something like this in my opinion:
Spawn point A, B for enemy.
Spawn Points are protected by a strong boss that can drop a lot of AOE.
You have a time limit until they summon a boss that can’t be killed. But your side also have a base. If that is destroyed, you lose.
So you need to seperate the zerg in 3 groups: DEF, ATK A and B.
Not only does this prevent the huge zerg infestion this game have, but also requires a little bit of coordination with other players. You can add spices like mordrem that only attacks the base and ignore everything, so people focus their dmg on him.
This is only one of many possible events on a map.

The jungle also requires a better computer, and the meta maps is in heavily need of DC protection, since the reward is build on the time you spend on it. Also, it’s time the fix oom(out of memory) which comes from the client(32bit).

between 8 and 9 so I guess that makes 8,5 ?:D

Slightly bias thread since most of the forum goers lately are complaining or wanting something changed. But I give it a solid 8.5, since after downing the hardest mob in the game, Mord in dragon stand I only received a few rares and a couple greens. Yes I got the unique armor but for 2 hours of work was thinking a little more. Still getting bags and bags of greens/blues.

Ranael.6423:

Ascii Red.4029:

Personaly I think HoT is a move away from GW core values.

Which ones? When Factions was released we had to grind/farm/gain Luxon points. When Nightfall went out, I need to gather Lightbringer and Sunspear, to advance the story and get the related skills stronger. Things were event stronger in Eye of the North.
When expansion were released, if I wanted to get the new skills of my profession and all secondary profession (like Espec in HoT) I was put in front of a huge paywall : every single skill for 1k gold, plus the elite. For those last I had to actually run the same map several time to collect them all.
I don’t think GW cores have changed so much, but rather the players’ expectations.

This is only partly true: You got to come into both Factions and Nightfall without them taking your skills away from characters that already had skills open. The elite spec grind is a real slap in the face for characters that had already earned thousands of skill points. Those points being suddenly taken away and switched to shards, then being told to earn new points… That part sucks.

I’m mostly fine with earning masteries, although I do believe they should choose one mechanic or the other — either use mastery points or use exp to unlock them, not both. I’m okay to earn new stuff, I actually enjoy earning new stuff, I’m not okay with them removing the old stuff that I had already earned.

I’m certainly not okay with them announcing the number of hero points that would be needed 2 days prior to launch like some kind of bombshell. I feel it was an exploitative move against the pre-purchase players, and I personally resent it. This news should have been made available much earlier.

i’d give it a 1, or 2.

0 out of ten. It has potential, if it was a multiplayer game. So far, i don’t know where everybody has gone to, but i am roaming the maps and coming across 1, or 2 people if im lucky. This was supposed to be an mmo, for crissakes. Where’s everybody? This is the dealbreaker for me.

8 out of ten. The story is great so far, but i have to grind more in order to advance, so haven’t seen it all yet.

4/10. The maps are dissapointing. There’s a lot of detail, and they are beautiful, but they promised these were not just maps, but biomes, and verdant brink was far from that. you fall from a cliff and you quietly glide down to… an empty place with no way out. How cool is that? Zero, actually.

Also, everything feels way more ‘corridory’ than the original game. In central tyria every map is full of little details you are not forced through. If you explore, you will find, but here, you are basically following the path or gliding. There’s nothing outside the path.

4/10 Elites: well, leaving aside the fact you have to grind exp to unlock the mastery points you need to spend to unlock the access to the hero points you need to grind in order to unlock the elite skills, the only one i’ve tried so far (reaper) seems gimmicky and potentially useless in serious pve. Sure, it works for clearing open world packs of mobs, but any serious boss is going to destroy you before you can say ‘gravedigger’!
The fact that, out of my 7 toons, i could unlock the elite in only one, doesn’t help much.

Super fun. I’ll dock it one point for the pain of Revenant not seeing Herald for a loooong time, but really that is fairly minor. Maps are amazing, gliding is a blast.

7.5-8.5 so far, love the maps, love the story so far, and im fine with grinding but its a little overkill but i guess it makes the content last.

Amroth.2170:

It’s worth mentioning the game has a 5.8/10 on Metacritic right now.

Granted, thats with only 23 user reviews.

I’d give the game a 5/10, and really only because its riding on the base game’s coattails. The maps feel claustrophobic. Acquiring mastery points and hero points is confusing with the mastery gating system not being explained anywhere on the map. The open world content is limited and repetitive. And the thought of doing all this over, and over, and over again, each time I want to unlock the elite spec on an alt makes me want to just put the whole thing down.

There were so many poor design choices made for HoT. It’s not unplayable, but the idea of playing it is not attractive to me at all.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s now 7.0 on Metacritic. Pretty much shows that the majority of people who gave the expac a review so quickly were people who just had a grudge with a single decision that ANet made and didn’t really even play the content to get a well-rounded view.

4 Is a Maximum at the moment…

Dahkeus.8243:

It’s worth mentioning that it’s now 7.0 on Metacritic. Pretty much shows that the majority of people who gave the expac a review so quickly were people who just had a grudge with a single decision that ANet made and didn’t really even play the content to get a well-rounded view.

Also worth mentioning that no one in this thread said 10 something that I think nearly 90% of the positive scores are (on Metacritic), not to mention this is as absurd as giving it a 0. This is far from perfect.

9/10

I love the 3d levels of the new maps, finally some ‘crazy cool’ sense of exploring. It’s more challenging, and to be honest, as a veteran player it was necessary.

Mastery ‘grind’. C’mon ppl, i already have mushroom jumping, gliding (and updraft) and almost poison master (Itzel). That in 5 days. I relogged to another profession, guess what, all that progress is saved. Fast players can get mastery in a matter of hours/days maxed. in about a month people will be bored to haven othing to do. Masteries is a good sense of progression. Gliding is cool, but working to unlock it/improve it, makes it feel even more rewarding. For all the people asking to nerf the grind of masteries, just no!!! EVen casual people can complete it, in about a month, wich is nothing in the livespan of an mmo.

Then about elite profession ‘hero points’. Sure i had to work quite a bit to unlock mine. But it isn’t that hard. And it’s a bit of challenge etc. There is no such thing as ‘everything is free’, but people expect it. I want it good, I want it now, and I want it big, or I quit the game. But those are the same people, that would complain if they get bored after a month, cause the content is repetive and not rewarding. A lot of these people, THINK it’s a grind, and complain to much. THey should just play the game and enjoy it (wich is perfectly possible in the current system).

Then about Druid: 0/10 for the Roy Cronacher nerf on druid and the smokescale F2 switch nerf (this is not about damage nerf, i’m ok with that). Druid was amazing in BWE and now it’s but a splinter of what it was then, very very very very weak, unrewarding, almost impossible to feel rewarded by the elite specs mechanic. Not thought very well. I really hope they stop focussing on ranger so fast to nerf.

9 out of 10 so far.

9/10
The story is amazing. And soloable! I was mad when Zhaitan required a party. The final HoT fight is challenging but doable. I did it in a glass canon zerker ele.
Masteries and Elite specs feel rewarding because you have to work for them. I enjoy the progression.
Events and maps are outstanding. You actually have to learn the map through experience rather than press m.
As for the hero point contention, I would have been upset if everyone had their specs as soon as logged in. Would have made it cheaper than a blind hooker. I enjoy working with others to figure out fight mechanics.
Above all, the game makes me communicate with other people with new and challenging content. I love it. I have had so many positive experiences and made so many friends. People are being forced not to faceroll and how to dodge. It’s so great.
****EVENT SPOILERS****
A good example of all this is the Mouth of Mordremoth fight. First off, it takes communication between three lanes to succeed. The triple tower bosses require split pod groups. Then you go up. Let’s put aside the breath-taking epicness. Again this fight requires split platform organization. The updrafts make you feel like a kitten and put your hard work to work. Come back with ley line gliding and be even more awesome and efficient!

And yes this event can be PUGGED. Shoutout to my map group. Platform 6 ftw.

I do not mean to invalidate others opinions. I hope the lovers keep playing. The genuine feedback gets remedied. And the haters stop complaining in map chat.

Thanks! See you all in the jungle.

Sicarius.4639:

“Most games you go out and you have really fun tasks occasionally and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff. I swung a sword, I swung a sword again hey! I swung it again, that’s just great. We just don’t want players to grind in GW2, no one enjoys that, no one finds it fun…” – Colin Johanson

Those ones I guess.

This quote refers to games where you go in a place and bash mobs one after the other, the same ones, to get 1 stone of something nice. With ten stones you can get an item that grant you access to the next dungeon. Worse I remember spending hours in a game in an “elite” zone where all the mobs where elite ranked just to get exp and level my character. Nothing to earn, just the right to play my character in the next zone. There is nothing like this in GW2, nor in HOT. Just in VB, if you tried all the chains in daytime, there are 5 (it is a different chain each time) and then tried all the nights events, you already unlocked a lot of you mastery. If doing that you missed all the hero point then that means you didn’t pay attention at all on you mini map. So I don’t see the grind here. It is not again and again the same thing or the same exact mob with you doing the exact same skill rotation.
Then there are three other maps with different event chains….
Maybe what you miss is that the content is actually the event chains…. so there is no gating, you access them directly. Masteries makes you them complete easier (you gain mobility) and helps you to do something out of the currencies you find.

Dahkeus.8243:

Amroth.2170:

It’s worth mentioning the game has a 5.8/10 on Metacritic right now.

Granted, thats with only 23 user reviews.

I’d give the game a 5/10, and really only because its riding on the base game’s coattails. The maps feel claustrophobic. Acquiring mastery points and hero points is confusing with the mastery gating system not being explained anywhere on the map. The open world content is limited and repetitive. And the thought of doing all this over, and over, and over again, each time I want to unlock the elite spec on an alt makes me want to just put the whole thing down.

There were so many poor design choices made for HoT. It’s not unplayable, but the idea of playing it is not attractive to me at all.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s now 7.0 on Metacritic. Pretty much shows that the majority of people who gave the expac a review so quickly were people who just had a grudge with a single decision that ANet made and didn’t really even play the content to get a well-rounded view.

But ton of people who gave this expansion 10 is right then ?! Are you kidding me dude, check the rate 90 % green reviews is 10, where HoT is no where near to deserving even 8 rating ! Overpriced grind factory that what it is!

Funfactor 10 for me \o/

Most of it is worth ignoring, people are only giving 0’s and 10’s to bump the scores in the overall direction they feel it should be. Which is why it’s a terrible system.

Right after WoodenPotatoes did a rant about how the game wasn’t worth the 5.8 (or whatever it was sitting at) Metacritic score on his stream, it jumped up in score, the number of 10’s in a row were astonishing.

This expansion isn’t defining gaming (What a 10 score should be), it’s not the worst thing ever released (we have mobile games for that!) people need to just calm down a little bit, be more reasonable and just review it with their own personal score and forget about the overall number.

6
It’s not worth a 10. That would mean it’s absolutely perfect in every single way. I think people who give it a 10 are deluded with Stockholm or something.

The game is great but the grinding ruins it. So 6/10

Aye.8392:

This is only partly true: You got to come into both Factions and Nightfall without them taking your skills away from characters that already had skills open. The elite spec grind is a real slap in the face for characters that had already earned thousands of skill points. Those points being suddenly taken away and switched to shards, then being told to earn new points… That part sucks.

I’m mostly fine with earning masteries, although I do believe they should choose one mechanic or the other — either use mastery points or use exp to unlock them, not both. I’m okay to earn new stuff, I actually enjoy earning new stuff, I’m not okay with them removing the old stuff that I had already earned.

I’m certainly not okay with them announcing the number of hero points that would be needed 2 days prior to launch like some kind of bombshell. I feel it was an exploitative move against the pre-purchase players, and I personally resent it. This news should have been made available much earlier.

It is not totally fair because, when the game was released, nobody really farmed hero points by leveling up after 80. It was a side effect and that was mostly used to buy what spirit shards are actually worth for now. At that time neither Anet nor the players would have known those points were used for unlocking Espec. All the hero point you earned through hero challenge are still hero points since the shards split. The level up points are the shards.
Right now if you farm HP before level 80, it allows you to unlock things faster and give you a good boost for your Espec as well. My only toon with world completion could unlock almost half of the scrapper track from day 1. So everything I did before was actually useful. Maybe not 100 % sure but I prefer this than (what you would expect in any other game) only jungle points count towards your Espec.

Reaper Alim.4176:

5 since A Net is going to force WvW players to PvE and map complete to unlock the class they’ve already paid for. Awesome graphics, gameplay is fun.

I just feel like A Net since all the WvW players a message as such… “Master say you WvWers do PvP or no new spec line for you. You want that new spec line you’ve paid for right? Well better get to the PvEing and Map Completion then master demands it!”

I’ll give GW2 post HoT a solid 5 as I take my business else where. I’ll be kitten to be a game dev slave. My money my enjoyment not my money dev enjoyment. Point and point.

People who do WvW do not have to leave WvW to get there elite specs https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/earning-hero-points-in-world-vs-world/ i even did it to get one of the hero points that needed a mastery but was bypassed because i unlocked it in WvW randomly with the scrolls they sell. And currently i rate this 5/10 until i get use to more of the stuff.

8/10

Overall I love the expansion. The zones are beautiful and the content is engaging. The story presentation is much better than in the original personal story, but the dialogue is still too cheesy, IMO. Get better writers and voice actors. Hire some of the people who work on the Witcher series or something.

I personally like the fact that masteries are difficult to obtain. I don’t feel the same way about the the elite specs. I think it was a poor design decision to lock masteries AND elite specs behind difficult content. I can’t even find many of the hero points without using a web guide, much less defeat the challenge when I finally manage to get there (when it’s a champion spawn).

My biggest gripe is the fact that you can’t earn HoT mastery experience in Central Tyria. I’m not one of those people who is exploiting CoF to grind Tyria masteries. I haven’t done that, at all. I just don’t like the fact that I’m funneled into HoT if I want to earn mastery experience, and vice versa…I’d like to be able to work on legendary mastery tracks while in HoT.

Nemesis.6938:

im very frustrated because
the maps are stunning
the story is fine
the enemies, weapons, armors – all good to great

but – the pathfinding, complicated maps, hero points and mastery grinding – its incredibly frustrating to me right now….especially cause i feel im running around for 2 hours only to achieve something worth 15 minutes…

and this is really a shame – cause it has so much great and beautiful stuff – but after hours of not finding stuff im ready to throw my keyboard into the screen

^this.

Probably 6.5 or 7.

+ Difficulty.

+ Maps and music are gorgeous.

+Story looks promising.

+I like the new collections.

+Extra T6 rewards for map events.

- I really really don’t know what to do to have fun in new maps. Events take a lot of time. Meta events are, idk, messy? I think SW have a better time invested/reward ratio.

- WvW new maps are beautiful but desperately empty.

- New legendaries precursor gated behind millions of XP.

- New mastery system is interesting, but I don’t like having to unlock it to be able to get HP.

6/10

bladed armor chest in RNG is terrible idea.

Ronnie Hu.1694:

6/10

bladed armor chest in RNG is terrible idea.

itzel vendor, yo. No need to thank me.

Ranael.6423:

It is not totally fair because, when the game was released, nobody really farmed hero points by leveling up after 80. It was a side effect and that was mostly used to buy what spirit shards are actually worth for now. At that time neither Anet nor the players would have known those points were used for unlocking Espec. All the hero point you earned through hero challenge are still hero points since the shards split. The level up points are the shards.
Right now if you farm HP before level 80, it allows you to unlock things faster and give you a good boost for your Espec as well. My only toon with world completion could unlock almost half of the scrapper track from day 1. So everything I did before was actually useful. Maybe not 100 % sure but I prefer this than (what you would expect in any other game) only jungle points count towards your Espec.

There was a currency. It was called skill points and it was used to unlock skills or to buy crafting materials. I had a metric-kitty-ton of it. The developers took all that I had earned/acquired, changed it into something I didn’t want, and told me to earn a new currency to buy skills. Seems accurate to me.

After they did away with skill points “Training Wheels” came to be in the game. some of those wheels had traits, others had utility skills; none of them had items, runes, sigils or skins. I could spend my newly minted “Hero Points” on those items that I wanted. If I didn’t want a trait line I could keep my points and not use the trait line. If I didn’t want a specific utility line — ie: gadgets — I could keep my hero points and not unlock that utility line.

I played in every HoT open beta. There were no Hero Point challenges in any of the betas. There was no training wheel for the elite spec, all of the skills were simply open and available. After playing the betas I decided to pre-purchase the expansion. And then, two days before the drop of the new content, they tell us that we have to buy every available utility/trait-line before we’ll be allowed to open the elite spec. And, when I get into the game I find they have put everything imaginable on the Elite Spec training wheel so that we can’t even spend the points that they so generously allowed us to keep on what we actually want. We can’t just open the trait line and wait on the utilities… To top it off they made hero-points that spawn champs + escorts so that unless there are other people at the same spot (that took 2 hours to figure out how to get to) it is impossible to succeed.

And I’m accused of being unfair when I voice my unhappiness.

Sicarius.4639:

Dahkeus.8243:

It’s worth mentioning that it’s now 7.0 on Metacritic. Pretty much shows that the majority of people who gave the expac a review so quickly were people who just had a grudge with a single decision that ANet made and didn’t really even play the content to get a well-rounded view.

Also worth mentioning that no one in this thread said 10 something that I think nearly 90% of the positive scores are (on Metacritic), not to mention this is as absurd as giving it a 0. This is far from perfect.

Err… that’s not at all correct. The responses are certainly varied but there have been 10s on almost every page:

kimeekat.2548:

10/10 – I guess I should realistically give it more like an 8 or 9 but I can’t think of anything to change, besides wanting more fractals.

Wiperas.7240:

10/10 Currently having a blast.

Takoyakii.2146:

10/10 fun for now.

gaspara.4079:

11/10 maybe 12/10. This is by far the most fun I have had playing GW2 since the original beta over 3 years ago.

Susulemon.3204:

10/10 If I can glide outside of HoT maps too.

Oldyoung.6109:

10/10 would play again

Malediktus.9250:

10/10 a lot of new achievements to get

Emiko.3217:

I rate it a 10. It’s beautiful and a totally new, refreshing and extremely challenging experience from GW2.

Merkin.8412:

inch.3769:

10/10 no lie. The game is epic, best expansion i’ve ever played.

I agree.

Game is fun as hell, feel bad for all the people who can not enjoy this game as it is a total blast.

Zok.4956:

10/10 – because I have a lot of fun in the HoT maps.

nunn.7903:

for me i’ts 10/10

Inverse.2967:

I think it is super fun. 10/10

warbignime.4610:

10/10, been having a blast.

Nightwin.6423:

10/10 smooth as butter launch

This does not include all the 10s as part of a section of a larger breakdown, nor the 9.5 I saw.

Wow, people are certainly entitled to their opinion however over the top it may be.

I could be wrong though, so I’ll wait for the reviews and award ceremonies, certainly a GOTY contender for some people.

I’m rather casual but I think the way they have done this expansion is awesome.
The new area is challenging but very beautiful, makes me want to work with other players.
9/10 for me… Would be 10/10 if I could get my scrapper traits a little quicker though I do appreciate not having everything handed to me on a silver platter.

10/10 for me. I have been reading the forum complaints and decided to just stop, the negativity has reached an overload.

I personally and having a ton of fun exploring and figuring out new events. I like it this way. Once we figured out Silverwaste it just became a grind. I don’t want that to happen here.

The Maps are confusing as heck to navigate at first, but the more time you spend in them the more you figure out how to get around. Tangled Depths is crazy to navigate. More waypoints would be nice though.

Working on Masteries is ok too. Trying to figure out which to train first or next so you can finally do something like Bounce or summon an exalted to help, or learn the new languages is tricky but makes you kind of plan ahead.

All in all I love it and find it worth the money.

Visually a 10 – Game Play a 3…… It is what it is…..

The corrupted apple falls far from the pale tree.

6/10

Killyox.3950:

Ronnie Hu.1694:

6/10

bladed armor chest in RNG is terrible idea.

itzel vendor, yo. No need to thank me.

you cant find the coat part in itzel.

PVP 10/10 as usual always fun and easy to just login go in pvp and just bash it out vs other players using all the elite skills, which also gives me practice for the upcoming tournee’s.
PVE no clue havent touched the content waiting for Anet to nerf it when nobody does it anymore and make it more solo’able, eventually they will have no choice because most people have completed the first part and the “beginer” zones are almost empty.
WvW haven’t touched it yet either, waiting for the PVE Nerf if it ever comes to I can get my elite specs to do WvW.

Stopped playing more then a year ago. Came back to give it another chance with HoT.
I would give it a 4/10. I am actually having much more fun in dry top and doing the Halloween events so it did serve a purpose after all but if I had played it first I would not have purchased it and I have not recommended it to my friends who do play.

FYI, for any thread like this, to get a more balanced view, throw out all 10/10 and 0/10 answers then average the remaining votes.

Story: 7/10 .. Too short and last chapter is bugy as hell and one other thing I will not say cause of spoilers.
Maps: 7/10 … Some of the maps are just unnecessarily complicated and hard to navigate.
Progression: 9/10 … Dont know what ppl are complaining about grinds. This is not WoW where you get everything under your nose.
Elite Spec: 8/10 … I thought when it says ELITE that it would take longer than just 3 days =/
PvP balance 2/10 … currently sPvP is unplayable vs Dragonhunter and Reaper.

I want to play fractals and WvW, maybe continue HoT story from time to time. I dont have much time atm and mastery leveling taking so long prevents me from even thinking about proceeding story. Instead I spent 2 hours in CoF so I dont have to worry about getting gated in fractals. So atm, all I experience are the QoL changes from HoT and finally some use for my experience boosters.

I’d say 7 or 8 so far. I love all the little deviations like Adventures, Helping the Pale Reavers, using unlocked masteries, the new collection achievements and the new style of story. I just did the one where you get the egg. I never imagined I’d play a mission like that in GW2.

Review in progress from MMORPG.com:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/10236/Guild-Wars-2-Heart-of-Thorns-Review-in-Progress.html

For me personally, it lands right on a solid 9.

It’s not perfect and I do not love all the elite specs, but the new areas and how they were handled impress me very much. I don’t think hero points are too much of a grind. It does feel like you have to put some effort in, but it hardly feels that difficult. With effort I’d say you can fully unlock an elite spec from scratch in a week or so.

Additionally, I found the new challenge to open world pve in HOT to make the entire experience feel more like an epic adventure (specially with my mothakittening hang glider… Wubba lubba dub dub, yeah!). I think the verticality present in the maps causes me to enjoy exploring them even more.

Pvp seems more or less the same other than the meta/class balance though I don’t much like stronghold (they thankfully allow you to opt out if you want).

I cant speak on the new WVW map at all, as I have been very busy with the new fractals/pve zones.

I’ve done 50hrs in the new expac on one character. This allows me to kitten my character by having no traits at all and use a different weapon.

Everyone who did this in easy mode with the first wave of meta characters carrying the zone events is going to realise how horrible this truly is once they try and do an alt with lesser gear off peak.

I haven’t been this worried about a mmo changing direction since star wars galaxies or ultima online, both of which never recovered from listening to very bad advice from a small section of players.

Heart of Thorns appears to have been designed to throw a large portion of its customerbase under the bus and force them to have a massively worse experience than the first wave of metas who did it together on easy mode.

8/10 for the work that the team out into the zones, but -7 for the devs who poisoned so much work with the character mechanics grind gates, mastery grind gates and enforced maguuma event grinning. Leaving 1 out 10 but it’s fixable if devs act very quickly.

As a new player who just hit 80 and then stopped my personal story when I saw a full xp bar that seemed to be stuck, I find the new area and everything about it completely confusing. At this point, even unlocking glider mastery is a mystery. I don’t know how or where to go.

I would say 8.5/10 now that I will be able to get my specs in a more reasonable amount of time, have loved playing them in pvp, only improvement I would like is a way to get hp from pvp reward tracks so I have some variety with options to get my specs…. Seeing as pvp doesn’t count for progression right now unfortunately, maybe have it give notarized scrolls or something.

As a self proclaimed pve hater, I actually am hooked on the story now, it just seems interesting and I imagine will end with some pretty awesome boss fight or something.

7/10

What I didn’t like so far..

I would have liked a more satisfying story end
Masteries aren’t too interesting.
Only one new PvP map.
No additional fractals.
No leagues or raids on release.

What I did..

Elite Specializations
New PvP gamemode
Music
Map design.
Enemies.
Map rewards.

If there are enough people close by to do events than it can become a 7/10, if not it’s a 3.
“Periodically Vulnerable”. 0/10 This artificial bullkitten is just annoying nothing else.

Legendary Modrem Wyvern is quite a fun fight.

PvE, at least 8/10. Verging on 9. Best exploring and solo play I’ve had in an MMO for a good while. Events are good too. Mastery system and the acquiring of HPs plays to the kind of slow, long-term gameplay I prefer, meaning something solid and simple to chip away at, here and there, on and off over a year or two until the next expansion.

Personal Story 7/10 of which most is for the gameplay, a vast improvement on the awful, frustrating, annoying combat and gimmickry of LS2, which I detested. Story is ok but dialog options are too limited. If characters don’t have a plot-relevant line they don’t say anything so a lot of the flavor is missing.

WvW changes I give 3/10. The new BL would make a great PvE zone but the old Alpine BL was vastly superior for the purpose of three-way, siege-based team warfare. At the moment WvW players have clearly voted with their feet – hardly anyone is playing. Whether that will change in a few weeks or months we’ll see but unless there are further, significant changes I doubt it.

Fractals, legendaries, not interested, no rating.

Overall 7/10 – Very Good.

Elite Specialications 10/10 I enjoyed all of those I already played with. I like that it takes some time to unlock them, so I am forced to spend some time playing with the new skills and traits and get used to them. Also makes me use my “abandoned” characters again.

Masteries 8/10 It is nice to have a long term goal in the game again some masteries feel like they should be unlocked in a different order. For example when you need to have to have max rank mushroom mastery unlocked in order to get a hero challenge at the entrance of auric basin done.

PvE Content & Maps 10/10 The maps are really nice designed and offer a lot of stuff to do. Even in the maps I have completed I still feel like there’s things I haven’t seen yet.
I also like that every enemy in HoT is different in how they fight and I really enjoy the bossfight mechanics.

Story 6/10 The Story is good but missing sounds in dialogues (german audio) made it a little less enjoyable. Also the ending feels like they ran out of time and cut out like 4 episodes.

WvW 2/10
Quote: My reply in the WvW Forums

I think that neither the size nor the maze like style are the problem but the combination of them both. It takes much too long to get from one location to the next. Also that pve stuff should be removed. Theres already more than enough pve in gw. To me it seems that anet had a lot of ideas for those maps which is great but they tried to put too many of them into the maps. What adds to the anger of lots of players is the massive lag and crashes.

A lot of people out of my guild didn’t enjoy our recent raids. It’s a sad thing to see a guild that has been raiding in wvw for 3 years to suddenly stop doing so. WvW was pretty much the only thing that made me come back to this game over and over even when I paused for a while.

sPvP Unrated I’m not much of a sPvP Player and didn’t try the new map yet.

Fractals Unrated I don’t do Fractals atm.

New Items, Skins, Legendaries 8/10 Not much to say about new weapons and armor. Pistol and axe were good choices but staff didn’t really need a new Legendary. Longbow, shortbow or hammer would have been better choices in my opinion. Every Weapon type should have at least 2 options for a Legendary like Sunrise and Twilight, so that we have Legendaries that fit every type of charcter design (good/evil/funny).

Total Rating 7,5/10