I used to love this game and was very excited about HoT the day before its release. Now two days have passed and I feel like I’ve done nothing but waste my time. I have buyer’s remorse and would like a refund.
The whole mastery system is designed to keep you grinding the same events over and over until you can get the mastery you want to reach the Hero Points to unlock parts of your elite specilization. I never cared for PvE events and the story, so for me to be able to enjoy my elite spec in WvW, fractals, raids I have to spend hours upon hours of grind with my old spec. It feels like Arenanet tried to stretch a 20 dollar expansion to a 50 dollar one and cleverly disguised the grind as “masteries”. Even the story is gated behind event grinding to level up your masteries.
Not only that but a lot of the Hero Points are impossible to get without a zerg of some sort. It’s impossible to solo the champions, so you have to organize people in map chat just to get one of the points. Did I also mention that the maps are dead already? They are severely underpopulated which makes it really hard to grind the events or organize people to get hero points to finally unlock a different traitline. There is one Hero Point in the city below Tarir, which requires you to organize about a hundred people to kill the bramble within a few minutes of each other just so you can get a tiny bit closer to your elite spec.
I’ve seen the argument “they’re elite dude, of course they’ll take a long time to get” used a lot. Elite specs do not give you some overpowered build, they give you a slightly different playstyle to keep the game from being stale. And some of these elite specs feel inferior to others (tempest for example). I have zero interest in organizing zergs to get hero points to play an elite spec with any of my alts.
You might now say “you could just farm the old hero points in Tyria or do WvW”. Sure you could do that if you hate yourself. Hundred percenting the old skill points in Tyria gets you about 200 points which is half of what is needed, and doing that for the sake of elites is mind numbingly boring and unengaging. Same with leveling up in WvW, you’re grinding long hours doing something you don’t want to do either way. As a player who leveled his Necro with EotM and PvP tomes I have no option but to grind one of these until I can finally play my Reaper. Why can I not go through the grindy events with my Reaper? Why is everything gated behind masteries and grind?
On top of this, if I wanted to fractal with my Reaper, I have a whole another grind to go through until I can get proper prizes from the fractals. Because Arenanet thought it would be a good idea to content gate the fractals (which I enjoyed before the expansion) as well.
All of this feels even more ironic since the game’s motto at launch was “No grinding!”. And it used to be true, most of the grind in the game was for cosmetics. But now we need to grind for better gear, different playstyles, rewards from fractals etc…
TLDR; the new content is unengaging, grindy and gated. Instead of having the players get their elites through fun quests, treasure hunting and story, Arenanet thought grinding masteries was a better way. The maps are vast with nothing but events and Hero Points, and they’re underpopulated. Solo players have no choice but to zerg for elites.