Guild Wars 2

I am really not looking forward to farming more mindless zerg content just to get xp to lv up my masteries because you can’t level up the masteries in dungeons or anywhere that actually requires some team coordination and more thought than just mashing 1 and collecting loot bags in a zerg.

“Dynamic” events are anything but dynamic. They’re the McDonald’s of game content, and hopefully it’s not 3 jungle floors of doing dynamic events on a cycle.

Even worse is that designing leveling around dynamic events is a bad idea as it’s population density dependent. Once the inital zerg rushes through the content, alts and new/returning players come to a much less populated zone where they can barely complete some events on their own or it’s really time inefficient.

I agree. Having to rely solely on events in order to train masteries is awful for a lot of reasons, many of which you’ve already listed. I fail to understand why they’ve given us so many sources of mastery points (To the point where it appears that you’ll never run out of them) yet we still have to grind random events in order to actually spend them.
Instead of actually exploring you end up running between the same points of the map, looking for an event so that you can semi-AFK it along with the rest of the zerg. While I appreciate that the general mob design has been improved greatly when compared to the base game, the so-called dynamic combat system becomes completely redundant when 50 people can stand at max range and auto attack their way to victory while alt-tabbed out of the game.

I was under the impression that the open world part of the expansion was supposed to be about exploration, but as it currently is it seems that it’s going to be about farming events in order to actually navigate around and/or unlock content. So much for the ‘No waiting to have fun’ catchphrase that they’ve been spewing since the official HOT announcement.

Either rapidly increase the rate of which you ‘train’ your masteries (Make it require less experience, give way more experience for completing events, tasks, defeating tough monsters and so on) or give us more ways to obtain the experience required to level up the mastery track. Currently we have an overflood of sources that provide mastery points (A currency that to some extend is useless since you can’t spend it anyway) so perhaps some of the achievements, events and what-so-ever could provide mastery XP instead. Just my thoughts.

It’s a beta, who knows how it will work when they go live, by binding mastery’s to DE in the Beta they get people to actually do them.
Chill out and wait for the live game.

You will be able to train your ‘Tyria masteries’ through all the content of the base game including dungeons and fractals. Whereever you get experience you train your masteries.
So I bet you can train your ‘Maguuma masteries’ also through personal story, exploration and raids. And mandatory things like gliding or using jump mushrooms are really fast to get.

If what TaDe says is true, then I would say I do like the Mastery system. I am however still a bit unclear how it works. It took me a long time to figure out that those “unspent” mastery points can be spent once I get enough xp on a track. But can you skip around and pick and choose which line on a given track you want to work on? And how do you unlock a track in the first place – is that an in-game content-driven type of thing (which I would prefer)? I’m looking for it all to be more fully linked to the story-driven content, since that’s what I love best about this game. And true about the zerging for XP all over the beta – but hey, it’s a beta with a very limited map space and lots of folks trying it out. Maybe once we can all spread out and have more options, that bit will dissipate.

All tracks are enabled if you buy HoT.
You can switch between tracks anytime. So at a time you have one track chosen for the core game areas and one track for the HoT areas.
Within a track you can’t choose a specific mastery. You have to do it one after another.

There was no clear indication on how to swap the mastery tracks ingame so I just tried clicking around and you can basically choose to work on a track by clicking on it at the top after selecting the track in the UI. It appears you can fill up each of the mastery tracks and then spend your points to upgrade them all to tier 2 at the same time. This is something that can be used by players as a way to postpone your rewards, which is nice for players that want to play a certain way.

As for actually earning experience, when I first entered maguuma during daytime without mastery tracks it took me a while to find events. However, once nighttime hit I levelled up fairly quickly as there are alot of events going on at rapid succession at that point. I’ve only gone through 1 proper cycle so far and a few bits in between but it seems like nighttime allows for much faster levelling.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you only have to unlock masteries once, they are account bound. So going through the content on an alt will be easier once you have the basic masteries such as bounce mushrooms and gliding. I don’t mind if it takes a while because I don’t want to have them all too quickly.

Zenith.7301:

I am really not looking forward to farming more mindless zerg content just to get xp to lv up my masteries because you can’t level up the masteries in dungeons or anywhere that actually requires some team coordination and more thought than just mashing 1 and collecting loot bags in a zerg.

Since launch I’ve seen others cry out for more people when they already had far more than enough. If it’s not labeled as a group event, you should be able to solo it. If it is, 3 people is generally all you need.

To zerg is to intentionally play the game on easy mode. You do get more loot from zerging, but playing the content in a small group of good players can be much faster, safer and easier compared to carrying a bunch of dead players. With Silverwastes, they fixed the loot problem, though unfortunately they didn’t stick with it.

As for leveling masteries, as long as you’re doing the expansion’s content, you’re leveling the HoT masteries. In all other content, the Tyria masteries. If you enjoy mindlessly grinding dungeons, the alternative in HoT would be raids. There’s also the living/personal story, which you could grind out once on each character.

Yes but the point is that in order to TEST this beta – in terms of PvE – you have to spend hours mindlessly Zerg Grinding FIRST.

Now I am sure there are ultra keen players who are happy to spend hours of their weekend time – to no longer term effect – so they can provide feedback, but GW2 is mostly a casual friendly game.

The Beta Weekends are making mugs of casual players, and where I am concerned turning me off the whole expansion as I can’t even attempt to enjoy the experience without committing myself to hours of Zerg Grinding on MY weekends!

I mean what is it with Anet and Zone Zerg Grinding as a means of providing PvE entertainment?

It’s the ‘carrot on the stick’ type of progression in end-game this game sorely needed and it fits in with the atmosphere of the game they created as it is not a Gear grind.

Guild Wars 2 end game was sparse. It was a desert of hot, humid dry sand that just sucked the life out of the game.

This is at least SOMETHING to make you feel like at end-game you are still ‘progressing’.

This is entirely a personal thing, but I couldn’t stand feeling.. ‘stuck’ in GW2 at endgame. Like, nothing mattered as you never progressed further than level 80. There was nothing after that only an endless grind for cosmetics or gold.

With this Mastery system, there is now a sense of ‘progression’. Until you max it. Then it’s back to the same stuff.

Hopefully by that point though, the end-game is at least decent.

There’s the new Story content too but GW2 has always been very dynamic event focused. I actually like the way its presented – I really like the open world voice acting and following around Lord Faren and friends trying to live through the night (although some of the “collect X” events scaled up pretty high and took a while if everyone wasn’t running X – specifically the one with the Quaggan group leader)