Guild Wars 2

The new zones are beautiful. There’s a plethora of content that has been added and it looks meaningful, for the most part. Guild Wars 2 is finally encouraging players to step out of the zerker meta comfort zone. For the first time, it felt a bit punishing to play zerker in these new zones. Sure, the big numbers are fun but I die rather quickly.

This actually became a problem.

See, now I’m considering regearing to explore Maguuma. But it seems like a huge waste to gear up to be more capable… at grinding. Soon, I’ll have my elite spec then I’ll need to gear again. My old builds feel like they don’t work as well here but changing them costs gold. I am totally fine with changing my builds when I have my elite, but buying sets of gear with the express purpose of grinding the specialization so I can buy more gear seems really wrong.

This xpac has introduced unprecedented levels of grinding. I would still be fine with this if I could enjoy these new quests, events and such with the build I’ve been hyped to play with for so long.

Can I hop on a dragon hunter and play in Maguuma? Sure. But the content is hard and playing with an incomplete spec is a real handicap. Even this would be okay if I could level up my traits (like any other traitline) and then grab the skills next. I could play dragon hunter, for instance, without traps. It’s a small sacrifice to enjoy a full build. But I’m forced to grab them to reach the next traits in the traitline.

It’s just such a huge letdown. The grind has become unreal. It’s not a simple matter of running from Hero Point to Hero Point until I’m done. Most, if not all, are gated behind some mastery point requirement, (which require incredible investments of time to unlock).

So it seems that unlocking the entire specialization will take quite some time. I’m now forced to come to terms with the idea that I might have to buy gear/runes/sigils to make a “grind build” so that I can conquer the heart of thorns content until I finally (blessedly) reach the point where I can unlock the entirety of my Elite Specialization.

To preempt the large amount of people who say that it’s okay to play with just the beginnings of an elite specialization I say this:

Playing the elite spec before I’ve unlocked the necessary traits and skils, has actually ruined the experience for me to a large degree. I was playing my reaper. I love the greatsword, but when you play without the shouts, without the master traits, and grandmaster traits, it makes the build feel weak. This took a lot of fun out of the reaper class for me (which before was one of the most fun, in my opinion). I understand that the build isn’t complete, and it gets better. But it gets better very, very slowly. It takes so long to unlock the traits that I would rather not play the reaper spec and ruin it for myself until I can play with a respectable set up.

On the zerker thing: You probably don’t need to re-gear. You need to re-think tactics. The enemies in HoT are built specifically to make face-tanking in zerker gear ineffective, so instead of just a pure DPS strat you should go with some self-preservation strats. Non-DPS utilities, non-DPS traits, etc.

Tactics, traits, and utilities play a much bigger portion than gear. Everything else I kind of agree with, though.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

On the zerker thing: You probably don’t need to re-gear. You need to re-think tactics. The enemies in HoT are built specifically to make face-tanking in zerker gear ineffective, so instead of just a pure DPS strat you should go with some self-preservation strats. Non-DPS utilities, non-DPS traits, etc.

Tactics, traits, and utilities play a much bigger portion than gear. Everything else I kind of agree with, though.

I’ll take a look at my traits and skills. It’s just a bummer because I’m so excited to have fun in Heart of Thorns, but having fun in heart of thorns requires a lot of grinding to unlock.