This is everything I’ve been asking for and far more than I expected.
Thanks Devs & Anet!
I know there’s going to be a lot of raging by people who are having a hard time with this right now, but I want to stop and take a moment to talk about it.
For three years we’ve essentially been ‘fighting’ creatures that stand in place with absolutely no pathing. All of these creatures have been soloable to a very large extent. What this means is not that there is anything wrong with Heart of Thorns, it simply means you’re going to have to spent a little time finding people you want to play with.
For the very first time in my entire Guild Wars 2 experience I did something with my guildies today. We explore, got Mastery Points, and generally had fun doing Heart of Thorns content. That’s fantastic!
But okay, alone? Yeah, it’s pretty brutal out there. But you know what? I like it. I actually feel like I’m accomplishing something and darned happy when I succeed at it. I’m not being Armor Gated out of content. Neither are you. Not yet at least. We can go to all of these maps and do just about whatever we want; the only real stipulation is you have to do this MMO thing and take some time with other people.
Now, something I’ve noticed is _ a lot_ of people aren’t rezzing. They’re still in that mindset, “If you get downed / die rez at Waypoint X.” I think this demonstrates we’ve had quite enough time soloing. We’re becoming a bit too selfish and self important.
I also see a lot of not-zerker specs doing incredibly well out there. I say this with some clarity because my Soldiers geared Elementalist did quite well, but the same Elementalist in its Ascended Berserker gear… sorta just dies …to everything. That’s okay. I put a lot of time into getting that armor, but I can also throw some spiritshards at the mystic forge and be some other armor. This really doesn’t break the game or ruin my characters. Interestingly, my Warrior is dying a fair bit on its own, but not so much it annoys me. In a group of one or two people my warrior is the DPS: it’s still running the old zerker meta.
Step away from characters a moment and look at the mastery system. It’s wonderful. We’ve got to explore, learn, play, vary our styles of play and we’re trapped to one character such that we have to level each character through its masteries separately. Now, IF that was the case – if Masteries were not account wide – yeah… this would be a failed expansion on that alone. That’s not what we have. What we have are a ton of things to do that are as expansive as original Tyria. Probably more so if you’ve started to get the hang of finding Mastery Points and leveling up with events/etc.
And talk about the creativity going into this. You have Gliders, content made for it, mushrooms you just hop on once – no clicks or anything – and off you go, a whole range of flushed out creatures we haven’t seen before. Gargoyles from Guild Wars I. Jumping Puzzles. Chests. Challenge… did I mention Challenge (healthy challenge). Player Cooperative Experience!
Really, I think the vast majority of complaints about this come down to having to play together with other players. I will admit getting through the maps alone is pretty brutal, but this is endgame content. The whole expansion is end game content. It filled in that void this game has been missing since launch without transforming the game into that content. The main stay of this is play. Play: as to go out and do something besides grind things.
It also gets easier I’m seeing. In the beginning I had 0 mastery points and hated everything because everything killed me. Then I got gliding and I could avoid some areas that made playing my thief utterly impossible solo. Then I got shroom hopping and suddenly I was zipping area areas that took a good half an hour to navigate before. Then I got gliding II and so on. By the end of just a few hours playing with some random person that invited me with them, we’d made it all the way down to the bottom of the world and mapped most of it as well.
So Masteries are like a momentum thing. At first you start out slow and it’s awful. It feels like a kind of personal torture that’s never amounting to anything. Then you break through into Gliding and you find yourself thinking, "Well, this is nice while I can. Maybe I can short cut into this a bit more. And while you’re doing that you think, “Well I guess I have a little while before I have glider II leveled. I’ll dump those into Itzel I, then I can do whatever this shroom stuff is about.” Before you know it you’ve forgotten about all this and you’re staring in awe at an underground river system you’ve found spanning an entire map…
These zones are absolutely massive, pure genius in design, and progressively more fun the further along you get. Chill, Anet delivered big on all of this. This is a kiddy play pin for adults! Squee a bit, then forget about life. This is a blast!
Thanks again, Devs! This is wonderful.