Guild Wars 2

First off, I love HoT and am very happy with my purchase. Great work Anet.

I particularly love the mastery system. I think, as a concept, it is brilliant and should definitely be the direction GW2 continues in. Modeling an MMO off of metroidvania is brilliant.

That said, it has been a divisive topic because some people think it’s grindy. I think this is a problem that can be resolved with one change: Not all masteries should be tied to experience. Having all masteries tied to experience encourages players to find hte activity that rewards the highest experience and grind it, and do activities unrelated to the masteries. Gameplay wise, it doesn’t make much sense either. How does killing wyverns for experience teach me the Itzel language?

Rather, some masteries should be connected to story progression, collections, map completion, and other activities. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

-Exalted lore mastery: This would probably work best if it was tied to certain POIs or hero challenges around the map. Or players could complete a collection of exalted related items, items that are rewarded from completing meta events.

-Gliding: This should probably be taught to the player through an event in the personal story. As the story progresses, additional events teach it to the player and as they complete those story instances they complete the mastery. There could be additional challenges in maps to earn higher masteries not required for story progression.

-Fractal: This is a mastery that would work well for experience, but experience should be experience earned in fractals (obviously with a boost to fractal experience as well). Alternatively, it could be linked to completing certain fractal related achievements or collections. Better yet, have some masteries based on experience, some on collections, and some on achievements.

-Pact commander: Of all the masteries this would probably best follow the current experienced based model. It makes sense from a lore standpoint that the pact mastery would increase as you participate in world events, bosses, dungeons, renown hearts, etc.

-Finally, I think elite specializations should be a mastery, not based on hero points. Tying elite specializations to a mastery allows for there to be some lore behind the specialization. I was kind of disappointed that there wasn’t much lore and it was just “get more hero points.” What should be done with the current hero points in HoT? Well convert them to other masteries. Rather than getting 10 hero points for fighting Itzel blade dancers, you get progress toward your Itzel lore mastery.

Obviously those are a lot of changes, but maybe some food for though moving forward. The stated goal was to make HoT feel more like Zelda/Metroid and I think these changes would go a long way to doing that. It would encourage players to engage more with the maps, the lore, and story while discouraging repetitive grinding.