Guild Wars 2

Hello. I’d like to share my thoughts about mastery system.

I really like idea of mastery system. I think this is good system for end-game pve progression. My first thought after beta finished: progression seems to be too fast.
I know that many people won’t agree with me, some may say it is opposite and it is too grindy. After all, people have different experience in beta, depending on variety of things.

I managed to unlock 6 masteries during beta: tier 2 in gliding, Itzel Nuhoch lines. 6 masteries out of 39. Unlocking them was really fun, getting new perks with next tier was exciting, but it felt too fast for me.

I understand that higher tiers will require significant amount of exp to be unlocked, but in current state I can predict that people who will focus on unlocking materies will be able to do so in 1 month or even faster. We should take into consideration a few things.

1.Events during beta were bugged. At some point they will be fixed and we will have more events on the maps, it was stated that events during beta were just an iteration of how it will look like when HoT is live. This means we will be able to get more exp with HoT “not bugged” event implementation. So leveling mastery tracks will be even faster.

2.Adventures were bugged during beta. Couldn’t complete them all. They will fix this problem so we will be able to get more mastery points in verdant brink, so more masteries we will be able unlock in the very first map.

3.Mastery points per alt during beta. If someone have 15 lvl 80s and complete first story step for HoT story will get nice chunk of exp and mastery point per alt. This should be changed, now completing a few steps of story with all alts will just give you enoguh masteries to unlock them all without doing much exploration and challenge.

4.With crafting exp HoT exp bar will ding every few minutes. Add to this new booster that increases exp from crafting and you will get masteries in no time.

Part 2 below.

I understand it’s hard to balance, noone wants masteries to be mindless grind, but if we want masteries to be endgame progression system, then it should take some time to unlock masteires, not like a week and then we’re done. I managed to unlock 6 masteries in 2 days, playing only a few hours. I think that it should take me a few days more to give me better feel of acomplishing something but also not to feel grindy. So I hope that some fixes will be done to above issues I listed.

I’d like to see required exp for masteries unlock to be slightly higher, like 20% more exp requirement and the most importantly, more masteries. The more masteries we have, the longer it will take to master them all and this won’t feel like a grind.
I know that Arenanet has limited resources so i don’t expect to see more mastery lines when HoT launches, more than were revealed so far, but I’d like to see more masteries in Pact Tyria. There is so much potential in this.

1.Racial masteries for playable races. Unlocking services in racial cities, maybe unlocking places like royal palace in each city, unlocking collections for new cultural armors and weapons, vendors with tonics/minis/finishers you can get only from them.

2.Orders masteries. Same as racial ones but order themed. New tiers of Order armors/weapons would be nice to have. Getting free teleport to Order base (portal like to HoM). Unlocking Oder-speciic dailies maybe? Would like to see some scavanger hunt for history books hidden around the world to fill priory library collection, etc.

3.Pact mastery, similar to Order masteries, but pact-centric, new tiers of pact weapons, dailies, mostly centric on lvl 80 zones where Pact is around (Orr, Frostgorge Sound, Silverwastes) etc.

EDIT: just got another idea.

4. Crafting mastery: doubling exp for discovering recepies, reducing amount of mats to craft items, chance to get some materials back during crafting, filling collections for unique recepies, for example crafting 25 slot (or even 30 slots) bags? Reducing the dmg your gear takes when you die, because your products are “higher quality”, etc.

So together we would have masteries: 5 racial + 3 orders + 1 pact + 1 crafting = 10 extra mastery lines. Approximaterly each mastery line with 5 masteries = 50 extra masteries to unlock. That would take some time to master I think.

What are your opinnion about the time required to unlock masteries? What other masteries would you like to be added to the game?