Guild Wars 2

Since there are quite a few mastery points/masteries threads I thought I’d start another one, but aiming to cover all issues at once.

So, which would be this system’s flaws? If you can, number them from most to least critical. Be considerate as this is a system that strives to provide a sense of progression. Also, don’t forget you don’t need to do rank gold in all adventures to max out 166.

Not enough mastery points in a wide enough area of content. Being forced to do Adventures for mastery points means that you directly couple in the flaws of the Adventure system into the mastery system. You look at the Adventures system and you see the problems like overtuned content, bugs, over-reliance on RNG and timed content with mechanics where lag will destroy your score. Instead of this just being a problem with optional content it becomes a problem with your core progression mechanic when you tie to masteries. I got enough points to max out my masteries and then never touched Adventures again.

XP becomes worthless after you max masteries. Which is completely bonkers for a progression system. Players should continue to gain experience after completing masteries and receive something for filling an experience bar. I don’t care at all what the player receives but it should be something. One of the best suggestions I’ve seen was Mystic Coins since there’s so few ways to get them in game. But again, I don’t care what the reward is, just that there should be one.

Many of the masteries aren’t actually good. They generally act as gates in two senses: The first that they gate off content that you may or may not care about. For instance, nobody really cares about being able to fight the ally champions beyond the collection items they give. “Yeah! I get to fight Potoni the Massive,” said nobody ever. The other kind of content they gate off is in regards to where you can go in the environment. Unlocking Itzel Poison Lore and having new areas to go to was actually kind of neat. I wouldn’t like to see this concept over-applied but the way it was done in this instance, I actually enjoyed. The second way that they act as gates is in regards to other masteries. There are a lot of interesting masteries locked behind masteries that nobody cares about. If players were given the option to choose which order to unlock masteries then you know that there are a bunch that would just never get unlocked at all. So from the perspective of a progression system this isn’t great. Your progress should be meaningful, you should be excited, like, “Yeah! This new thing I’ve unlocked is awesome” instead of “Okay, so I’ve unlocked this thing nobody cares about and now I’m one step closer to the awesome thing I actually want. Yay.”

The primary take away is that as a progression system it’s heavily flawed. Trying to force players to do things they don’t enjoy is a great way to create disgruntled players who burn out and quit your game. Having a progression system that makes one of your currencies irrelevant is a great way to make players avoid content related to that. If I have to sit down and ask myself, “Do I really want to go play in the open world and do events that grant me no experience and pathetic loot when I could be doing more rewarding content like SPvP or Fractals” then you’ve created a system that devalues your own existing content. But considering what Anet did to dungeons, maybe that was their intended goal here. The final thing to focus on is that with meaningful progression the keyword is meaningful. It shouldn’t feel like a chore or busywork or unrewarding. Every milestone achieved should actually feel meaningful instead of feeling like filler that takes you closer to something actually worth having.

Many of the masteries aren’t actually good. They generally act as gates in two senses: The first that they gate off content that you may or may not care about. For instance, nobody really cares about being able to fight the ally champions beyond the collection items they give. “Yeah! I get to fight Potoni the Massive,” said nobody ever. The other kind of content they gate off is in regards to where you can go in the environment. Unlocking Itzel Poison Lore and having new areas to go to was actually kind of neat. I wouldn’t like to see this concept over-applied but the way it was done in this instance, I actually enjoyed. The second way that they act as gates is in regards to other masteries. There are a lot of interesting masteries locked behind masteries that nobody cares about. If players were given the option to choose which order to unlock masteries then you know that there are a bunch that would just never get unlocked at all. So from the perspective of a progression system this isn’t great. Your progress should be meaningful, you should be excited, like, “Yeah! This new thing I’ve unlocked is awesome” instead of “Okay, so I’ve unlocked this thing nobody cares about and now I’m one step closer to the awesome thing I actually want. Yay.”

Thanks for putting this out there, Tapioca. 100% my opinion without my usual rambling.

Some of the masteries are decent in that they open up things you can do rather than just unlocking stuff you should have been able to get to in the first place. Masteries should have made the game experience either more efficient or more rewarding, instead of completely blocking off content.

Gliding is a joyous Mastery to have. Mushrooms and Wallows are useful for traversing maps without having to take the long way. Shortcuts, give us shortcuts.

Other semi-decent ones are the extra reward options (challenges, auric mining) that give us something else to gather. Unique currency that isn’t just map related is also useful. Nuhoch Stealth at least gives us a counter to some of the mobs that use stealth in Magus Falls, so it’s useful and makes encounters easier. (I could write an entire other post on how this was mis-applied to Axemaster…)

Terrible masteries? Itzel Poison Mastery comes to mind. It is nothing but a gate to content, including other mastery insights. Bad. There is no shortcut or bypass, just death for walking into the wrong spot without protection.
It could have been so much better. Enemies that use toxins as part of their damage could be mitigated by poison mastery (had some thoughts on how to redesign Axemaster with this in mind), and again, an availability of shortcuts that would normally be closed off.

Tapioca.9062:

Not enough mastery points in a wide enough area of content. Being forced to do Adventures for mastery points means that you directly couple in the flaws of the Adventure system into the mastery system. You look at the Adventures system and you see the problems like overtuned content, bugs, over-reliance on RNG and timed content with mechanics where lag will destroy your score. Instead of this just being a problem with optional content it becomes a problem with your core progression mechanic when you tie to masteries. I got enough points to max out my masteries and then never touched Adventures again.

XP becomes worthless after you max masteries. Which is completely bonkers for a progression system. Players should continue to gain experience after completing masteries and receive something for filling an experience bar. I don’t care at all what the player receives but it should be something. One of the best suggestions I’ve seen was Mystic Coins since there’s so few ways to get them in game. But again, I don’t care what the reward is, just that there should be one.

Many of the masteries aren’t actually good. They generally act as gates in two senses: The first that they gate off content that you may or may not care about. For instance, nobody really cares about being able to fight the ally champions beyond the collection items they give. “Yeah! I get to fight Potoni the Massive,” said nobody ever. The other kind of content they gate off is in regards to where you can go in the environment. Unlocking Itzel Poison Lore and having new areas to go to was actually kind of neat. I wouldn’t like to see this concept over-applied but the way it was done in this instance, I actually enjoyed. The second way that they act as gates is in regards to other masteries. There are a lot of interesting masteries locked behind masteries that nobody cares about. If players were given the option to choose which order to unlock masteries then you know that there are a bunch that would just never get unlocked at all. So from the perspective of a progression system this isn’t great. Your progress should be meaningful, you should be excited, like, “Yeah! This new thing I’ve unlocked is awesome” instead of “Okay, so I’ve unlocked this thing nobody cares about and now I’m one step closer to the awesome thing I actually want. Yay.”

The primary take away is that as a progression system it’s heavily flawed. Trying to force players to do things they don’t enjoy is a great way to create disgruntled players who burn out and quit your game. Having a progression system that makes one of your currencies irrelevant is a great way to make players avoid content related to that. If I have to sit down and ask myself, “Do I really want to go play in the open world and do events that grant me no experience and pathetic loot when I could be doing more rewarding content like SPvP or Fractals” then you’ve created a system that devalues your own existing content. But considering what Anet did to dungeons, maybe that was their intended goal here. The final thing to focus on is that with meaningful progression the keyword is meaningful. It shouldn’t feel like a chore or busywork or unrewarding. Every milestone achieved should actually feel meaningful instead of feeling like filler that takes you closer to something actually worth having.

Well said.

There are some masteries I would have liked to have skipped but the mastery I wanted couldn’t be opened unless the one before it was opened. Itzel Leadership, Nuhoch Proving and Exalted Purification come to mind as ones I could have done without or had them last as something to use extra mastery points on for additional rewards which I suspect are not that good anyway. I think they lost the meaningful progression by gating this way. The only mastery progression I thought was well done was the gliding. I enjoyed working my way towards the end goal on that one. I felt like I had achieved something by finishing. The others I do not have that feeling at all and really am not working that hard at finishing them.

Also obtaining mastery points should be able to be gotten more than one way – do an adventure OR a quest OR obtain some items to turn in etc. Not everyone can or wants to do adventures. Timed things are a nightmare for me especially if any jumping is involved. I don’t mind putting some work into getting the mastery point, I just would like some variety to do it in other than, oh goodness, now I have to jump/fly/fall within this time frame through these tiny boxes. Things like that force players to accept that there are some things they will not be able to obtain in the game because they may not be able to perform what is required either to disability, computer issues etc.

I assume some of this is to push players into trying out some of the other game content. I do think it is good to at least try the other content so you can decide if it is for you or not. I made Mawdrey II which required me to do some fractals. I did just enough to finish Mawdrey. I was glad I tried it because I realized it was not something I cared to do regularly and have not been back. You need dungeon tokens for Gifts for Legendary weapons and it is nice you can also do PvP tracks to obtain them if you do not care to do the dungeons and deal with the LFG issues. That is a good example of alternatives to being able to reach a goal.

I just want to be able to work towards a goal and feel a sense of achievement when I get there.

I’m going to go against the grain and say that I generally liked the mastery system.

So the most important masteries, like gliding and mushrooms, are the very first ones. So you can get those relatively quickly.

The others are mostly improvements to gliding, easier methods to defeat certain enemies, or access to special vendors or events. Not essential, but it does provide a sense of progression.

The poison mastery is the most blunt in what it does – you cannot go to X area without the mastery. These areas do not take up a large portion of the game. But I see them like getting a new item in any Zelda game – that item invariably allows you to access some portion of the map you couldn’t previously.

Now adventures. I think it’s what most people take issue with.

Yes, you’ll need to do some to mastery cap. No, you don’t need to do well in all of them. You can choose the ones to excel at. I’m terrible at shooting gallery, barely got bronze. But that didn’t stop me from mastery capping. When I decided I actually wanted to mastery cap (rather than getting it organically) I got all the strong boxes, did the easy adventures, and did some of the easy events. Took 2 days.

My only real complaint is that there’s no progression once you cap. I wish there was some sort of experience reward track, so the experience wouldn’t go to waste.

Having to do adventures for mastery points and having to grind XP to even use the mastery points.

Having to do adventures for mastery points. The fact that due to a certain disability I’m not that good at jumping fast really isn’t that important. I don’t like the adventures. As was previously said, should be more than one way to get the mastery points.

And that is valid for Tyria too.

Tapioca.9062:

Not enough mastery points in a wide enough area of content. Being forced to do Adventures for mastery points means that you directly couple in the flaws of the Adventure system into the mastery system. You look at the Adventures system and you see the problems like overtuned content, bugs, over-reliance on RNG and timed content with mechanics where lag will destroy your score. Instead of this just being a problem with optional content it becomes a problem with your core progression mechanic when you tie to masteries. I got enough points to max out my masteries and then never touched Adventures again.

XP becomes worthless after you max masteries. Which is completely bonkers for a progression system. Players should continue to gain experience after completing masteries and receive something for filling an experience bar. I don’t care at all what the player receives but it should be something. One of the best suggestions I’ve seen was Mystic Coins since there’s so few ways to get them in game. But again, I don’t care what the reward is, just that there should be one.

Many of the masteries aren’t actually good. They generally act as gates in two senses: The first that they gate off content that you may or may not care about. For instance, nobody really cares about being able to fight the ally champions beyond the collection items they give. “Yeah! I get to fight Potoni the Massive,” said nobody ever. The other kind of content they gate off is in regards to where you can go in the environment. Unlocking Itzel Poison Lore and having new areas to go to was actually kind of neat. I wouldn’t like to see this concept over-applied but the way it was done in this instance, I actually enjoyed. The second way that they act as gates is in regards to other masteries. There are a lot of interesting masteries locked behind masteries that nobody cares about. If players were given the option to choose which order to unlock masteries then you know that there are a bunch that would just never get unlocked at all. So from the perspective of a progression system this isn’t great. Your progress should be meaningful, you should be excited, like, “Yeah! This new thing I’ve unlocked is awesome” instead of “Okay, so I’ve unlocked this thing nobody cares about and now I’m one step closer to the awesome thing I actually want. Yay.”

The primary take away is that as a progression system it’s heavily flawed. Trying to force players to do things they don’t enjoy is a great way to create disgruntled players who burn out and quit your game. Having a progression system that makes one of your currencies irrelevant is a great way to make players avoid content related to that. If I have to sit down and ask myself, “Do I really want to go play in the open world and do events that grant me no experience and pathetic loot when I could be doing more rewarding content like SPvP or Fractals” then you’ve created a system that devalues your own existing content. But considering what Anet did to dungeons, maybe that was their intended goal here. The final thing to focus on is that with meaningful progression the keyword is meaningful. It shouldn’t feel like a chore or busywork or unrewarding. Every milestone achieved should actually feel meaningful instead of feeling like filler that takes you closer to something actually worth having.

Agree with all of this. There’s so much potential to the mastery system but there are some clumsy aspects to its execution and some strange choices in the masteries on offer. Now that I’ve almost completed them all I’m enjoying the jungle as it should be enjoyed, but getting there was tedious. Rather than feeling like leveling up new abilities, it felt like unlocking things that shouldn’t have been locked in the first place. I’m looking forward to future masteries to tackle. I just hope they make more sense than some of the current lot.

Absurdo.8309:

The poison mastery is the most blunt in what it does – you cannot go to X area without the mastery.

I found that I had to stop thinking about the masteries and just treat them as upgrades that need to be unlocked. Because thinking about them lead to awkward questions like how the heck does the poison mastery actually work?

So……..killing a whole lot of things gives me the ability to breathe poison?

EDIT: Yeah, I know. It’s magic.

Absurdo.8309:

I’m going to go against the grain and say that I generally liked the mastery system.

So the most important masteries, like gliding and mushrooms, are the very first ones. So you can get those relatively quickly.

The others are mostly improvements to gliding, easier methods to defeat certain enemies, or access to special vendors or events. *Not essential, but it does provide a sense of progression. *

Does it? Going from a useful mastery to one that is barely above useless doesn’t feel like progress at all.

I like the concept of masteries but the main problem with the HoT ones is the fact that most of the masteries are only useful in HoT maps. By the time you have earned the masteries you are probably done with the maps where they are useful. I’m hoping future content/expansions/stuff will find further uses for the HoT masteries.

DoctorDing.5890:

By the time you have earned the masteries you are probably done with the maps where they are useful.

Well, they certainly help you rush additional characters through the content.

On my first character, I was annoyed because of all the speed bumps I ran into, lacking certain masteries. On subsequent characters, everything felt completely trivial because of a combination of prior experience and those speed bumps being gone. Both experiences were sub-optimal. Something about the system is off, for sure.

Manasa Devi.7958:

DoctorDing.5890:

By the time you have earned the masteries you are probably done with the maps where they are useful.

Well, they certainly help you rush additional characters through the content.

On my first character, I was annoyed because of all the speed bumps I ran into, lacking certain masteries. On subsequent characters, everything felt completely trivial because of a combination of prior experience and those speed bumps being gone. Both experiences were sub-optimal. Something about the system is off, for sure.

That is one of the biggest flaws with Nuhoch Alchemy (the other is that you have to burn a dodge for it to do anything). By the time you get it you have pretty much been forced to learn how to deal with the Chak without it so getting it is pretty much useless. It is the complete opposite.

Why are over half the mastery points from stupid mario mini-games. I thought this was an MMORPG. Most if not all mastery points gotten from either doing events or bosses. I could do without the stupid 1980 style games (incl. SAB).

Rauderi.8706:

Other semi-decent ones are the extra reward options (challenges, auric mining) that give us something else to gather.

I’d actually forgotten that Exalted Gathering supposedly gets us other things when mining. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed getting a sliver from a mithril node. The only use I definitely had for it was the collection item needed for the elite weapons, and I got all 8 (sans Rev) of those in my very first whack at my very first mithril node in AB after I bought that mastery tier.

Donari.5237:

Rauderi.8706:

Other semi-decent ones are the extra reward options (challenges, auric mining) that give us something else to gather.

I’d actually forgotten that Exalted Gathering supposedly gets us other things when mining. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed getting a sliver from a mithril node. The only use I definitely had for it was the collection item needed for the elite weapons, and I got all 8 (sans Rev) of those in my very first whack at my very first mithril node in AB after I bought that mastery tier.

I’ve gotten Auric Slivers from that but why should I even care about getting Auric Slivers? They are only good for Auric weapons and 3 decorations(scribing cost renders this moot). That leaves the last reason “to get the item needed for the elite specialization collections”. It’s a mastery that becomes obsolete fairly quickly.

The biggest problems I think with the mastery system are:

• HoT used materies put a large emphasis on making experience gain worthwhile, but once masteries are done it becomes worthless again. I didn’t grind for EXP at all and this is still the case. There should be some reward for exp gain, or else masteries should be released more frequently.
• Some masteries are almost entirely worthless. Many provide cool new ways to interact with the environment, or provide combat or mobility benefits. But there are also more than a few which you could remove from my account and I would never notice.

Some things that people have mentioned that I don’t think are bad:

• Adventures, and generally being forced to do things you don’t like – people tend to want to get stuff the easiest way possible (e.g. doing only swamps every day for fotm) and ignore content that isn’t the easiest thing. I’m not going to say that I love the adventures in this game, but believe it or not I like being forced to do different content because otherwise I might not try it or even know about it. Finally getting gold on a fungus among us felt amazing, even if my time grinding it was frustrating. I’ve seen people grind dragon’s stand for days straight to max mastery exp and then complain that getting silver in adventures is too hard. You’re playing an mmo. You grind for your kitten. Adventures only have to be done once, and you don’t even need gold…you can spend less a day on them and have enough mastery points to cap, which is pretty benign for something you don’t have to repeat. The one adventure complaint I would agree with is how often some are unavailable due to meta events.
• Mastery progression – I think having a progression system is fine, and the system in the game where some masteries are gated behind others only seems like an issue because a decent chunk of the masteries are not good.

I don’t think the mastery system was horrible, but there are definitely a couple aspects that are questionable. There are also lots of really cool things about it but that’s what this thread is for so w/e.

“Yeah! I get to fight Potoni the Massive,” said nobody ever

Tapioca expressed half the problem perfectly. I mean it’s just underwhelming. Sometimes just there to block you, other times you don’t even care about it. Thank you for stealth gliding…

The other half is having advanced gliding in the game. I would get why, but it doesn’t help me feel anything but annoyed that before I had to carefully manage my endurance in-air and now…Suddenly I won’t ever care about it … ever. I mean why ? I’ll even forget one day about it. Seems like I struggled pointlessly before and they could either spare me the trouble or make it part of the game. It’s a radical change that feels like it’s there because of a lack of other ideas.
And it’s not progression – it’s a complete 180 degrees change that will never be reversed…

Also know a lot of people that complain about the fact that masteries lock behind them map completion. They don’t like repeating same content over and over again so to them it’s annoying (because if you take it like that it feels like a grind). They bought hot knowing they won’t replay it over and over again and they still log in the game periodically to play pvp fractals raids or wvw. So they are “punished” to play
So even though itzel poison or nunoch wallows might sound cool, I believe it’s a bad idea to lock hero points or vistas behind it…There could’ve been other form of rewards for that

Talking about adventures… I thought Anet understood we shouldn’t be forced to do something that isn’t really important in the game. Remember when they nerfed the map completion ? No more WvW exploration, and that was a good (and logical) idea.

And now… Why should we get gold on adventures ? I don’t like these “games”, mostly when you have to jump (Sanctum Scramble is.. Ugh, I hate it). It doesn’t add much to GW2, and I’ve seen videos where the player has to use “glitches” (I don’t know how to call it, but when you have to shadowstep at the same time you press the “play” button…) to win. Really ?
I know they worked on it, and maybe they want us to try these adventures, but… Nope, it’s not what make me have fun on a MMO.

Valento.9852:

Since there are quite a few mastery points/masteries threads I thought I’d start another one, but aiming to cover all issues at once.

So, which would be this system’s flaws? If you can, number them from most to least critical. Be considerate as this is a system that strives to provide a sense of progression. Also, don’t forget you don’t need to do rank gold in all adventures to max out 166.

I think the mastery system is too grindy. The amount of XP needed for deeper tiers is way too high. The amount of content we, as level 80 players with most everything done in the maps, have is way too low. Also, too many of the masteries feel completely pointless and useless, but there’s no way to bypass them.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Valento.9852:

Since there are quite a few mastery points/masteries threads I thought I’d start another one, but aiming to cover all issues at once.

So, which would be this system’s flaws? If you can, number them from most to least critical. Be considerate as this is a system that strives to provide a sense of progression. Also, don’t forget you don’t need to do rank gold in all adventures to max out 166.

I think the mastery system is too grindy. The amount of XP needed for deeper tiers is way too high. The amount of content we, as level 80 players with most everything done in the maps, have is way too low. Also, too many of the masteries feel completely pointless and useless, but there’s no way to bypass them.

The exp requirements probably feel too high because the masteries they give don’t feel like it was worth it. Even in gliding where the masteries are mostly fine, ley line gliding is not really a step up from advanced gliding. Gaining access to a handful of other places is not as big of an impact as infinite gliding.

It seems people try shooting gallery as their first adventure and after many raging attempts not getting gold they just ragequit and generalize all the adventures as hard as that one. I personally enjoyed most of the adventures but I do get the point that even bronze rank should reward one mastery point. There are some hard ones and if you just can’t do them then don’t. My biggest issue with masteries is that I can’t repeat it! Shame it’s account bound so when you do it, it’s gone forever. This also points to the idea that some players might think that this account bound progression has to be done only on one character and burn out when trying to get it done. Just leave it it be, you get exp anyway from almost anything you do. I think there’s enough points in hot masteries but core tyria ones might get hard to do if you don’t have LS2 (which you should buy though it’s nice).

Bambu.4270:

It seems people try shooting gallery as their first adventure and after many raging attempts not getting gold they just ragequit and generalize all the adventures as hard as that one. I personally enjoyed most of the adventures but I do get the point that even bronze rank should reward one mastery point. There are some hard ones and if you just can’t do them then don’t. My biggest issue with masteries is that I can’t repeat it! Shame it’s account bound so when you do it, it’s gone forever. This also points to the idea that some players might think that this account bound progression has to be done only on one character and burn out when trying to get it done. Just leave it it be, you get exp anyway from almost anything you do. I think there’s enough points in hot masteries but core tyria ones might get hard to do if you don’t have LS2 (which you should buy though it’s nice).

Then there is Haywire Punch-o-Matic. The game gives you 5 skills but you should only be using the #2 …