Guild Wars 2

Having just played the beta for HoT, one issue that I (and several others in my particular instances of the Beta) had was the user-friendliness of the UI for the Mastery System. The problem, from my perspective is having mastery points.

When a mastery point is earned (this happened after completing the first instance), it flashes like one of the bouncy boxes for event completion (the one notification over the minimap). The problem with that is the player expects something to immediately happen once a mastery is unlocked and they click the bouncy notification over the minimap. Since the player is only allowed to progress one mastery track at a time, it is not unheard of to amass a small fortune in mastery points and be only working on one path.

A possible workaround for this would be to make mastery tracks unlocked after completing certain events rather than just putting all of them out there from the beginning. Treat the leveling of the masteries more like sPvP reward tracks graphically (Where it is one linear reward track with multiple tiers of rewards) rather than having a multitude of sub-categories into which we will have to activate.

One possible scenario that could play out is a player completes the first instance and gets in the reward screen a choice between Gliders or Mushrooms (or just give both) from the beginning. Then when a player interacts with an Itzel, that particular mastery track is unlocked (rather than just giving us the option from the beginning). This removes the mastery point unlock completely (and also seems to shut out the need for mastery points even).

TL;DR: The more I was in the map, the more people I saw asking how the mastery system worked because they were confused having mastery points unlocked, yet no mastery tracks completed. As I figured out the system, it just became more and more clear that mastery points are useless.

Yeah, since the beggining i questioned the wisdom of having to unlock a track twice (once by making it trainable with Points, then again through leveling). It is confusing (and the UI for the system isn’t that great atm), and kinda counterintuitive.

What makes it even more confusing is that they apparently made all the Maguuma tracks “trainable” (if you notice you have a 1/1 or 1/4 on all parts of the track) for the Demo, which makes the whole system even more confusing.

Honestly I doubt the UI is anywhere close to its final form for this and it could be made a lot more straightforward by the final version. We can’t really judge from what we’ve seen but remember that mastery unlocks are account wide. (I believe, Ive been out of the news loop for awhile so forgive me if any of this has changed, thus making me look like an idiot.)

So this is really only going to be an issue for your first character through, as they unlock things to spend points on. For succeeding characters, they would be spending the points as they get them on things that have already been unlocked, so it would be a lot more straightforward.

It does work a little better than during the first stress test where you had to spend a point to unlock each line before you could train it up.

But even still I found myself looking to see Um.. Okay I’ve equipped a mastery line how do I use the points. Once I figured out okay, need to fill the progress bar before I unlock being able to spend the point. And I need to spend the point in the line before I can use my glider (or mushrooms).

A little tutorial on how it all works would be nice. Ideally it would happen as soon as you hit 80 and there would be a small track as an example to show folks how it worked. (This should only happen for the first time you hit 80).

It is much better placed in the hero panel too.

My one concern I hit was as soon as I filled up the progress bar I found myself rushing to get out of combat so I could slot that mastery point because I didn’t want any additional XP to be wasted. It didn’t seem to go to the next progress bar until after I spent that point. Like when you just have a tiny bit left on a PvP reward track but you get 600+whatever points OVER what you needed to finish the track. All that extra progress is wasted because it doesn’t roll over to the next track.

The wasted exp because you don’t know how to start it or can’t activate a new track in time is really cumbersome to say the least. That check mark button needs to be more visible too.

I’m not really a fan of having to work towards mastery tracks via generic leveling. I was expecting the mastery points themselves being the sole unlocker of masteries. (e.g., beat wyvern, get mastery point, unlock gliding! not, beat wyvern, unlock mastery point, select mastery, beat wyvern 10 more times for the xp, unlock gliding!)

psionflames.5246:

Honestly I doubt the UI is anywhere close to its final form for this and it could be made a lot more straightforward by the final version. We can’t really judge from what we’ve seen but remember that mastery unlocks are account wide. (I believe, Ive been out of the news loop for awhile so forgive me if any of this has changed, thus making me look like an idiot.)

So this is really only going to be an issue for your first character through, as they unlock things to spend points on. For succeeding characters, they would be spending the points as they get them on things that have already been unlocked, so it would be a lot more straightforward.

I think the UI looks fantastic, really flashed out.

Hopefully there will be a tutorial that pops up when you hit 80. (Or the first time you log in with a level 80.)

This is the point where a dev steps in and says “nothing is finalised yet, we’re still working on the layout, etc.”

I’ll give them this, the first beta mastery UI wasn’t intuitive at all. This one has potential but needs a bit more work still, but at least it’s not hogging the bottom 2/3rd’s of the screen anymore.