Guild Wars 2

Hey,

I have a question to all those who participated in the BWEs (sadly real-life prevented me until now to test for myself):

As far as I am informed, masteries are essential for some aspects of the expansion.
E.g. gliding latest tier:

Learn to enter ley-line energy flows while gliding to be moved along with the flow, gaining access to otherwise inaccessible places. (from wiki)

So I would like to know how restrictive masteries are.

Have you found out if there are “locks” in content that prevent players from participating in pve aspects? For example:

-> map completion
-> events, story…
-> combat
-> CGC – i guess there is no info out on that yet

If so, what mastery would you suggest to train first?

According to the Devs, you will need certain Masteries to be able to interact with certain content, including some aspects of CGC.

I don’t think anyone knows all the particulars yet.

I, personally, unlocked one of the amphibian lines first, and then Gliding, and then the other amphibian line for mushroom jumping. I think it’s just a matter of personal choice. Eventually, likely all will be unlocked (depending, of course, on when new lines are added).

Good luck.

I’m pretty sure the masteries will be required for some content. For example, Devs said that you’d need certain masteries to raid, or at least, raids would be much easier to do with the masteries. They said they weren’t putting out the raid on day one to allow people to get themselves leveled up in a couple of masteries.

We’ve been told about other stuff too, but nothing specific. There’ll no doubt be skill points that you need to fly to that require gliding…maybe bouncing mushrooms too.

The low level stuff leveled pretty fast. In a beta weekend that I didn’t play that much I got all the early stuff unlocked. I don’t really see that early masteries as a grind.

But then it’s supposed to be a progression system, and if it goes too fast, the week after it’s out, people will start complaining again.

Dident the dev state that masteries for the beta was easier to level so people could help them test out mastery systems.

So I guess masteries will be harder to level when hot release.

The basic intent is that all masteries are content locks in one way or another. You can’t get certain vendors or content without training mastry X, you can get to a certain POI without training mastry Y, you can’t fight a certain mob without trainging mastry Z, etc.

The difference is that they all sit sort of parallel to each other, so unlike the gear treadmill they’re intended to replace, you’re not locked out of everything while you grind, but rather you prioritize what content you unlock through the system based on what you find most appealing.

They’ve likened it to more of a zelda/metroid style advancement and from my experience it’s a pretty apt description. For instance, I saw a mastry point I wanted to get to, but I didn’t have the glider yet, and I also saw a treehouse full of heket that i wanted to fight, but I didn’t have the mushroom jumping unlocked. So there, I had to make a choice. Which do I want to check out more? The tree branch with the mastry point and the other ledges I can see that I could glide to, or those ledges and vertical spaces above the mushrooms? In addition, once you do unlock these things, you find it’s easier to take shortcuts with them even to do stuff that they don’t hard lock you out of. The mushrooms let me move between two platforms that I could walk between, but it took much longer to walk, as did the glider (but a different set of platforms)

Similarly, the racial masteries unlock vendors and daily challenge NPCs which are likely hard locks on certain kinds of rewards, and “soft locks” on certain kinds of tokens or other items.

I’d say the best way to go about it is start HoT, walk around a bit, and then see what looks most appealing to you. You can eventually master them all so the real choice is what order you find interesting to unlock the content.

I can tell you that I didn’t enjoy the new zone at all until I got glider mastery.

People have already found that for levels 4 and 5 of Gliding you need 1 million+ and 4 million+ Mastery experience to unlock the level, so it’s not going to be that fast as I presume each Mastery will work the same. In other words, each level requires considerably more Mastery experience than the previous one.