I liked most of the HoT beta experience. I like the characters and potential builds. But there was a couple of things I didn’t like.
1. I didn’t like the design of the map. I know it was to allow some glider action to go on. But I never really needed to use the glider. I never found a way up to the noble ledges area. Also though I didn’t want to learn updrafts I got stuck with them. I never saw any updrafts in the game. I’m assuming that they was somewhere. But I didn’t see them at all. Again, the map was poorly designed, and gliding seemed to have no benefit, as there was no direction. I don’t like jumping off the edge when I can’t see where I’m going.
2. The masteries. While I liked the concept of masteries I find the system very dated, especially in light of how the trait system was changed. This masteries system seems to be a throwback to the previous trait version, except worse in my opinion. It felt like you had to do two things to actually unlock only one thing. First you had to fill the exp bar up, and 2nd you had to actually earn a mastery point before you could unlock it. I also found that selecting which mastery point I was working towards to be confusing. I wanted to train the glider and the mushroom thing so I could jump on them. But after the glider one leveled, I thought I’d changed it to leveling the mushroom jumping one. Only to find later that it had kept leveling updrafts, which was useless to me. Overall I find the mastery section overly complicated, especially in light of the improvements made to other build pages. Also are masteries going to be refundable? Can we click to unlearn them and put them in different places like we can do with traits?
The only other bit I found a bit odd was that the beta mastery level was locked to only 2 masteries. I was unable to earn anymore. Or I couldn’t find them. I thought I’d saw a video on youtube were people were landing on them like vistas? Anyway, I couldnt find any and thought the map wasn’t that good at directing people were to go. I’ve never liked the jungle maps anyways. I thought the other maps silverwastes and dry top were better maps.
Also why was the progress we made on one character transfered to the other characters? On the first day the enemies I found to be tough if playing on my own, so exp would have been slow to get. But on the second day the enemy levels seem to have dropped (I know some complained about this) so exp was easier to come by. So the potential grind that I had feared on the first day had gone by the second. The problem with carrying over the progress of one character is that if you make a mistake on the masteries as I did, I’ve no way of resetting them, or trying out another character to pick again.