Guild Wars 2

It was a bit hard for me to get a good sense of Masteries this BWE, and I felt (for me) that I played a lot. Probably 6 hours a day on Friday-Sunday. I was able to unlock gliding and jumping mushrooms only though; I got perhaps 3/4 through unlocking updraft use, but didn’t finish it.

What made things tricky was finding that (I think?) the discoverable mastery points weren’t obtainable (the ones that look like a “commune” hero point in the main GW2 map) – I found a couple up in hidden spots and after interacting, I didn’t get extra points. I’m sure this was probably already mentioned elsewhere, apologies if so! Also, morale seemed a bit low in the beta maps I was in (after the issues with squad UI/raids) so there didn’t seem to be a big population of folks running events, which made progression feel sluggish to me.

Also, the event chains don’t feel quite as intuitive as say, the Silverwastes meta-event does, but I’m sure that’s just a matter of getting used to the flow of them. I did find myself wandering a lot and trying to figure out what stage the events were at, and where to go to find more. But the maps were really fun to explore, so I don’t see it as boring or annoying at all.

Maybe it’s just me, but I really like that it seems as though masteries will take some time to level up and progress through. I feel as though GW2 really needs a tiered achievement system like this that isn’t immediate-gratification oriented. Sooo many of my friends bail on the game a lot because level 80 is boring for them. For my part, I’m really happy the system is going to take some time and work to ascend through.

My verdict after the BWEs thus far is I’m really happy with masteries. I feel like I have a lot to figure out about them still, but this will be a fun project to work on during the expansion, and definitely something that will keep my friends engaged and playing! <3

This HoT seems to be very focused around events. I dislike the event farming trains we already have in this game. HoT seems to be the new place. Running in huge zergs doing events is not encouraging or fun.

My concern was mostly about the way to earn experience for the master abilities. Looks as it will be a long and painful way. It will most likely take running with the zerg farming events to be able to going forward.

Thank you for this thread, it helped me to finally decide if I should or not should buy the expansion. I will not.

After playing through several of the beta weekends, I have to say that I’m not opposed to the mastery system, but if what we were shown in the latest beta is representative of how it is working, I’d vote for some small tweaks. I’d drastically decrease the amount of experience needed for the base gliding skill. Gliding is so integral to my experience with HoT so far, that running around without it just wasn’t fun. Maybe it was the lack of events in the last beta weekend, but it felt like a chore getting that up. I didn’t mind it so much with the bouncing mushrooms, because at least on the part of the maps we had they were more of a shortcut than a required mode of transport, and I had gliding to move around between events.

I’d even consider unlocking gliding with the story instance or with some other tutorial like event instead of an experience grind. Outside of that, masteries seemed much improved, and I wasn’t throwing experience into an empty track like the early betas.

Grind: Repeating the same thing over n over.

You do dungeons repeatly.. aka you grind dungeons for rewards.
Stop moaning about grinding when everyone has been doing that since forever

I loved the masteries I was able to unlock (Gliding and Bouncy shrooms), and I can’t wait to do more! I’d rather work towards goals that let me do things instead of just grinding gold/gear/skins…

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

also don’t forget raids

Actually, yes. For this discussion, forget about raids.

By their nature, raids are not meant for everyone. If you want to include them in the equation of how long it takes for people to earn the masteries they need to move around, then you have to change them to be open and beatable by anyone.

I don’t think we should expect that change anytime soon. (Also, people doing raids will also have raid masteries to unlock. It may give EXP, but it will up the requirements, too.)