Guild Wars 2

Is it possible to change the Raid Mastery line to automatically unlock in Hot maps without beating a raid?

The big reward is the armor and as of right now, you either want it or don’t, regardless of reasoning. Rank and spirit shards are a small reward in comparison to armor, but, if everyone had the availability of those lines to train, they may be more inclined to step into raids, if for no other reason than the green mastery points.

That’s not the reason why this particular source of spirit shards is gated behind raids.

The system was designed so that post-mastery XP gave no rewards at all. That began well before HoT & raids. We protested and some time after HoT, ANet gave us the smallest possible reward: spirit shards for every ‘level’ past L80, after maxing a full mastery tree.

The problem is that raids were included as part of the HoT mastery tree and there wasn’t any easy way to separate them. So, by accident, this nearly trivial reward is now connected to raids.

It’s an unfortunate side effect and, on principle alone, it should be fixed. However, that’s not easily done.

Accordingly, I speculate that ANet is waiting to do something about this until they need to overhaul trait mechanics generally, e.g. with the upcoming expansion. They might change the reward from spirit shards to something meaningful or simply separate raids into its own mastery tree.

tl;dr it’s possible but not worth the effort to worry about a few spirit shards from post-mastery XP being gated behind raids.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s an unfortunate side effect and, on principle alone, it should be fixed. However, that’s not easily done.

It is. Just make the raid mastery track unlock on entering raid instance. Or even just add the unlock option to Glenna. Mechanics to do that already exist within game.