Guild Wars 2

I am curious,

whats the planned length of HoT Expansion?

as people said, it seems kind of small. So I feel players will likely run a large chuck of it in a few months before it becomes normal routine.

As with every expansion to every game, people will rush through it, find the optimal ways to do encounters, come up with the best builds for the new specializations and class balance and then we’ll have the same “we need an expansion”, “we need new content” posts on the forums.

This will take anywhere between 1 and 2 months i guess.

Put me in the pool for someone will have it “done” in 105 hours or less.

But my blood pressure is way lower than that person .

The planned length depends on a lot of things including replayability.

it will take some time to progress the datadisk content for 100% completion, including all masteries, at least I hope it will take some time also the story will be probably bound to one or more masteries, so you will need them to progress the story, making it a bit longer… but I wouldn’t expect new living world content until half year after the datadisk launch (if the living world will take place after the HOT story just like first season)

Just because they are not focusing so much on a long personal story or a lot of maps but are instead focusing on ‘end game’ i.e. masteries, specializations, repeatable events, adventures, pvp, guild halls and so on, doesn’t mean it will be quick to be done with it all. You might reasonably quickly be done with map completion in the jungle and defeating Mordremoth but if things like the new pvp map, the new borderlands map, adventures, the Revenant and specializations keep you playing and enjoying yourself then that could still be counted as being part of the ‘length’ of the expansion.

kinda wierd question.

Competitive endgame is replayable for…forever?
After release they should focus on 1 thing – balance for next 3 month at least, and only after it some “new big stuff”

not taking in account pve side, they will keep adding it for AP hunters. I wish though PVE will become fun.

Probably it will last for 1-2 months and then it could already be completed, but remember they’ll have money now for frequent updates (alteast I hope)

There are several aspects we have to consider:

• Will the masteries gate some content for a longer time? How fast you can collect mastery points?

• How will the story and the maps be delivered? All at once or step by step over several months?

• How many achievements and challenges are embedded into Hot? How long will be adventures and other content funny or profitable.

Seems kind of small? You haven’t seen but the smallest fractions of the content. You have no idea how big it will be. We have no idea how expansive the map is in both width and height. We have no idea what story it will bring. We have no idea how long it will take to get enough mastery points to unlock all content. We have no idea how many adventures will be in the game and how enjoyable/repeatable they will be.

You are assuming the worst based on the smallest of sample sizes. Think again about your life choices.

If we look at silverwastes and dry top which are said to be the closest to what HoT will bring you can see they;re build to last. Many may rush through them, but to get everything they have to offer it’ll either take some hardcor e playing and a lot of it, or a looong time of casual, but constant play. So i think for the speedies there it’ll be 2 months or so, for regular folks half a year to year, depending on their pace.

Bear in mind that when an expansion comes out, there’s still plenty of patches after the initial launch. An apt example is WoW’s Cataclysm. While the initial expansion has it’s share of content, there was still content after the fact in later patches. You didn’t even fight the big mascot dragon of the expansion until the last patch.

I’d guess it’d be the same. We get the initial release of the new areas and systems, with additional patches, likely Living Story season 3 telling the rest. that said, I do wonder how much story we’ll get on initial release, and how much we get overtime.

The fact that we have player character voice acting implies a higher budget, and might mean we get a sizable chunk of story day one.

As for how long the expansion “lasts”, a good bet would be 2 – 3 years. It’s been almost 3 years since GW2 release, and 2 years seems the upper limit competing MMOs (see: WoW) can go between expansions. I’d be cool with another one in two years.

yanipheonu.5798:

As for how long the expansion “lasts”, a good bet would be 2 – 3 years. It’s been almost 3 years since GW2 release, and 2 years seems the upper limit competing MMOs (see: WoW) can go between expansions. I’d be cool with another one in two years.

you forgot to consider how long you are playing a living story content and not the initial release content (if we talk about “current content”)… so by “How long the HOT lasts” I imagine how long until we start to get new content / story on top of the HOT

The personal story sections might take hours for the hard core and weeks for the casual, but as for the rest of the content… I’d expect part of their goal with only introducing a small amount of zones it to only add repeatable content. How long those zones “last” will depend on the player base. With Mega Servers no zone is completely dead until it’s literally down to only seven or so people hanging out in the zone world wide.

But yes, there will be Living Story afterwards, that’s beyond any doubt. I’d give maybe a six month pause between Heart of Thorns release and the Living Story Season 3. Enough time for their four month development cycle to get the first half of Season 3 actually developed.

Important thing about masteries that is different between the demo we have seen and the final system in HoT on ship is that the mastery points only unlock the abilities for training you need experience to learn them still.

So even if you can farm the needed mastery points in a day or two you still have to gain experience to unlock each of the abilities individually (and it might not be on a flat curve, but there is no definitive statement on this, but it seems unlikely to be as quick as gaining levels is right now with the system being account bound and all).

How Tomes of Knowledge will factor into this is unknown at this point though. What they did for the demo is remove the gaining experience step from unlocking masteries afaik, because the demo is timed to 40 minutes.

So assuming content is gated behind masteries with needing to gain experience for those masteries it is a soft time gating on unlocking all the content in the expansion immediately (also, any retroactive mastery points will not be for HoT masteries either).

Also, while this is just my own opinion, mastery system is at least on paper way more effective method of controlling the longevity of the content than say a flat level increase because the mastery points are a definite resource, and some mastery points are no doubt gated behind having access to other masteries. What this means is that it is far more difficult to figure out the optimal progression path because while experience will still be a factor how the mastery points are laid out in the world will determine how quickly you can actually make use of the experience you gain from events towards specific masteries.

Knighthonor.4061:

I am curious,

whats the planned length of HoT Expansion?

A couple hours of new content.

1.250 hours of grind to get some new skins.

Until the end of time, of course.

There are rich players who will have new legenedaries on day one for their level 80 Revenant who is fully geared. They will deck out their guild hall and start zerging through Maguuma and ultimately miss all the fun stuff. I imagine to feel a sense of completing the expansion it will take less than a week for those kinds of players.

I think Anet plans on this lasting for at least a month or two of new experiences for the majority of players. I’m sure they are already thinking about the next steps and ready to crank out more updates as soon as the expansion is released.