Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I was looking forward to do HoT content with elite specs powered up but can’t due to the grind, but I don’t mind a little effort to put in. The middleground feels lost amongst the complaints though between “git gud” and “I have a life” though, so I guess I just felt like throwing this down before it gets merged into a cluttered mess and never acknowledged.

A lot of people wanted to finally play their elite specs throughout a lot of the content for HoT, but can’t because they won’t have their elite specs until they’ve already played through most of the HoT maps. You have to raise your masteries high enough before you can go to most of them, and to raise your masteries you have to chase tags for the big events and level up.

I personally feel like they missed an opportunity to just do what L1-80 did, give the players a good chunk of hero points for leveling up reasonable tiers of masteries or something. Just by doing that, you make at least some clusters of hero points people have to do all the work for on their base class, completely optional for all but those 100%ing the map, which let’s be honest, is still how hero points work in core and L1-80.
The grind wouldn’t be so bad, because leveling up means you’re still empowering your elite class. At that point, you use hero points to speed up the process rather than be forced to go get them, also just like how the core handled them. Plus, you get a little experience from hero points anyways too, which also gets you closer to mastering it.

These sorts of tweaks would at least vastly speed up the process of getting elite specs. If this was a matter of a skin or whatever like a legendary or ascended, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But this is about entire class mechanics that are locked behind a large wall of leveling and tomfoolery for PvE and WvW. A little work isn’t going to kill anyone, and the newness of the jungle and its more complex events (Pale Reavers yeeea) are fun enough to get the masteries up and explore more. Personally, I believe that would be a better chain than to gate all of the 10HP nodes with various mastery requirements, some of which are very plain lock and key concepts (the poison bacon one in that second map, for example, prevents any regen and drops your health significantly to get without the mastery it requires). Gliding, updraft, and things that involve the player a bit more are a lot more forgiveable than what is shallow gating like that, because it’s a pretty new experience that’s fun to play around with and explore otherwise.

Thoughts? Other possible solutions? Creative names to call me for whining for attention? I just felt like some more constructive discussion on what needs revamping and what a good middleground between casual and xXxh4rdc0rexXx would be for consideration.

I’d like either:

Start out with the elite spec having a generally useful set of traits, then unlock the rest of the traits as well as the skills as we go along

Or

Let us unlock the elite spec for one class while playing a different class.

The people excited over druids because of their strong healing focus probably /aren’t/ the same group of people that will love playing base rangers, a class with almost no healing focus to them.

60 Hero Points for the line for traits and things, Map completion on HoT maps for the skins etc., a reward track for each skin part in PvP, or 30 WvW ranks and 1k BoH per piece as well (assuming 7).

Basically, it’s like this… making a viable solution that makes people happy is easy and the possible solutions are numerous. The problem is, Anet stabbed themselves in the foot when they revamped the skills system. If you look at the game where it is now and take the elite specs out of the picture, hero points are all but a pointless feature. They are useful while leveling, maybe, and that’s it.

Back when skill points meant something for mystic forge recipes, the excess of them meant something, even after you’d fully unlocked a spec. Since they changed skill points to hero points and made them into a purely class-based feature, they serve zero purpose outside the context of 1-80 leveling and (now) elite specs.

The point is, Anet could fix the problem in 10 different ways and make people happy. But no matter what they do, they are probably going to be left with an embarrassing number of worthless hero points in their game. They need to address that worthlessness in the process of fixing this, or they will be trading one embarrassment for another.

My thought is, integrate the elite specs into masteries and do something like this with hero points: Make the challenges repeatable on a daily cycle and turn them into a kind of currency (but only usable as a currency once all of your base specs are fully unlocked – basically, so you can spend excess). But rather than making them a generic mystic forge thing like before, they can be spent to buy from a narrow purchase list on a special vendor; items such as boosters, for example. Items in that sweet spot of consumable and desirable that aren’t too good, but also aren’t so bad that no one wants them.

This kills several problems. Not only are the elites more accessible and alt-friendly, but hero challenges continue to serve a purpose and will never run out of people to do them with you because they are repeatable and consistently give you something worth having (thereby also killing the non-soloable issue in the process).

Change the HP challenges to be soloable when you’re the only person around and remove (some of) the mastery gating. Reduce the number of points needed for the elite spec (200 maybe? 150? Just less) and make the skins/etc from the track be the highest rewards requiring 400 points.

I had a thread like yours I made this morning for suggestions only: so I’ll copy my ideas here, as I know they have long since been buried in the mass craziness:

I know there are a lot of QQ this grind sucks threads out there, but not a lot of them that gather constructive feedback on how to fix the issue organized so the devs don’t have to sift through thousands of posts.

If you are one of the “Well I think the hero points are fine, I enjoy map completion bla bla bla bla bla” players, this thread is not for you either, just constructive feedback to fix the issue that is very real to a large number of players. If you are blind to the fact that the issue does in fact exist for many players, your feedback is of no value.
So the following is a list of suggestions from myself, some are stolen from others, but I will highlight them all with pros and cons:

1. Allow the specs to be played throughout the new HoT areas, instead of having to nearly complete the area to fully unlock the spec
-This suggestion seems to be what a lot of PVE players would like to see, they have been playing with the same build for 3 years up to the expansion, and would like to be able to spice things up and continue through the story/map completion etc… while learning the new class.
-An argument against this has been: “the specialization is available at under 400 HP so just take the traits you unlock until you get the full thing.” That discounts the fact that people will be playing with a largely subpar build, and WvW players will be shafted because the build will likely be all but useless, largely due to not being able to choose which traits to unlock.

2. Create a PVP reward track that allows players to get HP, ~100 per track completion
-This is a suggestion I would like to see implemented personally, as I primarily play pvp and wvw, but occasionally cross into world bosses/fractals/dungeons with friends, so I would like to be able to unlock the specs in a game mode I enjoy playing, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this crowd.
-100 may seem like a lot of HP for a reward track completion, but having to do the reward track 4 times per character with the current system seems reasonable, that way people can say “we worked for our specs,” because 4 reward tracks does take quite a few matches.
-A potential issue is this may lead to pvers meandering into pvp, which does anger a lot of the more skilled pvpers who don’t like having people that don’t understand how to play pvp on their teams.
-It could also lead to people farming quick join, however the rank points earned there are lower than unranked, so it would take them a long while to complete 4 reward tracks. Maybe to prevent farming this, make it so rank points can only be gained from unranked/ranked arena. This will negatively impact the prior issue though, as then the PVErs who would rather come to PVP, maybe to unlock the spec before doing the new area, would essentially be forced to play with the pvpers that don’t want them.

3. Increase the hero point gain in WVW
-Hear me out on this, I know it isn’t as bad as it was first predicted, however it still takes around 50 hours of PVD on each character to unlock the new line. That is a long time, and this has led to some zergs cooperating in normal wvw to essentially karma train, which destroys the whole purpose of wvw being a massive player vs player area.
-EOTM is filled with players all out zerging for essentially one purpose, getting HP, badlands players often get the shaft though because other zergs from OG and FR often have much more populated player bases so they can HP train while crushing a smaller BL zerg on occasion, giving them an advantage of more WXP per hour, while badlands has to work extra hard. I say the faster it is to get the HP done and out of the way, the faster we can be back to playing normal WVW, or even just go straight back to normal wvw and end up with the elite specs in a reasonable amount of time just playing.
-It will also be a slight relief to folks that primarily roam, because it would take them ages to get one elite spec under the current system.

4. Make Elite Specs Baseline
-The elite specs don’t really outshine many of the prior core spec lines in a way that many players think that they really are working too hard to unlock something that is not really worth the effort put in.
-The most common counter argument is: “Why should they be handed to you on a silver platter.” Well in all reality they aren’t. First, you paid fifty dollars for an expansion, fifty dollars that at some point in your life you ideally worked a real job to earn. So it is logical to me that many players want to be able to use what they paid for and not have to “work for it” in a game, which should really be about playing and having fun. When a game gets to the point that you have to work to be able to play a core mechanic, you might as well just get a second part time job and earn some real life money on the side than work virtually.
-A more reasonable counterpoint is: “There should be some feeling of progression.” The issue in large with this is that feeling just is not created as the specs are largely gated behind having to play PVE content, and having to get masteries and struggle through content that isn’t enjoyable to players that don’t do open world, or to players that like to go at a casual pace. And is that not the point of the mastery system- to progress your character, I for one enjoy playing the gliding stuff, but hate navigating the new map in a mad rush to unlock what I want for WVW, fractals, dungeons etc…

5. Go back to the old system where you could go to a vendor and refund hero points to switch up your trait line for a few silver.
-This is an idea I saw presented earlier today, so I kinda stole it, but I REALLY LIKE THIS ONE. Essentially you go to a vendor and purchase a refund for hero points and can spend them in unlocking different trait lines. People will still want to get hero points for convenience of not having to revisit the vendor every time they change builds, and it will allow folks to play how they want, keeping the current system to unlock the mastery skins, while allowing players to play the new content in whatever way they would like.
-I haven’t seen the counter-argument to this, though I imagine there is some elitist crumudgeon out there that would gladly come up with one. ( I welcome folks to input their thoughts, I for one would like to see, and if the devs end up implementing something along the lines of this I would like to see it polished… same goes for all the other suggestions.)

6. Allow Hero Points to be purchased through other currencies.
-I have seen many suggestions floating around about having an exchange of spirit shards for hero points, gems for hero points, gold for hero points etc…
-The thing I see as benefits of having hero points being purchasable, is you can have them in exchange for fractal/dungeon tokens, for spirit shards that seem to build up like crazy, allowing people who do those game modes, but not open world PVE or WVW an option that will allow them to continue dungeon running and fractal running in peace.
-Gems I’m kind of torn on, I think this would look bad on A-net, because plenty of players would be prone to buy out of frustration more than just pure support of the game, but at the same time, some people would rather pay a little bit than waste time doing map completion content they don’t enjoy, because after all, time is money.

7. Lower the amount of hero points required to unlock the elite spec, keep 400 for the skins.
-People really enjoy cosmetics in guild wars, that’s why people are willing to work for legendary weapon skins, armor skins etc… It is informally known as fashion wars for a reason.
-Progression and status can be shown through weapon/armor skins, not to mention some of the new skins are worth the time to get, please just don’t make players have to wait for the new core mechanics along with the skins.
-Elitists will argue: “Well veteran players that do all this “hard” work should be able to play more better than all you pugs that don’t like farming hero points in this new map that I’m leet at.” Veteran players get there status from achievement points, weapon skins, fractal level, pvp rank, wvw rank etc… not from being able to play a class that is gated off to a large group of people that, just frankly, don’t enjoy playing the same content as them, or enjoy playing it differently.

These are some of the suggestions I have made, or come across, please feel free to add your own, mixing and matching the suggestions also works, lets let the devs have something to work off of so Gaile isn’t cherrypicking through the thread to find the one person that says “its working as intended.” Thanks all ahead of time, keep responses positive and constructive

I was willing to compromise on a shorter time frame with elite hp unlocked from mastery and minus the group challenge aspect. Unfortunately the group on the other side of the argument just calls the majority whiners and criers so now my suggestion is just to say to anet, that elite unlocking was just a bad idea and scrap the whole thing so I can play the content with the elite finally.

leftyboy.9358:

I was willing to compromise on a shorter time frame with elite hp unlocked from mastery and minus the group challenge aspect. Unfortunately the group on the other side of the argument just calls the majority whiners and criers so now my suggestion is just to say to anet, that elite unlocking was just a bad idea and scrap the whole thing so I can play the content with the elite finally.

Unfortunately you are right, most do not have any constructive feedback, and are generally dismissive of issues that players are having problems with. There hasn’t been much of an opposition other than: “It works fine for me, so everyone else needs to deal with it.”