Guild Wars 2

I don’t know if Anet would change this aspect of the mastery system in this point of development, but still, it’s just an idea I’d like to share. (Don’t know if people have posted anything similar, but still…)

How about having to do specific objectives to unlock the mastery track to be able to level it up, instead of having all masteries available at the start? It can be something simple, like speaking to an NPC, but just to make some tracks make more sense, since the way it’s currently implemented we can start training in Exalted Lore without even meeting an Exalted, or starting to master the Fractals track without ever doing a fractal.

I’d suggest having simple objectives to unlock the tracks before its available to master, like speaking with an Itzel to unlock Itzel Lore, speaking with an Exalted to unlock Exalted Lore, finishing a Fractal to unlock the Fractal Mastery, reaching 400 of a crafting discipline to unlock Legendary Crafting Mastery, and so on. I think this would give an even better and impactful Metroidvania feeling, since not only you are unlocking new abilities to change the way you interact with the jungle, but you’re unlocking them as you interact with the world in a meaningful way.

If it was only me, I’d go as far as having a specific objective tied to each tier instead of having the mastery points, but that is probably just an urealistic dream at this point, so just tying it to the track itself is good enough.

Let me know what you think about it, because maybe, if enough people like the idea, the devs might consider it.

Agreed—though ideally unlocking, say, gliding would give you access to the most basic gliding tier, since it’d be odd to talk to an NPC or something who says “here, take this glider!” and then not be able to use it until you’ve filled your mastery bar.
Having each tier tied to some sort of adventure or “jump puzzle” (for gliding or mushroom hopping) would be neat as well, though as you say it’s probably not possible at this point.

At the very least I think that, yes, you should have to talk to an NPC to gain access to the new mastery tracks. The only issue here is that you’d have a period where your mastery XP isn’t doing anything for you, but that’s easily solved by having at least one track available without an unlock (the Pact Commander track would be ideal for this, though if I understand correctly you can’t train Central Tyrian masteries in HoT zones?).

Yes, Pact Commander would be ideal to be unlocked from the start in Pact Tyria, and I’m actually okay with the Gliding track being unlocked from the start in the Maguuma Jungle since it is not tied to any specific race or character in lore, its just a thing our character develop while in the jungle. We could have an NPC mention it right at the start of the map, maybe even in the first personal story instance, and that would cound as the unlock, or something like that, since I really see the gliding being the first mastery the great majority of players will start mastering first.